Sonic Youth Gossip - The Politics Thread

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Oprah just endorsed Fetterman. A little fucking late; believe it or not, some people on the fence would finally be convinced of Oz's quackness when told about it by the star who had him as "her" doctor for five lamentable seasons... Let's hope it's not TOO motherfucking late.

Well, if the polls are correct, The Insane Party is about to win again.

America is fucking lost.

Newsom has it right. WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE??? I blame Biden for this. He really is "too nice" in these extraordinary times. (He's too fucking old!!!)

But anyway, I live in Canada.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Skuj

Well, if the polls are correct, The Insane Party is about to win again.

"If the Bible is right, the world will explode..."

FiveThirtyEight had the Kansas Amendment 2 vote wrong by... 20 points! :eek: I'm clinging to things like that, although, unfortunately, not every poll can be that wrong.

Have I mentioned that Musk is a fucking asshole lately?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Skuj

Have I mentioned that Musk is a fucking asshole lately?

I've been letting my guard down, as the Twitter addict here I should've been ranting.

Quote:

Originally Posted by choc e-Claire

I've been letting my guard down, as the Twitter addict here I should've been ranting.

the fucker really has ruined things there. i used twitter as a news alert aggregator from unlikely sources, but now it's all about him and his cult of personality and his tantrums. fuck him.

i'm currently looking for an alternative. there really aren't a lot of options out there, but i'm sure something else will appear because this can't continue in its current state.

Twitter was always a social cesspool though.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Diesel

Twitter was always a social cesspool though.

of course, but now it's 100x the cesspool with no adults in charge.

the problem is that there is no other text-based microblogging platform like this right now, and everyone in the public square is currently in it.

i used it like the old rss feeds to hear from serious sources, and it was good in this form.

during brexit, for example, instead of waiting for tv or newspapers to report things hours later i would follow https://twitter.com/houseofcommons

(and labourwhips and so forth)

anyway of course you can go even deeper and watch stuff happen live right here: https://www.parliamentlive.tv/Commons but now it becomes a collection of websites instead of a centralized funnel.

...

thinking this through out loud, i think the way to go for me is to start collecting bookmarks. but see, bookmarks don't have push notifications, so now i have to start scanning. unless of course i can find a script that scans for me... but it's still not a network.

I've never tweeted anything, and I quit facebook 2 years ago. Trust me - life is better without social media.

(Yes I know, this is a forum....but it's different.)

So, when the Repukes do well today, will any of them be talking about rigged elections? Or will it be crickets?

Every cycle is "the most consequential ever", but this one really is! How many Big Liars will win, and be in power to fuck up the 2024 election?

Imagine if McCarthy was House Speaker instead of Pelosi last time around.

It's sickening to even think about, but I think we know how this is going to go tonight.

Good luck, America. You are going to fucking need it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Skuj

I've never tweeted anything, and I quit facebook 2 years ago. Trust me - life is better without social media.

(Yes I know, this is a forum....but it's different.)

i haven't tweeted either (it's stupid)

but i think you missed the point about getting info "from the horse's mouth," which for me provided a real value

sounds like the demonrats (lol) have managed to partially stem the bleeding. good!

the maga promotion strategy was playing with fire/flirting with disaster, but i'm glad someone in the democratic party had both the balls & brains to go with it, because repukes are corrupted to the core and will enable trumpians shamelessly. just look at how they crucified darth cheney's spawn. so this was very good judo. nevertherless, borderline or deeply irresponsible depending on how you look at it. i have no opinion.

anyway the reason i did not go hysterical through all of this fucked ordeal was that because unlike outside observers commenting on another country i have to live through this shit and can't afford to be a *gynormous* pussy about it.

we have dodged half a bullet. the other half is still flying. we're on the same side, but please quit it with the fucking tears, it's not just embarrassing but actually demoralizing, and if these were trenches you'd be shot for it.

From Paul Krugman's NYT newsletter (1/2):

Quote:

Is divided government good?

Would we be better off with gridlock? Don’t take Elon’s word for it.

By Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist

I have to admit: It has been fascinating to see Elon Musk tweeting his way ever deeper into a hole. It’s like watching a car crash — an electric, self-driving-car crash.

Nor is this just about Twitter. I’m not a marketing expert, but it seems obvious that Tesla’s brand rests in part on the perception that Musk himself is a cool guy. Tweeting out homophobic conspiracy theories about the attack on Paul Pelosi and suspending the accounts of comedians who mock him doesn’t seem good for that perception.

But I’m not here to give Musk business advice. What struck me instead was the justification he gave in urging Americans to vote Republican — an assertion that divided government is good because “shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties.”

Leave aside the rather obvious question of whether extremists are equally prevalent on the two sides of the aisle. Is divided government actually good?

Now, Musk’s assertion didn’t come out of nowhere. The idea that divided government is good, at least for the economy, is widespread among businesspeople. I see it quite frequently in economic newsletters. What does history have to say?

First, we have to note that there’s divided government, and then there’s divided government. Democrats controlled the House of Representatives throughout the Reagan years, but some of them were conservative southern Democrats (some of whom later became Republicans). More broadly, political scientists have devised useful measures, based on roll-call votes, of polarization in Congress over time, and they show that neither house in the Reagan era was anything like it is today:

One nation, all too divisible.
Voteview.com

Still, the battle between the parties was already fairly bitter by the 1990s. Let’s not forget that Newt Gingrich shut down the government in 1995 in an attempt to force President Bill Clinton into cutting Medicare.

Yet the economy thrived during the six years of divided government that made up most of Clinton’s time in office. Unemployment fell further than most economists had thought possible, while inflation remained low:

Good times in the ’90s, not so much after 2008.
FRED

Does this episode show that divided government is, in fact, good? Not really. There were underlying reasons for the good times that had nothing to do with politics, and the state of the economy at the time made strong government action unnecessary.

Most important, from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s the U.S. economy experienced a surge in productivity as businesses finally figured out what to do with information technology. Here’s total factor productivity — a measure of the economy’s overall technological level — since the early 1970s:

The golden age of I.T. is behind us.
FRED

I’ve expressed productivity as a natural logarithm, so that the slope of the line shows the rate of growth; if you don’t get that, never mind, just look at the picture. Clearly, there was rapid progress back then that has slowed a lot since. And I see no reason to believe that these good things had much if anything to do with politics.

Rapid productivity growth was good for both supply and demand: It held costs down, helping to keep inflation low, and it fed a boom in business investment. This boom, combined with favorable demography — baby boomers weren’t yet beginning to age out of the labor force — had an additional effect that economists, at least, consider important. Namely, the “neutral” interest rate — the rate consistent with full employment — was relatively high. As a result, the interest rates set by the Federal Reserve were consistently well above zero:

Sometimes the Fed has room to cut, sometimes it doesn’t.
FRED

Why was this important? Because it gave the Fed — a quasi-independent agency fairly insulated from politics — room either to raise or cut rates to stabilize the economy. That is, we didn’t need active fiscal policy, which would have required some bipartisanship, to fight possible recessions. Alan Greenspan, who was then the Fed chair, and his colleagues could do that job themselves without needing much of anything from Congress or the president.

So while it’s hard to make the case that divided government was responsible for the good economy of the 1990s, at least it didn’t do much harm.

(2/2):

Quote:

Matters were very different during the next extended period of divided government, under President Barack Obama, and not just because Republicans had become more extreme. The economy also needed more help — help that wasn’t forthcoming, because the G.O.P. wouldn’t allow it.

If you look back at the chart showing unemployment and inflation over time, you can see that recovery from the 2008 financial crisis took a very long time. Total employment didn’t regain its December 2007 level until April 2014, and unemployment didn’t get below 5 percent until late 2015. Given that the U.S. economy was clearly capable of sustaining an unemployment rate below 4 percent without excessive inflation, the sluggish recovery under Obama represented a huge waste of economic and human potential.

The Fed was aware of this problem, but it didn’t have the tools to fix it. Look back at the chart on interest rates, which were approximately zero over this whole period, leaving the Fed with no room to cut further. While Ben Bernanke and colleagues did engage in “quantitative easing” — purchases of longer-term bonds in an attempt to gain some traction — this was a poor substitute.

What the economy needed was fiscal stimulus — government spending to boost demand. This stimulus could and should have mostly taken the form of investment, both in infrastructure and in children, via education. Borrowing to pay for this investment would have made a lot of sense given extremely low interest rates.

But the Republicans who controlled the House after 2010 wouldn’t allow that. In fact, they used the threat of refusing to raise the debt limit — which would have created a financial crisis — to force Obama into fiscal austerity, with federal spending falling steadily as a share of gross domestic product. Divided government was extremely costly during the Obama years, even if the costs may not have been obvious to casual observers.

So where are we now? Republicans are more extreme than ever; today’s G.O.P. makes the Tea Party look like a well-mannered debate society. And there’s a very good chance that if Republicans take Congress, they’ll again threaten to create a financial crisis over the debt limit.

The good news is that the current state of the economy doesn’t demand immediate federal action. Unemployment is low; inflation is a big problem, but it’s a problem the Fed can tackle on its own by raising interest rates, which it has been doing.

The bad news is that there are many important things the federal government should be doing other than short-term macroeconomic management, from enacting sensible climate policy to supporting Ukraine’s fight against Russian aggression. And Republicans, if they gain control of one or both houses of Congress, are all too likely to undermine these efforts.

So, no, divided government isn’t a good thing. Extrapolating from the Clinton years, when partial government paralysis did relatively little harm, is a really bad idea.

Quick Hits

Polarization and the Southern switch.

Neutrality — monetary, not political.

The Biden administration is taking a tough line on China.

Speaking of China, it has big problems.

the biggest economic risk of a republican hijack of the budget is not falling short of fiscal goals, but the monetary result of dangerous flirtations with the debt ceiling which push the dollar further towards losing its status as *the* reserve currency of the world. this status is already under pressure from the rise of china as a global power, the reaction of authoritarian governments against western economic sanctions, etc.

this reserve status is what right now protects americans from feeling the full effects of inflation induced by global supply shocks and other risks. we get cheaper imports than anybody else with the dollar at historic highs so we don't feel the punch. and we can outbid anyone for what we need, while others can't. we have in fact exported inflation to the rest of the world.

the reserve status is also why the size of the national debt is not such a terrible burden. to see what happens when you destroy confidence in a currency look at the short lived government of liz truss.

biden's fiscal policy goals are already in place and are massive, even after the manchin/synema reductions. we now have an industrial policy codified within the inflation reduction act etc. that will play out over the next decade and beyond.

just because democrats are terrible communicators who can't properly tout their achievements it doesn't mean the industrial policy is not there. here are 2 polar opposite views of it: https://www.americanprogress.org/art...-quality-jobs/ https://reason.com/2022/10/17/bidens...-always-fails/ and here the more evenhanded and reasonable take: https://www.economist.com/united-sta...ith-difficulty

a short one (from reuters)

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones must pay $473 million in punitive damages on top of a nearly $1 billion verdict handed down last month for his defamatory claims about the 2012 Sandy Hook mass shooting, a Connecticut judge ruled Monday.

Georgia On My Mind again, huh. Remember the big bearded dumb fuck in Superman II? Basically, that alien subcreature, minus the powers, is Herschel Walker. Even though the dipshit cannot speak he got enough votes to take Warnock to a runoff election, on which EVERYTHING depends now.

Quote:

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

a short one (from reuters)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFm-U8WIrNg