alanjjohnstone
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You lost your bet. I was aware of it.
“Far from panicking at the prospect of a Biden win, Wall Street CEOs, traders and investment managers now mostly say they would be fine with a change in the White House that reduces the Trump noise, lowers the threat of further trade wars and ensures a continuation of the government spending they’ve seen in recent years.”
Wall Street traders still like the idea of Trump winning, as it would mean a continuation of their preferred tax and regulatory policy. But they are willing to give that up, at least in the short term, for an all-Democratic government that would provide economic relief to the pandemic.
“The market very much believes that Biden is going to win and the Senate is going to tip to Democrats,” said one Wall Street CEO to Politico. “And the assumption is that we are going to have a very significant increase in stimulus very quickly and that’s very positive for markets. But the fact is there is still a tremendous amount of uncertainty around the outcome of the election and when stimulus might actually come, if it ever does.”
This i didn’t know
Some states allow people who voted early to change their ballot if they show up Election Day and nullify their initial vote; many do not. Minnesota, for instance, allows voters to “claw back” their vote and change it, but the deadline for that has passed. Wisconsin allows people to change their vote up to three times, though it doesn’t happen often. Florida allows voters who received mail ballots to choose to vote in person instead, but they cannot vote more than once.
A tipping point?
evidence that frozen methane deposits in the Arctic Ocean – known as the “sleeping giants of the carbon cycle” – have started to be released over a large area of the continental slope off the East Siberian coast, prompting concern among researchers that a new climate feedback loop may have been triggered that could accelerate the pace of global heating.
A report on the ignored Green Party candidacy
https://www.dw.com/en/us-green-party-theres-more-at-stake-than-getting-rid-of-trump/a-55399856
As we expected, workers to pay the cost of Covid-19
corporations are going to boost their profits by crushing ordinary workers’ wages when the crisis is over, the Nobel economic prize winner and inequality expert Sir Angus Deaton has warned. Many economists have attributed the surge in equities in recent months to a flood of new money printed by central banks, but Sir Angus, who won the economics prize in 2015, attributed it to expectations from investors that companies will be able to boost their profits in future by squeezing their wage bills….
Who did the smearing?
Jeremy Corbyn’s former chief of staff, Karie Murphy, said there had been an “extremely successful campaign to obscure the facts” about how the party handled complaints, claiming it was “primarily driven by political opposition to Jeremy Corbyn’s socialist, internationalist politics”
Mike Katz, chair of the JLM, said Murphy’s claims were a smear of Jewish members. Smearing the pain of our members and the wider Jewish community as part of a ‘highly politicised media campaign’ is shameful.”
The new study, the largest ever of its kind, was carried out by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden found a significant shift since 2000, the GOP has taken to demonising and encouraging violence against its opponents, adopting attitudes and tactics comparable to ruling nationalist parties in Hungary, India, Poland and Turkey. The shift has both led to and been driven by the rise of Donald Trump.
By contrast the Democratic party has changed little in its attachment to democratic norms, and in that regard has remained similar to centre-right and centre-left parties in western Europe. Their principal difference is the approach to the economy.
My suspicion about this research is the category described as the illiberal left which included the Bolivian MAS which as we saw was overthrown in a coup and just won an election to power.
“it doesn’t compel people to perform in ritual observances”
Each and every morning American school students stand before the American flag and recite the pledge of allegiance.
It is not compulsory but i recall a young American telling me how continuing her opt-out from it the day after 9/11 resulted in ostracisation from fellow school students.
When it comes to sporting events, the national anthem is normally sung at only international occasions, not domestic. But as we saw with taking to the knee, such rituals are done at almost every sporting event, junior and senior in the USA
If fraud becomes a a talking point post-election, this may be the government agency to refer to
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, part of Homeland Security.
It was created by Trump in 2018.
So far its director has declared, “I have confidence that your vote is secure, that state and local election officials across this country are working day in and day out, 24/7, that the 2020 election is as secure as possible,”
But warned to “be prepared for efforts that call into question the legitimacy of the election” without mentioning who he was suggesting.
We are at risk of derailing the topic into a very big side-issue but i have to challenge this statement.
“you would understand the challenges the councils faced, challenges like insurrections that lasted right up to the mid 1930’s throughout Russia.”
Yes, what you are saying is true and it was the warnings being issued from November 1917 by the anti-Bolshevik Marxists by the choices that your Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov and Lev Davidovich Bronstein were making at the time. You do not deny, do you, that there were other approaches that could be made? And that if other policies were followed they may have led to a different outcome to the ensuing civil war, the peasant revolts, the suppression of the left political opposition, the dismantling of the factory committees and the soviets?
Do you disagree that there were other possibilities during 1917 that could have been taken which may have avoided what did happen. Or are you saying, regardless of the choices Lenin and Trotsky made, the upheaval was inevitable and what they did to restore order was unavoidable?
Just listened to an AOC interview where she explains the lesser evil approach.
Biden will be easier to lobby and more receptive to protests.
I specifically quoted the two “experts” that you cited as evidence that the USA under Trump would become a fascist state – and neither supported your analysis, LT.
Many of those attributes you cite are exactly the policy of Biden or was his platform in the past.
We are both speculating, using experience of the past, to add credibility to our predictions. I suggest that history of the USA does not provide any evidence that Trump would turn the USA into anything other than what it always has been, an authoritarian country.
By promoting the fascist scenario, you are advocating the vote lesser evil strategy. Perhaps you should focus on that as the real issue to be debated, because it is the concrete alternative being offered by the left. Dump Trump now and then go on to dump the president you lied all about to get into the White House.
BTW, Chomsky’s lesser evil argument is based on what he considers to be the existential threat to humanity by Trump’s environmental program, not any creation of a police-state or the transformation of the USA into a corporate-state.
