The “fall” of Neoliberalism
Thx for this link. I'm glad to see people trying to address the yawning gap between the statistics we see about the economy and the way many people feel about it. Can't fix what you don't see.
jimmurphy said:
I think Murphy is onto something here. No relation.
Most of us have done OK, but I do worry about our children’s futures.
Edited to add that this does go a long in explaining Trumpism's appeal to the working class.
the "economic anxiety" angle as the basis for Trump's support has been pretty well disproved by multiple studies since 2017. It does not appear to be a main reason for his support.
read away
https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+support+economic+anxiety
drummerboy said:
jimmurphy said:
I think Murphy is onto something here. No relation.
Most of us have done OK, but I do worry about our children’s futures.
Edited to add that this does go a long in explaining Trumpism's appeal to the working class.
the "economic anxiety" angle as the basis for Trump's support has been pretty well disproved by multiple studies since 2017. It does not appear to be a main reason for his support.
read away
https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+support+economic+anxiety
while that may be true, economics may be a good explanation for non-voting.
ml1 said:
while that may be true, economics may be a good explanation for non-voting.
maybe, but not quite sure what you mean. "economics" covers a lot of ground.
Alex Jones endorses this, I think a few people on here could benefit from this also…
Alex Jones seems to have an odd definition of "true patriot." As you might expect.
Jaytee said:
Alex Jones endorses this, I think a few people on here could benefit from this also…
I wish Russia great success with this program.
I imagine this allows thousands of right wing nut jobs to go to Russia for intensive military training.
mrincredible said:
I wish Russia great success with this program.
I imagine this allows thousands of right wing nut jobs to go to Russia for intensive military training.
They won’t go though, they will never give up their freedom to bash the government….
Jaytee said:
They won’t go though, they will never give up their freedom to bash the government….
It’s weird. Three month visas starting in September. Maybe it’s just a propaganda stunt but seriously what’s the real point?
I may sound a little tinfoil hattish here, but it sounds like a pretense for a bunch of disaffected US Citizens to go learn how to be insurgents. Or maybe it’s just a way to get a bunch of disaffected US Citizens to come spend their money in Russia for three months. I’m trying to figure out if there’s a way Putin could conscript these potential “true patriots” to fight in Ukraine.
drummerboy said:
the "economic anxiety" angle as the basis for Trump's support has been pretty well disproved by multiple studies since 2017. It does not appear to be a main reason for his support.
read away
https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+support+economic+anxiety
I expected this reaction from you, DB, and I understand it. I am sympathetic to it.
I'm doing my best to understand the appeal of Trump and why people I know and love are drawn to it.
I think Senator C. Murphy has a point, that's all.
mrincredible said:
It’s weird. Three month visas starting in September. Maybe it’s just a propaganda stunt but seriously what’s the real point?
I may sound a little tinfoil hattish here, but it sounds like a pretense for a bunch of disaffected US Citizens to go learn how to be insurgents. Or maybe it’s just a way to get a bunch of disaffected US Citizens to come spend their money in Russia for three months. I’m trying to figure out if there’s a way Putin could conscript these potential “true patriots” to fight in Ukraine.
I saw a documentary a few years back about a young couple who migrated to Russia. Very conservative people but they were becoming homesick after a year or so. They were living in a very remote area in Russia. The wife seemed very sad, while the husband was kind of a true believer in what Putin was doing. I can’t remember if they were from Canada or the United States. It was depressing to watch. The whole idea was to get back to the time of the pioneers, but the reality is that the pioneers had it very hard.
drummerboy said:
ml1 said:
while that may be true, economics may be a good explanation for non-voting.
maybe, but not quite sure what you mean. "economics" covers a lot of ground.
feeling like the economy isn't fair to working people.
jimmurphy said:
drummerboy said:
the "economic anxiety" angle as the basis for Trump's support has been pretty well disproved by multiple studies since 2017. It does not appear to be a main reason for his support.
read away
https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+support+economic+anxiety
I expected this reaction from you, DB, and I understand it. I am sympathetic to it.
I'm doing my best to understand the appeal of Trump and why people I know and love are drawn to it.
I think Senator C. Murphy has a point, that's all.
(sorry for the long post ahead, but I got a bit carried away)
I think he has a point that Neo-liberalism sucks and has helped to cause a general dissatisfaction among Americans. And I've also struggled for years trying to understand Trump's wide appeal myself. My much loved nephew (who I'm on vacation with for two weeks and is making us pancakes for breakfast as we speak) has succumbed. Still no answers.
I also really have a problem with a piece that quotes Steve Bannon approvingly. I don't know the author at all, but I find this really troubling and colors my take on the article and on him. Bannon should never be mentioned without pointing out his utter destructiveness.
Another problem with the piece, and with Murphy, is that are few if any specific policy prescriptions.
But more importantly, I think that significant change is not even possible without tackling what I believe is the fundamental problem with our politics - the role of money. (mis/disinformation is also a huge problem, but I didn't want this post to go on forever so I'll ignore it for now.) This is not mentioned at all, and while I understand that this is a separate subject and was not the point of the piece, I don't see how you can seriously talk about the need for drastic policy corrections without even mentioning the biggest impediment to achieving them.
The point being that Murphy (and people on his side) are putting the cart way ahead of the horse, and, if you ask me, they'd be far more productive if they made their priority removing money from politics. (Liz Warren gets it. But she's kind of a lone voice.) Without dealing with that, you're pissing in the wind.
Here's a concrete example of what potential reformers like Murphy face but seem to be ignoring. Dems have been crowing lately about Biden's achievement in enabling Medicare to negotiate drug prices . And rightly so - in our sclerotic political environment, it's an achievement to be proud of. And is yet another example of the great success of Biden's administration.
But cripes, look at some details:
The policy itself is so obvious that passing it should have been a widely supported no-brainer effort.
Of course, it wasn't close to that. I heard Amy Klobuchar (a primary sponsor) talking about the effort to pass it a couple of days ago. She's been working on it for 10 years.
10 effing years. To pass what is, in the end, a very, very minor change. And look at how the final product was crippled in order to get support. From Democrats ferchrissakes, because no R even voted for it. The number of drugs that can be negotiated is very limited. The roll-out is being slow-walked so that it is taking years for savings to actually make it to drug buyers. Klobuchar said that during the final push to pass the bill, there were 3 pharma lobbyists for every legislator.
All of this push back and crippling compromises for an extremely trivial (in scope) and obviously needed reform.
How can anyone talk about making far-reaching reforms - the whole point of the piece and Murphy's efforts - without acknowledging the massive structural impediments in the way?
(geez. It's really hard to stop adding to and editing this post. I'll stop now.)
drummerboy said:
jimmurphy said:
drummerboy said:
the "economic anxiety" angle as the basis for Trump's support has been pretty well disproved by multiple studies since 2017. It does not appear to be a main reason for his support.
read away
https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+support+economic+anxiety
I expected this reaction from you, DB, and I understand it. I am sympathetic to it.
I'm doing my best to understand the appeal of Trump and why people I know and love are drawn to it.
I think Senator C. Murphy has a point, that's all.
(sorry for the long post ahead, but I got a bit carried away)
I think he has a point that Neo-liberalism sucks and has helped to cause a general dissatisfaction among Americans. And I've also struggled for years trying to understand Trump's wide appeal myself. My much loved nephew (who I'm on vacation with for two weeks and is making us pancakes for breakfast as we speak) has succumbed. Still no answers.I also really have a problem with a piece that quotes Steve Bannon approvingly. I don't know the author at all, but I find this really troubling and colors my take on the article and on him. Bannon should never be mentioned without pointing out his utter destructiveness.
Another problem with the piece, and with Murphy, is that are few if any specific policy prescriptions.
But more importantly, I think that significant change is not even possible without tackling what I believe is the fundamental problem with our politics - the role of money. (mis/disinformation is also a huge problem, but I didn't want this post to go on forever so I'll ignore it for now.) This is not mentioned at all, and while I understand that this is a separate subject and was not the point of the piece, I don't see how you can seriously talk about the need for drastic policy corrections without even mentioning the biggest impediment to achieving them.
The point being that Murphy (and people on his side) are putting the cart way ahead of the horse, and, if you ask me, they'd be far more productive if they made their priority removing money from politics. (Liz Warren gets it. But she's kind of a lone voice.) Without dealing with that, you're pissing in the wind.
Here's a concrete example of what potential reformers like Murphy face but seem to be ignoring. Dems have been crowing lately about Biden's achievement in enabling Medicare to negotiate drug prices . And rightly so - in our sclerotic political environment, it's an achievement to be proud of. And is yet another example of the great success of Biden's administration.
But cripes, look at some details:
The policy itself is so obvious that passing it should have been a widely supported no-brainer effort.
Of course, it wasn't close to that. I heard Amy Klobuchar (a primary sponsor) talking about the effort to pass it a couple of days ago. She's been working on it for 10 years.
10 effing years. To pass what is, in the end, a very, very minor change. And look at how the final product was crippled in order to get support. From Democrats ferchrissakes, because no R even voted for it. The number of drugs that can be negotiated is very limited. The roll-out is being slow-walked so that it is taking years for savings to actually make it to drug buyers. Klobuchar said that during the final push to pass the bill, there were 3 pharma lobbyists for every legislator.All of this push back and crippling compromises for an extremely trivial (in scope) and obviously needed reform.
How can anyone talk about making far-reaching reforms - the whole point of the piece and Murphy's efforts - without acknowledging the massive structural impediments in the way?
(geez. It's really hard to stop adding to and editing this post. I'll stop now.)
I think that's underlying the concern that the MAGAs will blow the whole system up. They prefer electing a fascist who will take away a wide swath of freedoms.
We're a lot closer to a dictatorship than we are to widespread reforms to make the economic and political system more supportive of working people.
@jimmurphy….if I may take this opportunity to offer thanks again for helping me with connecting to the whole new world of books — even audio books! Just finished listening to Mitch Albom’s “Stranger in the Liferaft” — hearing of the recent explosion aboard a super yacht off the coast of Sicily, carrying extremely rich and famous people, as I finished Albom’s book, was eerie!
Could never have happened without your patient help. My hearing aids and I thank you!
gifted WSJ article
This, to me, is the most important paragraph:
He can sound like Bernie Sanders at times. But Mr. Murphy’s program of “pro-family, pro-community economic nationalism” is less one of social welfare than an attempt to give regular people agency in the face of the supersized corporations he believes wield far too much influence today. He calls for sectorwide collective bargaining of the kind that exists in some European countries, an expansion of antimonopoly efforts and something like a reimagining of our political value system: “We’re going to have to upset this cult of efficiency,” he told me recently, “establishing a clear preference for local ownership, local industry.”
I actually think this is less a question of policy than about framing. A lot of liberal/progressive discourse is framed around fairness and justice. These are important questions, but I think that don't speak to what Sen. Murphy, and this article, correctly identify as a feeling of malaise and lack of meaning among many voters.
The key, for me, in the quoted paragraph is agency (unsurprising, I'm guessing, to those who've seen my posts in the Ukraine threads). I think one of the greatest challenges in modernity -- meaning the last few centuries which are most characterized by everything scaling up to numbers beyond those immediately comprehensible by a single person -- industrialization, mass media, powerful centralized states -- is that often people can feel lost and that they have no control over their lives.
Reactionaries propose a returned to an idealized past as the solution. It's a cruel and stupid approach, and I trust there's no need to point out the many arguments against it with this audience.
Many proposals from the political left focus on fairness, but I actually see them being more about agency. Take health care -- yes, it's unfair and unjust that employers and insurance companies and private-equity-managed hospital systems have so much power over something as basic and essential as health, but another way of talking about health care is that, in a world where everyone is guaranteed access to quality and affordable health care, everyone suddenly has a lot more agency. They can work where they want to, not where they can get decent insurance. When they need health care, they can work with doctors they trust, not with who is in network. They have a degree of control over their lives, rather than being at the mercy of faceless corporations and bureaucracies.
I don't know if this is exactly what Sen. Murphy is getting at, but for me the take-away is that liberals need to be more explicit in framing their policies as being ones that empower people and let them take ownership of their lives. Increased minimum wage, debt forgiveness, universal health care, debt forgiveness, anti-monopoly enforcement, voting reform, and the whole gamut of liberal goals not only as questions of justice (which they are), but primarily as questions of agency and ownership.
PVW said:
I actually think this is less a question of policy than about framing. A lot of liberal/progressive discourse is framed around fairness and justice. These are important questions, but I think that don't speak to what Sen. Murphy, and this article, correctly identify as a feeling of malaise and lack of meaning among many voters.
The key, for me, in the quoted paragraph is agency (unsurprising, I'm guessing, to those who've seen my posts in the Ukraine threads). I think one of the greatest challenges in modernity -- meaning the last few centuries which are most characterized by everything scaling up to numbers beyond those immediately comprehensible by a single person -- industrialization, mass media, powerful centralized states -- is that often people can feel lost and that they have no control over their lives.
Reactionaries propose a returned to an idealized past as the solution. It's a cruel and stupid approach, and I trust there's no need to point out the many arguments against it with this audience.
Many proposals from the political left focus on fairness, but I actually see them being more about agency.
I don't know if this is exactly what Sen. Murphy is getting at, but for me the take-away is that liberals need to be more explicit in framing their policies as being ones that empower people and let them take ownership of their lives. Increased minimum wage, debt forgiveness, universal health care, debt forgiveness, anti-monopoly enforcement, voting reform, and the whole gamut of liberal goals not only as questions of justice (which they are), but primarily as questions of agency and ownership.
Thank you, PVW,for clarifying what I was writing in my post to our Jim Murphy!
I had the “right” to partake of the world of literature offered in Audio books. But, lacked Agency!
Meanwhile, back in Chicago, this has to be kept under extremely tough wraps — absolutely zero agency!
mtierney said:
Thank you, PVW,for clarifying what I was writing in my post to our Jim Murphy!
I had the “right” to partake of the world of literature offered in Audio books. But, lacked Agency!
Meanwhile, back in Chicago, this has to be kept under extremely tough wraps — absolutely zero agency!
No surprise that to me, Agency means a woman having the freedom to make her own reproductive choices.
Morganna said:
No surprise that to me, Agency means a woman having the freedom to make her own reproductive choices.
You know, it has always puzzled me that women seem to demand “agency” from state and and federal governments — and voters to abort unwanted or inconvenient children —but let men get a free pass. When males get to be held responsible for their participation in activities which result in procreation, changes in behavior will occur — gone the halcyon days of hook-ups and free love!
mtierney said:
Meanwhile, back in Chicago, this has to be kept under extremely tough wraps — absolutely zero agency!
This is all publicly available information and much of it is meaningless without context. It’s all just cherry-picked by Rupert Murdoch’s drones at the NY Post to stoke the anger and fear of Post readers.
mtierney said:
Morganna said:
No surprise that to me, Agency means a woman having the freedom to make her own reproductive choices.
You know, it has always puzzled me that women seem to demand “agency” from state and and federal governments — and voters to abort unwanted or inconvenient children —but let men get a free pass. When males get to be held responsible for their participation in activities which result in procreation, changes in behavior will occur — gone the halcyon days of hook-ups and free love!
you know, maybe your side should join our side in increasing sex education and access to contraception, instead of fighting those most obvious forms of warding off unwanted pregnancies.
whaddayasay?
mtierney said:
You know, it has always puzzled me that women seem to demand “agency” from state and and federal governments — and voters to abort unwanted or inconvenient children —but let men get a free pass. When males get to be held responsible for their participation in activities which result in procreation, changes in behavior will occur — gone the halcyon days of hook-ups and free love!
So you think a woman needing or wanting an abortion is because a man got a free pass? Rather than enumerate the many circumstances that pregnancy can occur, I'll just say that this is why you are a Republican and I am a Democrat, you feel you have the right to judge another woman's reproductive choices, and I don't.
Ultimately I think the male-dominated Republican Party is threatened by any hint of a woman taking agency over her own body. There’s an entire patriarchal structure that intends to suppress female sexuality with systemic shame. The male-dominated Republicans also assert a right to know what a woman is choosing to do with her own body.
The abortion fight is a result of the same sense of entitlement and fear.
mtierney said:
Morganna said:
No surprise that to me, Agency means a woman having the freedom to make her own reproductive choices.
You know, it has always puzzled me that women seem to demand “agency” from state and and federal governments — and voters to abort unwanted or inconvenient children —but let men get a free pass. When males get to be held responsible for their participation in activities which result in procreation, changes in behavior will occur — gone the halcyon days of hook-ups and free love!
child support
ml1 said:
child support
the “agency” — having to pay for play should present a serious obligation for men who use women and expect/demand anonymity.
mtierney said:
the “agency” — having to pay for play should present a serious obligation for men who use women and expect/demand anonymity.
Now I understand, this is about Trump and the hush money payments to Stormy Daniels.
mtierney said:
You know, it has always puzzled me that women seem to demand “agency” from state and and federal governments — and voters to abort unwanted or inconvenient children —but let men get a free pass. When males get to be held responsible for their participation in activities which result in procreation, changes in behavior will occur — gone the halcyon days of hook-ups and free love!
Women's agency and men's responsibility are two separate issues. Event if men are 100% responsible and accountable, women are still entitled to control over their own bodies.
@mtierney, you carry on as if unwanted or inconvenient pregnancies only happen to women who don't really have any major problems in their lives.
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I think Murphy is onto something here. No relation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/19/opinion/chris-murphy-democrats.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Most of us have done OK, but I do worry about our children’s futures.
Edited to add that this does go a long in explaining Trumpism's appeal to the working class.