Donald Trump

[pipbarber]

It's simply all or death in November. If he wins the election E. Jean Carroll would need to very quickly leave America, along with many others, i suspect. If he loses in November, he's toast. It looks like the more dire his legal troubles the more disastrous and authoritarian would be his presidency.

[stevebrooks]

It's simply all or death in November. If he wins the election E. Jean Carroll would need to very quickly leave America, along with many others, i suspect. If he loses in November, he's toast. It looks like the more dire his legal troubles the more disastrous and authoritarian would be his presidency.

E. Jean Carroll's lawyers have already posited there will be further lawsuits for defamation due to material posted while the trial was ongoing, but yes if he wins election it's probably best for any enemies of Trump to flee the country, this may include a number of former Presidents!

[stylofone]

It's simply all or death in November. If he wins the election E. Jean Carroll would need to very quickly leave America, along with many others, i suspect. If he loses in November, he's toast. It looks like the more dire his legal troubles the more disastrous and authoritarian would be his presidency.

E. Jean Carroll's lawyers have already posited there will be further lawsuits for defamation due to material posted while the trial was ongoing, but yes if he wins election it's probably best for any enemies of Trump to flee the country, this may include a number of former Presidents!

It reminds me of the Politico article below... last time it was fight, time it might be flight. Then Trump can ruin the country and blame it all on the criminal cowards who opposed him. If he can't quite get a constitutional amendment to let him have a third term, he will be able to install a puppet successor like Putin did with Medvedev in 2008. His takeover of the Republican Party is just the first stage.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/ ... s-00137965

[pipbarber]

It reminds me of the Politico article below... last time it was fight, time it might be flight. Then Trump can ruin the country and blame it all on the criminal cowards who opposed him. If he can't quite get a constitutional amendment to let him have a third term, he will be able to install a puppet successor like Putin did with Medvedev in 2008. His takeover of the Republican Party is just the first stage.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/ ... s-00137965

Interesting in that article was the mention of a JP Morgan exec expressing a degree of indifference to (if not actual support for) another Trump term. If the corporate class were a little nervous in 2017, perhaps they aren't now. Reduce regulations, expand mining and smash unions, only properly this time, would be fully acceptable to their class and interests. That has to be of some significance, you'd think, in terms of raising campaign money. (Of course, the corporate sector seem to donate to both parties, as it does with laboral in Australia. It is something that ought to be gaped as an open ongoing scandal, but isn't). Probably lots of corporate opportunities under a new Trump presidency. The orange turd is obviously open to monetary grifts gifts too, which really opens up the field of gov. contracts etc.

Meanwhile, i think the oppositional media still misread the situation a little.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... nomination

It's seems strange to describe Trump's unhinged rants as his 'achilles heal' given that he has barely produced anything but unhinged rants. His supporters seem to enjoy them and after 8 years of it i don't think independent voters who are considering voting for Trump are likely to be shocked out of doing so because he mocked an opponent. Maybe i'm wrong, just feels a bit desperate or something.

[stylofone]

That has to be of some significance, you'd think, in terms of raising campaign money. (Of course, the corporate sector seem to donate to both parties, as it does with laboral in Australia. It is something that ought to be gaped as an open ongoing scandal, but isn't). Probably lots of corporate opportunities under a new Trump presidency.

I think the business view of a Trump Presidency would be mixed . The neo-Liberalism the Democrats have embraced has made the rich so much richer. Trump's tariffs threaten the globalisation which has allowed them to shut American factories and increase profits by outsourcing everything to China. His immigration policies take away the cheap labour for whatever manufacturing is left.

Two reasons I can think of for business to support him: they are misogynistic racists and they are prepared to risk profits because they relish the idea of abusing women and non-whites; or they are prepared to take their chances in a knife fight with other capitalists because they think they will be the chosen ones, like Putin's oligarchs, part of a tiny elite left alive to thrive after nearly everything else is destroyed.

[stevebrooks]

His immigration policies take away the cheap labour for whatever manufacturing is left.

I think there's a break somewhere in the size chain for this, you see I think mega corporations don't care where workers are, they just build factories where the cheap labour is so immigration policies don't matter so much for them, it's the middle sized corporation that can't afford to build factories where the cheap labour is that have a problem, and of course industries that can't move to where the cheap labour is, like farming and construction where cheap immigration labour is a key resource.

That of course is offset by trade barriers Trump puts in place. But in the end they don't really matter because if the mega corps manufacture cheaply enough they can still sell below the local manufacturing and drive them out of business and customers have to buy the more expensive goods anyway. In the end mega corps and ultra rich will probably be for Trump in general, medium sized corps against Trump in general. We already see this with people like Musk.

[pipbarber]

There's also usually a sizeable gap between the anti-immigration racist rhetoric and what actually happens. 'Stop the boats' being code for increasing the number of work visas on offer. Build all the walls you like, but it's easy enough to bring labour in when needed and it's more or less invisible.

[Irrev-Black]

There's also usually a sizeable gap between the anti-immigration racist rhetoric and what actually happens. 'Stop the boats' being code for increasing the number of work visas on offer. Build all the walls you like, but it's easy enough to bring labour in when needed and it's more or less invisible.

Invisible labour that must stay invisible because it's undocumented, and subject to deportation?

You can exploit the fuck out of that.

[stylofone]

I read some terrible quotes over the years from Penn Jilette identifying himself as a RWNJ, but it seems the pandemic was his road to Damascus. Most unusual to see someone recant.

For so long, you identified as Libertarian. What changed?

I completely have not used the word Libertarian in describing myself since I got an email during lockdown where a person from a Libertarian organization wrote to me and said, “We’re doing an anti-mask demonstration in Vegas, and obviously we’d like you to head it.” I looked at that email and I went, “The fact they sent me this email is something I need to be very ashamed of, and I need to change.” Now, you can make the argument that maybe you don’t need to mandate masks — you can make the argument that maybe that shouldn’t be the government's job — but you cannot make the argument that you shouldn’t wear masks. It is the exact reciprocal of seatbelts because if I don’t wear a seatbelt, my chances of fucking myself up increase — if I don’t wear a mask, the chance of fucking someone else up increase.

Many times when I identified as Libertarian, people said to me, “It’s just rich white guys that don’t want to be told what to do,” and I had a zillion answers to that — and now that seems 100 percent accurate.

So how do you identify politically?

Well, let’s go to empirical evidence: I’m going to vote Democrat, maybe that’s all you need to know. I will not vote for a third-party candidate. I believe all the clichés, I believe they’re true — I believe that Trump and MAGA might make the United States unrecognizable enough that it’s not a beautiful place to be.

I said to anybody who asked me, “No matter how bad you think Trump is, he’s worse.”

https://www.cracked.com/amp/article_408 ... l-out.html

[Irrev-Black]

There's also usually a sizeable gap between the anti-immigration racist rhetoric and what actually happens. 'Stop the boats' being code for increasing the number of work visas on offer. Build all the walls you like, but it's easy enough to bring labour in when needed and it's more or less invisible.

Invisible labour that must stay invisible because it's undocumented, and subject to deportation?

You can exploit the fuck out of that.

Footnoting that: The USA already has immigrants as virtual slaves, and there's also the huge prison population working for for-profit corps.

ANGOLA, La. (AP) — A hidden path to America’s dinner tables begins here, at an unlikely source – a former Southern slave plantation that is now the country’s largest maximum-security prison.

Unmarked trucks packed with prison-raised cattle roll out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where men are sentenced to hard labor and forced to work, for pennies an hour or sometimes nothing at all. After rumbling down a country road to an auction house, the cows are bought by a local rancher and then followed by The Associated Press another 600 miles to a Texas slaughterhouse that feeds into the supply chains of giants like McDonald’s, Walmart and Cargill.

Intricate, invisible webs, just like this one, link some of the world’s largest food companies and most popular brands to jobs performed by U.S. prisoners nationwide, according to a sweeping two-year AP investigation into prison labor that tied hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of agricultural products to goods sold on the open market.

They are among America’s most vulnerable laborers. If they refuse to work, some can jeopardize their chances of parole or face punishment like being sent to solitary confinement. They also are often excluded from protections guaranteed to almost all other full-time workers, even when they are seriously injured or killed on the job.

https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-pl ... 4eadf08c4e