Donald Trump

Not surprised

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/02/05/politics/donald-trump-white-supremacists-new-hampshire/index.html

 

I think America was great at one point in its early history. The fact that it was the first country that had a constitution, wasn't run by kings and queens, and had term limits on presidents. When it broke free from British rule, an organized government established by principled people followed. This is really a miracle it happened that way considering how many countries that have taken their own government down have had worse results than before. When most countries have revolutions and take down their dictatorships, the gangs, churches, and wealthy organizations with weapons and money take over and make things worse than they were before. I think America was a great country once. But Donald Trump won't be the one to bring it back.

 

Well now he's won in New Hampshire. Shit, there go our Iowa hopes.

Bernie Sanders won too. I hope he can appeal to more than just young people.

 

How is a country ‘Great’?

Is it size, is it its power, wealth, or is it meant to mean morally or is it used to claim that state, nation, country is somehow better than any other?

To me the problem with thinking any country is ‘great’ is that none are - they are and have been countries that have had their good points but they are usually accompanied by as many bad points, and anyway what is meant by ‘good’ and ‘bad’ can be so subjective.

But for me if people gloss over what I see as the ‘bad’ and only look at the supposed ‘good’ they can end up creating a myth which at best is can be seen as patriotism and at worse the type of nationalism that shouts ‘my country right or wrong’

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Aristotle was writing about the constitutions of differing states over two thousand years ago – republics have been around as long and the limited on US presidents to two terms didn’t come in until 1947 as a mainly right wing reaction to Franklin D. Roosevelt who’d been voted to four terms as president.

Oh you really should read up on it and see how it was set up in most places at the beginning.

I mean at the time of the ratification there were property limits in most places to voting or the holding of office which meant only about 10% of the colonial population of the new nation had any chance of voting or gain positions of power (most women, black people and natives didn’t get the vote) And in many places there were further higher property qualifications for holding office, meaning only the wealthy could stand.

Many states carried on using the same colonial charters, rules and laws that were in place before the revolution (For an extreme example look up the Dorr Rebellion).This is really a miracle it happened that way considering how many countries that have taken their own government down have had worse results than before. When most countries have revolutions and take down their dictatorships, the gangs, churches, and wealthy organizations with weapons and money take over and make things worse than they were before.

To quote Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy, a University of Virginia history professor specializing in the Revolutionary period - "One reason that the United States was stable after the war was that it did not need to revamp its system of government, and the men in charge had experience in governing….This made the country far more stable than places that did not have this tradition and later went through dozens of constitutions and revolutions. In short, when it came to government and voting, Americans had a model to build on."

Basically they got rid of British appointed rulers but in many if not most places the same squire class that had run things before the ‘revolution’ remained in control. And the constitutions they put in place at state and federal level often reflected the interests of that class.

Define ‘great’?

He is an American demagogue in a long list of American demagogues and like most demagogue he’d most likely be very bad (and dangerous) news if he gets anywhere near power .

Sorry for the aside…

 

It also opened the door for corruption. We know no Government is clean but I t would seem since the WW1, America has taken corruption to a new level.

There is no transparency, as much as the politicians would like us to believe, there is no truth, just 'slight of hand' methods.

 

So let’s say Trump and Sanders get the nominations and go on to compete for the presidency – who would wealth back?

I have the horrible feeling that given the choice between a sane socialist and an utter loon most would back the loon.

 

Besides...

There were term limits on rulers since the roman republic. There were countries around this time (edit: time of the american revolution) already that weren't ruled by kings or queens. And most of all America breaking free from UK rule was more a sign of the times than a miracle. Same with the french revolution afterwards. Do people really think that was sparked by the american revolution? Things were already rolling... (The netherlands for example told their king to fuck off at least a century earlier ) USA were merely the first with a written constitution in 'modern' times, they didn't invent or sparked the idea (same with the concept of democracy or reforming into a republic), it's only the greatest in that regard if you perceive it like some kind of race.

 

The timing was good too, because these documents were written during a time when there was a lot of cross-pollination of ideas about democracy between the Colonies and many of the thinkers and leaders who played a role in the French Revolution. So, Americans can't take credit for everything we put on paper during that era. Ben Franklin in particular learned a lot and made a lot of valuable contacts during his time as ambassador to France, and it is not trivial that he was replaced by Thomas Jefferson. Paris was ground zero for bright people from all over Europe with good ideas about how to take governing ideas from ancient Greece and Rome and adapt them to a larger, more modern context.

Paris wanted to give us as much help as they could, partly because we were on the same page politically, and partly because we were a giant thorn in the side of King George. A calculation was made that George Washington and Nathanial Greene could defeat a small British army and win independence, because fear of the French and Spanish would force King George to leave a lot of military assets at home. And that's exactly what happened.

Can you imagine Donald Trump's contribution to this conversation? "Screw the French, I just want to build a huge wall!"

 

I fear you are correct.

 

Cheers and hoots Trump steps up to the podium to reply to Karen

Hell If I’d been President at the time of the War of Independence I’d have made sure all those illegal French cheese eating surrender monkey’s would have been kept out of our glorious country…

a chant goes up…USA…USA…USA

Yep this man and his supporters would have even lost the War of Independence

 

But then he would just sue.... somebody, anybody.

 

It is subjective I agree. I'm certainly no jingoist as there have always been terrible flaws and wrongdoings by this country (just like any other). There was a time when America was the primary country to go to and live for technological innovation and individual prosperity because the country incentivized many people to come here and reinvent themselves, and achieve entrepreneurial growth they couldn't achieve in their own country of origin. Nowadays there is plenty of opportunity for personal growth and innovation in multiple countries around the world. I think that made America great in its early history. But don't get me wrong, I'm well aware of the atrocities that the country was doing around the same time. This is why I say it was great, not perfect. I suppose I'm just an optimist.

That's correct. Anyone who's ever taken a Law 101 class will tell you that much of the original legal system in the USA was derived from British Common Law.

 

Yes, Woodrow Wilson took the corruption to a whole new level with the creation of the Fed which operates with zero transparency.

 

Pardon me if I implied that America was the first country with term limits. I was aware that ancient civilizations had democracy style systems and term limits. The reason why the white house and the US Capitol have Ancient Greek style architecture is to give credence to the Greek system of democracy in ancient times. Even some Native American tribes like the Iroquois had a democracy system. I think every country ought to have at least one thing to be proud of, and a first written constitution is one of them.

 

Fast forward 50 yrs when JFK made his speech in regards to closing the Fed down, well we know what happened there.

 

http://i.imgur.com/cf4vF31.jpg

what has been seen can not be unseen.. warning graphic dump..

 

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The thing is that in many ways the US was ‘the land of opportunity’ right up to the middle of the 20th century, (for those that were free) it had risen on a wave of previously untapped resources but by the 1940's many of those resources had either been tapped, were becoming harder to extract or had been exhausted.

I mean the material and mineral wealth of the old world has been exploited and ‘owned’ for some 5000 years. From the Middle Ages there was no unsettle land to just occupy it was virtually all privately owned.
In the US large areas of land didn’t even become exploited until the late 19th century.

To take a telling example in 1848 Europe was in turmoil as revolutions sprang up across the continent many based around resources and there distribution, while in the US you had the beginning of the California gold rush

The myth of the American Dream I think has some basis in that era (1700 – 1920) when it wasn’t such a myth (although always ever only for a few), but with resources now largely ‘locked in’ and wealth distribution limited to a very few coupled to falling social mobility …well I think many America have begun to wake up to the new world.

Some are railing against it and others want to change things, and I think that is why we are getting people like Trump and Sanders becoming popular.

 

In the area where I live, economic opportunity for those who were willing to make a serious effort was quite commonly and consistently available up through the early 1970's. Manufacturing companies were shifting production from the Northeast and Midwest to the Southeast, running from unions. The cost of living was and still is much lower here, so the lower wages looked very good to us. There was a great shortage of qualified people for jobs requiring a college degree, so people had to be brought in from the Northeast to fill them. The regional culture was mostly anti-intellectual and anti-education, so a lot of college scholarship money sat unused. If you were willing to study hard for a few years and take a first job in an undesirable location, it was not that hard to launch a good career. You could move up in just a few years to a better job in a bigger city with more to offer. That's the world I was born into.

Rising oil prices and interest rates got us into a pattern of recessions every few years that significantly slowed down the economic boom, but the party didn't completely end until the 1990's when our manufacturing jobs started moving to China in significant numbers. Instead of being alarmed and wanting to fight it, our political leaders just told us to adjust to the new reality, because free trade was better for America in general.

Now in a full state of panic, local people are clinging to higher education as the ultimate answer, but the numbers don't add up. We're no longer importing college graduates from the Northeast. In fact, many of them have moved back home. Doubling the number of graduates isn't going to double the number of jobs for them, so a lot of young people are going to be bitterly disappointed. The reality is, most of them are going to have to settle for a low quality of life.

When Trump and Sanders talk about the pitfalls of open trade and people respond to it, it makes me wonder what took everybody so long. I wish this conversation had been taking place before all the factories were gone. Many have been torn down, some abandoned, some converted to warehouse space for Chinese imports. We can no longer easily bring those jobs back.

The other bullshit Trump spouts about Mexican immigrants and other talking points from Fox News doesn't seem to match up very well with reality around here. I haven't seen anybody lose their job to a Mexican illegal. It's just annoying when they demand that people speak Spanish.

 

Karen

I was talking in general terms, there is always going to be regional difference. But your story follows the familiar pattern. Manufactures ‘ran from the unions’ to find cheaper labour internally and then with the advent of neoliberal globalisation sort cheaper labour around the world.

Oh people tried even before neoliberalism took hold many tried to explain the possible pitfalls of global free market policies

“The famous liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith bluntly told President Johnson in 1964, -“If we are screwed on tariffs, this will have an enduringly adverse effect on the balance of payments”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ian-fletcher/kennedys-blunder-or-how-f_b_836325.html

But that was with the US competing with Europe and Japan, when globalisation opened up corporations worked out they could move manufacturing to places like the Philippines, Mexico, India and then China got in on the act and….

Thing is all the way along people have been trying to explain this – that economic globalisation without social globalisation wasn’t in the best interests of the majority of the people in the already developed countries.

As I said a few years back

[SIZE=11pt]It seems to me that the political history of the 20th century (in the industrialised nations) has been to one degree or another about the curtailment of the adverse effects of 19th century exploitative capitalism (some call classical liberalism). [/SIZE]

[SIZE=11pt]People in many nations fought for voting rights, social benefits, safer working conditions, progressive taxation, and decent living wages. The result of that movement was that the economic benefits of production were much more distributed. Many people saw their wages grow and in the period between the end of WWII and 1970 many in Europe and the US gain middle class status. [/SIZE]

But from the 70’s onward a new idea was promoted in some of these nations (often referred to as neo-liberalism) it was in many ways opposed to the ‘distributive’ system that had developed. One thing it promoted was economic globalisation, which basically allowed back some aspects of exploitative capitalism by promoting the moving of production to nations that had not developed the more distributive systems away from those nations that had.

In this way the long fought for distributive system has been undermined in those places where it had developed. Neo-liberals argue that to ‘compete’ in the global market the elements of the distributive system need to be dismantled what is needed they say is deregulation, the cutting of welfare, tax cuts that benefit the rich, lower wages, weak government oversight etc etc.