Jimmy Kimmel said:
Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? Bernie Sanders wants to know who owns America?
#19581
Posted 2022-March-24, 08:08
#19582
Posted 2022-March-24, 19:18
Pew Research Center said:
#19583
Posted 2022-March-25, 21:39
Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft said:
https://quincyinst.o...-the-obstacles/
Joe Biden said:
#19584
Posted 2022-March-26, 12:11
Quote
Keynes then describes how this Londoner could speculate on the markets and travel wherever he wanted without a passport or the bother of changing currency (the gold standard meant that his money was good everywhere). And then the famous economist delivers his coup de grace by going inside the privileged Londoner’s head:
Keynes’s cosmopolitan Briton, completely unaware that the first great age of globalization was about to be shot to pieces at the Somme, is the urban equivalent of the cavorting toffs in “Gosford Park,” Robert Altman’s movie about a weekend in a grand country house just before the outbreak of war. One of us possesses a photograph of the Bullingdon, Oxford’s poshest dining club, in 1913: The future rulers of the world stare out at us with frozen arrogance. Within a year most of them were in the trenches.
Foppish aristocrats weren’t the only ones who were complacent. Intellectuals agreed. Norman Angell’s “The Great Illusion,” the Edwardian bestseller published in 1909, argued that war was impossible given the interconnectedness of the world. The great businesses of Europe and the U.S. operated on the same assumption. The first great age of globalization, which started in the 1860s and was underpinned by British power and coordinated by British statecraft, had left the commercial classes free to make money — businesspeople then faced far fewer barriers than their modern equivalents when it came to moving money, goods or people around the world.
It’s easy to mock the shortsightedness of the West’s ruling class in 1913 — for not seeing how the rise of Germany and the complex web of alliances between the Great Powers could turn an assassination in Sarajevo into a global conflict. Clio, the muse of history, is always wise after the event, but future generations could well ask the same question about us: How could they not know?
Keynes’s Londoner, lounging in his bed, had at least this excuse: The end of his age of globalization came with little warning. In our case, globalization has been under sustained attack for two decades, with serious assaults in 2001 (when two planes, hitherto symbols of modernity, slammed into the World Trade Center); 2008 (when Lehman Brothers collapsed and the global financial system went into cardiac arrest); and 2016 (when the British voted to leave the world’s largest free-trade zone and Americans elected a nativist TV personality as president). The “decoupling” of the global economy into Chinese and Western portions has been gathering pace for some time. And the biggest drama before Ukraine was a virus that froze supply chains and forced the world into hibernation.
And yet, at the beginning of 2022, many of us shared the assumptions of Keynes’s Londoner. We ordered exotic goods in the confident expectation that Amazon would deliver them to our doors the next day. We invested in emerging-market stocks, purchased Bitcoin, and chatted with people on the other side of the world via Zoom. Many of us dismissed Covid-19 as a temporary suspension of our global lifestyle. Vladimir Putin’s “projects and politics of militarism” seemed like diversions in the loonier regions of the Twittersphere.
Now that we have been shaken awake, most of our attention is on the bloodshed in Ukraine, and rightly so. But just as World War I mattered for reasons beyond the slaughter of millions of human beings, this conflict could mark a lasting change in the way the world economy works — and the way we all live our lives, however far we are from the carnage in Eastern Europe. The “inevitable” integration of the world economy has slowed, and the various serpents in our paradise — from ethnic rivalries to angry autocracies to a generalized fury with the rich — are slithering where they will.
That doesn’t mean that globalization is an unalloyed good. By its nature, economic liberalism exaggerates the downsides of capitalism as well as the upsides: Inequality increases, companies sever their local roots, losers fall further behind, and — without global regulations — environmental problems multiply. Yet liberalism has also dragged more than a billion people out of poverty in the past three decades and, in many cases, promoted political freedom along with economic freedom. The alternatives, historically speaking, have been wretched. Right now, the outcome that we have been sliding toward seems one in which an autocratic East gradually divides from — and then potentially accelerates past — a democratic but divided West.
From this perspective, the answer to globalization’s woes isn’t to abandon economic liberalism, but to redesign it. And the coming weeks offer a golden opportunity to redesign the global economic order.
#19585
Posted 2022-March-26, 15:35
Hillary Clinton said:
In her searing 2018 book, “Fascism: A Warning,” Madeleine [Albright] described Mr. Trump as the first U.S. president in the modern era “whose statements and actions are so at odds with democratic ideals.” She observed that his assault on democratic norms and institutions was “catnip” for autocrats like Mr. Putin. After the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, and Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn a free and fair election, Madeleine imagined Abraham Lincoln weeping. “My family came to America after fleeing a coup, so I know that freedom is fragile,” she wrote. “But I never thought I would see such an assault on democracy be cheered on from the Oval Office.” With the Republican Party recently declaring the insurrection and events that led to it to be “legitimate political discourse,” and some of the party’s most powerful media allies pushing Kremlin talking points on Fox News and elsewhere, it’s clear that the threat to our democracy that so alarmed Madeleine remains an urgent crisis.
The fundamental truth that Madeleine understood and that informed her views on all these challenges is that America’s strength flows not just from our military or economic might but from our core values. Back in 1995, Madeleine told me a story that still inspires me. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, she visited parts of the Czech Republic that had been liberated by American troops in 1945. Many people waved American flags as she passed, and to her surprise, some had just 48 stars. They had to be decades old. It turned out that American G.I.s had handed out the flags a half-century earlier. Czech families said they had kept them hidden all through the years of Soviet domination, passing them down from generation to generation as the embodiment of their hope for a better, freer future.
Madeleine knew exactly what that meant. Even at the end of her life, she treasured her first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty, sailing into New York Harbor in 1948 as an 11-year-old refugee on a ship called the S.S. America. She would have been thrilled by President Biden’s announcement on Thursday that the United States will welcome up to 100,000 refugees fleeing Ukraine, and she would encourage us to do more to respond to this unfolding humanitarian nightmare. She would warn, as she did in her book, about the “self-centered moral numbness that allows Fascism to thrive,” and urge us to keep pushing the envelope for freedom, human rights and democracy. We should listen.
#19586
Posted 2022-March-27, 06:40
And for God's sake, or for everyone's sake, I wish he hadn't said it.
There are times when our leaders, including leaders that generally reflect my hopes and views, say some really stupid things.
#19587
Posted 2022-March-27, 11:06
#19588
Posted 2022-March-27, 12:11
I had to look him up, I gather he was a character in Inglorious Basterds, a movie that I thought was even more ridiculous than Kill Bill.
Perhaps that's what Biden has in mind but I hope not, and really don't think so.
Biden was just trying to sound tough.
The least of the problems is that various spokespeople will have to tie themselves in knots trying to explain why “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power” doesn't really mean why it clearly does mean.
A more significant problem is that Biden sounds like a loose cannon speaking of a very serious problem.
And a still more significant problem is that any effort within the Putin administration to try to curtail his power will be significantly hampered. Nobody there wants to look like they are doing Biden's bidding.
And then there is the danger that some of the more extreme parts of the Putin administration could look at this and say "Ok, game on. Let's see whose operatives can remove which country's leader from power".
Biden was doing very well in working with the international community to make it clear that the cost to Russia of its invasion of Ukraine would be very costly.
Is it really that hard for a president to understand that he should not make off-the-cuff remarks about how another country's leader cannot remain in power?
#19589
Posted 2022-March-27, 12:20
kenberg, on 2022-March-27, 12:11, said:
I had to look him up, I gather he was a character in Inglorious Basterds, a movie that I thought was even more ridiculous than Kill Bill.
Perhaps that's what Biden has in mind but I hope not, and really don't think so.
Biden was just trying to sound tough.
The least of the problems is that various spokespeople will have to tie themselves in knots trying to explain why “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power” doesn't really mean why it clearly does mean.
A more significant problem is that Biden sounds like a loose cannon speaking of a very serious problem.
And a still more significant problem is that any effort within the Putin administration to try to curtail his power will be significantly hampered. Nobody there wants to look like they are doing Biden's bidding.
And then there is the danger that some of the more extreme parts of the Putin administration could look at this and say "Ok, game on. Let's see whose operatives can remove which country's leader from power".
Biden was doing very well in working with the international community to make it clear that the cost to Russia of its invasion of Ukraine would be very costly.
Is it really that hard for a president to understand that he should not make off-the-cuff remarks about how another country's leader cannot remain in power?
Be serious-nothing is more ridiculous than Kill Bill
Still, as careful as Biden has been it seems odd that he would all of a sudden stop. Have you considered that the words were chosen carefully to send a message to those around Putin that they needed to think regime change. Autocrats like Putin aren’t surrounded by buddies and they are most susceptible to an attack from within so putting that idea out in the open may not be as crazy or off-the-cuff as it seems. It may have been a calculated risk in order to send a message to those surrounding Putin.
#19590
Posted 2022-March-27, 14:24
Winstonm, on 2022-March-27, 12:20, said:
Still, as careful as Biden has been it seems odd that he would all of a sudden stop. Have you considered that the words were chosen carefully to send a message to those around Putin that they needed to think regime change. Autocrats like Putin aren't surrounded by buddies and they are most susceptible to an attack from within so putting that idea out in the open may not be as crazy or off-the-cuff as it seems. It may have been a calculated risk in order to send a message to those surrounding Putin.
I think it is very difficult to be careful 24 hours a day. I couldn't do it.
I do not think this was calculated at all. I think it was spontaneous. Far more than once I have acknowledged that something I said was crazy. I get to do this, for presidents it is (much) harder.
i once started a Friday lecture in a MWF class by saying "You might imagine that on Wednesday I said XXX. You might even have it in your notes that I said XXX. But I could not possibly have said XXX because XXX is absolutely false. So please delete from your minds and your notes any indication that I once said XXX".
It was my own declaration of "Fake News".
Unfortunately, it is much harder for a president to undo errors.
#19591
Posted 2022-March-27, 16:10
kenberg, on 2022-March-27, 06:40, said:
And for God's sake, or for everyone's sake, I wish he hadn't said it.
There are times when our leaders, including leaders that generally reflect my hopes and views, say some really stupid things.
Yes, shame on Biden, he accidentally told the truth, which is something just about every leader in the free world is undoubtedly thinking. In the US, a majority of the country was thinking the same thing about Trump for 4 years.
Edit: I'm sure that everybody in Russia who believes in democracy is also thinking the same thing.
#19592
Posted 2022-March-27, 18:31
#19593
Posted 2022-March-27, 18:58
y66, on 2022-March-27, 18:31, said:
Counter productive? Maybe, or maybe not. I think not.
Was Putin being productive when he (his spokesman) wouldn't rule out the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine??? IMHO, the West (and Obama) made a huge mistake in not doing more to prevent Russia from invading Crimea. Now, after 4 years of having a puppet Manchurian President in the US, and basically no consequences for continued foreign interference and outright aggression, Putin must think he is the Guardian of the Galaxy. Putin is past the appeasement stage.
#19594
Posted 2022-March-28, 02:00
Imagine for a moment if America invaded Iraq and Russia suggested that Bush ought to be removed from power.
#19595
Posted 2022-March-28, 12:11
Quote
John Eastman had sought to block the release of the emails to the House select committee probing the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. In rejecting his lawsuit, Judge David O. Carter of the Central District of California cited the crime-fraud exception, which removes protections for documents written in furtherance of crime.
“Based on the evidence, the Court finds that it is more likely than not that President Trump and Dr. Eastman dishonestly conspired to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress” the day of the riot, ruled Judge Carter.
https://www.wsj.com/...atest_headlines
#19596
Posted 2022-March-28, 14:39
y66, on 2022-March-28, 12:11, said:
I prefer this report to the WSJ:
Quote
my emphasis
To all the trolls casting about for a reply, let me give you a head start:
WhatAbout ___________________.
#19597
Posted 2022-March-28, 16:24
Judge David O. Carter said:
Dr. Eastman and President Trump launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history. Their campaign was not confined to the ivory tower—it was a coup in search of a legal theory. The plan spurred violent attacks on the seat of our nation’s government, led to the deaths of several law enforcement officers, and deepened public distrust in our political process.
More than a year after the attack on our Capitol, the public is still searching for accountability. This case cannot provide it. The Court is tasked only with deciding a dispute over a handful of emails. This is not a criminal prosecution; this is not even a civil liability suit.
At most, this case is a warning about the dangers of “legal theories” gone wrong, the powerful abusing public platforms, and desperation to win at all costs. If Dr. Eastman and President Trump’s plan had worked, it would have permanently ended the peaceful transition of power, undermining American democracy and the Constitution. If the country does not commit to investigating and pursuing accountability for those responsible, the Court fears January 6 will repeat itself.
With this limited mandate, the Court finds the following ten documents privileged: 4553; 4793; 4794; 4828; 5097; 5101; 5113; 5412; 5424; 5719.
The Court ORDERS Dr. Eastman to disclose the other one hundred and one documents to the House Select Committee.
#19598
Posted 2022-March-28, 16:50
pilowsky, on 2022-March-28, 02:00, said:
Talking of irony, Putin and the Kremlin actively interfered in the 2016 and 2020 elections in the US, in 2016 by actively hacking DNC emails and a vast fake social media campaign, with an even larger fake social media campaign in 2020.
#19599
Posted 2022-March-28, 18:39
johnu, on 2022-March-28, 16:50, said:
I'm still trying to get my head around the concept of a "fake social media campaign".
What other type of social media campaign is there?
Dov Levin said:
You can read the whole article here.
Levin also wrote a 300 page book in 2020 that includes a rather comprehensive analysis of the effect of Russian interference on the Clinton campaign - he appears to conclude that it caused the Trump win. No surprise there.
#19600
Posted 2022-March-29, 02:25
pilowsky, on 2022-March-28, 18:39, said:
What other type of social media campaign is there?
There are real grassroots social media campaigns based on actual facts. Then there were the 2016 and 2020 Russian bot/Fox Propaganda Channel campaigns to rile up the QOP base and spread misinformation by promoting controversial alternative facts.
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