I was on a train and in the city when responding to comments in the last post, so I was limited by the constraints of typing on my phone. But I want to make it clear that I’m going to criticize Democrats in future posts, that such criticism is welcome in the comments, and that nobody should be shy about commenting with constructive criticism or even just plain old bitching. With that said…
Here’s Greg Sargent, hardly a guy outside the tent pissing in:
Some Democrats believe that the leading pro-Harris Super PAC, Future Forward, failed to spend enough of its enormous budget on advertising early on that might have reminded voters of the horrors of the Trump presidency. That perhaps allowed him to slowly rehabilitate himself and edge up his favorable numbers while Democrats weren’t looking.
“There was a calculation among Democrats after 2020 that Trump was disqualified and wouldn’t be back,” Democratic data analyst Tom Bonier told me. “That evolved into a calculation that he would be disqualified by his legal troubles and could end up in jail. Democrats undeniably failed to disqualify him. The result was that by the time the Harris campaign started, it was too late.” […]
But surely a key part of this [Trump not getting blamed by voters] is that Trump was permitted to rehabilitate himself and his presidency relatively unchallenged, after running the economy into the ground and presiding over countless needless Covid deaths, then inciting a violent coup and facing an array of serious criminal charges. Trump and his media allies launched years of propaganda designed to erase 2020 from voters’ memories entirely while hammering Biden’s recovery as a catastrophe despite it actually proving a largely successful one, which Trump will now undoubtedly take credit for as president.
All throughout, this effort from Trumpworld met little resistance from Democrats and woefully inadequate scrutiny by the news media. That the unpopular Biden remained in the race so long—keeping voters focused on him as the target of blame for inflation and the awful post-Covid hangover—may have further enabled Trump to shake off association with those national wounds, slowly rewrite the story of his presidency and burnish retrospective approval of it.
There was a fundamental error made by the Biden administration and by its political consultants: they thought Trump was done and that people wanted to turn the page. So Biden appointed a institutionalist Attorney General and generally ignored Trump’s antics. I’ll grant that any AG would have had an uphill battle — but Garland’s slavish devotion to the norms of the institution also led to the Hunter Biden special prosecutor and a two-year delay in appointing Jack Smith.
We all liked Joe Biden, and it’s difficult to acknowledge that he failed in what is in hindsight the most important task in his Presidency, going after Trump. We all saw how diminished he was in the debate, and that didn’t happen overnight. Rather than advising him to step down (preferably by not running again in 2024), his advisors doubled down on a losing strategy of not acknowledging the importance of the economy, and not spending money on anti-Trump ads.
Compared to any of us, these advisors and consultants have a massive audience in the DC media. Now we’re hearing a bunch of nonsense from them arguing that the real problem is that Democrats were too “woke” and how Democrats need to throw trans people under the bus. And, oh yeah, “headwinds”. I’ll grant that there were headwinds, that Democrats were caricatured as overly woke by right-wing media, and that the lies told about trans people hurt us. But when has all of this trimming that these consultants advise ever worked? Even if we Democrats decided, for example, that we have to throw trans people under the bus, it wouldn’t fucking matter because the right-wing media tells whatever anti-trans lies they need to put Democrats in a box. These consultants have had years to figure out how to get us out of that box, and they have completely, utterly failed, despite the billions of dollars spent on them and the advertising they recommend.
One of the things on my long, long list of topics to write about after the election is the plague of Democratic PACs that just hoover up hard-earned, earnestly-given donor money without showing results. We need to name, shame and avoid most of these useless grifters.
zhena gogolia
Some Democrats believe a load of bullshit.
zhena gogolia
Here’s an unorthodox hot take: We should have just left Trump alone and not prosecuted him at all. He would have withered away without the attention. Prosecuting him just added to his evil charisma.
Yes, it’s stupid, but no stupider than a lot of things I’ve heard in the last few days.
bbleh
Oh yes absolutely NOW is the time to throw Trans people under the bus, when they are most at risk and many doubtless afraid even for their lives, and of course AFTER the election the Advanced Politics Knowers think it might have affected. And besides, what REALLY should the party of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and the Lily Ledbetter Act, to mention just a few landmark pieces of legislation, do in the wake of an election driven in HUGE part by bigotry except join with Republicans to demonize and oppress a small number of Americans? What could be Savvier?
The Democratic establishment in the Village is truly odious — in some ways even worse than the Republicans, who at least refresh their counterpart occasionally by sending a mob from the countryside to chop off all the heads and burn the place down. You wanna throw someone under the bus? Start with the entire Democratic “consultant” class.
Baud
I agree. I think a lot of voters who say that Dems spend too much talking about trans issues (or something similar) are reacting to Republicans spending all their time attacking Dems on these issues.
The other part is that is that people come across some rude aggressive lefty online (who probably hates Dems for being too far right) and collectively blame the entire party for that. Not sure how to deal with that.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
👍
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
In a thread below that is relevant here. The right wing has tarnished us unfettered in social media spaces. We can limit the reach of that.
“One thing I absolutely would love to see codified into law is that algorithms need to be banned from directing you to controversial topics, unless you are searching for them. So people looking for information about a video game won’t get pushed videos by Andrew Tate. Kids searching for information about how rainbows work won’t be pushed info about the gay community that might be overly sexualized for their age. People looking for information on controversial topics will still find it.
The fact that kids and others get radicalized politically, religiously, and spurred to hate being pushed controversial material via social media algorithms is how we’ve ended up here. As someone who knows, that is something that isn’t hard for them to implement. You’re just layering in some rules with the predictions. Conservatives (especially parents) would support this. Liberals would support this. The only people who will get bent about it are influencers, which is a GOOD thing. Those are the people steering our culture and communities off the rails.”
Baud
By the way, as a rule going forward, can we actually identify the “Dems” who are doing things we don’t like? I’d like to know if it’s coming from Joe Biden or some Village idiot I’ve never heard of.
cmorenc
As to critics alleging the Ds were too “woke” and need to move right – whenever voters have a choice between a fake Republican and a real one, they will choose the real one. They are at least who they say they are, not some weasel pretender.
Ohio Mom
Democrats could drop trans advocacy tomorrow (please, finish reading this comment, I am not arguing for this), and it wouldn’t matter because Republicans are never letting go of attacking us on this issue.
We are stuck doing the right thing.
SomeRandomGuy
Guys, the political analysis doesn’t matter.
Republicans. at every level, showed their true corruption in doing everything to keep Trump from paying for his crimes, and they succeeded. People didn’t “punish” him for his crimes, because Republicans lied constant, and it was all “he said/she said”.
WTF are you analyzing anything for in the face of that? You can’t win a war of ideas, if you’re stuck by facts, but your opponent can promise you’ll shit unicorns that shit icecream that freezes into literal shit, if they want. And people *are* often fascinated by unusual bowel… what? Okay, I guess I stretched that example out too far.
My point is: all of this analysis is *nothing* compared to “holy shit, they really will lie, cheat, steal, obstruct justice, and let people die or be killed, all so their trumpie-bear wins.”
It’s a literal alternate reality – they know what they’re doing is horribly wrong, but, someone’s told them there’s something more important. than mere “right” and “wrong”.
japa21
@Baud:
Assume the latter and you will be right 90% of the time.
And as I said last night, why aren’t people recognizing that Trump and his people ran an excellent campaign?
Finally, enough of the anti-Garland crap. No other AG would have done anything different.
trollhattan
Sunday night I was sitting in a Raleigh sports bar watching four simultaneous NFL games. Every other commercial break was scare-video of Kamala being a baby-eating commie, transitioning to a looming Trump mug, declaring his impending America takie-backsie. Felt like I was in Max Headroom, real time.
That shit seems to have worked.
ETA, really tough way to watch some football.
hrprogressive
A lot of concern I’ve seen is that the Democratic Party writ large “didn’t offer anything to (me), so (I) didn’t vote for them”.
“The economy is doing great!” felt like a slap in the face to people who were still struggling.
Real people don’t go off GDP or Unemployment figures.
They go off how far they can stretch their damn paychecks, and for a lot of people, it wasn’t far enough.
Simply saying “Trump Bad, GOP Bad” wasn’t good enough for a lot of people.
I liked Harris. I thought Harris did well with the time she had.
I thought Joe was unfairly vilified by a corprofascist media that did so because they don’t practice journalism any longer.
None of it mattered to a large swath of voters or non-voters.
The Democratic Party has got to stop pretending that ignoring means and methods that work for “facts and logic and reason” just don’t fucking work anymore.
I’m not saying you have to sit here and lie outright.
But I am saying treating gun fights like they are civilized, cordial debates is fucking stupid, and has been for a long time.
The old guard has got to retire and get out of the way for people 20-40 years younger than them, and a full embrace of popular progressive populism has got to occur.
Assuming we even get the chance to try this again in a few years, that is.
Baud
LGBT folks were one of our best groups this election in terms of voting percentage. Frankly, I’m ok losing if we lose because of basic civil rights.+
* I assume, as with every issue, someone somewhere has a more radical view of what Dems should do, so there will always need to be some judgement that needs to be made about how far to go.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Never.
I saw something on twitter that highlighted a CNN panel that talked about the election. They had on some dude who’s name I don’t remember that’s been on every failed Dem presidential election in memory. Yeah, we want that “expert” analysis.
It’s what I said in another thread:
Watering down one’s politics is simply a strategy for losing.
mistermix, your posts this week are an example of why this blog is great. I appreciate your efforts, links and analysis.
different-church-lady
The more I think about it the more it seems this cake was baked long before Biden stepped aside.
trollhattan
@hrprogressive:
All that seemed half a degree at most from the anti-Hillary campaign, when a frequently uttered complaint began with “I haven’t heard her position on X.” In fact she’d spoken in detail about X and her website had an extensive section specific to X.
You’ll never hear that thing you do not wish to hear.
painedumonde
@bbleh: +1. It’s never been about specific identity groups, look at the Amendments, look at the Code, it’s always been expanding right and protections to all citizens, it just happens that those that were excluded before should not be. Conversely, the conservative mission is the shrinking of those rights and protections of those formally excluded groups.
And so I think your comment is spot on, the party is trying to improve established law with a 000 detail brush when they should be painting with a mop!
Baud
@hrprogressive:
My political time is coming to an end, so I’ll watch to see what young people do. But I’ve seen people make this argument for at least 20 years, and I can’t say I can name an example where it’s been a political winner except in already heavy blue areas. The future might be different than the past, but until there’s proof of concept, I think this is a losing argument.
Janus Daniels
Wouldn’t “Garland’s slavish devotion to the norms of the institution” have led to prosecuting Republicans as criminals, starting with their ex-president?
different-church-lady
@hrprogressive: Now that this is over, I can say it: Biden completely screwed the pooch on “The Economy™”.
It was always this lame, meek, “Your income is going up faster than inflation.”
Well you know what Joe? Mine wasn’t. (And still isn’t.) And I’m about as reliable a voter for you as you can get.
So if I wasn’t buying it, did you really think anyone else was?
Harris at least came out and said she’d focus on inflation. But by then it was too late.
Bex
Here we go again. Stepping aside for a while. That’ll show ’em.
Baud
@different-church-lady:
That’s where I’m landing.
painedumonde
@hrprogressive: the economy is great, it’s just not evenly distributed.
h/t William Gibson
zhena gogolia
@SomeRandomGuy: Good comment.
zhena gogolia
@different-church-lady: Bingo.
@mistermix.bsky.social
@different-church-lady:
In part because Democrats have trouble with the eternal campaign, while that’s Republican’s default mode. R’s started baking the cake in January 2021.
Belafon
@SomeRandomGuy: especially when you get people saying “I voted for Trump and I don’t believe he’ll ban abortion.”
Nukular Biskits
At the risk of being accused of sycophancy, agreed on all counts.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Here’s something that’s a useful go-to quick look at exit polling data. This is a carry-over conversation from the last thread:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/11/9/2284288/-A-First-Look-at-Exit-Polling-Data-Race-Gender-Age-and-Party-Preference?utm_campaign=spotlight
What’s great about this is that looks back at the presidential elections from 2012.
cmorenc
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
Regarding the notion of passing a law banning algorithms from directing folks into the most click-bait controversial take on search terms – such a law would have run into 1st amendment problems, even under prior much less RW configurations of SCOTUS, and are even less likely to fly in the current Roberts Court lineup. What might pass muster are laws analogous to those recently passed in some states requiring registration with proof of age at porn sites, designating certain controversial subjects as O-18 or O-21 only.
True, what topics are controversial enough to require adult age qualification is probably more slippery than what qualifies as sufficiently pornographic. Vagueness and overreach into protected speech are additional problems with defining the extent and type of covered “controversial” territory.
danielx
I’ve been numb up until today – but today I’m truly angry.
To Trump voters:
The economy collapses because of Trump policies? Fuck you, this is what you voted for.
Your daughter gets assaulted at school because some rotten little bastard has absorbed that whole “your body, my choice idea? Fuck you, this is what you voted for.
A family member is arrested or just simply disappears because of his or her political views? Fuck you, this is what you voted for.
Israel kills off every last Palestinian man, woman and child in Gaza? Fuck you, this is what you voted for.
A family member suddenly runs into unexplained problems with a Social Security application or monthly payments suddenly stop for unexplained reasons? Fuck you, this is what you voted for.
Gay people assaulted and murdered with no consequences? Fuck you, this is what you voted for.
You don’t have birth control available any more? Fuck you, this is what you voted for.
You or your wife, daughter or other family member dies because of unavailable care or delayed treatment for a complicated pregnancy or a dead or dying fetus? Fuck you, this is what you voted for.
You live in a blue state affected by a natural disaster and Federal aid is not forthcoming? Fuck you, this is what you voted for.
Your tax dollars get used to prop up Truth Social? Fuck you, this is what you voted for.
Your employer suggests it would be better for your career if you started attending church – his or her church? Fuck you, this is what you voted for.
Certain books suddenly disappear from stores and libraries? Fuck you, this is what you voted for. Not much of a threat for most of the ignorant swine, I admit.
And on, and on, and on…..
I am pissed to the point where it’s going to be difficult if not impossible to sit at table with inlaws who are evangelical Christians, much less friends – who in any case have become former friends.
trollhattan
Today’s Letters of Note is perfect for the time. Charles Schulz, of Peanuts fame, writes a schoolboy who asked “What makes a good citizen?”
Anybody else hearing an echo?
nonrev
Biden not only failed in going after Trump. Just as important long term is he continues approaching the war in Ukraine with a “Managed Escalation” philosophy. This despite Putin escalating again and again, most recently by inviting N. Korean troops to fight.
Biden failed in his #1 responsibility as leader of the free world. He failed to support a fight for freedom and democracy. Providing just enough to keep Ukraine afloat but not enough to win.
As we say in the military; One oh-shit erases 10 at-a-boys. Ukraine is Bidens oh Shit and despite the good he did his legacy will be this failure of leadership. Frankly right now Biden appears to have become a bitter old man with no more shits to give about anything.
Belafon
@different-church-lady: Biden was old and somehow the media couldn’t say the same of Trump, because, in part, the Right didn’t freak out after the second debate.
Baud
I see we have newcomers.
New Deal democrat
Here is a link to an opinion piece in the Guardian by a Harris phone banker:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/09/us-voters-kamala-harris-donald-trump-republican
Pretty eye opening on why so many people were not buying into voting for Harris.
Also, I have a suggestion: writers, as in this case, should indicate whether constructive self-criticism is allowed, or only positive comments.
Nukular Biskits
Agreed. 1000000%
On a related subject, something I’m proposing on my new Bluesky account, is coming up with a list of state and local businesses & business leaders who supported Trump. Why such a list? So people like me can make informed choices as to where we want to spend our money. Ideas? Suggestions? Flames?
Shaming the grifters on our side, making it financially hurt on the other. We’re gonna have to fight every way legally imaginable.
ETA: Oh, yeah. Forgot to add: FUCK CIVILITY!
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@cmorenc: It would not violate free speech. You aren’t banning access. You are banning algorithms from actively pushing people to this material… actively angering them. To find it, all they have to do is look. Then they will have unfettered access. Age limits for some subjects is fine with me too, but harder to quantify.
Also, controversy isn’t hard to measure. If it inspires vitriolic sentiment, which we can measure with sentiment analysis, its controversial. Some harmless topics qualify as this too. However, if you WANT to look for feelings about Return of the Jedi, you just search for it. We need the temperature turned down. Period.
New Deal democrat
@Baud: John Cole has been on the social media intertoobs inviting new readers.
Belafon
@Janus Daniels: i think part of Biden’s mission to Garland was to make the DOJ independent of the presidency. That, I think, made him reluctant to get too aggressive, which is not what was needed.
Michael Bersin
Question: “Is there a proper blessing for Eric Schmitt (r)?”
Missouri: “Why, certainly. May God bless and keep Eric Schmitt (r)….far away from us.”
Apparently, the junior senator from Missouri is on Donald Trump’s (r) short list for Attorney General:
Donald Trump (r) is looking for someone with previous experience setting up an informant network to head the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit
TBone
@SomeRandomGuy: 👍
New Deal democrat
Btw, *lots* of prominent accounts have closed down their Xitter presence and moved over to Bluesky in the last few days.
So see if you can find them before handing you know who any more of your eyeball time.
Nukular Biskits
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
Agreed (again) and agreed (first time but definitely continuously).
Alice
“But surely a key part of this [Trump not getting blamed by voters] is that Trump was permitted to rehabilitate himself and his presidency relatively unchallenged, after running the economy into the ground and presiding over countless needless Covid deaths, then inciting a violent coup and facing an array of serious criminal charges.”
There is nothing Democrats could have said to disqualify Trump. He did not rehabilitate himself – his voters know exactly who he is and what he did, and they’re fine with it. They love him for it.
Nukular Biskits
@Baud:
Are you spinning a cocoon and metamorphosizing (sp?) into a beautiful butterfly?
TBone
@painedumonde: 🎯
Gin & Tonic
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: The freakout by the right would be visible from Mars. Look into what happened to Nina Jankowicz – a name you probably haven’t heard of, because her mooted appointment to a Presidential commission to research ways of combating disinformation was torpedoed so fast it’d make your head spin. And she was (still is) an actual expert.
Belafon
The fact that Democrats passed major legislation and got no credit for it, passed a bill legalizing gay marriage, and got no credit for it, Biden stood in line with with union workers, and lost, just says that doing things doesn’t mean squat.
What would a liberal podcast equivalent to Rogan or Jones look like? I guess you could go on about hating macho men and selling health crystals.
zhena gogolia
@nonrev: Очень интересно. Или нет, совсем неинтересно.
Baud
@Belafon:
Small correction, the gay marriage bill says states have to accept marriages performed in other states. It doesn’t legalize gay marriage per se.
ETA: But I agree with your general point.
piratedan
Failure is an orphan. I’m not gonna bang on Dems. If there’s absolutely one truth that we should all acknowledge is that many of our fellow citizens are stupid and easily manipulated. The idea that tariffs are good for the economy or that Trump would protect abortion, social security and Medicare are professed by Trump voters. Now Dems can claim that these are obvious lies, has anyone here actually heard the Media state this? The people that are supposed to offer context, that are supposed to remove the “he said/she said” those supposed champions of impartiality couldn’t be bothered to do so or made the conscious choice not to.
so the low information voters who remembered that bacon prices were high for a while, or that inflation was high for a while and yet none of them were around when prices came down or have the slightest inkling on how economics work or that certain items are beyond the control of the government, like say bacon. With a nod to those who own media networks and have been whittling away at our educational institutions, they got what they wanted, people more concerned with what to binge watch, sports teams that need to be bet on and who is the masked singer than an idea on who will address anything that they have a vague understanding of, the pandemic, climate change or civics.
For fucks sake, some people still think Trump is a successful businessman.
This is the absolute core of our issue IMHO.
Plenty of blame to go around, but until we can permeate or reach these people, who vote for only the most esoteric of reasons, with so little actual facts/knowledge in making a decision. Maybe there really are that many shallow, selfish, cruel people out there, I think we have a major issue with disinformation and stupidity.
Hildebrand
75 million people voted, again, for Trump. They want what he is selling. They like the cruelty, bigotry, and bullying. The only ‘different messaging’ that will reach these people is to be just as cruel and bigoted (which seems like a bad idea). Clearly, this cohort wants to make someone suffer in order to feel better.
As of right now, the Harris/Walz ticket is 10 million short of Biden’s 2020 total. Why did they stay home? The Harris campaign focused on a few main points – the danger of Trump, reproductive freedom, growing the middle class. Too many have already argued that the campaign didn’t address the working class – nonsense, it was the most overtly union and working class friendly campaign that I can remember. But still they stayed home.
Which means we have to consider concerns that have nothing to do with campaign strategy or tactics or messaging:
The very real misogyny and racism of the cohort that stayed home.
The dramatic tilt of the entire media against accurate reporting on Democratic governance. The Biden team could have had the best messaging in the world, but if the media doesn’t run it, nobody sees it.
Just mulling.
TBone
@trollhattan: yes! My mother decorated her Special Ed remedial reading classroom, (where she taught a lot of K thru 6th minority children to overcome their hurdles), with curtains on the huge, tall windows made from Peanuts bedsheets she’d purchased and sewn into curtains 💜
Thanks for the memories!!!
Rosetree Media Elementary School
lowtechcyclist
@zhena gogolia:
Yeppers. The notion that her campaign was going to be able to redefine Trump in the public mind in less than three months is absurd.
Where do these people come from?
different-church-lady
@New Deal democrat:
“AVERAGE WAGES” DON’T MEAN SHIT TO INDIVIDUAL VOTERS! 🤬
Fuckin’ price of bread goes up for everyone who goes in the store, whether they got a raise or not.
I fully recognize Biden’s hand was shitty, but playing it like this made it even worse.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Gin & Tonic: Controversial cuts both ways. They don’t want their kids or themselves pushed things they are angrily opposed to. They want to manage their own cultural influences. The reason right wingers freaked out about labeling things as ‘disinformation’ is because they believed the disinformation was true and didn’t want liberals blocking the “truth”. They don’t want liberals telling them what to believe. However, most normie people want to enjoy being online, not feel angry all the time.
So no. Influencers will freak, but there would be a lot of support for this from normies.
Steve LaBonne
Trump voters- including the low-info ones beyond the core of his cult- did not care about his crimes, do not care, will never care, and could never have been made to care. I know it’s really hard to assimilate that this is the kind of country we live in, but I strongly believe that it’s true.
Geminid
@Hildebrand: Some of those Biden voters came out this year but voted for Trump. I’m thinking here of Biden/Trump Independents. Indies broke for Biden in 2020, but for various reasons Trump may have carried a majority of Independents this time.
Trump’s total may or may not show a corresponding increase, but that might reflect the number of Republican voters who stayed home.
Soonergrunt
Also, the GOP has shown that they will ALWAYS find a scapegoat. These “consultants” only ever tell us to abandon whomever the GOP attacks. They are the last remaining bastions of those Dick Morris “middle way” consultants, many of whom were only ever country-club Republicans embarrassed by the trash that took over their party. They’re the ones that have always said that instead of addressing the causes of public school systems collapsing like blighted communities with bad property tax bases and no employment, that the answer instead was to instead push for school uniforms.
The sooner we’re shot of these losers the better.
satby
@zhena gogolia: Not sure it is so stupid. Because he used it to spin it all as political persecution with a media that reported on his trials as if they were a Perry Mason whodunit.
They’re still arresting and convicting people for Jan. 6. Most people don’t realize that,or how long it takes to id someone from crowd pictures.
And most of all THIS 👇
@zhena gogolia: Some Democrats believe a load of bullshit.
Belafon
@different-church-lady: anyone have an idea for a message that would have worked?
lowtechcyclist
@hrprogressive:
Real people don’t notice whether or not they’ve got a fucking job??
That’s what the unemployment figures were telling us: how many people had jobs, and how many did not.
And the secondary effects of those numbers: they don’t notice whether there are job openings in their field, even if their ‘field’ is being a cashier at a grocery store? People know when other employers are hiring people like them and maybe they can get more money for the same job without having to pick up and move, and they notice when nobody’s hiring and they’d better hold on for dear life to the job they’ve got.
If you are telling me people don’t notice this shit, I’m wondering where the hell you left your brain when you got out of bed this morning.
MagdaInBlack
@different-church-lady: Nor did mine nor that of most of the people I know. I knew better than to blame it on Biden, but no, my wages did not go up.
Splitting Image
Trump’s image started getting rehabilitated by the “news” media when they sandbagged Biden on the Afghanistan withdrawal. Trump is the one who negotiated the agreement with the Taliban and withdrew most of the troops. Biden managed the fallout from that and took 150% of the blame for the collapse.
That’s when Biden’s approval began dropping and never recovered. After that it was the constant stream of bullshit about the bad economy.
As for the economy, if people want to argue that inflation made their lives worse because their paycheck didn’t keep up with it, that’s fine. This is probably true for a great many people and they have a perfect right to be upset about it.
But if they voted for a guy who is going to make things worse for them, and who did in fact promise to make things worse for them? Fuck them. They can starve to death under a bridge, with or without the sparrow.
Trump voters wanted a Big Daddy Figure who will protect them from All Bad Things. They got him. The one consolation is that he is going to hurt Republican voters as much or more than he will hurt most Democrats.
different-church-lady
@Belafon: Darned if I know. Like I said, hand was shitty. But waving it away with that line of approach and a smile was infuriating even to me.
satby
And thank you! The blame for electing the convict lies with the people who voted for the convict. Not the people who tried like hell to prevent it. The last few days have been nuts around here.
Splitting Image
@Soonergrunt:
Agreed.
Phylllis
@TBone: On the one hand, as a former safety director for the district: ARGH! Fire hazard!.
On the other hand, I bet they were lovely and I would have helped her spray them with the fire retardant.
Mai Naem mobile ¹
@hrprogressive: I’m saying lie outright. I remember Mnesomyne saying the Dems should have their own disinformation system and people pooh poohed her. IiRC it was around 2015 and the QAnon stuff. Americans don’t want the truth. Mondale lost on telling his truth telling while Reagan was lying. Just tell everybody they can get 150% tax cuts and get full government paid family leave. 175% tax cuts and government paid 4 year college degrees and one graduate degree. 200% tax cuts and free gold plated healthcare for all US citizens with zero premiums,deductibles or copays!
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@satby: @SomeRandomGuy:
Agree completely.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Sort of undercuts the argument that Trump is a horrible monster, a Hitler and the Confederacy rolled into one, when our people just his slapped his hand.
Ruckus
Putting someone into the box is entirely different than getting them out of the box. And if it’s two different entities that put one in and another that gets him out, it takes even longer and is harder and more expensive. Especially if one has to tear down lies to make it work.
This is not actually normal politics, this is old style 1920s style politics. Which it has to be to sell someone who would have been at home in the 1920s – which is djt. He is interested in only 2 things, power and money. And he has an unreasonable amount of money. Especially for someone that actually has zero positive talent. If he hadn’t started out by inheriting $400 million we wouldn’t be in this mess. Aw money. Something we can’t live without and something that some will abuse massively. As we see in this instance.
Baud
@Mai Naem mobile ¹:
We do, but it also lies about Dems.
New Deal democrat
@Janus Daniels:
A man who incited and attempted a coup was completely unable to be held to account during an entire four year period of his successor’s term.
Either (a) the Institutionalists failed, or (b) the Institutions themselves failed. There really is no other choice. Res ipsa locquitur.
Belafon
@lowtechcyclist: ppeople look at whether they have a job and whether people around them have a job. That’s their unemployment statistics source.
One of the craziest things I learned about people the last few years is that they believe that Help Wanted signs means people aren’t working.
Quinerly
@New Deal democrat: I read and posted this earlier.
I’m calling it the “skyscraper piece”
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Baud: @Mai Naem mobile ¹:
That is absolutely true.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
It’s really been a game of hot potato. Every institution tossed the problem back and forth, then tried to toss it on voters. Maybe the people who didn’t voted are saying “We voted for you all in 2020 to stop this shit from happening again”
N
I’m astounded that people thought TRump was done. I have always assumed that regardless of who won the presidency, he would not go to jail and would simply continuing doing what he does. I also have assumed that nothing will convince the MAGGOTs to stop worshiping him and our appeal should be to independents. And lastly I think that even if Trump died today, the whole Republican party would continue and would be just as toxic, authoritarian, and corrupt as he is.
Sure Lurkalot
@New Deal democrat: After brief elucidation of the discussions the writer had with voters about the economy, immigration, Harris’ gender and a couple of other points, here’s the writer’s “eye opening” conclusion:
People believed the lying lies the liar told them and couldn’t care less about his lack of moral compass or crimes. Sorry if I don’t find this particular navel gazing piece particularly eye opening or constructive.
Margaret
Yes! With respect to combating disinformation, I feel the Harris campaign showed us how to spread our message using non-traditional media and we clearly need to do much more of that – meeting people where they are in a way that feels fun, engaging and relevant to them.
Baud
@Sure Lurkalot:
People believe what they want to believe.
Renie
Thank you for posting the articles; all were very interesting.
I’ve been saying for years that Democrats are bad on messaging. There has never been enough emphasis on anyone’s part of talking about a lot of the accomplishments they have done to help Americans. They don’t explain facts to people. The only exception is Mayor Pete.
We heard nothing about trump’s theory of tariffs being a tax on China disputed. No one mentioned Mexico didn’t build the wall or the fact that most of the building was repairs. Not enough talk of GOP voting down immigration legislation. Nothing about presidents don’t control price of gas or groceries.
If tons of money is spent on all these campaign advisors/marketing people, someone must be able to come up with easy explanations for people’s concerns. Marketing people create commercial jingles we all remember.
The RW media is a huge problem and they have figured it out how to lie about everything Democrats do. They are a united front and growing. Being a Democrat to them is being the devil. And they made many Americans believe it.
All my opinion and I really don’t know how to fix any of it.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@New Deal democrat:
Also agree completely. We need judicial reform badly. Criminals should not be able to delay, delay, delay for YEARS while walking around free like Trump did. People can have plenty of appeals once they go to jail, but our current system is complete bullshit. Justice delayed IS justice denied. Part of why he won is his ability to defy the system and come out on top. If we had a system that was fast but fair, he would be in jail years ago and NOT president.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Baud: And again, if our own people let him get away with it when they had the chance, then it’s pretty hard for them to denounce Trump as an unthinkable monster.
lowtechcyclist
@Belafon:
Exactly – that’s the ‘lived economy’ right there.
It’s a mystery how people’s minds work.
It’s finally getting back to something more normal now, but for the past few years, help-wanted signs were everywhere around here. We’ve just got more or less full employment, rather than full employment plus a ton of employers desperately trying to fill openings. I remember having several experiences like going into Office Depot in the middle of the day and there’d be literally just one clerk in the store.
eemom
THIS is why we fucking lost.
If I ran this blog I’d pin Mystal’s piece at the top of every one of these agonizing threads.
Baud
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
It’s not hard at all. I don’t excuse people who declined to do it.
West of the Rockies
Conservatives spent years whining about The Liberal Media and Lame Stream Media. Did that (along with billionaire rightwing ownership) cause the media to become the sane-splaining shitberg (think iceberg) it is?
Maybe it’s time the left start to blow that shit up.
satby
@different-church-lady: I don’t know where you live, but gas prices in IN have been at or under $3/ gal for most of the last month. Bird flu affected eggs, but price gouging affects almost everything; and even so prices for a lot of goods were stabilized or even dropping.
I just think that the real economy also reflected full employment, and people were angry that they had to deal with or hire more minority coworkers, service workers; and pay them more.
gene108
I have felt since the Bush, Jr. years that Republicans are and have become a radical rightwing revolutionary party. Their actions are to gain control of institutions or make any institution that could oppose them impotent, like FEC.
This really kicked into high gear during the Obama years.
Too many Democrats thought the institutions had some magic powers to hold their perversion at bay, but the reality is institutions and governments are only as good as the people running them. We can pass laws to try and limit how far people in charge can bend these institutions out of their intended purpose, but the the laws meant to protect voting rights, limit money in politics, etc. were gutted by the Roberts court.
The problem Democrats have to cope with is we no longer have a shared set of values. Everyone believes their own thing or some kind of conspiracy theory. There’s almost nothing that can shock this country into a shared belief that something terrible happened and we need to unite.
9/11/01 is probably the last time in a couple of generations when people came to together in shock and wanted to unite in purpose. Bush, Jr. squandered this. He played up divisions, like gay marriage, for short term wins without caring about anything else.
Anyway, Republicans recovered from 2008 pretty damn quickly. I doubt Democrats have the ability to focus on winning above all else to do this. Republicans and conservatives recovered from setbacks like the 1964 election, Watergate, and the 2008 election by building out their media, setting up a partisan ideological society for conservative law students to be guided, and continuing to keep pushing despite setbacks.
Democrats have the money floating around in PACs, campaign funds, etc. to start putting together their own belated countermeasures to what Republicans have built. I doubt they will do it.
Anyway, Democrats hopefully have some pull with data analysts, who can compete with the Thiels and Facebooks, that they can start running as good or better online micro-targeting ad campaigns to as Republicans to reach potential voters and get them mad at Republicans.
The failure to swiftly prosecute Trump and the coup plotters led a lot of people believe J6 was no big deal. If it was such a big deal, wouldn’t Trump be arrested?
Baud
@West of the Rockies:
We started to try this year. The election outcome set that back, I think. The NYT won.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I will note, the Harris campaign really did dominate the mems and posts in the social media I use. I was joking about it was like they bought out the Russian Troll farms. Maybe more of that, and longer, so it could have sunk in to the vibes, would have helped.
Lobo
@piratedan:
If there’s absolutely one truth that we should all acknowledge is that many of our fellow citizens are stupid and easily manipulated. Add racism and misogny and I think we got!
gene108
On another note, I don’t think enough people appreciate how disruptive COVID was for people in terms of jobs in 2020 and 2021. Companies laid off a lot of people (like me) waiting to see what the future might hold.
Part of the reason the Great Resignation was a thing is because companies had stripped their workforces down.
When I was interviewing for jobs in 2022, most of the positions I interviewed for were positions the company had eliminated during COVID, and as things improved they started building their departments back.
different-church-lady
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: The only thing Biden fucked up was convincing people he wasn’t a fuck-up.
zhena gogolia
@Splitting Image:
Absolutely right.
different-church-lady
@Baud: 😂
….
😭
Ruckus
@satby:
Just looked at Gas Buddy and the cheapest here in SoCal around where I live is $3.79/gal.
UncleEbeneezer
@Belafon: Biden didn’t run on continuing to keep DOJ weaponized and politicized (as it was under Trump). He ran on returning to some semblance of DOJ independence from the Executive branch (as it should be). So I guess we’re mad that Biden kept the promise that he made to us (eye-roll).
Investigations for Jan 6th began immediately but were delayed due to Covid, Republicans refuting to seat a new USDA for the district where the crimes happened, MAGA rat-fucking inside FBI etc. But they were already well underway and when Smith was appointed it was to finish them, not to start them. Garland had no reason to appoint a SC until there was a political conflict when Trump announced he was running again. Garland was confirmed in March of 2021. By the Fall of 2021 (six months) DOJ had assigned Thomas Windom “to pull together some of the disparate strands of the elector scheme.” That right there is investigating Donald Trump. That’s not Garland losing two years. That’s doing it almost immediately once he can get his own people (not Trumps) in at USDA office to do the investigation. There were numerous investigative steps taken in 2021. The notion that Garland appointing a Special Prosecutor/Counsel the day he was confirmed would’ve gotten us to a conviction and sentencing prior to the 2024 Election, is extremely wishful thinking that has no basis in the reality of how long these investigations take, especially with all the privilege rulings, data extraction (cell phones), etc.
People are mad that Trump won again so they are looking for someone to beat up. Garland has been an easy punching-bag for them since the moment he was confirmed so they keep going back to him.
cmorenc
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
Please explain how you could define what constitutes “controversial”. That’s the part that Courts are going to find problematic under the 1A, even if purportedly only directed to the context of “algorithms”.
satby
Well Renie, I have to disagree here, because all of that was mentioned on the news occasionally and in other social media too. That’s how CNN and the others covered their asses, and then ran hours of sane washing the convict’s gibberish and both siding.
But the people who voted for him have been primed not to believe anything other than from Fox (now too liberal) or OAN. They fight with family members that tell them differently; they definitely don’t care or even hear what Anderson Cooper says.
karen marie
I’m always late to the party but I want to give this:
a hearty hear hear!
MSNBC and its endless parade of so-called “never Trumpers” and polite Republicans should be laughed at, spurned and shunned as hard as the NYT and WaPo.
UncleEbeneezer
@satby: Agreed!
New Deal democrat
@UncleEbeneezer: Again, either (a) Garland failed, or (b) (as you imply) Garland did all he could, but the American system of Justice simply was not up to the task of holding a putchist to account, for four full years – even though the putsch occurred in full view, right in front of all our eyes.
Which means the Institution itself – American Justice – is fundamentally a failure. There is no third option.
satby
@Ruckus: CA is blue. I was talking about ruby red IN, where my local gas (away from Toxic Masculinity U on football weekeds) was $2.79 / gal today.
gene108
@Lobo:
@piratedan:
Our side has to be able to manipulate them to our benefit, since they can be manipulated.
***********
One thing I realized about public policy during the Obama years is even big fucking deals like Obamacare only impact a small sliver of the population. For most people with employer health insurance or Medicare, Obamacare didn’t impact their lives at all.
The infrastructure bill, the American Rescue Plan, etc. do not directly affect most people.
Trying to sway voters with good policy seems to have become a suckers bet. Two to three generations have come of age with Reagan’s “government is not the solution, government is the problem” as a core belief.
35 years ago, when I was in high school, we were told Social Security wouldn’t be there for us when we retired. I honestly was interested in Bush’s privatization plan because of this. Too many of us have come of age with the belief that we’re on our own and government won’t be there for us.*
*Edit: Governor will not be there for us and is not capable of being there for us.
Ksmiami
@Hildebrand: we have to be as aggressive and mean and ruthless in dealing with the main stream media as the Right. We have to create a righteously angry left message ecosystem that drives the narrative. And every Dem consultant needs to be fired.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@different-church-lady: I happen to think Trump is the second coming of Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson, with a heap of stoner Harding thrown in. Biden had to the chance and passed on it.
Now why would you expect a low information voter to agree with me on Trump being the three worst president ever combined, when the actual sitting president has shown by his actions he doesn’t agree with me?
Another Scott
@gene108: Great comments. Thanks.
I’ve been thinking lately that the country used to go through boom and bust, panics, and depression cycles with horrifying regularity.
Maybe the folks who want to throw out the regulatory state and the powerful national government haven’t thought through the consequences yet…
It’s a truism that everything’s connected, but there’s often some truth to it.
Eyes on the prizes, everyone.
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Bigredwookie
@different-church-lady: What exactly were you looking for him to say/do on the economy? Not to mention he was not only fighting Republican disinformation, but the so-called main stream media’s relentless drum banging that the economy sucks. Please don’t think I’m attacking you, I am truly curious, because personally I think he did a good job letting people know what the reality was.
Ksmiami
@UncleEbeneezer: pardon my rebuttal but yeah no, the incoming AG should have from day one moved to investigate and punish everyone involved in the insurrection. Or the Capitol police should have just shot the instigators on site.
satby
@New Deal democrat: It hasn’t been news since forever that there are two Americas with two different justice systems. In one, draconian bail can keep people imprisoned for years awaiting trial, and then if they’re too poor to afford competent lawyers, they’re often advised and convicted on a plea deal just to finally see an end in sight.
In the other, rich people using good lawyers can drag things out forever, especially with corrupted judges, and end up walking free.
Renie
@satby:
Thanks for commenting. I was referring mostly to the campaign advisors not media. I believe the talk of not trusting the media has become ingrained into a lot of people’s thoughts. A good marketing group should have been able to develop a better way to let people know these issues. I don’t watch news programs so I’m not up to date on what they say. But with millions of dollars going to consulting groups it should have been easy to come up with ideas to catch people’s attention in a manner they can understand.
satby
@Ksmiami: So Italy huh? When ya leaving?
Another Scott
@UncleEbeneezer: Thank you.
Cheers,
Scott.
New Deal democrat
@satby: OK, To my mind that means you choose (B).
satby
@Renie: Agree, but that only works if they’re open to hearing information that doesn’t match their biases. And clearly, lots aren’t.
Edit: on the other hand, experience may be a great teacher over the next couple of years.
gene108
@Another Scott:
I want boom and bust cycles back. I want shit to burn. I don’t care if I get fucked. I want Republican voters to get fucked too.
I am under no illusions Republican voters will stop voting for Republicans. I just want them to suffer.
Let people wallow in their stupidity.
Lily
Fwiw, On Nov 6 two people from Texas were wandering around here. Lots of Harris signs. The woman came up to us to point out the house where she stayed summers as a child with her grandmother. Then the guy took over and she retreated way back. Unasked, he had to tell us he voted for two things, “Gideon’s bibles in the schools” and Elon Musk’s “electricity smoothing device.”
Plug it in and it smooths out the electricity usage in your house, saving you a lot of money. EM just started it selling online directly to people. (I searched a couple minutes for any mention of this scam on any weird site, found nothing.) He believes Elon’s a genius who outwitted Russia when it tried to attack his satellites.
different-church-lady
@Bigredwookie: Honestly, I got nothin’. I don’t have an answer. I just know that “Everything’s great” wasn’t working.
FDRLincoln
Not interested in Dem bashing. This race wasn’t close enough for some tweak of strategy to make a big difference.
We lost for a simple reason: people like Trump. They like him because he is everything that we hate. He’s cruel, stupid, ignorant, a felon and a traitor.
His voters know that. That’s why they like him.
FDRLincoln
We’ve failed the test of self-governance as a society.
At this point all I care about is trying to shield my family and the non-Trump people from what is to come. And find a way to cope with the knowledge that half the people I know would be Trump’s Willing Executioners if the time comes.
zhena gogolia
@Ksmiami: Oh, that would have been a political winner!
Just to be clear, NOT.
ETA: Does the name Ashli Babbitt ring a bell?
Ksmiami
@Splitting Image: our biggest or most salient value should be that Democrats make life better and look out for the little guy/girl… meaning we want a better, more just and more equitable America.
satby
@New Deal democrat: Dude, I just described the actual system we have, I didn’t choose shit. Your argument is with reality.
Suzanne
@MagdaInBlack: My wages went up 30% since 2019 (I made a jump to a high-profile firm to work on a national-level project), and yet the cost of everything else — most especially housing— has gone up much faster. If I was to try to move back to literally my old house, I probably could not qualify for the mortgage, or my monthly payments would be roughly double what I was paying in 2020, when we sold it.
If you are working more and more and yet can buy less and less….. that sucks. And insisting that it’s the best economy in the world destroys your credibility.
Steve LaBonne
Good information about where best to direct $$ is one of the best things about BJ. Thanks especially to WaterGirl and to everyone else involved in that.
Ksmiami
@zhena gogolia: at least the first part. Clinton’s phrase has stood the test of time. In the US, strong and wrong always beats weak and right.
Ksmiami
@zhena gogolia: ffs, I really emphasized that the first order of the Biden’s administration should have been to protect our democratic system. They didn’t and here we are.
Nukular Biskits
How long before DougJ comes to Bluesky?
satby
@Suzanne: Weird. Housing price to income ratio in the Americas: (another thing that hurts us is the American lack of international knowledge. This is a fun graph to play with, BTW)
Cuba
47.8
2
Argentina
19.6
3
Colombia
18.4
4
Peru
18.3
5
Dominican Republic
16.9
6
Chile
16.4
7
Venezuela
16.4
8
Brazil
16.3
9
El Salvador
13.7
10
Bolivia
13.1
11
Ecuador
12.2
12
Panama
12.1
13
Mexico
10.7
14
Canada
10.4
15
Uruguay
10.0
16
Costa Rica
9.3
17
Puerto Rico
4.4
18
United States
3.3
Chris Johnson
@zhena gogolia: That was actually not nearly as stupid as it sounds. It just shows the crazy world we’re in.
Big chunks of the electorate thought they were electing literal fucking Han Solo. Compare the smirks sometime, I wonder if the guy makes an effort to ‘read’ as Han Solo or whether it is inherent in being a scoundrel.
When Trump was accused and tried, it was like ‘psyche! He got away!’ for these people. Because he’s fucking Han Solo to them.
Except, Trump doesn’t return in the Millenium Falcon to save the day at the last moment.
Because Han Solo is a story for CHILDREN.
Cheez Whiz
@Another Scott: haven’t thought through the consequences yet.
Oh yes they have, the consequences are Guilded Age 2.0. Those panics and recesssions were fire sales to pick up properties cheap, and nothing more. The regulatory state is a cancer to be cut out, and the Federal governmemt will remain “powerful” in military and foreign affairs. Everything else, and I mean everything, is Waste, Fraud, and Abuse. You want it darker?
YY_Sima Qian
@New Deal democrat: I posted a question (request for comment) to you in Betty Cracker’s Early Bird Open Thread, wrt whether Fed rate hike was necessary to fight COVID inflation caused by supply chain disruption & “greedflation”, & whether other policy options were available. Spain addressed the root causes of COVID inflation & tamped it down w/o hiking rates, raising unemployment or entering recession, Left Wing government bucked the global anti-establishment trend despite having been in power since 2018 (even though it lost seats in the Nov. 2023 elections.
However, the tools Spain used seemed out of bounds for the U.S. due to political & ideological reasons.
Would still appreciate your thoughts on this if you are so inclined.
eemom
@UncleEbeneezer:
omfg. I am, as the kids say, triggered by having to look at fucking apologism for garland again, especially now.
Here’s a slightly edited version of what I said to you on the other thread:
None of that is any excuse for Garland not doing his fucking job, promptly, in the first instance. On DAY ONE. He didn’t need to appoint a special prosecutor.
His job was to pursue justice, and the fact that there are systemic obstacles to obtaining justice has fuck all to do with the fact that he did NOT do his job. The reason for that was that he’s a chickenshit coward, plain and simple.
There’s another recent article out there that lays all this out very specific and sourced detail, which I’ll try to find.
Finally, my heart aches for Jack Smith, who gave it his all.
Suzanne
@satby: Housing prices are so wacked out. On one hand, record-high percentage of homeowners owning their homes outright. On the other, record-high percentage of American renters are officially rent-burdened.
Seems that last year, the median cost of a house was about 5x the median household income. That’s not a record-high, but it is very high.
Layer8Problem
@satby: Good old fashioned “Seize him!!!” justice. As easy as that.
ETA: And if that streamlined version of justice gets a workout in the new administration, maybe we can get to use it too if we get back in, uh, someday.
bbleh
@different-church-lady: @Baud: Nancy SMASH has made a few comments that arguably are consistent, and I’ve heard the same argument elsewhere. MAYBE had Biden stepped aside EARLY, like at the beginning of the year, before the nominating process really got rolling, and thrown it open, then MAYBE things would have been different, either because Harris would have had much longer to establish herself and bring the fight or because someone ultimately better would have prevailed.
But of course maybe not, and in any case a lot of this is with the benefit of hindsight.
Whatever, as noted before, the task now is to figure out what to do. And as already widely noted, item 1 is self-care and item 2 is network care, especially of those who may NOT be reaching out and/or are at risk. We can do Big Plans and Big Thinking later.
eemom
Here it is. Fuck Garland and his apologists.
(Ignore the Politico and headline and read the substance. There are some non shithacks at Politico who do actual investigative work.)
mrmoshpotato
Racist dumbshits still hate “Obamacare” but don’t want to destroy the ACA that provides affordable healthcare.
Sure Lurkalot
@different-church-lady: I didn’t get “everything’s great” from the campaign. Yes, talk that the US recovery was markedly better on metrics than the rest of the world (both fact and touting the administration’s accomplishments) but that there was a lot of work to do. Specific programs to address housing, child and elder care costs were proposed and action on price gouging by food producers and sellers (criticized as price control) to name a few.
karen marie
@gene108: It’s been amazing to see how many people voted for Trump because they think he got rid of “Obamacare” and created the ACA. It’s baffling.
Cheez Whiz
The “fundamental error” of the Biden administration was to focus on governing and preserving the institutions they governed through. Trump would be dealt with, and whether he went to jail or not was irrelevant. He would not regain power by focusing on his 35% base of Believers.
But, they did not reckon with the voters’ own appetite for “perceptions” as facts, complete lack of understanding of government, and goldfish attention span. They swallowed every food tablet the machine fed them. If there is anything like a One Weird Trick Trump used to win, it is that he relied on the Democratic party to stop well short of open rebellion. They called him a fascist, not even experts agree on a definition less that 10 bullet points long. He was a crook, they’re all crooks. He abused women, well, all men are pigs. He stole state secrets, meh, who cares? It is impossible for anyone engaged in the political proccess to grasp how disengaged most American voters are. Trump won by the rock-solid support of the Republican party and the propaganda networks feeding the food tablets. The mainstream media did what they could to normalize him, but Id be suprised to hear that had any effect on the outcome. The problem the Democratic party has now is how to deal with a Republican party united behind a corrupt autocrat, and a voting population indifferent to facts, policy and messages.
mrmoshpotato
@Ksmiami: Who doesn’t love a massacre? You dumbshit.
TBone
@Phylllis: because they were so visible from the main drag in town, they became a bit famous and I don’t know what the 1970s regulations for fire retardant in bedding for kids were, but if they were anything like 1970s seat belt usage regulations, I don’t think anyone else thought about it!
Were you at RTM School District? What a small world!
Kayla Rudbek
@Nukular Biskits: I’ve been using the app Goods Unite Us but it’s more national than local
karen marie
@satby: I would be THRILLED to spend only 29.9% of my income on rent. I’m 67 years old, and my rent has always been close to or more than 50% of my income
Please tell me where rent is that low that it’s affordable.
It’s impossible. Look at real estate prices on, say, Zillow. Sale prices are doubling every three to five years.
FDRLincoln
Biden bet on the patriotism and good sense of the American people to reject someone who tried to destroy the government.
He bet wrong.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@New Deal democrat:
Nukular Biskits
@Kayla Rudbek:
Tell me more.
Chris Johnson
@bbleh: Impossible to have a primary at this stage. Flat out impossible.
We’ve learned the propagandists can get into so many niche demographics and spin things in so many contradictory ways at once, with such good information on what peoples’ weak points are, that it is absolutely impossible to run a primary and have it be anything other than a method for weakening the general election candidate in advance.
We were in the best of all possible situations. Anything else would’ve been substantially worse. We’ve seen how effective the balkanization of the Democratic Party already was, you want to allow more time for that?
zhena gogolia
@Cheez Whiz: That’s about it, sad as it is.
New Deal democrat
@satby: Ok, I’m trying not to make this an insult-fest, so let me just conclude by laying these two statements side by side.
Me:
You:
I submit these are two versions of the same statement.
Peace out.
K-Mo
Mr Mix: this is a solid take.
It was frustrating that Trump came back with a basic message of “look how great I was last time” and we didn’t have the ground laid to demolish that and establish Biden’s performance as exemplary.
We absolutely should rethink our approach. Not sure about the PACs and the burning things to the ground. I’d have to see the alternative.
Ksmiami
@mrmoshpotato: fuck you. The insurrectionists should never have been allowed to breach the Capitol. If the people who smeared feces etc had been justly dispatched in self defense, that would be way preferable to where we are now.
zhena gogolia
@eemom: I thought you were an attorney?
bbleh
@eemom: all very true, and alas nothing that people haven’t been saying for quite a while. And while I think I understand the PoV of Garland and his apologists, they’re still living in a world where office-holders respect the law and respect norms, and neither the Orange Guy nor his increasingly many imitators do either.
Just for example, the Insurrection Act and the Posse Comitatus Act contain various qualifications and exceptions to keep the military from being deployed domestically absent, broadly, situations where the national defense requires it. Does anyone think the Orange Guy will respect or abide by those? Does anyone think the current SC would even allow him to be challenged if he violates them?
I’m pretty sure that, absent IMMEDIATE (and hence very unlikely) global warming catastrophe, the most enduring domestic effect of the coming Orange Regime will be (and arguably already has been) the near-complete erosion of the “rule of law.” The corruption and economic damage will wash out, and the human misery eventually will pass, because people also pass, even if its memory lingers. But the shift from a nation of laws to a nation of men may well be permanent.
bbleh
@Chris Johnson: nonono, I’m saying well BEFORE the convention, BEFORE the nomination process even got started. Like at the beginning of the year, if he had taken himself out of contention as though he were a 2-term Prez.
Not backcasting here, just saying there have been comments that MAYBE things might have been done in a way that MIGHT have avoided the “pre-baked” outcome that has been ascribed to the situation.
But coulda-shoulda-woulda whatever.
Ksmiami
@Layer8Problem: you do realize that the combination of the insurrection and the re-election of Trump means the end of our Democratic Republic. I’m not understating this.
New Deal democrat
@YY_Sima Qian:
I’m not familiar with what Spain did, so I can’t help you there. The Fed does have a broad mandate to protect the currency and the financial system, and also try to keep unemployment low, so it could do some pretty unorthodox things.
What I do know is that the Fed’s hair should have collectively been on fire when house prices rose over 10% YoY by the beginning of 2021, because house prices feed through into the official inflation rate with about a 12-18 month lag. Instead, it sat on its hands until March 2022 – even though the unemployment rate was below 6% by June 2021, and the first vaccines were already widely available.
Then, when the Fed did act, it really slammed on the brakes with the most aggressive hikes since Volcker in 1981. And then it kept rates high even though inflation ex-shelter was already only 2% by mid-2023.
An earlier and less aggressive Fed rate hike policy is clearly what should have been done, since it had ample warning about the feed-through of house price inflation that was coming.
Hope that is helpful.
Suzanne
@karen marie: I bring up this anecdata because it’s fairly illustrative: Mr. Suzanne’s parents bought a four-bedroom house in Menlo Park, CA, in the early eighties. Neither of them had college degrees. He had a range of jobs…. Salesman, music manager, etc. She was a cashier at Safeway. They had one son when they moved in, and then two more.
Mr. Suzanne and I both have master’s degrees paid for without parental help. We both have professional careers and we do pretty well, and we’re pretty financially conservative. We also have three kids. Yet much of the country, especially near the cities where we could work in our careers, is financially out of our reach.
ChicagoBarca
@Hildebrand: All of this.
@Renie: Literally every point that you cover there was talked about daily on the campaign trail. It was part of all of the rhetoric, every single day. I have no idea how you are convinced that this did not happen.
YY_Sima Qian
@New Deal democrat: That is indeed helpful, thanks!
Spain identified that a major component of COVID/post-COVID inflation was “greedflation” or price gauging by seller taking advantage of crisis to boost profits. So Spain implemented price controls, raised taxes on profits, & reduced charges on public services. It did not raise interest rates or reduce fiscal spending, which would have caused a recession. Inflation fell the quickest in Spain among EU economies, did not see rise in unemployment, & saw real economic growth unlike most of the rest of EU. The Left Wing coalition government lost seats in the Nov. ’23 elections, but withstood the anti-Establishment wave, even though it has been in power since ’18.
Spanish policies are probably out of bounds among “polite” circles in the US, for both political & ideological reasons, but at least Harris did include price controls in her platform.
karen marie
@Suzanne: I don’t understand how there hasn’t been public concern about another real estate bubble. It’s worse now than it was 20 years ago.
Who are all these people that can qualify to rent a shitty one-bedroom apartment for $2000/month? Most landlords want income of three times rent.
I wanted to buy a 700 sq ft one-bedroom in Boston’s West Fenway in the mid ’90s, when you could get one in a nice building facing the park for $60,000. My parents told me no one would give me a mortgage because I was self employed (which was utter bullshit but of course I didn’t know that, so I listened to their “sage advice). That same apartment today is $500,000+ and rents for $3,500-$4,000/month.
Starfish
@zhena gogolia: Yeah, the fear-based ads from the Democrats themselves were exhausting. “Give us your money, or you are going to get that dude who will leave you bleeding in the hospital parking lot.” It was not quite as bad as the Republicans tricking the elderly in mental decline into believing that Donald Trump thinks they personally are very special, but it was pretty bad.
frosty
I see this over and over. You do realize that they’re not done counting votes in the west, right? Let’s wait for the final count before we wring our hands.
ETA The comment isn’t just to you; it’s for everyone who’s repeated this number (and 13 million) for the last couple of days.
New Deal democrat
@YY_Sima Qian:
Yeaf, that would be beyond the remit of the Fed. I can’t see those policies ever making it through the Senate at the time.
Suzanne
@karen marie: The math problem is that there’s such low supply and high demand that someone will pay whatever is asked. So it isn’t a bubble in the traditional sense. It’s just….. costs rising much, much faster than wages.
And housing is a critical issue for a few reasons. 1) Largest bill for most people/families. 2) Most people’s only appreciating asset. 3) Uncertainty in housing costs affects major life choices like where to live and if to have kids and what kind of job one can take. 4) A paid-off house is what we have instead of a strong social safety net when you are old.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@karen marie:
Everybody should read up on the issues of the Commodification of Housing and The Rentership Society. This was first pushed in a paper in 2011, typically found at Morgan Stanley’s web site.
The guy who wrote the first piece revised it in 2015 after he formed a private equity group to buy up houses:
https://sylvanroad.com/wp-content/uploads/Rentership-Revisited.pdf
Companies like Blackstone now own 300-500K SFHs that they in turn only rent. There was a piece earlier in the year on this effort in Atlanta. 8 years ago there were no companies involved in buying houses and converting them to rentals, now there’s at least 10 and it’s starting to have an impact. It’s replicating itself nationwide.
Compound that with the Short Term Rental issues that are choking home ownership availability (good piece on Canada that’s no different than here):
https://thewalrus.ca/airbnbs-canadian-housing/
away from people, and it’s a real problem.
How to fix that is where people like me clash with the “market urbanist” crowd (which, always remember, were first founded as an astroturf group in CA primarily funded by Peter Theil) since most of them are about deregulation and developer profits, not addressing *affordability*. I digress. Back to the Rentership Society angle.
We bailed out the banks, and then the banks and developers realized they could buy up all the foreclosed property as commodities. And it is not just the foreclosed properties that have fallen prey to the speculators. Lotsa neighborhoods in “hot” cities have been a workforce housing neighborhood for 120 years because of the relatively small houses 800-1500 SF (typical). However these small footprint houses exist on standard city lots (3000-6250 SF). Since we have shit zoning with no design/development standards and no control over unit size, speculative developers have commoditized neighborhoods. They buy relatively affordable houses with cash, competing and winning against residential buyers who need mortgages. Then they scrape and build tacky tasteless abominations at 4x the existing Floor-to-Area-Ratio, and sell them for in excess of $1.2M.
Then there’s this asinine market urbanist movement fueled by the Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase set screaming about how we need to tear down all the single-family housing and build multifamily. Single family neighborhoods are low risk development areas with high ROI. That’s why the banks want to redevelopment them. It is not because it will lead to true sustainable redevelopment. The blanket upzoning battlecry against SF neighborhoods overlooks the areas where we should prioritize that kind of residential development: transit station areas, rapid transit corridors, planned growth areas which are frequently tax sucks compromised of auto-oriented big box and single-use commercial development.
There is a thoughtful way to do it, Minneapolis, (at least on paper). They achieved that paper goal with significant regulation of design plus enormous political commitment to design focused neighborhood plans and policies. And even then, pretty much nothing has changed in terms of what kind of new builds occur or any downward trend in rents or sales prices.
So we lose attainable housing stock and neighborhood character, while the market urbanist Lords of the Flies dance around the fire of neighborhood commoditization. To quote a former chief planner in Madison WI:
Enough housing never gets built, but the developers and real estate interests make money off of what does get built because when the profit margins get too low, they stop building–it’s not like building widgets. And the commodification of housing continues which is the entire point.
Market urbanists have controlled Auckland NZ for a decade. They enacted tons of market urbanist theories and it didn’t change the number of new places built since and it remains one of the most expensive markets on the planet. I’d encourage people to look at this analysis:
https://www.fresheconomicthinking.com/p/the-auckland-upzoning-myth-response
Finally, Patrick Condon, a noted market urbanist for years, has a new book out basically saying he was wrong all this time and that the data shows that:
https://48hills.org/2024/09/vancouver-study-shows-how-the-yimby-narrative-has-failed-in-real-time/
Finally, if anybody other than some of our market urbanist ‘valued commenters’ have gotten this far, the Urban Institute of all people (they typically push a lot of neoliberal, market urbanist orthodoxy) came out with a long piece on *a* way to maybe help decommodify housing:
https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/2023-02/Decommodification%20and%20Its%20Role%20in%20Advancing%20Housing%20Justice.pdf
But, as others have mentioned, there’s a shitload of capital out there looking for a place to sit and since 2012, it’s increasingly getting parked in real estate…and the result is the commodification of housing. And who loses? The poor and middle classes.
If we taxed the rich more/better, well, that’s a start short of affixing their heads to the ends of pikes.
frosty
I reckon I’ll be cutting back on my Balloon-Juice obsession for the next week or two. Three posts today where the comments are some combination of (classic) circular firing squad, combined now with navel gazing (branding, messaging) and the perfectly valid observations that the media did us no favors. I understand the anger and angst driving it; believe me, I’ve got a share of my own.
At this point, though, I think I’ve read every permutation of these and other takes today from all my fellow jackals and I just can’t read any more.
I wonder what I’ll do with the newly freed up 5 to 6 hours a day?
YY_Sima Qian
@New Deal democrat: Well, the Fed wouldn’t be the instrument, but coordinated policies from the Dem federal government & Dem run state & local governments (still a political fantasy).
These kinds of leftist policies should be part of our platform going forward, as we try to build something better out of the ashes.
After all, FDR’s socialistic New Deal was a reaction to the real twin threats of Fascism & Communism.
frosty
Sums it up.
Quinerly
@frosty:
I’m looking for restaurant and microbrewery suggestions for Tucson in December. You been there? You can kill an hr getting that info together for me.😎
Geminid
@New Deal democrat: Could the Fed have fought inflation more effectively and with less of a rate increase if it had acted sooner?
I remember comparing Fed rate actions to inflation month by month in 2021, and it seemed like they let 5 or 6 months of inflation go by before they announced their first rate increase, and that was a small one.
Soon after the Fed was adding a half a percent or three quarters at a time. It’s like they were asleep at the wheel and then woke up and slammed on the brakes.
Suzanne
@Quinerly: Cup Cafe at the Hotel Congress. There also used to be a taco shop called Nico’s. Not sure if it’s still there, but it was incredible. Very walk-up kind of place.
sab
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Good comment.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Geminid:
That’s certainly been my take, doubly so now that NDD pointed out the rate spike was Volcker-esque.
New Deal democrat
@Geminid: I agree with you 100%.
Had the Fed acted sooner, and made clear it was targeting house price inflation – maybe by some quantitative tightening to drive up mortgage rates more quickly – it probably could have stopped at about 3% or so. And could have aimed for something like 5% mortgages.
And had it done so, in my opinion it is much more likely Harris World have won.
karen marie
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Well, yeah, but the flip side is that people buy houses precisely because they double in “value” every three to five years. My “affordable home” is someone else’s “I didn’t get the return everyone else got.”
How that circle gets squared is beyond me. To bring prices down, or at least stop them increasing at the rates they’ve been going would require … I don’t even know what.
Quinerly
@Suzanne: Thanks. I was hoping to fill all this extra time frosty now has. Give him a little job.😎
Another Scott
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Thanks for this.
I’m skimming your last link before I walk the pooch…
Yikes!
;-)
Thanks again.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Ramona
@Hildebrand: 74.394 million votes in craphead’s column, no need yet to round up to 75 million and the reason not to is because it fucking demoralizes me to see his vote count exaggerated on a liberal blog although i realize that this number is only ancillary to your main point.
Also, in the course of the day, his percentage of the vote went from 50.9% to 50.5%.
It’s quite possible that given some more time Harris might have been able to swing the vote by the requisite 2 points in Michigan and Wisconsin giving her an electoral college victory while losing the popular vote which would have been oh so sweet because then the Republicans would have been all for abolishing the electoral college.
My math might be wrong so feel free to correct it and I’ll retract the statement.
frosty
@Quinerly: Haha, no I haven’t been there since 2020. Can’t help you out, sorry.
Suzanne
@karen marie: We need to build more, we need to build more different types of housing, and we need to change some of the design and zoning rules we have put in place to only make large single-family homes profitable to build. (Minimum lot sizes, on-site parking requirements, large setbacks, etc.)
We need to seriously limit AirBNB. When it was renting out a room…. it wasn’t distorting the market. When people are buying up properties they don’t live in for short-term rentals, it’s a problem.
I think we also need to make landlording much less profitable. I’d love to see a fairly punitive tax on those who own more than two properties with separate addresses.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Belafon:
Billionaires are traitors working for Russia to loot & destroy America. Lock them up, confiscate their ungodly hoarded wealth and give it all to the middle class, who did all the work to create it and got none of the pay
It probably would not have worked as a message. None of it is plausible under US law except by slow grinding financial attrition via extremely high rates of taxation. But it would have been a message to stir up people’s blood.
Aziz, light!
@frosty: The recriminations will continue until morale improves.
frosty
@Quinerly: You’ll notice I’m still reading the comments LOL.
Re: Extra 5 or 6 hours. The company I semi-retired from contacted me a month ago to head up a project similar to others I’d worked on. I’ve looked at the proposal, took a cut on the hours they gave me to match what I think I can do, then worked out a schedule. I’ll be on the road January through mid-March which puts a crimp in the whole thing. I’ll see what they think when I show them this.That’s the first issue.
The second (and main one) is … I don’t think I can work* any more after five years of retirement. Focusing and concentrating on something I don’t care about? For 20 hours a week?? Meeting a deadline? Talking to clients again? I hope they’ve got a Plan B if I decide to do it and then flame out.
*Cue Maynard G. Krebs
Suzanne
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Unfortunately for our messaging…. A lot of people aspire to be rich and don’t want to think of themselves as taking anything.
Ramona
@New Deal democrat: One of these institutions the Supreme Court has been corrupted by the insurrectionists. Has that institution necessarily failed?
Quinerly
@frosty:
Ok. We could discuss my new Panasonic Flash Xpress Toaster Oven. No preheating needed. Infrared technology. It’s a really attractive toaster oven. Small. You like toast? It does all kinds…plus, bagels, rolls and hashbrowns. The owners manual takes about 20 mins to read. That could take up some of this time on your hands.😎
Follow me for more fun things to do to fill time.
Kathleen
I thought Harris shouldn’t talk about Trump because 1) she shouldn’t expect people to vote for her only because of danger Trump posed 2) she had to “earn voters with policies” and not an anti Trump strategy.
That’s what many on this very blog said. So now she should be criticized because she didn’t sufficiently warn us about Trump? What’s next cudgel? She didn’t campaign enough in Ohio? WTF?????
Kathleen
@frosty: I’m right behind you.
New Deal democrat
@Ramona:
As I originally said, either the Institutionalists or the Institution failed. If it is the latter, then the Supreme Court is part of the broader American Justice system that failed.
eemom
@zhena gogolia:
I am.
And if I didn’t do my job for my client because it takes a lot of work and time and the wheels of justice grind slowly and the justice system in this country is fucked 8 ways to Sunday and my opponent can afford to make my job harder, I’d be a shit attorney.
Aussie Sheila
House prices in Australian Capital cities are 9-10x average annual salaries. It’s a crisis for the young middle and working class. If our governments, state and federal don’t do something fast they will also be out on their ears. But of course building more houses takes time and requires lots of labour. So our federal Conservative Party is promising to ‘reduce immigration’ to make more housing available.
Sound familiar?
The asset bubbles caused by loose money after the GFC without corresponding increases in wages and salaries is part of the problem, together with loosening monetary policy again to deal with Covid and another asset bubble, mainly in housing. We are in a pickle here, and I can’t see a way out quickly.
People gonna do what they do.
Lash out after doing their own research on Google.
Oh, and I am firmly in the camp of Garland didn’t do his job. Because he mistook his job as protecting the DoJ and not the US State.
Ramona
@Margaret: Yes indeed! I don’t think the Harris-Walz campaign was at all a failure. It mobilized us, brought us together and I want it to keep going to get the House and Senate in 2026 and a Democratic trifecta in 2028.
frosty
@Quinerly: I have five guitars and six harmonicas. And a set of harmonica lessons that I just bought for $197. I’m on #53 of 121 of those. Plus I still have to clear out the house and Get Rid of Stuff. Plenty of useful things to do if I ever put this damn computer down.
ETA But thanks for thinking of me wandering around with nothing to do!
Quinerly
@Aziz, light!:
I actually have a t shirt…”the beatings will continue until morale improves.” I wore it and my “the drinking will continue until the economy improves” one during the Bush Adm. My favorite one is solid black with large white print….”UNCIVILIZED.” Cherokee flute player gave it to me. I get a lot of personal space with that one.
Ramona
To what extent can House Republicans expect financial help from the RNC in 2026? Even without the need to now to pay his lawyers, will Trump ignore the RNC coffers to line his pockets?
Quinerly
@frosty: that’s all well and good. Guess you don’t want to talk 5 different settings for toast. I guess I understand. I can accept that.
YY_Sima Qian
@Another Scott: Housing is a basic human necessity that, like health care & education, should not be left to the markets for the purpose of profit maximization. Otherwise, w/ the the oligopolistic tendencies of the U.S. economy, the special interest capture of government at all levels (especially local ones), & pursuit of profit maximizing will structurally cause scarcity & elevated prices. Not just housing, either.
Beyond the Fed modulating things via interest rate, there has to be much greater government activism, beyond public housing for low income households (is that still a thing in the U.S.?), but subsidized rental developments for young entrants into job markets, reforming zoning laws to encourage high density developments in large urban areas, etc.
Suzanne
@Aussie Sheila: Another difficult problem to solve is that new home starts absolutely fell off a cliff after 2008. And that supply shock continues to be felt today.
Some cities just make it incredibly difficult to build any capacity at all (I read recently that NYC built fewer units in recent years than they did in 1965). And it is thought to have significant political effects, i.e. blue states are losing Congressional seats because other states can better accommodate population growth.
Quinerly
@frosty:
Re retirement. I couldn’t function in an office setting anymore. I early retired myself at the end of 12/2019. Then Covid Times. My carpenter buddy in St. Louis describes me “as going feral” in 2020/2021. He’s probably not too far off.
Good luck with whatever you decide.
Suzanne
@YY_Sima Qian:
Um, it is massively unpopular and so pretty rare. There are Section 8 vouchers for rental housing owned by private landlords, and various other social programs. All of which are inadequate to meet the need.
Often there’s some sort of local government engagement, in which the developer gets some tax break for making a certain percentage of units in a development affordable, which is generally defined as below a calculated market rate.
ETA: I should note that I live next to a house that has been divided into separate apartments and the landlord accepts Section 8 and other vouchers from programs for housing for disabled adults.
Subsole
@Alice: Also, can’t help but notice mister media man being awfully goddamn quiet on our vaunted 4th Estate’s role in said rehabilitation.
Subsole
@Splitting Image:
I seem to recall he actually hurt them a little more than he hurt us, last time.
They were certainly squalling about him hurting the wrong people…
Not that they’ll ever learn. They’re not brave enough. But still. I love that for them.
sab
@satby: That is averages.
My house was reasonably affordable but before I retired I had an hour commute because I could not afford much near where I worked. Even my bosses live in condos. When I lived in California even rents were astronomical.
Rural Ohio housing is very affordable, because nobody wants to live there because there are no jobs.
I gave my old house to my oldest stepson (early inheritance) because he could never afford to buy, and buyers in that neighborhood tend to be LLCs wanting to rent. Also too I didn’t want him waiting for us to die. It’s unseemly and awkward.
Aussie Sheila
@Suzanne:
Yep, same here. NSW ALP government has taken steps to strip local councils of the ability to block housing development on various grounds. However building thousands of housing units (apartments) takes a long time, and we don’t have the time. Federal election terms are three years and state government terms are four years. Simply not enough time, especially when our Reserve Bank is keeping interest rates relatively high.
It’s a problem globally in most advanced capitalists countries. The UK is also facing real issues in housing its young working and middle class. It’s going to take time. After WW2 there was a huge housing shortage in Australian cities.
It wasn’t overcome for around a decade. At the time, there was plenty of relatively cheap land around city outskirts (10ks) or so from the cbd, and building modest single story dwellings on flat land wasn’t so exxy.
Now? Not so much. Australia’s population increase since then has nearly tripled.
Kayla Rudbek
@Lily: I’ve been getting spam emails for that on my oldest active email account. Block sender and delete, I swear that AT&T has worse spam filters now than it did twenty years ago.
Gvg
@Belafon: it goes back to the obliarchs and monopolies own the media. TV and the big papers do still influence the social media space even though those space think they aren’t. I don’t know how he could have with out total control by big majorities and a better court, but we have got to break up the monopoly of all conservative controlled big media. And make no mistake, because they are rich owned and old established brands, all of them tend to be conservative in the old sense which makes them susceptible to Republican influence and authoritarian government. They do not really like the common rabble or changes.
Subsole
@West of the Rockies:
They won’t.
They’re too busy sniping at the real enemy: us.
Juju
@different-church-lady: What should Biden have said instead or in addition? I’m not saying you are wrong, but I’ve heard this criticism before but nothing about what he should have said.
sab
@Suzanne: My city it is still common and popular, but we have moved from public housing to public/private partnerships which are a bit pricier for the renters but affordable for the city. We don’t get any state or federal help anymore. I think my city is unusual. We used to have a mayor who grew up in public housing with a single mother. He was really adamant about supporting public housing and he was mayor for 20 years. That is unusual.
Ramona
@FDRLincoln: this is what we should be talking about: How to shield ourselves and ours, but without collaborating with the fascists. I don’t know how. John Cole said he and others will come up with suggestions on how to protect our retirement money for those lucky enough to have some and how to protect our electronic information. There are many other good suggestions I’ve seen here.
Mai Naem mobile ¹
@Suzanne: it’s not just the rentals. It’s the industry that’s popped up around renting – both Airbnb and regular rentals. It’s the making a buck off everything in a rental situation. I’ve talked to a bunch of people who’ve gone through the process. You’ve got a non refundable background/credit fee for every adult renting which can be $25-$50/person and you aren’t guaranteed to get the place even if you pass the background check. Your household could waste $1500 on these checks before even getting a place. Security deposit(usually 1 mo rent)/nonrefundable cleaning deposit $150-500/pet deposit/non refundable pet deposit/monthly pet rent(!)/non refundable key fee/fee for internet. I don’t even remember some other stuff. The kicker though was one that a friend told me – $25/ payment fee to pay the rent online with no snail mail or other options. His apt complex had a manager on-site and still had online payment only. Oh, and one of his early payments got lost online and they tried to charge him late fees even though he had paid on time and it was a screw up on their end.
Kayla Rudbek
@Nukular Biskits: it’s an Apple app that has a database of businesses. For instance, I can put in Home Depot, Lowe’s, or Ace Hardware and the app gives an initial blue/red in the result list, then you can select and see what the distribution of their political donations are and additional information if they have it (e.g. does the company give leave for voting, did they pull donations to the J6 congressmen, etc.). If the company isn’t listed in the database, the Goods app gives you an option to email and ask for more information about the company.
Suzanne
@Aussie Sheila: Every municipality that I have worked in is different, but some of the hurdles to development are ludicrous.
Some cities have these unelected Design Review Boards, which can approve, deny, or dictate changes to your building on purely aesthetic grounds, and there could be a lot of cost involved in those changes. I had one municipality dictate three acceptable styles (Mission, Pueblo, or Mediterranean), and then, months later, said the design didn’t have enough (expensive) clay barrel tile on it. Had another project where the DRB didn’t think the building was showy enough and wanted it to be more dramatic.
There’s also these months-long public comment periods, in which we host public meetings at the local public library, and then people show up and make comments about paint colors.
Pittsburgh recently shot down a project (would have replaced a shitty old building with a grocery store and a huge parking lot with about 200 housing units and the grocery store on the ground floor) in an expensive neighborhood because the people a few blocks away would have lost their views of the park.
Zoning and design review need to be based on concerns about health and safety and environmental impact. That is…. not the case in much of the country.
sab
@Juju: He could say anything and no news media would report it. Kamala got brief press coverage but then it ended, although her people were canny about putting her where they could.
YY_Sima Qian
@Suzanne: Why did they become unpopular? Because they only benefited the lowest levels of the socio-economic strata? Because they became “run down & crime ridden” (which are symptoms rather than causes)?
In Singapore, the Public Housing Authority builds large apartment complexes consisting of relatively small but heavily subsidized units, so that every Singaporean family can afford a home. Those not satisfied w/ the small public housing can purchase much more luxurious places on the market. US cities should consider emulating this model, especially for young new entrants into the labor market.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
“Build your way out” is trickle-down housing propaganda. We have a demand problem not helped by nominal wage suppression (until recently) amidst a speculative-led housing inflation as I described above.
Builders build until prices look to drop, then they stop building. Great quote from the president of a developer group: “”We have builders that have land, they could build, but they are not going to cut prices unless they hit their market target. They can sit back on the land and wait.” *The* thing that is crucial to affordability (other than income inequality which market urbanists avoid talking about like the plague) is inflation and interest rates.
I mentioned Auckland earlier. Total regulatory capture by market urbanists. They did everything and guess what? Their precious market decided they didn’t want to build. Again, read the link I provided above. Same thing has happened in Minneapolis although with fewer years of data.
Yeah, I remember when I was young and wanted to move into a centrally located place in a superstar city because of the magic of housing abundance. Oh yeah, that’s *never* been the case but instead, market urbanists created a “crisis” which boils down to
“I can’t afford an Audi, therefore, there must be an Audi shortage”.
Again, look at price-to-income ratio over time:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/median-house-prices-vs-income-us/
It ain’t great but market urbanists never talk about the other side of it: income. They only focus on housing because that’s where the money is to be made.
Securing socially equitable means of shelter is out of reach for the working class because finance has cornered the market. Trickle-down housing is a myth. Fixing it will require more than the trite, facile Theil-originated talking point of buildbuildbuild.
Always remember, the people pushing this glibertarian approach are either people on the real estate industry payroll in one form or another (planners, construction, real estate, architects, etc) or people too clueless to know that the only folks who say these things are being paid.
And the developers are laughing at the latter from their mountain homes in Telluride, or Aspen, or a yacht.
RaflW
Throughout Biden’s presidency, it sure looked like he was running a campaign based on accomplishment, but the WH and Dems sucked at tooting their own horn.
I know this sounds like the age old “messaging” complaint, and sure that’s what part of it. But beyond staid ribbon cuttings, and lots of those should have been events with very, very sharp elbows shoved into the ribs of Republicans who showed up to take credit where they had voted against the bills, all these fucking great things that got done were barely talked about.
And I seriously WTF, the way that (what I’ve read but I’m going off memory here) definitely over half, and maybe over 60% went to fucking ungrateful red states. If that was a political strategy, they forgot to blast the klaxons of “Democrats did this for you.”
The failure to win the election has many threads, but that’s one I’m mad about.
Gvg
@Renie: all of those things were talked about. But they weren’t repeated over and over by everyone. Either they were supressed by the systems gatekeepers editors, owners, algorithms) , democrats didn’t say it in a catchy enough way or understandable enough way, or there wasn’t a support system of bots and agents amplifying it so it caught on. I suspect all 3, plus unknown other factors. Winning over this isn’t just building our own media and building a market, it also seems like building a secret anti propaganda agency within to defeat algorithms and out shout bots with our own or can you build anti bot kill programs? Disrupt communication so people don’t get fed lies? Prevent Trump from preventing it or knowing it’s being done? And I know nothing about computers, just that they can’t be allowed to radicalize people.
sab
@Suzanne: My brother in Marin County CA had a request for a door denied because there was insufficient support for the skylight ( it was a door not a skylight.) He appealed it but lost the contractor to scheduling elsewhere in the meantime. Idiots.
ETA The contractor thought it was because he was SF and not Marin, so sort of corruption denial. That would not surprise me.
Deeter
Failure to disqualify him is ultimately the fault of republicans. They could have easily done it after the January 6 impeachment. It would have had the best chance of sticking as it would have been bipartisan. They chose not to, because they are cowards and terrible people.
That said, shouldn’t we *the people* demand enforcement of the 14th amendment right now? We have some levers (strikes, boycotts, etc.)
He is already kicking guardrails that he signed into law.
(Hi, I’m new — long time lurker, first time commenter)
Another Scott
@Suzanne: I greatly appreciate your comments on construction, design, zoning, etc.
Another thing that probably doesn’t get talked about as much as it should is lumber prices. There was a big run-up under TCFFG (Canadian fires and his beautiful tariffs). But then they went absolutely went nuts (giant swings up and down) during the pandemic, and Biden increased some of the tariffs for a time. Prices have stabilized at about 2x the quasi-stable low baseline of around mid-2015. How could any builder figure out how to price new construction with swings like that??
Everything’s connected, and we non-experts need to realize that there isn’t a simple solution to the housing problems in the USA.
Thanks again.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Ramona
@bbleh: Selfcare coupled with network care seems like big thinking to me.
Suzanne
@YY_Sima Qian:
Yes and yes.
The most high-profile failure was Pruitt-Igoe.
Americans really don’t love public goods in much of the country.
Jay-Z famously grew up in the Marcy Projects in Brooklyn.
So we get this much more piecemeal approach in which the federal government hands out the money to local governments and then to private landlords.
Aussie Sheila
@Suzanne:
Exactly the same issues here. Although our State governments have much more control over local government here and can simply override them if they wish. Our governments state and federal have a lot of power in their domains, Local government ,not so much. But the issue is the time it takes to build what is needed in a particular electoral cycle. Local Council objections to a State government aren’t a particular delay to a determined State government.
sab
@sab: Akron is still embarrassed about how long LeBron James and his young mother bounced around after we knocked down his grandmother’s house after she died. They eventually got public housing but it took years.
As a local citizen I am embarrassed.
bbleh
@Ramona: certainly top priority, at least for now, and rarely a bad idea.
YY_Sima Qian
There is also the issue of the interest of capital owners, & each of us who owns a house is a small capital owner in our own right. Who wishes to see the value of the assets we hold drop (& they would have to drop significantly given the current elevated prices)? Of course, for the majority of working/middle class that own only 1 property & have mostly paid off the mortgage, the paper value of the property is largely immaterial.
This is how the big capital owners that benefit by far the most from capital accumulation convince the middle class that their interests are aligned.
Basic housing (like basic health care & basic education) really should not be a scarce tradable good that forces the working & middle classes to outbid each other to put a roof over their families, & motivate those who have bought the scarce good to kick away the ladder for those still on the scramble.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Since we’ve discussed fucking AirBnb, here’s some good reading on their negative effects all over the place:
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/inside-bro-tastic-party-airbnb-gentrifying-east-austin/
AirBnb and gentrification
https://gothamist.com/news/these-bed-stuy-blocks-lost-80-of-their-airbnbs-after-nycs-short-term-rental-crackdown
AirBnb owned by corporations in Brooklyn, impact on crack down there. Good piece on how they took over entire blocks.
https://twitter.com/NotoriousAirbnb/status/1846608997593575632
The work being done in cities like Lisbon and Barcelona to retake their cities is ongoing.
YY_Sima Qian
@Suzanne: Yeah, massive public policy failure at all levels, as a country.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@YY_Sima Qian:
I think most of us here would agree with that, hence why I talked about commodification upthread.
Suzanne
I will note that, despite some “valued commenters” trying to imply that correcting a shortage of a first-tier-of-Maslow’s-hierarchy requirement of life is “glibertarianism” and “trickle-down”…. I have proposed other regulatory solutions. Building more is by no means the sole solution. But no solution exists without building more.
I’ll also note that I’ve spent 14 years of my life actually designing and working through the hurdles of actual buildings…..hospitals and senior living.
Suzanne
@YY_Sima Qian:
Exactly the hurdle. There’s a lot of incentive for current homeowners to oppose development near them because the scarcity inflates the value of their asset.
Gvg
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: They have too much money that isn’t taxed. They are looking for places to invest it and have run out of good ideas and have had to move on to bad ideas. This is taught in basic business school classes. Too much capital to invest and the excess gets wasted. When there is a balance, the capital has to choose the worthwhile investments.
Bigredwookie
@different-church-lady: Fair enough.
YY_Sima Qian
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: & Dems need to resist the temptation to brag about housing prices (& other asset prices) as economic accomplishments, & the population at large need to stop treating these statistics as signals of economic health/prosperity.
Here in the PRC housing also became distorted by market dynamics, as it became a financial instrument for the urban mass affluent & the rich to park their savings & earn higher returns. In fact, it was worse than in the US because people here have far fewer assets to invest in. It was not an issue of supply as developers built like crazy, but runaway demand driven by speculative impulse. The end result is similar to the ROW: housing affordability relative to income was worse than the US, it was increasingly difficult for new entrances to the labor market & young households to secure permanent housing, to the point of suppressing household formation & births.
Here, the hard authoritarian CPC regime decided the course was untenable, & purposely popped the real estate bubble to pivot resources away from real estate (& internet platforms) into advanced manufacturing & hard tech. The ongoing transition remains painful (speaking as someone who owns property here), but it was necessary (indeed, overdue) as public policy for the larger public good. Now prices have dropped by 25 – 50%, they are now much more affordable relatively to income everywhere, except the top tier cities.
Whether the pivot back to advanced manufacturing works, whether the deflating housing sector seizes up the whole economy, & whether having the “age of abundance” brought by advanced manufacturing at a colossal scale can eventually spur consumption, remains to be seen…
janesays
Two words:
Merrick fucking Garland
OK, that’s actually three words, but whatever. That dude will go down as the worst Democratic-appointed U.S. Attorney General in American history, and the contest isn’t remotely close. I think Biden has been a pretty terrific president on most things, but holy shit did he ever royally fuck up by letting that asshole keep his job once it became super obvious that he (Garland) had absolutely no intention of addressing Trump’s criminality with the seriousness and expeditiousness that was required. He should have been fired at the end of Biden’s First 100 days, and Biden’s decision to let Merrick be Merrick for the duration of his presidency may well have cost Harris the presidency and the rest of us the endurance of American democracy itself.
Quinerly
@Suzanne:
Also in St. Louis. 10 blocks from where I lived for 40 years. Major gentrification now. Darst Webbe was torn down during my tenure in my neighborhood of Soulard (AB Brewery world headquarters)
https://www.urbanreviewstl.com/2009/06/darst-webbe-public-housing-project-long-gone/
Another Scott
@Gvg: +1
When the MotUs in Europe were getting negative interest (which we were told was “impossible”) it was yet another wake-up call that there was too much too much money out there that wasn’t doing anything productive because their taxes were too low.
It’s one of the reasons why the Fed spent years/decades trying to get US inflation up to 2% consistently without success – the folks with money didn’t need to borrow any from Fed-associated banks.
It’s a big reason why I figured that the Fed jacking up interest rates wasn’t going to do much to the US economy (with the important exception of housing for folks that need a mortgage) because normal people were already paying 10-30% interest on credit cards and were used to getting 0.05% on savings, etc., etc., so it made little objective sense as a response to the temporary distortions of the pandemic. But, of course, inflation expectations are built on sentiment and expectations and the only way to change those was for the Fed to make a big show of jumping in to slay the Inflation Monster!!
Anyway…
Agreed that all the evidence shows that taxes on the wealthy are far too low. It looks to be a while before they’ll be going up, though. Here’s hoping they don’t destroy the world before we can make them pay their sensible share (and maybe more).
Best wishes,
Scott.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@janesays:
I’ll never understand this take. Lots of people blame Garland that he didn’t act fast enough, but I think the SCOTUS immunity ruling from July shows that it didn’t matter what he did or didn’t do. Thinking Garland alone was going to stop Trump is wishful thinking
Aussie Sheila
@YY_Sima Qian:
Agree that the provision of housing shouldn’t be treated like an asset class. But I don’t know how you unwind the insane capital value it represents (on paper) without engendering a middle class meltdown that would make the NSDAP look like chickenshit.
Rising house values has been a way to smooth over the decline in real wages for the middle and working class for the last 30 years. Now we have lower real wages than we did nearly 60 years ago and house prices that have reached the stratosphere in Australian Capital cities, excluding the children of the very people who benefited from this pea and thimble trick.
It’s an abomination.
Suzanne
@YY_Sima Qian: In the run-up to 2008, when housing prices were skyrocketing due to cheap-ass subprime mortgages….. I have never seen so much construction. You could go out to the exurbs of most Sun Belt metros, and huge developments were going in. In Phoenix, you could probably pick from thirty different builders at any one time. Each development at least a 1/4 square mile, if not more.
After that, production just absolutely tanked, for close to a decade. We’re now building roughly as many units per year now as we were then, but of course, the population grew in that time. And a lot of the professionals working in development, design, engineering, construction, etc at that time lost their jobs and left the field.
Also, the housing stock in the U.S. is aging and needs replacement.
And now we’re gonna deport a chunk of the construction workforce.
So.
dww44
@janesays:
@janesays: you’re on to something here. Jack Smith should have been Attorney General. He may have started from the top down. Now even those who were found guilty for their actions on January 6 are gonna get pardoned. I do hope Biden can mete out some much needed justice before the Inauguration. .
YY_Sima Qian
@Suzanne:
That’s what I meant by “kicking away the ladder”. However, it is entirely rational behavior in pursuit of self-interest. It’s the job of the government to address the pathologies such behavior engenders.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Another Scott:
Actually, I think the Fed’s mistake was waiting too long and not raising interest rates a year earlier than they did. They kept hoping that the inflation was “transitory”
dww44
deleted duplicate.
Chacal Charles Calthrop
@Gvg: this explains bitcoin certainly
sab
@YY_Sima Qian: OT I had never even heard of Adam Tooze until you mentionned him. His books are amazing but also kind of dense. I will have to reread a couple of times.
He is writing about major economic and financial changes when I was in business school and nobody mentionned any of it. Humbling. And a complete waste of my tuition because my teachers apparently knew nothing. (Actually, my teachers still did because we were accounting.) But the finance guys sure missed an aircraft carrier sized boat/ship.
Yikes level of missing the obvious if what they were teaching mattered.
Suzanne
@YY_Sima Qian: There’s a residential development under construction just a few blocks away from me. It is just over the city line in a pretty wealthy municipality. It is being built on a site that was a school for the deaf. The school moved and the site is being redeveloped into a mix of single-family and townhomes. A certain number of the townhomes are designated as below-market-rate.
The neighborhood freakout has been something to behold. Neighbors have been saying all kinds of things about how people who live in affordable housing are drug addicts and sex criminals and will ruin the neighborhood.
Suzanne
@sab: Adam Tooze has a podcast called Ones and Tooze. I listen on occasion.
sab
@Suzanne: We went through that thirty years ago. They will get over it. The horrors won’t happen.
YY_Sima Qian
@Aussie Sheila:
You can’t, until the hoped for aftermath after the reactionaries have been defeated, & only after they have done tremendous damage, current structures fallen apart, & current mindsets change, rebuilding from the ashes, so to speak. It can’t happen before, for the reasons you state, & it can’t happen when the Dems were successful in keeping boat afloat & the show going.
& now I sound like one of those Left Wing “accelerationists”, but I don’t see a gentler path. Only a major disruption like the Great Depression can spur this kind of fundamental change, or the Oil Crisis of the 70s.
Suzanne
@sab: There’s already drug addicts in the neighborhood!
Mai Naem mobile ¹
@YY_Sima Qian: i don’t think you can compare Singapore to the US. For the equivalent you would have to have the US spend probably a minimum of $150K per unit. Probably closer to $200-$250K. If you thought the pushback to student loans was imagine what it will be to this.
Another Scott
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I think that’s the conventional view, but I personally still don’t buy it. I don’t think that I can convince anyone otherwise, so I’ll not spend the time to try other than to say that a lot of the old conventional wisdom about the Fed controlling the money supply (decades ago the economics news reports would talk about “M1” along with the Dow, because they thought it meant something) has been shown to be inapplicable now because of the huge rise in shadow banking and similar things.
Also too: PBS.org (from February 2023):
The impossible happened. How? Why? Because the omnipotent Fed did such a great job? No, not in my view. It happened because the Fed actually doesn’t control most of the real interest rates in the real economy any more since the rise of shadow banking and all the rest, and the temporary inflation from the pandemic ended on its own (as I expected it would – but it took longer than I expected). The economy as a whole wasn’t overheated or overextended and tired, the temporary shock of the pandemic ended, [ and cheap money was available outside of the Fed-associated banks ] so there was no natural cause for a recession.
Similarly, I expect that the US will enter another period within the next few years where inflation will again be under 2% for extended periods no matter what the Fed does. **Unless** Congress substantially raises taxes on the wealthy to get the unproductive money out of the economy.
My $0.02, FWIW.
Best wishes,
Scott.
YY_Sima Qian
@Suzanne: Wow, I had not followed the US real estate industry between the GFC & COVID. Thanks.
sab
@Suzanne: But wasn’t construction with no water? Seems pointless.
Mai Naem mobile ¹
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Garland should have acted faster. He got was trying to be uber careful because it was the first president being prosecuted for some serious criminal stuff. Garland of all people should have known that the GOP doesn’t act in good faith. Garland is not some new grad third rate lawyer. He should have gamed some of this stuff out. And the stuff about Kavanaugh and the FBI’s so called investigation should have gotten Chris Wray fired within the six months of Garland being AG. Didn’t he have to go through a background check when he was nominated for SCOTUS? He sure was fast enough to get a special prosecutor for Biden’s nothing burger documents case and Hunter Biden’s situation.
sab
@Suzanne: There’s drug addicts in every neighborhood, new neighborhoods and old neighborhoods.
You know that but sheesh. We need housing our kids can afford. Restricting housing ups my property value but I already bought the place. My kids will profit but only when we die. Meanwhile they need houses they can afford.
Mai Naem mobile ¹
@Another Scott: we’ve gotten addicted to cheap money and low inflation. Cheap money makes people think they can play around with money. I’ve never understood this 2% interest goal. I get that you don’t want 7-8 percent but it’s not like we’ve ever been an Argentina or a Zimbabwe.
YY_Sima Qian
@Mai Naem mobile ¹: I was thinking US cities could take some inspiration from Singapore.
The contrast between Singapore & Hong Kong is instructive, both are city states heavily reliant upon service industries & trade, w/ no endowment of natural resources & high population density. Hong Kong became the neoliberal paradise from the British colonial times (perennially ranked among the “most of economically free”), w/ real estate supply tightly controlled by a small group of oligarchs that has captured the city’s administrations (again, since British colonial days). The result is that housing is expensive & scarce, forcing most of the working class to live in tiny abodes more appropriate for livestock, utterly unaffordable to the fresh HS & college graduates.
Through the GFC & COVID, Singapore has remained relatively stable, & Hong Kong had been wracked by mass protest movements in the 2010s. Both had soft authoritarian governments. Singapore still is one, but Beijing has now imposed a hard authoritarian government in Hong Kong.
Another Scott
@Another Scott: Before I forget – one more thing:
Housing loans are different and the Fed has a big impact there because of the huge federal (and quasi-federal) infrastructure backing home loans. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, FHA, and all the rest. And housing does have a substantial effect on the economy especially via new household formation (people having to buy a bunch of stuff for their new abode, etc.). (But seemingly not as much as it used to).
The rest of the economy isn’t affected by the Fed’s actions nearly as much these days.
[ /soapbox ]
Best wishes,
Scott.
sab
@Another Scott: Read Adam Tooze. You will be shocked. Everything you thought you knew will be in question.
Another Scott
@Mai Naem mobile ¹: +1
I was talking with a young colleague at work who was upset that he wasn’t able to get a 3% 30 year mortgage for his first home purchase. I told him about our 30 year mortgage being a 7% first and a 9% second when we got our place in ’98. We only refinanced it once (which seemingly is unheard-of among people these days). Instead, we paid it off in less than 20 years by paying more principal every month. I said that I think he’s dreaming if he’s expecting 3% mortgages to come back soon.
We wouldn’t be able to do that now, of course, because housing prices in this area are nuts. :-( And the difference in a monthly payment on a giant mortgage at 3% vs 7% is huge these days.
It seems to me that inflation these needs a lower bound of 2%, not an upper bound, not an average. We’ve seen what happens when inflation is too low for too long (money moves up the ladder and doesn’t move in the economy). Savings needs to be valued, so that people don’t have to feel that they’ll only have enough money for retirement by buying too much house or speculating one weird meme stocks and the like, or both.
But (short of Tmurp setting the economy on fire), I don’t expect inflation above 2% anytime soon. And that’s unfortunate in my view.
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Darkrose
I’m sorry, but this is nonsense. Harris repeatedly talked about how Trump deliberately tanked the bipartisan immigration legislation because he didn’t want Biden to have a win. The “tariffs are a tax on YOU” line was repeated over and over and over by Harris and her campaign surrogates. Harris pointed out Biden’s child tax credit, and how the Republicans refused to extend it. She pledged to go after price-gouging by corporations, which is the actual reason grocery prices. Her economic platform included concrete proposals like $25,000 for first-time homebuyers and money for entrepreneurs.
Meanwhile, we have people on food stamps complaining about inflation and not realizing that Biden increased the available funds for food stamps every year of his presidency, despite Republicans trying their hardest to cut or outright eliminate it. 45% of voters said they were better off 4 years ago, when there were bodies piling up in refrigerated trucks, you couldn’t get toilet paper, and Trump was telling people to inject bleach.
This is a global problem: people want to forget that the pandemic happened. It’s over and we all want to go back to normal–i.e. before COVID–and pretend that nothing has changed. A majority of voters apparently do want to go back.
Another Scott
@sab: Sorry if I missed it. Is there some free overview you can point to?
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Mai Naem mobile ¹
@YY_Sima Qian: I’ve been to Singapore and HK. I just don’t see even blue US cities being able to give away that kind of money and that is assuming they even have that kind of money available. There will always be people complaining like they did about student loan forgiveness. Maybe you could have some lottery system from people who meet some basic financial standards where they at least have income/savings to maintain the unit.
YY_Sima Qian
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Inflation caused by COVID related supply chain disruptions were transitory. Not sure the there is evidence that the fiscal stimulus contributed to inflation or overheating the economy, but it would have been manageable anyway. Inflation caused by “throwing money out of the helicopter” would have persisted if the Fed did not change course, so on that it should have pivoted much sooner. Of course monetary easing went straight to inflating asset price bubbles, there aren’t nearly enough productive investment opportunities to absorb all the new money. Protecting asset prices is the purpose of monetary easing, & their primarily serve the interests of the big owners of assets.
Ramona
@Another Scott: what kind of a money system did they have in the 19th century before the Federal Reserve Act of 1913? Home-based private bank-notes?
Suzanne
@Darkrose: Sarah Longwell said on one of her podcasts that most voters consider the pandemic an exogenous event — neither blaming nor crediting Trump for it. And I think when we ask if they were better off four years ago, people are actually answering how they were doing five years ago.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Suzanne:
What’s your point?
YY_Sima Qian
@Mai Naem mobile ¹: Not today, but the US will be going through some dark days & wrenching changes. As I said upthread, if there is the opportunity to build something better out of the ashes, let’s not reconstruct the status quo ante, & there will be strong vested interests who want to do just that.
Short term, cities can consider PPPs like sab‘s municipality has been doing as a solution that suit US condition. Dems can also run on such populist proposals (this is no longer the time for technocratic considerations of whether the specific policies are practical & which monied interest they might offend), make “housing is a human right” one of the rallying cries for non-violent resistance.
spoot
A few thoughts.
I think the biggest reason for the loss is due to the incumbency curse. People are hurting because of the high prices of everything and also the flood of immigrants storming the border and they blamed the Biden/Harris presidency.
I think we forget how disorienting the 21st century as been so far. In 2007-8 we has the meltdown of the global economy and the collapse of the housing market. When that happened I thought of the Great Depression and the rise of Hitler in the next decade and I was certain we would face the rise of the Ultra Right all over the world. In 2016, a mere 8 years later, we got Trump.
In 2019-20 the world suffered a global pandemic which killed millions and shut the global economy down once again.
Most of our stable institutions, banking, international trade, the healthcare systems, government institutions, congress, the Presidency, were all shown to be incapable of responding adequately and found to be fragile and weak, failing to keep the People safe.
I think faith in American strength and power have crumbled and people feel extremely vulnerable. Americans are not used to feeling this way.
My Dad once told me that human societies have a hard time resolving big problems. Only war and famine create the conditions by which a civilization can begin anew. And only sometimes, much of the time civilizations collapse instead.
I think we need to start again, this time on the local level. Forget about Washington, the solutions are not coming from there. We need to engage in our cities, our local groups, our communities. I don’t know how to do it, really, but my little city just elected a dynamic guy who wants to move and shake things to get stuff done. So that’s something I can get involved in.
RevRick
@zhena gogolia: I agree. Most of the hot takes are stupid, because they’re said in the heat of anxiety, and anxiety is the functional equivalent to a blow to the head. Nobody is thinking straight right now. And the hysterical freakouts just confirm that.
Kayla Rudbek
@Ramona: not too far off, individual banks could issue bank notes (not coins though) and the banks would frequently fail if there was a panic and all their depositors would come get their money in cash out of the bank at once.
RevRick
@Ramona: There were a bazillion state chartered banks, which were backed up by various amounts of specie (gold or silver coins). They issued their own bank notes. As a result, the country experienced a Panic (what they called depressions back then) every 20 years or so, because this unregulated system invited speculation. During the Civil War the US Treasury issued paper money called Greenbacks, but gradually withdrew them from circulation as it paid off the accumulated debt. The brief Panic of 1906 (caused by the San Francisco earthquake) induced the big banks to push for a central bank — the Federal Reserve.
Another Scott
@Ramona: I’m no expert on this stuff. I could dig up a link or two on banking and the Federal Reserve but I have no independent knowledge of those things.
(My interest in federal banking and the like goes back to my work study days in college where I would dig up economic stats and make graphs for a professor in the Business School.)
HTH a little.
Best wishes,
Scott.
sab
@Another Scott: YY Siam Quian discussed him with another jackal in huge long thread a couple of days ago so I bought two books. I am reading the one about 2008 and ten years after. I am shocked by how little I knew because back then I thought I was following this stuff. I was in busimess school towardss the end and we were taught nothimg about it.
I cannot even summarize. How different the 2008 financial crisis was from what we thought it was in the long leadup and the aftermath. Goes back to Nixon.
And almost nobody who should have seen it coming was even watching the right things.
It is very interesting and educational. Makes me rethink everything I ever knew since I have been following these things.
Another Scott
@sab: Ah, Ok. Thanks.
I assume you’ve seen The Big Short?
Cheers,
Scott.
YY_Sima Qian
@sab: I mentioned them before, but I think heterodox voices such as Isabella M. Weber & Yuen Yuen Ang would shock you even more.
I highly recommend Weber’s How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate, & Ang’s How China Escaped the Poverty Trap & China’s Gilded Age. While all 3 are China focused, they take comparative & historical approaches to their analyses, that greatly challenge Western economic orthodoxy (& not just Neoliberalism) on economic development. Weber’s research for her book formed the foundation from which she characterized the root causes for inflation during & post-COVID, & recommendations for addressing it. Ang in her 2nd book compares the PRC & the US economies as a tale of two “gilded ages”, and that the real Great Power Competition should be between which power will solve its “gilded age” pathologies more quickly.
Ang’s worthwhile to follow on Twitter, where she has lately been demolishing the arguments of this year’s Nobel Econ Prize winners AJR (Acemoglu, Johnson & Robinson), who posited that the advanced/industrialized Western democracies developed to their current advantaged positions due to their more “inclusive” institutions, while the ROW were left behind because their governments have all too often been merely “extractive”, implicitly suggesting that the centuries of extraction by western empires from their colonies & decades of economic exploitation by western powers of their former colonies played secondary (if any) roles.
sab
@Another Scott: Tooze refers to that early in his book. Not sneering. Just thought the picture was too limited.
Mai Naem mobile ¹
@YY_Sima Qian: i hope you’re right but it’s a tough problem. If it wasn’t it would have already been solved. The city of Phoenix has done some public private partnerships with low income housing but the problem is beyond just low income housing. You need regular housing that has an affordable entry point.
RevRick
@janesays: Clearly, you aren’t acquainted with A. Mitchell Palmer, who orchestrated the Red Scare under Wilson, or James McReynolds, who became a shitty Supreme Court Justice, orRichard Olney, who called out the troops to bust the Pullman strike, or Roger Taney, of later Dred Scott infamy.
Ramona
@New Deal democrat: sorry, I was trying to be sarcastic in that SCOTUS did not fail because it fulfilled its corrupt purpose. But yes, you are right in that our institutions failed us.
sab
@YY_Sima Qian: Thank you so much for all of this.
Citizen Alan
@New Deal democrat: It was the Institutions themselves that failed. I pessimistically said in 2004 that after the nation rewarded Bush’s grotesque incompetence and venality with another term that we were on an irreversible course towards fascism. And we’re there. I don’t see how the nation survives as a democracy with 5 Trump appointees on SCOTUS and the majority of federal judges all being Federalist Society Nazis. To say nothing if he succeeds in demolishing the federal bureaucracy. I really don’t mean to be a doom-spreader, but I honestly don’t see a way forward.
Citizen Alan
@N: I just thought he would die or something. He so clearly has some degree of dementia or mental illness that I assumed he would fall down a flight of stairs or stroke out and that would be the end of him. I did not anticipate we would have this macabre Weekend at Donald’s situation where the entire GOP establishment and the entire national media apparatus would just pretend that he was in excellent health and mentally competent.
K-Mo
@Kathleen: I read this not as a criticism of what Kamala did for the last 4 months but of what the Biden Administration did for the 3-1/2 years before that.
Citizen Alan
Part of me wonders how blue it will stay if Latinos really are swinging right as hard as last Tuesday suggests. Has it been long enough since Pete Wilson for California Latinos to have forgotten.
Lily
K-Mo
@Suzanne: Did she explain why they don’t think the pandemic-recovery-driven inflation wasn’t also exogenous?
RevRick
@different-church-lady: It might have helped after the American Rescue Plan was passed for Biden to note that we were going to endure a rough ride, because nasty bouts of inflation are the inevitable result of shocks to the economy, as happened in 1973, 1979, following WW1 & WW2, during the Civil War and the American Revolution. The GOP will always scream “reckless spending “ whenever Democrats do something to help average Americans.
YY_Sima Qian
@Mai Naem mobile ¹: PPP for subsized housing for young singles & couples. Small apartments that do not complete w/ the McMansions. This is far beyond low income housing.
dnfree
We drove through rural Wisconsin in September looking at signs. The Democrats there had a lot of solid blue signs with white lettering that simply said “Vote for Democrats/They vote for us”. Not at all inspiring or motivating. The Republicans had red and blue signs on a white background, more eye-catching, that said “Save America/vote for Trump”. The Democratic signs were depressing. I wonder how they came up with such a lackluster slogan.
chbnna
@SomeRandomGuy: all these Monday morning quarterbacking is so frustrating. For me I don’t think that there is any kind of analysis that won’t show me that the reason Harris lost was due to selfish, self-interested shitty people. People who couldn’t see beyond their own experiences, people who didn’t mind that the other guys is shittiest person alive, so long as there is a glimmer of hope that their life was gonna improve, doesn‘t matter if he delivers or not, doesn’t matter if it means stepping all over other people to get what is theirs. I’ve have never been so disappointed in “people” in my life. When people show you who they are believe them. I don’t know where we go from here I really don’t. This election truly made me believe that facts don’t matter, ground game doesn’t matter, enthusiasm doesn’t matter, polls are worthless, even money doesn’t matter….how did all the money Harris was supposedly raising monthly help her? Trump wasn’t raising nearly enough and all of that didn’t matter because ultimately people voted for their own interest, and the fuck with everybody else.
Jim Appleton
Very late to this game ‐-
Do not like this “Demz did wrong ” bent.
The entire problem is that Trump supporters were going to be for him no matter what.
Nothing Biden or Harris could do would move that needle.
It’s a problem all the feel good rallying today just won’t make one whit of difference until Trumpists start seeing themselves as wrong, and that’s not going to happen on a scale that matters.
YY_Sima Qian
On a slightly lighter note, if you are still despairing at the state of America, remember that America is not in fact exceptional, & all of the sociopaths/psychopaths/entitled assh*ts/incurable idiots that one can find in America can also be found elsewhere (such as Shanghai):
If you read stories in Western MSM about “average” Chinese despairing at the “Xiconomics”, take special note if the quoted persons fit the above example (more likely than not from my observation). There is a reason the CPC regime decided to proactively pop the real estate bubble & reform the entire fiscal-monetary circulation system that fed it, & rein in other rent seeking industries (such as internet platforms & cram schools). It saw the dangers from the bubbling social discontent (not to mention the economic distortions), decided to respond to the popular anger w/ appropriate regulatory actions, wrapped in populist rhetoric. That is also partly why the CPC regime remains secure for the foreseeable future.
Someone replied:
prostratedragon
Well at least we have the man’s tendency to sand his own gears working for us:
Might slow down even wanton, heedless destruction a bit.
Splitting Image
@chbnna:
Harris distributed a fair bit of money to other candidates and Democrats did a lot better down-ticket. Trump had almost no coat tails. If the country does come back from this disaster, that will be a big reason why.
(As the Spartans said: “If.”)
SomeRandomGuy
Why does everyone fail to stop, and ask themselves, “what would have been different if Republicans were willing to tell the truth about Trump?
“We all liked Joe Biden, but, somehow, he was unable to counter the avalanche of lies, all saying that Trump was a *good man* being unfairly *persecuted*”.
There; *NOW* you’re thinking like an adult, educated, human, and not someone who reads too much news.
Splitting Image
@SomeRandomGuy:
Trump’s campaign made so many horrific, cringe-inducing mistakes that would have buried any other candidate that he probably single-handedly knocked “Dukakis in the tank” off of the top five worst campaign images ever. Working at McDonalds, driving the garbage truck, saying that Haitians eat pets, falling asleep at his trial, starting a fight at Arlington, and god knows what else I’m not remembering.
None of it mattered. On Monday I expected at least some of that stuff to matter to at least some of his voters. None of it mattered to any of them. The idea that anybody besides Biden or Harris could have gotten through to these people or that there is any message Biden or Harris could have used to get through to them is to ignore what happened in the campaign.
Layer8Problem
@YY_Sima Qian: Thanks for this. Privileged fools are everywhere.
tobie
@satby: Wow. Fascinating data.
I was in Germany from Nov 2023 to August 2024 and food prices soared through the roof there.
Re inflation in US: when I left milk was $4 / gallon at my local Lidl. Now it’s $2.15. Republicans kept the sticker shock from 2022 alive to win in 2024. The strategy worked. Meanwhile I’m waking up early in panic wondering what my health insurance premiums will be, will there be Medicare and Soc Sec in 4 years when I retire, etc. I’m not into hitting on Biden. He was a good Pres for me.
tobie
If you step back a bit from specific issues and campaign decisions and look at the state of the world right now, you get a very difft picture of things. Liberal democracy is dying. Putin has won.
Qatar has told Hamas (after Trump’s win) that the organization needs to leave. The most impt cleric in Gaza (after Trump’s win) issued a fatwa condemning Hamas. Iran and Russia are now calling in favors to end a conflict they helped inflame and prolong with one purpose: to divide the west, so any opposition to the new power alliance of Russia. China & Iran would be destroyed. If I fault Biden for anything, it’s not leveling with the American people about this conflict.
TPP would have helped Biden limit China’s influence but that’s another story.
bjacques
@prostratedragon: probably dead thread, but I remember they were slow with the paperwork back in July when Trump became the GOP nominee again, and he was supposed to start receiving limited classified briefings. I wonder where that went? Trump’s people can just shout “gimme” at the classification people or else get Project 2025’ed in January, but they probably will get fired anyway, and they certainly would now if they cut corners before then.
Another Scott
@tobie: +1
VVP’s malign influence is far reaching and a huge problem. I don’t see him under every bed, but we need to recognize that he pushes to break things wherever he thinks he can gain advantage – or the west can lose advantage. We haven’t figured out how to counter it in an effective way that the public will support. And ultimately the public has to support government actions.
It’s going to continue to be a slog.
The bad guys aren’t 10 feet tall, we still have agency, and we have to keep working to make the world better.
Hang in there, everyone.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Hinkle
It’s very interesting reading the comments as someone who has no affinity for the Democratic Party. It seems to me that Credentialed Class + Dependency Class + Grievance Class does not equal a winning coalition. It’s also interesting to see the trans issue being discussed as the tip of the spear, albeit in an inverse way from the way I usually hear it. May you find your way out of the wilderness and do so in a way that strengthens our great country.
Geminid
@tobie: There’s a lot of reporting on Qatar’s expulsion of Hamas that dates it back to around October 17. David Magid has written about this in the Times of Israel and I believe Al Arabiya and other sources say the same.
This story could be coming out now because of Trump’s reelection, and many people take this as a given. But this war and the regional diplomacy revolving around it have their own dynamics that exist independently of U.S. politics, and the disclosure of Qatar’s ultimatum to Hamas may be part of those dynamics.
And it’s still not clear that Hamas’s civilian leadership will in fact leave Qatar. They apparently have not left yet, but that could be because they still have not worked where they will go. Reports are that possible destinations include Iraq, Iran and Turkiye, which has a long-standing relationship with Hamas.
So this is what might be called “a developing story” and it will be worth watching. Middle East Eye, Al Arabiya and Times of Israel will be covering it closely. So will Al Jazeera, which can be counted on to express the Qatari government’s view of the matter.
Or at least, that which the Qataris want the public to know. One aspect of this war and the diplomacy around it is that none of the actors are transparent about their negotiating positions or even their exact goals. It’s like a high-stakes poker game where the players are all holding their cards close to their vests.
Qatar, Egypt, Israel, and the U.S. are the four nations that have worked on the problem since February, with Qatar in effect serving as Hamas’s attorney.
The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are major players as well. Although they have not been directly involved in the ceasefire negotiations, they are still influential actors. Reports in January were that those two Gulf nations plus Egypt and Jordan agreed to back a common strategy in this conflict and they seem to be doing that.
I think the four nations’ goals track with the current U.S. government’s for the most part. The U.S.’s goals could change January 20, but I do not rule out a ceasefire agreement enforced by Security Council resolution before that.
Even Trump wants this war ended before he takes office, or at least he has said so, and realistically it can only end with a ceasefire agreement backed by an enforceable Security Council Resolution.