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PoliGAF 2016 |OT11| Well this is exciting

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I

ItWasMeantToBe19

Banned
The Trump campaign has confused an accounting identity for a casual relationship and made every economist terrified:

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/9/29/13075538/trump-trade-policy

Trump campaign argument:

To score the benefits of eliminating trade deficit drag, we don’t need any complex computer model. We simply add up most (if not all) of the tax revenues and capital expenditures that would be gained if the trade deficit were eliminated. We have modeled only the impacts of implicit profits and wages, not any other economic aspect of the increased activity.

Trump proposes eliminating America’s $500 billion trade deficit through a combination of increased exports and reduced imports. Again assuming labor is 44 percent of GDP, eliminating the deficit would result in $220 billion of additional wages. This additional wage income would be taxed at an effective rate of 28 percent (including trust taxes), yielding additional tax revenues of $61.6 billion.
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Why this is gasoline soaked pants on head level of reasonableness:

Here’s a quick way to tell that something has gone wrong with the Ross/Navarro argument. Last year, the United States imported $180 billion worth of petroleum products — oil and such.

According to Ross and Navarro, if the United States made it illegal to import oil, thus wiping $180 billion off the trade deficit, our GDP would rise by $180 billion. With labor constituting 44 percent of GDP, that would mean about $80 billion worth of higher wages for American workers. So why doesn’t Congress take this simple, easy step to boost growth and create jobs?

Well, because it’s ridiculous.

What would actually happen is that gasoline would become much more expensive, consumers would need to cut back spending on non-gasoline items, businesses would face a higher cost structure, and the overall economy would slow down with inflation-adjusted incomes falling. Modeling the precise impact of a total shutdown of oil imports is hard (hence the computer models). But we know from experience the directional impact of sharp disruptions in the supply of imported oil, and it’s not at all what Ross and Navarro say it would be.
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benjipwns

benjipwns

Banned
ItWasMeantToBe19 said:
Gloria La Riva defended the USSR without bringing up the Holodomor as an issue they thought they needed to defend so that's kind of a thought by omission:

http://marxistupdate.blogspot.com/2011/12/in-defense-of-ussr.html
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SET THE RECORD STRAIGHT: http://thisiscommunism.org/ThisIsCommunism/Home.html

Joseph Stalin is routinely portrayed as a paranoid, deceitful despot, on par with Hitler. But in fact, Stalin represented a class, the proletariat, and the system of socialism whose goal is to do away with all forms of exploitation and oppression. Stalin played a decisive role in leading in constructing and defending the world’s first socialist society. Stalin’s achievements and shortcomings as a revolutionary leader are all part of the first wave of socialist revolution in the 20th century that opened new historical possibilities for humanity.
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The Great Leap Forward of 1958-1960 was the first bold step by Mao to forge a more liberating road of socialist economic and social development. At the heart of the Great Leap Forward in the countryside was the movement to form communes.
The mainstream account of the Great Leap Forward derides it as irrational and utopian . . . leading to history’s worst famine. Learn about the actual aims and achievements of the Great Leap Forward, and the difficulties it encountered. Learn about the actual causes of the food crisis and famine, and how leadership actually responded. Find out why the sensationalistic and statistically-inflated accounts alleging “Mao’s great famine” are not trustworthy.
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http://thisiscommunism.org/ThisIsCommunism/ResearchNotes.html
The Famine of 1933 in the Soviet Union: What Really Happened, Why it was NOT an “Intentional Famine”

A major famine took place in the Soviet Union in 1933. It exacted a terrible toll on human life and exacerbated dislocations accompanying the great transformations of economy and society of the First Five-Year Plan launched in 1928 and the socialist collectivization of 1929-30. What caused the famine, how many people died, and how communist leadership responded—these have all been highly contentious questions of political analysis and scholarly research.

As presented in most mainstream histories, standard textbooks, and journalistic commentary, and as analyzed in the work of professional anticommunist scholars like Robert Conquest, the famine stands as a towering indictment of the savage brutality and calculated indifference of Stalin. Conquest and the authors of the Black Book on Communism declare this famine be one of the “great crimes” of communism.

In surveying and assessing new research, it becomes clear that the truth is very different than what is conveyed by the anticommunist narrative.
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http://revcom.us/a/030/socialism-communism-better-than-capitalism-6.htm
The growing danger of interimperialist war and the likelihood of imperialist assault on the Soviet Union were setting the stage for what Western scholars call the "great purges" in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Few subjects in modern history are so thoroughly distorted. Once again, there is bourgeois story line. We are told that Stalin was drunk with power and sought absolute power--knocking down any and all who disagreed with him.

But the reality of the situation was that the revolution was confronting new pressures and new challenges. And political struggle intensified within the party and government: over domestic and international policy, including international alliances…over the direction of the revolution…over whether the revolution could even hold out.

We’re told that Stalin was paranoid. But in fact there were real enemies of the revolution. There was real subversion. There were backward social movements in society. There was a real German threat.
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These were some of the circumstances surrounding the purges of top Party and military leaders. Stalin was fighting to defend the revolution. He was not going to allow the Soviet Union to go back to capitalism, or to cave in to imperialism.
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How do we put the Soviet revolution in perspective? From the sweep of history, the Soviet revolution stands as an earthshaking breakthrough in freeing oppressed humanity. Against great odds, the masses accomplished amazing things. A new world was in the process of being created. And this revolution inspired the oppressed of world. These were the first steps, apart from the short-lived Paris Commune, along the road of emancipation, towards a world free of oppression and exploitation.
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I

ItWasMeantToBe19

Banned
I like the Communist thing where they do this:

1. Define slavery under Communism as not slavery
2. Define poor people in capitalism as slaves
3. Claim that Communism eliminated slavery from 1 and 2.
 
S

SexyFish

Banned
This been posted yet?


Marco Rubio 'Deeply Concerned' About Possible Donald Trump Cuba Business


Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said Donald Trump will have to “answer some questions” about a Newsweek story reporting that a Trump-owned company allegedly violated the United States' trade embargo with Cuba in the late 1990s.

“This is something they’re going to have to give a response to. I mean, it was a violation of American law, if that’s how it happened,” Rubio said on the ESPN/ABC “Capital Games” podcast.
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G

Grief.exe

Member
Orniletter said:
I'm going through the bebate again and I'm really enjoying the actual content of what Clinton had to say.

The question "are police officers inherently prejudiced against black people", which was an utter bombshell in hiding, was so elegantly answered.

She's so good.
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Her answers were seriously dense with content in many respects.
 
C

CrazyDude

Member
Revolver said:
If it weren't for Megyn and Shep I'd never look at Fox News. I don't always agree with her, but at least she doesn't seem batshit crazy.

Also, Lol @ Trump blowing up over the suggestion he's going to do his homework.
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Trump does have the mentality of a grade schooler.
 
benjipwns

benjipwns

Banned
ItWasMeantToBe19 said:
I like the Communist thing where they do this:

1. Define slavery under Communism as not slavery
2. Define poor people in capitalism as slaves
3. Claim that Communism eliminated slavery from 1 and 2.
Click to expand...
Your lack of class consciousness is showing.

It's not slavery, they are working for themselves. It's a true democracy:
Vladimir Lenin said:
Dictatorship does not necessarily mean the abolition of democracy for the class that exercises the dictatorship over other classes; but it does mean the abolition of democracy (or very material restriction, which is also a form of abolition) for the class over which, or against which, the dictatorship is exercised.
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Marcuse understood. Read Repressive Tolerance: http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/60spubs/65repressivetolerance.htm
Consequently, true pacification requires the withdrawal of tolerance before the deed, at the stage of communication in word, print, and picture. Such extreme suspension of the right of free speech and free assembly is indeed justified only if the whole of society is in extreme danger. I maintain that our society is in such an emergency situation, and that it has become the normal state of affairs. Different opinions and 'philosophies' can no longer compete peacefully for adherence and persuasion on rational grounds: the 'marketplace of ideas' is organized and delimited by those who determine the national and the individual interest. In this society, for which the ideologists have proclaimed the 'end of ideology', the false consciousness has become the general consciousness--from the government down to its last objects. The small and powerless minorities which struggle against the false consciousness and its beneficiaries must be helped: their continued existence is more important than the preservation of abused rights and liberties which grant constitutional powers to those who oppress these minorities.
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Withdrawal of tolerance from regressive movements before they can become active; intolerance even toward thought, opinion, and word, and finally, intolerance in the opposite direction, that is, toward the self-styled conservatives, to the political Right--these anti-democratic notions respond to the actual development of the democratic society which has destroyed the basis for universal tolerance. The conditions under which tolerance can again become a liberating and humanizing force have still to be created. When tolerance mainly serves the protection and preservation of a repressive society, when it serves to neutralize opposition and to render men immune against other and better forms of life, then tolerance has been perverted. And when this perversion starts in the mind of the individual, in his consciousness, his needs, when heteronomous interests occupy him before he can experience his servitude, then the efforts to counteract his dehumanization must begin at the place of entrance, there where the false consciousness takes form (or rather: is systematically formed)--it must begin with stopping the words and images which feed this consciousness. To be sure, this is censorship, even precensorship, but openly directed against the more or less hidden censorship that permeates the free media. Where the false consciousness has become prevalent in national and popular behavior, it translates itself almost immediately into practice: the safe distance between ideology and reality, repressive thought and repressive action, between the word of destruction and the deed of destruction is dangerously shortened. Thus, the break through the false consciousness may provide the Archimedean point for a larger emancipation--at an infinitesimally small spot, to be sure, but it is on the enlargement of such small spots that the chance of change depends.

The forces of emancipation cannot be identified with any social class which, by virtue of its material condition, is free from false consciousness. Today, they are hopelessly dispersed throughout the society, and the fighting minorities and isolated groups are often in opposition to their own leadership. In the society at large, the mental space for denial and reflection must first be recreated. Repulsed by the concreteness of the administered society, the effort of emancipation becomes 'abstract'; it is reduced to facilitating the recognition of what is going on, to freeing language from the tyranny of the Orwellian syntax and logic, to developing the concepts that comprehend reality.
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I suggested in 'Repressive Tolerance' the practice of discriminating tolerance in an inverse direction, as a means of shifting the balance between Right and Left by restraining the liberty of the Right, thus counteracting the pervasive inequality of freedom (unequal opportunity of access to the means of democratic persuasion) and strengthening the oppressed against the oppressed. Tolerance would be restricted with respect to movements of a demonstrably aggressive or destructive character (destructive of the prospects for peace, justice, and freedom for all). Such discrimination would also be applied to movements opposing the extension of social legislation to the poor, weak, disabled. As against the virulent denunciations that such a policy would do away with the sacred liberalistic principle of equality for 'the other side', I maintain that there are issues where either there is no 'other side' in any more than a formalistic sense, or where 'the other side' is demonstrably 'regressive' and impedes possible improvement of the human condition. To tolerate propaganda for inhumanity vitiates the goals not only of liberalism but of every progressive political philosophy.

If the choice were between genuine democracy and dictatorship, democracy would certainly be preferable. But democracy does not prevail. The radical critics of the existing political process are thus readily denounced as advocating an 'elitism', a dictatorship of intellectuals as an alternative. What we have in fact is government, representative government by a non-intellectual minority of politicians, generals, and businessmen.
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So stop with your Orwellian language and submit to the chains of freedom.
 
N

nature boy

Member
Jennifer Epstein ‏@jeneps 6m6 minutes ago
Jennifer Epstein Retweeted Jennifer Epstein
Hillary Clinton, who was in Ohio just once in September, on Labor Day, is returning on Monday
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Guess she's still in the game.
 
B

Beer Monkey

Member
FFS, people in my FB feed are starting to pump up Joe DeMare for Ohio senator. I just read his platform, and of course he wants a GMO ban and nuclear ban. His website reads as if it was written by a seventh grader, too.

Oh well, at least most of these friends seem to be voting for Hillary, finally.
 
A

Aaron Strife

Banned
Beer Monkey said:
FFS, people in my FB feed are starting to pump up Joe DeMare for Ohio senator. I just read his platform, and of course he wants a GMO ban and nuclear ban. His website reads as if it was written by a seventh grader, too.

Oh well, at least most of these friends seem to be voting for Hillary, finally.
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Let them vote third party for Senate, at least he's not ruining a winnable contest.
 
T

TumblingHippo

Member
Third debate is moderated by a Fox News guy, right? I'd say that if Hillary can survive that, it's pretty wrapped up, but I can't imagine the third one is going to fair and balanced, and I expect emails and Benghazi to be every other question.
 
N

nature boy

Member
Teddy SchleiferVerified account
‏@teddyschleifer Teddy Schleifer Retweeted Teddy Schleifer
A huge percentage -- 45% -- of the ad money Trump is currently scheduled to spend through Election Day is in one state: F-L-O-R-I-D-A
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Go big or go home.

Yes, FL is expensive.
 
P

plagiarize

Banned
TumblingHippo said:
Third debate is moderated by a Fox News guy, right? I'd say that if Hillary can survive that, it's pretty wrapped up, but I can't imagine the third one is going to fair and balanced, and I expect emails and Benghazi to be every other question.
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Bring it. There's nothing they can ask her about Benghazi that she hasn't already adeptly fielded, and she'll be more than ready for the e-mail questions by then, I don't doubt.
 
P

Plinko

Wildcard berths that can't beat teams without a winning record should have homefield advantage
I wonder if Trump's taxes get released before the election, and he isn't the one that releases them.
 
F

Fragamemnon

Member
TumblingHippo said:
Third debate is moderated by a Fox News guy, right? I'd say that if Hillary can survive that, it's pretty wrapped up, but I can't imagine the third one is going to fair and balanced, and I expect emails and Benghazi to be every other question.
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Wallace is legit and I expect the debate to be moderated fairly. In the end it'll be Trump's burden to move the talk back to Libya and emails, and away from issues like NATO, Russia, and Trump's temperament.
 
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