2015 American Politics Thread: The 114th Congress Is in the House!

yup.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Sen. Chuck Schumer announced Tuesday that plans by aluminum giant Alcoa to close its North Country smelter have been averted due to a $70 million state aid package that will save its 600 jobs through at least early 2019.

However, during a news conference at the Massena plant, Schumer also said he had earlier helped Alcoa get a scaled-back federal cleanup of toxic PCBs from the Grasse River to help the plant stay open, and felt "betrayed" when the corporation announced last month the smelter was to close by early next year.

"We worked hard to come to an agreement with the federal Environmental Protection Agency," Schumer said. Alcoa CEO Klaus Kleinfeld "told me you make sure we don't have to put up a billion dollars to clean up the Grasse River, and we will put it into this plant ... when I read in the newspaper that the plant was closing, I felt totally betrayed."

http://www.timesunion.com/business/article/Alcoa-jobs-saved-in-North-Country-6655805.php

Great job, Chuck Schumer

i mean i know it's obvious to everyone here but like just employ those 600 people and have them clean up trash on the highways with that 70 million my fucking god...

i think politicians have a really reactionary response to this kind of stuff.... like as soon as any business threatens layoffs they start thinking "what concessions can i provide to keep that from happening?" just so they don't have to face those dozen people yelling at them about jobs... rather than step back and think about the bigger picture.

this is one of the baselines of politics, it has nothing to do with party or ideology.

@jaketapper
tomorrow 11 am: Unveiling Ceremony of the Marble Bust of VP Dick Cheney at the United States Capitol Visitor Center, Emancipation Hall

‏@mattduss
A great sign to the world of how seriously the US takes the ban on torture.

you're on Twitter?

nope

I find this fascinating: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/you-can-t-understand-american-politics-without-reading-this-study

Here's the followup: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/more-on-that-most-important-study

Yeah follow up (on Gelman's study) complicate things somewhat.

they complicate Marshall's primary conclusions quite a bit

what were Marshall's primary conclusions again?

the way I read this part:

Beneath the often febrile and sometimes race-tinged Republican talk about Obama "radically tranforming" America, or being a socialist whose erasing American 'exceptionalism' or various other regular themes on Fox News, one fairly straightforward, clear message is almost always discernible: The country people know, their country, is being taken away from them.

...in summary is that white people are mad because Govmit and immigrants and Obama...and their coping mechanisms (or inability to cope physiologically) is bad for their life expectancy.

(and in fact, it's worse for white life expectancy for a certain demographic than other demos in the study.)

But Gelman et al pointed out that methodology and reporting had ignored some nuances--what was driving the life expectancy numbers in Marshall's conclusions was actually women in that demo.

I don't think many people would have ever guessed that.

"How many times do we have to learn not to fuck with banking laws from the 1930s?"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trust-indenture-act_5661c3f1e4b08e945fef2bbe

sounds like those middle age white red state takers need to pull themselves up by their bootstaps

the point of the marshall article is pretty clear to me. these people are terrified because they're dying.

I thought the point was, in addition, that racism paid off for these people, and now it's not paying off anymore, and they're stressed because it gave them enough of an edge to overcome their terrible habits.

those follow-up interpretations of the data point out that the increase in mortality rates is more severe among women. i really wonder if the opiate crisis we're in isn't much more severe than we think.

lol @ talkingpointsmemo guy's blurry screencaps

Jon Cogburn has a thorough and thoughtful take on this study (http://www.philpercs.com/2015/11/white-punks-on-dope.html) here's some paragraphs towards the end:

"The New Deal was an astounding success at pulling poor whites out entrenched poverty. Because of concessions to racists to get it passed (primarily by exempting jobs from Social Security that southern African Americans worked in and by designing housing policies that to gut cities and redline everything), it did not function nearly as well for African Americans (please read Ta-Nahesi Coates' article on reparations for a glimpse at the full horror show). But for the Arkansas/Oklahoma Cogburns, and people like us, it was astounding. In one generation you had everyone getting college degrees. Consider my father, who had neither running water nor electricity as a child. He would have died as an infant if he hadn't been carried over to someone who had electricity and a chicken incubator. He had scurvy and life threatening untreated strep throat as a child and as an adult recognized the bit in Angela's Ashes where the kids are excited to get to eat the food at the funerals of their friends. Rural Arkansas/Oklahoma wasn't so different from the poorest parts of pre war Ireland. But my grandfather went to college on the GI Bill and my dad went on a ROTC scholarship during a time when college was incredibly cheap and his cousins, who were impoverished as children, also went to college and had middle class lives.

And the New Deal Consensus broke in the 1970s. All of our public policy innovations since then (privatization, deregulation, 401Ks instead of defined benefit pensions, a tax code that taxes work radically higher than capital, increased immigration, offshoring manufacturing, productivity gains from information technology) have served to ensure unprecedented economic growth that does not go to the actual people doing the overwhelming majority of the work. And any time wages have started to creep up since the 1970s, a recession comes along that serves to increase the reserve army of unemployed and relegitimate all of the other neo-liberal economic policies that are part of the problem.

The recent rapid increase in suicide rates started in 2007 (again, before Obama was President) with the onset great recession. But it also started at the end of thirty years or so of the constant and increasing erosion of the New Deal consensus.

I don't want to pretend that there are easy solutions to any of these problems. I just want to note that the generations being robbed from are the very generations whose parents inculcated the terror of falling back into poverty. The New Deal was largely passed by the "tweener generation," the one just prior to "the greatest generation." It's been dismantled mostly by the greatest generation (Tom Brokaw and Stephen Ambrose are full of it) with baby boomer help. And the victims of the dismantling are boomers not in on the grift and the children and grandchildren of the boomers. The downwardly mobile people who inherited bad Calvinism and whose parents and grandparents benefited from the New Deal can't handle it. They hate themselves."

meh, everyone reads their favorite political economic narrative into case/deaton, truth is no one knows why the trends they found are happening yet

^

he not busy not being white is bein busy dying

lol, nice

what's your favorite political economic narrative?

to explain case deaton? i'm agnostic, but it's probably something boring and medical not something sexy and political

that Cogburn quote is a perfect distillation of a certain stripe of nativist left-liberal windbag for whom everything can be traced back to the end of the new deal, but who doesn't really understand anything about the new deal or since and makes halfbaked attempts at causal claims like "The recent rapid increase in suicide rates started in 2007 (again, before Obama was President) with the onset great recession. But it also started at the end of thirty years or so of the constant and increasing erosion of the New Deal consensus" (how does he know that the end of the thirty year erosion happened in 2007? lol) and whose worldview is basically "lets reset to the policies when white people had good jobs and there weren't so many immigrants and we didn't have to compete with the chinese and hope that everything else goes back too"

ok tahnks

i was maybe overly harsh. i mean obviously the 30 years of assault on poor people and entitlements is a contender for explanation, and is obvs just bad in its own right. but just cause one explanation fits your political beliefs doesnt mean its whats driving the trend

i might not have set that up properly because i don't know if he's drawing a causal relationship between his narrative and the study, his piece might be more about the discourse around the study or maybe just 'hey, here's my favorite political economic narrative about why poor white people might hate themselves'

the opiate crisis is indeed very real and very bad

As a Lite Leninist that article really annoyed me.

GOP votes to give terrorists guns: http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/gop-blocks-bill-stop-terrorists-buying-guns

Haha

As a Lite Leninist that article really annoyed me.

― Frederik B

Then it at least got something right

couldn't find the primaries thread on my phone but this killed me ... his face lmao

https://twitter.com/rey_z/status/673205461538217984

ka-CHING

https://theintercept.com/2015/12/04/defense-contractors-cite-benefits-of-escalating-conflicts-in-the-middle-east/

sentences from a NYT op-ed article that effortless summarize life in the U.S. in 2015

"Unable to curb the availability of guns at home or extremist propaganda from overseas, the authorities may have to rely more on encouraging Americans to watch one another and report suspicions."

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/06/us/politics/california-attack-has-us-rethinking-strategy-on-homegrown-terror.html

"Mr. Johnson said the government should continue to augment airline security by placing more agents in overseas departure airports and further toughen standards for the visa waiver program that allows visitors from certain friendly nations easy entry into the country."

thanks Obama, I'm sure more US federal agents in Dubai International will stop attacks like this one. & yes making it harder for French citizens to visit the USA will also help a lot. & this is under president Obama!

“It’ll gradually dawn on people...that we’ll be living for a long time with the possibility of low-level attacks that can never be predicted and can rarely be prevented.”

isn't that already true for Americans? why is this shooting worthy of this kind of attention? I don't have any sense of why this is so important. is it just that it's election season?

lol at "whup her"

Jeh's not the sharpest tool in the shed, no. He needs to shut his mouth about this shooting and get to fixing the Secret Service.
Obama's record as a selector / evaluator of top people for Cabinet positions has been an ever-growing footnote for Twilight Of The Elites.

the audience reaction in that "whup her" bit was doctored, it's not quite as awkward in the real context.

putting fake derisive crowd noises in political speeches would be a brilliant way to manipulate voters, though. surprised it hasn't become a trend.

how about fart noises and seinfeld bass slaps

putting fake derisive crowd noises in political speeches would be a brilliant way to manipulate voters, though. surprised it hasn't become a trend.

Reminds me of William S. Burroughs' idea of starting riots by playing the sound of riots through hidden tape decks while walking around in crowds.

It's been done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1940_Democratic_National_Convention

One biographer wrote that Barkley's message "can scarcely be said to have conveyed the whole or literal truth".[3] When it ended, the convention sat in shocked silence for a moment. The silence was then broken by a voice thundering over the stadium loudspeakers: "We want Roosevelt! We want Roosevelt!" The voice was Thomas D. Garry, Superintendent of Chicago's Department of Sanitation (the sewers department), a trusted henchman of Chicago Mayor Ed Kelly. Garry was stationed in a basement room with a microphone, waiting for that moment. Kelly had posted hundreds of Chicago city workers and precinct captains around the hall; other Democratic bosses had brought followers from their home territories. All of them joined Garry's chant. Within a few seconds, hundreds of delegates joined in. Many poured into the aisles, carrying state delegation standards for impromptu demonstrations. Whenever the chant began to die down, state chairmen, who also had microphones connected to the speakers, added their own endorsements: "New Jersey wants Roosevelt! Arizona wants Roosevelt! Iowa wants Roosevelt!"[4]

The effect of the "voice from the sewers" was overwhelming. The next day Roosevelt was nominated by an 86% majority.

tallulah bankhead's father came in second for the veep nod, he died a couple of months later. sam rayburn replaced him as speaker of the house.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/08/us/politics/paul-ryan-brings-sharply-different-leadership-style-to-house.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

http://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/12/07/us/07ryan-web/07ryan-web-master675.jpg

beard story