Replies to post #334868 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[blackhawks]

Career elitist diplomats thinking they should set foreign policy and anyone that disagreed with their policies was to be banished. Not the way it is supposed to work.

Or, career diplomats who are knowledgeable, well trained and experienced people appalled at the misuse of presidential power by an unprincipled jackass insecure about the prospects for his reelection....without securing illicit help from a foreign government.

Whenever I read 'elitist', mostly misused by know-nothing, insecure, resentment nurturing, conspiracy theorizing righties, I think less about the more common connotation of an attitude of superiority or condescension and more about accomplishment and competence.

Oddly, I never think about 'banishing those who disagree'; seeing that rather as a common practice of the Trump administration towards its own appointees.

Some synonyms for "elite" might be "upper-class" or "aristocratic", indicating that the individual in question has a relatively large degree of control over a society's means of production.

This includes those who gain this position due to socioeconomic means and not personal achievement. However, these terms are misleading when discussing elitism as a political theory, because they are often associated with negative "class" connotations and fail to appreciate a more unbiased exploration of the philosophy.[3]

As a term, "elite" usually describes a person or group of people who are members of the uppermost class of society, and wealth can contribute to that class determination.

Personal attributes commonly purported by elitist theorists to be characteristic of the elite include:

rigorous study of, or great accomplishment within, a particular field; a long track record of competence in a demanding field; an extensive history of dedication and effort in service to a specific discipline (e.g., medicine or law) or a high degree of accomplishment, training or wisdom within a given field; a high degree of physical discipline, such as for administration of public service, maintaining and improving infrastructure, addressing extreme poverty, adherence to, individual or on a group level, the commonly used techniques which have tangible and/or spiritual benefits which improves the well-being of many of a societies members or contributes to the common good.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elitism

[arizona1]

[fuagf]

ForReal, Your fact-free, feel-good positions look little more than misguided justifications for your not having the courage to question your long-held political cynicism. Sure there are valid criticisms to be made about most everything and everyone, but to hold on to positions which fly in the face of accepted fact (by most experts in any particular field) is not helpful to anyone, much less helpful to you.

For one your NAFTA-jobs position is simply wrong.

[2015] shtsqsh, imo bulldzr is right, NAFTA is not so black and white either. This is a nice,
easy and uncomplicated pro and con. I've tossed in a few of the comments too.

NAFTA: Time for a Trade-in

The North American Free Trade Agreement has taken too many U.S. jobs away from the Rust Belt. Pro or con?

Pro: So Many NAFTA Casualties

[...]

Con: NAFTA Opponents Bark up the Wrong Tree

by John Berdell, DePaul University

Rewriting NAFTA is probably going to sound pretty good to the U.S. public these days. How and when the current financial meltdown will be stabilized can only be guessed. One might have hoped the example of the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930 would have forever poisoned the notion that higher tariffs protect U.S. jobs. Those tariffs were part of the unprecedented downward spiral into joblessness that we wish to preempt now.

Today’s NAFTA-jobs debate is a little like rehearsing Hamlet without the Prince. Since 1995, imports from Mexico have slightly more the doubled, while imports from greater China (China plus Hong Kong and Macao) have more than quadrupled. So the question of how trade affects U.S. jobs and wages is an increasingly Asian issue rather than a Mexican one.

As far as unemployment is concerned, increased labor productivity—rather than trade agreements like NAFTA—ranks as the predominant cause behind the shrinkage of manufacturing employment across the globe. On a percentage basis, Chinese manufacturing jobs actually have contracted far more drastically than U.S. manufacturing jobs, and China certainly has no NAFTA to blame for its situation.

[...]

This one fills the universal picture of 'loss of manufacturing jobs' frame a bit more and sheds more light on
the loss of those in the USA, of course. Nowhere near is it all, maybe even not much at all, to do with NAFTA.

Why Factory Jobs Are Shrinking Everywhere
By Charles Kenny April 28, 2014
http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-04-28/why-factory-jobs-are-shrinking-everywhere

See also:

Again though Clinton presided over the longest economic expansion in history, balanced the books and created 24 million jobs. W squandered that. $2 trillion
in tax cuts, $ trillions in wars and who knows what on the Medicare part D plan, that forced the government to pay retail prices for meds.
.. some pertinent NAFTA fact in there, too .. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=96425749

In that last there are yet another 6 reasons of why any, even if only implied, or indirect, or even unintentional implication of any solid, real
equivalence at all between Clinton and Bush, or Bush and Obama, will inevitably .. lol .. bring a gush of concerned and well meant information
to the two eyes of the one who makes such of any comparison, as you did. Ouch that's a lousily looong sentence. It can be a testing time for some.

[...]

Phil Gramm was Right
September 26, 2008 2:14 PM
We are a nation of whiners. Those Rust Belt jobs were going away long before NAFTA was signed. That they went south of the border or across the Pacific instead of simply disappearing only prolongs the agony of industrial dinosaurs like GM's inevitable demise. Decades of mismanagement, including poor product design, shoddy craftmanship, and yes, overpaying blue collar labor, are taking their toll. The sooner they're gone, the better.

Steve
September 26, 2008 3:56 PM
Nobody stops to think that NAFTA has very little at all to do with American businesses making manufacturing investments outside of the U.S., namely in Mexico.

American, and other, manufacturers had moved and were moving to Mexico to access low cost labor for almost 30 years prior to the NAFTA being signed. With or without the NAFTA, this can and continue.

The NAFTA is, in essence, a tax reduction treaty (import taxes). The biggest effect that the NAFTA had at the time of its signing was psychological. Manufacturers saw increased viability in Mexico due to the U.S. government's willingness to engage in such a treaty with that country.

NAFTA, in and of itself, has very little to do with the issue of industry migration.

those pretty well cover much of the picture i think, more comments here ..
http://www.businessweek.com/debateroom/archives/2008/09/nafta_time_for_a_trade-in.html

https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=110922792

A recent one

Sanders overshoots on NAFTA job losses
[...]
Our ruling
Sanders said that NAFTA, which Clinton used to support, cost the U.S. economy 800,000 jobs. There is a report from a left-leaning policy group that reached that conclusion. On the other hand, many other nonpartisan reports found that the trade deal produced neither significant job losses nor job gains. This is a result of competing economic models and the challenges of teasing out the effects of NAFTA from everything else that has taken place in the economy.
P - The report Sanders cited is an outlier, and his use of its findings ignores important facts that would give a different impression. We rate his statement Mostly False.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=152900371

See also:

US tariffs to hit trans-Pacific imports hardest in 2020
"Tariffs could cost American households $2,400 each in 2019, a new study warns"
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=145155086

hookrider! Trump is repeating the isolationism that led to the Great Depression and WWII
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=131381441

[fuagf]

ForReal, The political right wins by striking fear into its citizens' hearts. The left must raise their hopes

----
How the hell did did you come up with this?

"The voters and real patriots of this country gave the establishment the middle finger and created a political revolution, in order to take back our
government. And it is not just happening here. England, Brazil, Australia and soon France will have booted the elitist assholes from power."

The wins you mention have much less to do with kicking the elites out than with better marketing, more focused
campaigns. The minus in these wins is that fear and misinformation, particularly the latter, played a huge part.
----

Labor must be crisp and motivational and use sophisticated social media tools to catch the onslaught of misinformation

Ben LaBolt
Tue 3 Dec 2019 12.00 EST
Last modified on Tue 3 Dec 2019 20.24 EST


Whether it’s Scott Morrison or Donald Trump, the political right has exploited anxiety and fear to its advantage. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

In the United States, in Australia and around the world, shock election keeps following shock election. The world order that has been in place since the aftermath of the second world war is disintegrating. While globalisation has lifted many out of poverty and automation has revolutionised how we live our lives, these trends have exacerbated income inequality and economic anxiety.

The right has exploited these tensions to their advantage and developed a clear, nationalist narrative that focuses on protecting the average family from economic displacement. The left has come up short by attacking the candidates promoting these platforms as divisive and releasing with a repetitive laundry list of policies that we update on the margins every election cycle.

Whether it’s Scott Morrison or Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro .. https://www.theguardian.com/world/jair-bolsonaro .. or Viktor Orban, the political right has exploited these anxieties to its advantage. It has made fear a primary tool – of immigration, globalisation, and being rudderless in a changing economy and world.

Be it Trump’s Make America Great Again or Morrison’s Building our Economy, Securing Our Future, they have given the electorate a simple narrative about reclaiming their national identity while protecting them from hardship.

Faith, but fury too, for Donald Trump at home
Read more > https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/01/donald-trump-2020-election-democratic-revival-nato-meeting-uk

In the last election, Labor became a rubber stamp for dozens of proposals .. https://insidestory.org.au/why-campaigning-mattered/?fbclid=IwAR113XmD662-EweUJ-2l4RCrUwi2zVhumrSDf6H1bppEDQT8whzf8aG-BIc .. by left-leaning groups, and while Morrison repeated a simpler message while engaging in retail politics with voters, Shorten delivered reams of policy details that may be better left to a political science classroom. Hillary Clinton, whose policy prowess cannot be called into question, released a white paper on dozens of issues .. https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/ , but her message, Stronger Together, didn’t fully address the disruption families were facing.

For the left to win again it must:

1. Distil its message into one that is simple, compelling and repeatable;

2. Provide a vision for how it will address the challenges of globalisation and automation in a way that supports the average family;

3. Run modern, integrated campaigns that reach voters where they consume information.

For all of his flaws, Trump is a brilliant marketing talent. Make America Great Again has become core to the identity of today’s Republican party, the rallying cry for a loyal constituency that cannot be convinced to believe anything negative about him.

The left must be as crisp and motivational. Bill Clinton famously said that winning campaigns are about the future, and the left needs to both prosecute the case against the right while outlining a plan to restore opportunity to the average family in a changing economy.

It should expose the right’s populist appeals as a lie. In the US, Trump’s only signature legislative accomplishment was a corporate tax cut that actually raised taxes on many individuals, his trade wars have caused devastation across industries, and he has surrounded himself with advisers from Wall Street, not Main Street. In 2018 Democrats won back the House of Representatives largely by focusing on Republicans’ attempts to take their healthcare benefits away.

Simultaneously the left needs a clear and consistent message outlining how it will help families thrive despite global economic headwinds. It needs to not just make higher education affordable but make clear what types of training are most likely to help students succeed once they graduate. When the core industry of a region is on its way out, it should help secure a new one rather than repeat the same wishful thinking about it coming back. It should make sure that all children have access to learning and support at younger ages. It can help workers continue to pursue their education in search of higher skills and income. That’s the path to prosperity, not a backwards-looking vision that closes borders to immigrants, rejects cooperation on pressing international issues and assumes that the profits of a handful of corporations will trickle down.

Scott Morrison praises Donald Trump's political priorities
Read more > https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/sep/24/scott-morrison-praises-donald-trumps-political-priorities

Once it has developed a message that includes contrast and a vision for the future, it must ensure it is repeatedly delivered to the persuadable voters who will decide the election. During the Obama years, Democrats maintained a healthy digital advantage that allowed them to build the model for a modern, integrated campaign. In 2008 they leveraged Facebook to pilot relational organising. By 2012 their communications and digital teams were working in a fully integrated fashion, with a sophisticated in-house studio able to produce multimedia content quickly and around the clock. But by 2016 Republicans began to catch up, aided by Trump’s unprecedented ability to control the news cycle through Twitter, outside investments in one to one targeting and digital paid media technology, and an understanding that Americans now primarily got their news and information through their mobile phones. Trump’s content was simple and shareable and his message was constantly repeated.

Labor similarly lost its digital advantage in 2019 from repeated claims about a death tax by the Liberal party and its allies to countless attacks on Labor’s spending. As the average voter increasingly gets their primary information from their mobile device, Labor must rebuild quickly to regain its advantage. Democrats are making the necessary investments to fight back to parity, with leading candidates hiring digital strategists in senior roles on their campaigns, progressives in Silicon Valley providing seed funding for new technology companies to scale quickly, and continuous testing to perfect how to persuade undecideds, motivative sporadic voters and deploy content rapidly.

The spread of misinformation requires a whole new approach to rapid response for the left. Campaigns won’t just respond to its opponents’ attacks in the daily news cycle with statements and tweets. The left will need to use social listening tools to catch misinformation quickly and use its communications and legal muster to fight back.

Labor calls for Facebook investigation after 'death tax' election campaign
Read more > https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/sep/21/labor-calls-for-facebook-investigation-after-death-tax-election-campaign

It will need to produce viral, shareable content that flags misinformation as false and responds with the facts. And it will need to hire staff with sophisticated understanding of the leading social media platforms prepared to respond to the onslaught.

This is a tipping point moment for social democracy. The left has now had time to study its opponents, reflect on their unexpected victories and expose some armourless flanks. It can fight the nativist and isolationist tide that it has seen take hold in too many countries around the world with great policy ideas, but its best chance to defeat that tide is by also running the smartest and most innovative political campaigns.

Ultimately that is how the left will achieve the goal of preserving the climate, achieving durable, broad-based prosperity and promoting security ties that protect civil society from the very real authoritarian challenge at the doorstep.

Ben LaBolt is a partner at Bully Pulpit Interactive, a modern communications agency and was National Press Secretary for President Obama’s re-election campaign

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/04/the-political-right-wins-by-striking-fear-into-its-citizens-hearts-the-left-must-raise-their-hopes