Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

The US 2020 Presidential Election & Attempts To Overturn It

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • I agree with this article.
    Hit the grape lethally.

    Comment


    • Originally posted by DOR View Post
      So, all else being equal (it never is), increased FDI into India should force an appreciation, thereby making exports less competitive.
      Oh yes the exporters complain but the people benefit

      Usually the exporters get their way

      Comment


      • Originally posted by Double Edge View Post
        Oh yes the exporters complain but the people benefit

        Usually the exporters get their way
        Exporters in India usually get there way ... well, I won't disagree because I haven't been following it for some time.
        But, it is a huge surprise!
        No more stunts putting a car together with imported parts?
        Trust me?
        I'm an economist!

        Comment


        • Originally posted by DOR View Post
          No more stunts putting a car together with imported parts?
          I don't follow

          If the exchange rate does not fluctuate too much they would either absorb the loss or use cheaper parts

          The point about borrowing rates is major though. It's the reason for tariffs because multinationals with deeper pockets ie cheaper borrowing rates can withstand losses longer and drive the locals out of business. Cheaper borrowing rates are essential. The local rates might be 5-8% the MNC might not be paying more than 3% likely less.

          The bigger companies benefit from better rates than smaller.

          Here is an example i heard of a vegetable seller to illustrate how availability of cheap credit isn't universal

          The loan is for 45,000, amount to repay is 50,000. Period is a 100 days. A collector will be over daily to take 500

          What is the interest rate ?

          It's something crazy like over 40%

          The vegetable seller can't get a loan from a bank so relies on a money lender.

          You cannot grow with rates like this just survive.
          Last edited by Double Edge; 13 Jan 20,, 12:08.

          Comment


          • So long Spartacus!
            https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2020...4021578931744/

            Comment


            • Originally posted by Double Edge View Post
              I don't follow
              Back in the day (1980s?), every year the Indian car manufacturers would get together and build one car out of imported parts. The final cost – because of import duties – was something like $40,000. The point was to show that the taxes made it impossible to create a car industry by first importing kits and components, and later making those parts in India … like Japan, Korea, and others did.
              Trust me?
              I'm an economist!

              Comment


              • Sleepy Joe gets a free run in Iowa

                The Iowa caucuses are happening in a little over two weeks, and they’re on a collision course with a certain event that’s expected to keep several top candidates stuck in Washington: President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial.

                Three of the candidates polling in the top five in Iowa are sitting US senators — Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN). And all three plus the lower-polling Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) will have to substantially curb their time on the campaign trail starting Tuesday, January 21.
                In the realm of spirit, seek clarity; in the material world, seek utility.

                Leibniz

                Comment


                • Trump May Skip Debates, or Seek New Host, if Process Isn't 'Fair'

                  WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s campaign is considering only participating in general election debates if an outside firm serves as the host, and his advisers recently sat down with the nonprofit Commission on Presidential Debates to complain about the debates it hosted in 2016.

                  The Dec. 19 meeting between Frank Fahrenkopf, a prominent Republican and co-chairman of the commission; Brad Parscale, campaign manager for Trump’s reelection effort; and another political adviser, Michael Glassner, came soon after Trump posted on Twitter that the 2016 debates had been “biased.”

                  Fahrenkopf said the meeting was cordial but that Parscale essentially reiterated Trump’s complaints.

                  Parscale said “that the president wanted to debate, but they had concerns about whether or not to do it with the commission,” Fahrenkopf said, including worries about “whether or not the commission would be fair.”

                  Trump’s advisers asserted that the debate commission included “anti-Trumpers.” They also complained about previous moderators, Fahrenkopf said.

                  Fahrenkopf, in turn, insisted that the debate commission did not include any anti-Trump bias, and he said he walked Parscale through the guidelines for commission board members that require their neutrality.

                  He also said that with one exception, the commission did not think any of the moderators chosen over several decades had exhibited concerning behavior during the debates.

                  The one moderator he agreed was problematic was Candy Crowley, who was at CNN in 2012 when she moderated a debate between Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, and President Barack Obama.

                  Crowley fact-checked Romney when he wrongly claimed it took Obama 14 days to call an attack in Benghazi, Libya, an “act of terror.”

                  The meeting between Parscale and Fahrenkopf ended after 45 minutes with no resolution.

                  Since then, Parscale has told people that he was investigating other options for hosting the debates. It is not clear which outside firms he or other officials are talking to, and the campaign declined to provide any details.

                  “We want to have debates that are fair and are more geared toward informing the American people than to boosting the careers of the moderators,” Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for Trump’s campaign, said of the meeting.

                  The commission has scheduled three presidential debates, to be held on college campuses in late September and October, as well as one vice-presidential debate.

                  Trump has been discussing the possibility of sitting out the general election debates for months. He has harbored bad feelings about the debate commission since the 2016 election, when he accused them of putting him at a disadvantage “on purpose” by giving him a “defective mic” at the first debate. (Trump was clearly audible to television viewers, but the commission said a technical malfunction affected the volume of his voice in the debate hall.)

                  After The New York Times reported that Trump had discussed the possibility of sitting the debates out, he wrote on Twitter that he wanted to face off against his eventual Democratic opponent. But he said that “the problem is that the so-called Commission on Presidential Debates is stacked with Trump Haters & Never Trumpers.”

                  He added that “there are many options, including doing them directly & avoiding the nasty politics of this very biased Commission. I will make a decision at an appropriate time but in the meantime, the Commission on Presidential Debates is NOT authorized to speak for me (or R’s)!”

                  Most people close to the president said his advisers are likely using a debate around debates to work with the commission, which was established in 1987 and has attempted to maintain its independence through every presidential cycle since then.

                  Representatives from both major presidential campaigns typically begin to approach the commission well before the party conventions, as Parscale did, and the commission spends months working with advisers and campaign lawyers to hammer out the specifics.

                  People close to the president also believe he has a slim window to try to affect who the moderators are, since there may be a presumptive Democratic nominee as soon as mid-March, and that person might push back against Trump’s attempts to influence the choice.
                  ________________

                  Ah here we go again. President Snowflake whining like a little bitch about "unfairness".... In reality he's rigging the goalposts for travel. I'll be shocked if Trump actually attends a debate, regardless of the circumstances.
                  “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

                  Comment


                  • Don't look back, Bernie — Bloomberg is gaining on you

                    On Tuesday night, a few short hours before Bernie Sanders won the most votes in the New Hampshire primary and a few short days after he’d won the most votes in Iowa, the high-profile New York Times columnist Tom Friedman published an opinion column under the following sub-headline:

                    “Democrats need to nominate the right person to prevent Trump from winning a second term.”

                    Just above that, Friedman’s main headline made it perfectly clear who he thinks the “right person” to beat President Trump is:

                    “Paging Mike Bloomberg.”

                    “In an age when political extremists go all the way, and moderates tend to just go away, Bloomberg has the right stuff — a moderate progressive with a heart of gold but the toughness of a rattlesnake — for what is going to be an incredibly big, brutal task,” Friedman argued, dismissing Sanders as a nonstarter.

                    “On which planet in the Milky Way galaxy is an avowed ‘socialist’ … going to defeat the Trump machine this year?” Friedman wrote.

                    The column — or endorsement, really — rocketed around social media in the hours after it appeared online. Moderate media figures trumpeted Friedman’s take, characterizing it as “excellent” and “exceedingly convincing.” Progressives, meanwhile, cited it as further evidence that the multibillionaire former New York mayor’s campaign is nothing but a media creation, and that Bloomberg himself has no real constituency outside of the green rooms of MSNBC and CNN and the quiet car of the Amtrak Acela train between Washington, D.C., and New York City.

                    Unsurprisingly, Friedman’s disclosure at the bottom of the column — “Bloomberg Philanthropies has donated to Planet Word, the museum my wife is building in Washington” — triggered tons of “aha!” tweets on the left. And even Trump got in on the act, telling reporters Tuesday that he “would rather run against Bloomberg than Bernie Sanders … because Sanders has real followers,” as opposed to Bloomberg, who is “just buying his way in.”

                    The problem with the argument that Bloomberg isn’t running a real campaign with real supporters, however, is that it isn’t true. And progressives — particularly those who want Sanders to win the Democratic nomination — ignore that at their peril.

                    To be sure, no one would be writing columns about Bloomberg if his net worth was $100,000 (like Pete Buttigieg’s) or even $1,000,000 (like Sanders’s). A fortune of $60 billion helps, especially if you spend more than $350 million of it on ads during the first few months of your campaign. When Bloomberg entered the race last November, he was polling at 3 percent nationally. Today he is approaching 15 percent. Each percentage point cost him about $30 million. As the New Republic recently put it, “Old people watch a lot of television. Old people vote. The best way to reach these voters is to get on TV and stay there.” Facebook, too: Over the past two weeks, Bloomberg spent an average of more than $1 million a day running ads on the social network — or five times more than Trump spent during the same period.

                    But Bloomberg’s strategy hasn’t been just expensive. It’s also been effective. That’s partly by chance and partly by design. The chance part is that Joe Biden, who has campaigned as the Democrat with the best odds of beating Trump, just collapsed in Iowa and New Hampshire, finishing fourth and fifth, respectively. (Biden ran for president twice before and has never finished higher than fourth place in a primary.) The design part is that Bloomberg’s campaign has always been premised on stepping in as the new Joe Biden if and when the actual Joe Biden collapses.

                    All seems to be going according to plan. Consider not just the cost but the content of Bloomberg’s ads. There’s the one with the flashing images of white supremacist protestors and smiling autocrats that ends with the hashtag #DumpTrump. There’s the one describing the “real state of the union” as “a nation divided by an angry, out-of-control president.” And there are a whole bunch of them contrasting the current occupant of the Oval Office with the pragmatic, moderate Bloomberg, who “brings people together,” “solves problems” and “gets it done.” Bloomberg has basically been skipping the primary and running a general election campaign as a way of convincing Democrats that he’s ready to take on Trump — much as Biden tried to do.

                    “I’m not running against Bernie Sanders,” Bloomberg said last week in Compton, Calif. “I’m running against Donald Trump.”

                    Consider, too, the voters Bloomberg has been going after: not just old people in general, but older black people specifically. While Bloomberg’s rivals battled it out in majority-white Iowa and New Hampshire, the former mayor — who has skipped the four early-voting states to focus on Super Tuesday — was free, as the Associated Press recently reported, to host a meeting with nearly 80 black pastors in Detroit; to deliver a speech before a black Democratic organization in Montgomery; to hold a rally at a historically black university; to tour Martin Luther King Jr.’s church; and to conduct an early-voting kickoff at an African-American museum.

                    All in the past two weeks.

                    Meanwhile, Bloomberg’s massive, data-driven marketing buys have included “spots on black radio stations, a Super Bowl ad that featured an African-American mother who lost her son to gun violence and a national ad touting his work with President Barack Obama on gun legislation and a teen jobs program.” This week he is holding rallies in Montgomery, Ala., Raleigh, N.C., and Chattanooga, Tenn. — key cities in key Super Tuesday states where African-American voters can decide a Democratic primary.

                    Bloomberg’s black outreach has not been free of controversy; just this week, audio recordings from 2015 surfaced on which the former mayor boasted about his controversial stop-and-frisk policing policy and made the provocative (and exaggerated) claim that “95 percent” of “murderers and murder victims” are “male minorities, 15 to 25.” (Bloomberg has since apologized for stop-and-frisk.)

                    But while younger black voters have bristled at Bloomberg’s criminal justice record, older black voters, who tend to vote more strategically than ideologically, seem increasingly drawn to his pitch of electability and competence — which is the same pitch that initially drew them to Biden. In a telling move, Georgia Rep. Lucy McBath, who ran for Congress in 2018 after her teenage son was shot to death in a car over a dispute about loud music, endorsed Bloomberg Wednesday, citing his record on gun violence prevention.

                    So it would be one thing if the only people backing Bloomberg were corporate, centrist media types like Friedman, with his familiar arguments about “job creators and risk-takers” and how Bloomberg built “one of the most admired global companies as a real C.E.O.”

                    But instead, Bloomberg’s coalition is beginning to look a lot like the one that kept Biden atop the polls for an entire year, before Iowa and New Hampshire burst his bubble. Mainstream Democrats obsessed with electability. Pragmatic older black voters. And moderates who aren’t down with Sanders’s “political revolution.” Since Iowa, Bloomberg has shot up 7 points nationally. Biden has fallen by an identical amount. At the same time, Biden has shed 22 points among black voters. Bloomberg has gained 15. Most of those gains have been concentrated among black voters over 45. Upon entering the race in November, Bloomberg’s net favorability (or the share of voters with favorable views minus those with unfavorable views) was just +5 among Democratic primary voters and +4 among black voters, according to Morning Consult. In the latest Morning Consult poll, he was at +40.

                    This doesn’t mean Bloomberg is a lock to secure the Democratic nomination. In fact, because of the delegate math, he may not have a path to winning that doesn’t tear the Democratic Party in two at what could be its first multiballot convention since 1952. But assuming Biden continues to implode — and assuming the other would-be anti-Bernies such as Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar continue to split the moderate vote while failing to attract voters of color — then Bloomberg is perfectly positioned to sweep in on Super Tuesday and fill the big, Biden-shaped hole in the Democratic race. And to help fill it, he’ll have billions more in the bank than Biden, or any candidate in history, ever had.

                    Again, this was Bloomberg’s plan from the start. Sanders may have won the most votes in Iowa and New Hampshire. But soon enough he’ll have yet another rival to contend with — perhaps his strongest yet.
                    ______________

                    Interesting background. The son a bookkeeper for a dairy company, an actual self-made billionaire, unlike Trump. An actual successful businessman, unlike Trump.

                    Dunno what kind of President he would make but at least he's not an illiterate indolent fool like Donald Trump.

                    Oh wait, he's also Jewish. Cue the Trump followers chanting "Jews Will Not Replace Us" and the usual "Jewish Bankers" conspiracy theories.
                    “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

                    Comment


                    • I don't care for Bernie. I don't think he can win the states the Dems lost in the Midwest costing them the Electoral College. Bernie has his own cult in a way also.

                      Bloomberg, otoh, is a successful business man as you said. Voters claimed they liked Trump because he was an outsider and a successful (how I don't know) businessman. If that is true then his results easily beat those of Trump. However, if they voted for Trump because he is a bigot, and he is, then Bloomberg will make no difference. When Trump appeals to his core with the might is white (cough, cough) then it is impossible to peel those voters away. Those voters of his will have their fun with him being Jewish and Trump may tsk tsk but not stop it.

                      Comment


                      • risks either way. I can't stand either Bernie or Biden because they're deluded in their own way.

                        Bernie, not so much because of his stated policy (all of which, in the BEST case scenario, would be hugely moderated via Congress), but because he and his followers think there's a progressive democratic socialist hidden inside every swing stater if only their standard-bearer led the way.

                        Biden, because he thinks after all this time that he can work with the GOP and that they'll all wake up after Trump is defeated. he should know better, far better, by now.

                        I don't think Friedman did Bloomberg any favors by all but endorsing him at this stage; Bloomberg needs to "prove" his progressive creds in the primary first and Friedman is...not that.
                        There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."- Isaac Asimov

                        Comment


                        • Originally posted by astralis View Post
                          Bernie, not so much because of his stated policy (all of which, in the BEST case scenario, would be hugely moderated via Congress), but because he and his followers think there's a progressive democratic socialist hidden inside every swing stater if only their standard-bearer led the way.
                          Concur.

                          Sanders on the ticket is an instant -and easy- win for Trump.
                          “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

                          Comment


                          • Originally posted by TopHatter View Post
                            Sanders on the ticket is an instant -and easy- win for Trump.
                            I'm geniuely having a hard time believing this. After all the shennigans Trump pulled, I'n thinking that even a Chimpanzee would be able to win. That the only slogan needed is "I'm not Trump."

                            And you guys are telling me that Trump has more than an even chance of staying on as POTUS.
                            Chimo

                            Comment


                            • Originally posted by WABs_OOE View Post
                              I'm geniuely having a hard time believing this. After all the shennigans Trump pulled, I'n thinking that even a Chimpanzee would be able to win. That the only slogan needed is "I'm not Trump."

                              And you guys are telling me that Trump has more than an even chance of staying on as POTUS.
                              Sir, if the American people elected the President, then Trump would've gone down in defeat in 2016. But they don't and he didn't.

                              With all the shenanigans Trump pulled on the campaign trail, all the sacred conservative cows he slaughtered, both then and now, the Right should've hung him in effigy, but they didn't.

                              The sad fact is that it's theoretically possible for a person to win 22% of the popular votes cast, but still win the Electoral College.

                              With that in mind, as long as the economy looks good, superficially or otherwise, people will vote with their wallets. As long as they get a few nickels thrown their way, they're happy. They're unconcerned about the millions that Trump is looting from the taxpayer's coffers because their 401k is doing great.

                              The fact that your average Democratic candidate is a complete moonbat, or at best, Joe Biden, means that Trump stands an excellent chance of reelection...as of right now.

                              The flip side of the coin, as I've said many times, is that time is not Trump's side.
                              “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

                              Comment


                              • i'm not quite that pessimistic.

                                Sanders being the Dem nominee would likely mean the race would be a toss-up. with essentially any other candidate, the Dems have slightly better than even chance.

                                which shows just how much of a handicap Trump is working under-- given the economic fundamentals, any other standard GOP President would be absolutely wiping the floor with ANY opponent.

                                as it is, Dems will be crawling over broken glass to vote against Trump. the question is if Dems can get independents as well.

                                also should mention that Trump support outside his hardcore support is -very- brittle. any black swan event-- either an economic downturn or the equivalent of the Comey October surprise-- means a 2012-level major Dem victory.
                                There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."- Isaac Asimov

                                Comment

                                Working...
                                X