There’s something wrong with white America. A Sunday New York Times report further reveals what a Princeton study showed first in November: The death rate for white adults is rising at an alarming rate, with the increase resembling the historical patterns of an infectious disease like AIDS, experts say. The Times used almost 60 million death certificates from the last quarter century to evaluate the crisis affecting virtually all white adult age groups. By far the most shocking increases in death rates are occurring among working-class and poor whites without a college degree. And it’s not heart disease or the other medical culprits we might have suspected for the increase but suicide, overdoses and acute alcohol abuse: self-harm, in other words.
The skyrocketing trend of death due to self-harm cannot be considered as unrelated to the Trump phenomenon. It’s the same Americans at the center of each tragic contemporary puzzle. According to the Princeton and Times studies and any poll you care to consult–the consensus, in other words–the group of Americans who form the core of Trump’s support are also those most at risk of early death by their own hands. That less-educated, less-wealthy rural whites form the engine of Trump’s shocking success is well–documented, from the beginning of his campaign’s rise to the present. And now we know that this group is suffering from an almost unprecedented suicidal desperation. (...)
(...) The frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination has also waged a vituperative campaign against Wall Street, accusing hedge funds of "getting away with murder" — somewhat to the entertainment of the bankers who helped finance the rise of his business empire.
"I have been highly amused about Trump's comments about us given he's almost one of us, at least in a business sense," said one Wall Street banker whose group has provided Mr Trump's properties with millions of dollars in financing. "He is totally comfortable around Wall Street and bankers."
Mr Trump characterises himself as not beholden to special interests, ridiculing hedge funds as "guys that shift paper around and . . . get lucky" and highlighting a contrast with his own record of building large construction projects.
Big banks and hedge funds, however, have played a pivotal role in the growth of his real estate empire, providing his companies with loans, acquiring stakes in Trump properties and restructuring debt terms in his times of trouble — as he has acknowledged happily in the past.
"Morgan Stanley is one of the finest investment banking names on Wall Street," Mr Trump said in a 2004 press release, when the bank helped during the 2004 bankruptcy of Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts, a holding company for several properties.
"We are excited about the opportunity to work with (former Morgan Stanley managing director) Mitch Petrick and his team, given their proven track record."
Morgan Stanley became the joint lead arranger for $500m in financing as part of the reorganisation of the company, while UBS advised Trump Hotels and also helped arrange financing. (...)
Mr Trump has also sparred with Wall Street. In 2008, he suedDeutsche Bank and other lenders over a $640m construction loan for Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago.
Mr Trump argued the financial crisis prevented him from repaying the loan to Deutsche and Fortress Investment, a hedge fund, in the allotted time.
Deutsche countersued to obtain repayment. The two sides settled in 2010, with Deutsche extending the terms of the loan for five years.
Deutsche's private bank is providing a $170m loan for one of Mr Trump's latest projects, his new hotel in Washington DC. Construction on the Trump International Hotel is due to be completed next year.
Mr Trump's relations with high finance were more amicable in 2009, on the occasion of his last corporate bankruptcy. Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts, having previously emerged from bankruptcy protection in 2005, fell into trouble again under the new name of Trump Entertainment Resorts.
Mr Trump teamed up with Avenue Capital, the hedge fund founded by Marc Lasry, to beat back a takeover attempt by Beal Bank and Carl Icahn the activist investor. The plan he and his hedge fund allies put forward was endorsed by a bankruptcy judge.
But Mr Icahn has held no grudge. He is backing Mr Trump for president — and even briefly accepted his offer to be Secretary of Treasury. (...)
This vote is about taking the country back from a globalist elite supported by the establishment that doesn't care who you vote for as long as they are in their pockets. Left v. right is gone. The new war is globalism versus nationalism.
This vote is about taking the country back from a globalist elite supported by the establishment that doesn't care who you vote for as long as they are in their pockets. Left v. right is gone. The new war is globalism versus nationalism.
This vote might be, really, a vote about what do politicians mean in our culture anymore.
1) Serious, "let's move America forward" through laws, in a clunky but methodical way. 2) Figurehead cheerleaders who really make no difference in lawmaking, but act like royalty.
Obviously, this has broken down by party lines with Hillary/Bernie being #1
and Trump/Palin being #2
But really is it any different than it has always been? It is just getting progressively worse as our society becomes increasingly ignorant and banal.
This vote might be, really, a vote about what do politicians mean in our culture anymore.
1) Serious, "let's move America forward" through laws, in a clunky but methodical way. 2) Figurehead cheerleaders who really make no difference in lawmaking, but act like royalty.
Obviously, this has broken down by party lines with Hillary/Bernie being #1
Trading in the beautiful snow of Iowa for the red dirt of Oklahoma as planned, despite what the media is trying to spin up! Thank you Iowa - get out and caucus on February 1st!
The former Alaska governor captured the incoherence that's driving Trump's campaign.
Sarah Palin’s bizarre, rambling speech last night endorsing Donald Trump didn’t make much sense (it’s already been describedas “post-apocalyptic poetry,” which may not be entirely fair to either poetry or the apocalypse). Here, for example, is a representative passage:
A good, heated, and very competitive primary is where we are. And now though, to be lectured that, “Well, you guys are all sounding kind of angry,” is what we’re hearing from the establishment. Doggone right we’re angry! Justifiably so! Yes! You know, they stomp on our neck, and then they tell us, “Just chill, okay just relax.” Well, look, we are mad, and we’ve been had. They need to get used to it.
The speech name-checks a variety of conservative issues, from immigration to national defense to the build-up of debt, but not in any coherent context. They are not political issues in the traditional sense but free-associative decorations loosely affixed to Palin’s freewheeling resentment. At times the speech, with its whiplash-rhythms and word juxtapositions, became downright hypnotic.
(...)
In part this is because making sense isn’t really Palin’s style. But it’s also because there is no coherent defense of Donald Trump’s candidacy. His own argument is little more than a simple boast that he will make the country great, like it used to be, followed by a series of insults and a discussion of his poll numbers.
To the extent that he proposes anything resembling actual policies, they tend to be implausible fantasies, designed more as insults and power plays than ideas for governance. His speeches go long on personal boasting, and he dismisses most questions of governance by appealing to his own innate ability to overcome obstaces. You cannot make a reasoned case for Trump, because there is no such case to be made.
Palin’s support was incoherent, then, in part because that’s how she is, and part because it could be no other way. Support for Trump is not based on reason or argument or logic or even a sense of what Trump would actually do as president, but on his personal appeal as a businessman and political entertainer, and a related sense of how and what the country would be. It is not really a political campaign at all, so much as an extended act of fantasy and wish-fulfillment for both him and his supporters. Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is Donald Trump fanfic, with Donald Trump as the Mary Sue.
In a way, then, Palin’s speech was the perfect endorsement for Donald Trump’s campaign: an incoherent mess of angry, resentful sentiment, delivered in a way designed to provide the maximum in media spectacle. Palin effectively—and, okay, somewhat poetically—captured and amplified the identity-politics-driven nonsense that feeds both the candidate and his supporters.
"Populism (the rejection of political elites in favor of the people) has always had two faces. One is progressive populism, based on democratic renewal and widening inclusion. The other is authoritarian populism, based on strongmen who promise fundamental change because they're so powerful, and also scapegoat minorities. America's populist upsurges to date have been progressive (in the 1830s, between 1901 and 1916, in the 1930s, and, briefly in the 1960s). But populist upsurges in other nations and at other times have been authoritarian (think of Spain, Italy, and Germany in the 1930s).
Right now America is at the early stages of another populist upsurge. Bernie Sanders exemplifies progressive populism; Donald Trump, authoritarian populism. The question isn't just whether populism will prevail over political elites in 2016, but which face of populism — progressive or authoritarian? What do you think and why?"
The answer is simple if by prevail you mean win the Presidency. Neither and they will fail quite epically as well. Clinton will crush all attempts at populism by appealing to it. By pitting them against one another, it insures the status quo. We are still years away if ever from bringing them down. Good question though.
"Populism (the rejection of political elites in favor of the people) has always had two faces. One is progressive populism, based on democratic renewal and widening inclusion. The other is authoritarian populism, based on strongmen who promise fundamental change because they're so powerful, and also scapegoat minorities. America's populist upsurges to date have been progressive (in the 1830s, between 1901 and 1916, in the 1930s, and, briefly in the 1960s). But populist upsurges in other nations and at other times have been authoritarian (think of Spain, Italy, and Germany in the 1930s).
Right now America is at the early stages of another populist upsurge. Bernie Sanders exemplifies progressive populism; Donald Trump, authoritarian populism. The question isn't just whether populism will prevail over political elites in 2016, but which face of populism — progressive or authoritarian? What do you think and why?"
He’s hardly alone in wanting to use government force to control others.
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not that i agree with everything in it but this also reminded me of something i read long ago... The Ominous Parallels
Each of the philosophic principles essential to the rise of Nazism in Germany has a counterpart in present-day America.
Is the freest country on earth moving toward totalitarian dictatorship? What were the factors that enabled the Nazis to seize power in pre-war Germany? Do those same conditions exist in America today? These are the questions raised — and answered, with frightening clarity — by Leonard Peikoff, Ayn Rand's intellectual heir, in his powerful book The Ominous Parallels. "We are drifting to the future, not moving purposefully," Peikoff warns. "But we are drifting as Germany moved, in the same direction, for the same kind of reason."Some of the "ominous parallels" between pre-Hitler Germany and the United States that Peikoff identifies are:
Liberals who demand public control over the use and disposal of private property — social security, more taxes, more government control over the energy industry, medicine, broadcasting, etc.
Conservatives who demand government control over our intellectual and moral life — prayer in the schools, literary censorship, government intervention in the teaching of biology, the anti-abortion movement, etc.
Political parties devoid of principles or direction and moved at random by pressure groups, each demanding still more controls.
A "progressive," anti-intellectual educational system that, from kindergarten to graduate school, creates students who can't read or write — students brainwashed into the feeling that their minds are helpless and they must adapt to "society," that there is no absolute truth and that morality is whatever society says it is.
A student radical movement (from the 1960's through the violent anti-nukers and ecology fanatics of today) who are, Peikoff maintains, the "pre-Hitler youth movement resurrected." The radicals are nature worshippers who attack the middle class, science, technology, and business.
The rise of defiant old-world racial hatreds disguised as "ethnic-identity" movements and "affirmative action."
A pervasive atmosphere of decadence, moral bankruptcy, and nihilist art accompanied by the rise of escapist mystic cults of every kind — astrology, "alternative medicine," Orientalists, extrasensory perception, etc.
In an introduction to Peikoff's book, Ayn Rand describes The Ominous Parallels as, "the first book by an Objectivist philosopher other than myself" and goes on to say that, "If you do not wish to be a victim of today's philosophical bankruptcy, I recommend The Ominous Parallels as protection and ammunition. It will protect you from supporting, unwittingly, the ideas that are destroying you and the world."In brilliantly reasoned prose, Peikoff argues that the deepest roots of German Nazism lie not in existential crises, but in ideas — not in Germany's military defeat in World War I or the economic disasters of the Weimar Republic that followed, but in the philosophy that dominated pre-Nazi Germany. Although it was mediated by crises, Peikoff demonstrates that German Nazism was the inevitable climax of a centuries-long philosophic development, preaching three fundamental ideas: the worship of unreason, the demand for self-sacrifice and the elevation of society or the state above the individual."These ideas," Peikoff says, "are the essence of Nazism and they are exactly what our leading universities are now spreading throughout this country. This is the basic cause of all the other parallels."
Just finished watching. I would say she made a very compelling argument for Trump. I've seen a lot of speeches and a few endorsement speech's in my day and what she just got done there was one of the best I've ever witnessed.
The take away line from her is the status quo has got to go.
In the 2D world of traditional politics, Sarah Palin’s endorsement of Donald Trump looks like a yawn because she’s seen by many as a policy lightweight. But in the 3D world of persuasion, where Trump lives, it is probably a home-run.
Trump’s biggest obstacle is his perceived lack of empathy, along with voter suspicions about his motives. Palin’s endorsement says, in effect, that she doesn’t see anything dark in his soul. You can dislike Palin’s politics, but she is ridiculously likable on a personal level. And that likability probably translates into some sort of irrational trust about her people-judging skills.
This keeps all the media attention focused on Trump – on a safe and fluffy topic – and guarantees that no one will ask him to name the heads of state in the Middle East for at least one week.
Palin’s history with Cruz gives this story legs at least until every pundit has said every obvious thing you can say on the topic.
Getting the Palin endorsement is a perfect play for the Master Persuader. It touches all the right bases.
