It is strange to be living through history. A time when the most stable democracy in the world saw an attempted coup by a President who only stepped down when his attempt to stop the transition of power failed. Then he used his grip on a following of poorly educated racists to maintain a stranglehold on a major party to force his return to leadership knowing the party would collapse if he took his following with him. Trump is a villain for the ages.
We have large turnovers constantly. Our system is inherently unstable, even if one side actually tried to build as hard as the other side destroys, we’d just end up constantly building and destroying on a cycle. We’ve been destroying more than we build since the 90s when neoliberals convinced voters if they tried half as hard, they’d maintain power and slowly make progress.
But that hasn’t made us stable, we’ve just been taking two steps back and one forward. A slow march to dystopia
Trump should have been behind bars since the afternoon of Jan 6.
He should have been impeached immediately, and arrested and indicted for inciting an insurrection.
And every Republican in Congress should have been 100 percent on board with that.
But… If we set aside for a moment that they are a party of traitors, that still doesn’t explain why Merrick Garland wasn’t putting the cuffs on Trump the day he was sworn in as the new AG.
IT’S ABSOLUTE MADNESS THAT TRUMP IS ALLOWED TO WALK AROUND FREE. In our entire history, we’ve never come closer to losing our democracy. Including the civil war.
Does teaching Holocaust make us hate modern Germany? Does teaching about Pearl Harbor makes us hate modern Japan? Why do they think that teaching black history is exclusively spreading hate?
Because they don't see the racist, slave-holding south as a past entity separate from their current reality.
If the federal government weren't stopping them, they'd re-enslave people today. In fact, they have via the prison system. So they don't want anyone closely examining it, hence banning or slowing the subject in schools if they're able.
lmao American democracy was being destroyed the moment Reagan made lobbying a thing. All Trump did was show how fucking broken our system is and how close we can get to being a fascist regime without actually becoming one.
Biden should really be saying “we are destroying American democracy”, because until corporate interests get the fuck out of politics as a whole, American “democracy” will always be a theatre show to convince us we still matter to them.
“We’ve got to get back to the basics of teaching math, of teaching reading, writing and American history,” Sanders said.
This is American history, you dumb racist asshole.
The College Board, who runs the AP program, just needs to yank certification for any state that tries to play this game of cherry picking which courses they “approve” of. You teach them all or you get nothing. Fuck these bigots and their backasswards states.
Too bad prices are up 20% on average since 2020, and aren't coming back down. That the 2023-2024 inflation rate is only 3% doesn't matter when wages never caught up with the giant price jumps from the pandemic.
Prices have risen 20.8% since the pandemic-induced recession began in February 2020, with just 6% of the nearly 400 items the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks cheaper today.
That’s well above the historic average for a four-year period. For comparison, inflation rose 18.9 percent in the 2010s, 28.4 percent in the 2000s and 32.4 percent in the 1990s.
wages never caught up with the giant price jumps from the pandemic
I’m gonna have to go ahead and sorta disagree with you there
I was gonna link you to wage numbers or find something in my post, but it’s actually right there in your link, in the quote from Mark Hamrick. “ Will consumers suddenly feel relieved from the burden of elevated prices? No. But they are supported by a still robust job market that supports employment and wage gains rising above the recent pace of inflation.”
Hm - I interpreted "recent" as one way, but yeah, that's fair, you could interpret "recent" as him meaning the last year or something. Here's a summary, then, of how wages at the bottom end have kept pace with inflation over the last few years. "Real wages of low-wage workers grew 12.1% between 2019 and 2023." Cumulative inflation over that time span has been about 18% (which is massive), but low-end wages in current dollars also grew by 35% cumulatively in that time, well outpacing inflation.
What numbers are you looking at that say low income wages haven't kept pace with inflation? Like what kind of cumulative current-dollar wages, and what cumulative inflation, are you claiming? If my stuff is propaganda numbers, then what are the real numbers?
Inflation-adjusted wages have ticked very slightly down at the median (like a few percent), gone down a bit at the top end, and gone up significantly both at the bottom end and in the average. It's a complex topic and you can find a variety of numbers both on the income and inflation sides, but they generally all paint that same story (which is, itself, complex enough that you can paint a bunch of different narratives from it, by putting up the numbers for average vs. median vs. lowest-quartile or etc).
Not to be rude, but do you even read your own sources?
Wage rates remain insufficient for individuals and families working to make ends meet. Nowhere can a worker at the 10th percentile of the wage distribution earn enough to meet a basic family budget.
It's literally at the top of your article, under "Key Findings", probably because they knew that it's easy to misunderstand statistical data, or to claim it says what you want it to.
So the percentiles you are talking about still cannot keep their heads above water, despite the growth of wages in many of their jobs, and the other percentiles haven't seen that level of wage growth, or have even lost ground to inflation, but you're over here going, "I've got great news for you, you're actually not in a bad financial position, stop taking your actual lived experiences over my big numbers!"
I mean, sure. 🙂 I was trying to consolidate comments into a single stream of conversation since it's already sort of turning into a bickering sprawl, but if you'd like to reply to it here instead of there, then I'm fine with that too:
Yes, lower income people in this country are still fucked. If anything I was saying made it sound like I thought they were not, that was not the intent. My point was that Biden has been helping them get out of it, to a certain degree, in a way that's actually very unusual for an American president (they generally don't give a shit about the working class). And that happened even during a historic level of economic challenge to tackle his way out of. And therefore that attacking him by pretending that the opposite is happening is erroneous at best and openly dishonest at worst.
Dude if you have a disagreement with the article, let's have it. You tried to disagree with it in economic terms and it seems to me like you got tripped up on basic understanding of inflation-adjusted dollars versus non-inflation-adjusted dollars, which is why you're recasting the whole thing in emotional terms like "not some kind of economic saviour," but this new framing doesn't leave a lot to actually discuss. It just takes it into the realm of bickering and fact free opinion judgements.
The majority of people in the country believe that Trump is better on the economy than Biden, even though Trump is a fuckin trade war starting PPP fraud factory closing disaster. The idea that Biden is hurting the economy is not just un-heard-of, it is a majority view, which makes worthwhile a factual discussion of whether or not it is true.
The last article I posted before this morning that dealt with Biden in any capacity was almost a month ago. The thing about me posting article after article you are literally just making up. Comments, I post a lot of.
The article is a little bit explicitly "rah-rah Biden," I'll grant you that. On the other hand, if it's true, then that's legit, and I haven't really seen anything to illustrate that it might not be true other than a pretty large amount of obfuscation in the comments arguing other points that have more convenient answers (like "are low income workers doing okay yet" which they are not).
My disagreement with the post's article is that it is conflating the stock market with the economy, and the financial news sector is pushing this narrative very hard, or even saying it openly.
My issues with the article you linked about wages, in the comments, is that you're omissively citing bits and pieces to different people in order to support the idea that the economy is doing well, as the post article claims, when the post article is really about the stock market, not wages or living standards.
If the wage growth at the bottom 10th percentile doesn't mean they're not fucked, why would you even cite it?
The article talks about "growth" which is presumably GDP, which is a bullshit metric absolutely, but the overall context is:
The growth rate is high, the unemployment rate is at historic lows, household wealth is surging, and wages are rising faster than costs, especially for the working class. There are many ways to define a good economy. America is in tremendous shape according to just about any of them.
The stock market is based on total crap and can swing up or down by like tens of percents on a whim for literally no reason at all. The only reason stock market even got mentioned tangentially was because Trump said something about the stock market, and they mentioned that at the end of the article.
IDK why I've spent so much time on this. Honestly man it seems like you're literally just saying anything, casting about for some thing you can poo poo or disagree with that has nothing to do with what I or the article are saying.
The bottom 10th percentile covers people making less than $22,880, according to BLS.
That firmly excludes the median mode of American households, by wages. The vast majority of Americans were not helped by that number. Is it good that it happened? Yeah, absolutely. It wasn't Biden though. And it isn't most Americans. And it isn't the economy as a whole.
As always, conservatives are not pro-life, they are anti-women. Everything they do is about control.
To the conservative mind, white men should be in control, and all others should be lower down on the hierarchy, obeying those above them, and keeping those below in line. If viewed through that lens, every argument conservatives make becomes consistent. They want to be in control, and will burn the world to stay in power.
The Idaho Senate voted Thursday 27-8 to advance a bill that defines “domestic terrorism” as requiring the involvement of foreign groups. According to the bill, if there’s no foreign involvement, then there can be no domestic terrorism.
There’s no talking to these people or applying logic to them. They want to be racist, they enjoy being hateful, but they won’t admit that in those words. More and more though they are saying the quiet part out loud.
If your idea of the greatest country is one in which you can and probably will be imprisoned through no fault if your own, forced to perform manual labor until it kills you, and if you somehow survive long enough to be released, systematically impoverished in order to force you to steal to survive and thus ensure that you end up back in prison, then I have to wonder what you think goes on in the rest of the world.
Make no mistake, this country is extremely cruel. Living here is terrifying, and I’m not even black.
Why is belief in freedom, fairness, honesty, truth, knowledge, and acceptance of diversity considered hating the US. At the same time some how is authoritarianism, exploitation, lying, manipulation, ignorance, and tribalism loving the US. That is like saying left is right, up is down, dumb is smart, totally bizzare.
Reeks of didn’t read the article because everything mentioned, such as a 1974 discrimination case, Central Park five(1989), and his dad’s casino chip purchase (1991) predated Bill de Blasio’s term (2014-2021)
He stood idly by and did nothing except for when he himself was running for president against Trump and started an attack campaign against him that fizzled once he couldn’t get into the primaries. The same campaign where he spent $300,000 of the city’s money on his campaign and didn’t repay, racking up a $150,000 fine. The same campaign that he took inappropriate donations on, and was fined another $50k by the FEC. Is that what you are talking about? The upstanding citizen Bill de Blasio, the towering pillar of virtue that dedicated his career to fighting corporate and political greed. You’re right, I didn’t read the article. I didn’t fucking need to.
Humanity has bad spots and problems everywhere. Here in the US we throw the expression "greatest country" at the drop of a hat. What is greatness, if not to try to work on our problems as much or better than everyone else is working on theirs?
People that want to wallpaper over our history of mistakes are doing the opposite of making the country great. True greatness is recognizing the problems and working hard to fix them. People like Sanders are the opposite of patriots. She would have us lie about who we are and what we've done, perpetuate our mistakes, and oppose those that want to do the work to actually make us greater.
msnbc.com
Top