I guess if there is ever a PS pizza party, I will be in the corner with the 8% "shallow edge piece" nerds while 62% of you will be on the dance floor with mild burns on your tongues.
I remember when there was a huge news stand at Michigan and Randolph, between the entrance to the train station and the steps up to what is now the Cultural Center. They had newspapers from all over the country, all over the world!
In regard to the moronic city council & our utterly rotten & incompetent mayor voting for a vile anti-Semitic resolution condemning Israel, but not Hamas, Michael Che on SNL Saturday night had the perfect response: “In return, Gaza called for a ceasefire in Chicago"
That M&Ms photo reminds me of the old blonde joke of the blonde fired from the M&Ms factory, because she kept rejected all the "Ws"
And "Jiggery-pokery? You're quoting Anton Scalia now?
Regarding the cease fire resolution. SNL weekend update had a joke. After Chicago passed the ceasefire resolution, Gaza passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Chicago.
Thank you for your thoughts on the Gaza resolution. They are spot on---except that what matters is that our mayor and alders, whose job is to improve and unite our city, went out of their way to further inflame and divide us over something so inconsequential. Your fears about the far left abandoning Biden and enabling Trump's election are real and very scary. I fear the far left is not only damaging our city, but assisting the far right in their efforts to ruin our country and our democracy. A second Trump presidency will have scary consequences that will reverberate worldwide and could last generations.
You beat me to it! Rats! My question is this. All the Democrats ditching Biden- what do they think they will get from Trump? For example, Arab-Americans say they are ditching Biden. What do they think they will get from Trump, who has heavily supported Israel and, while in office, tried to ban entry of Muslims into the country? Polls are interviewing blacks who say they will vote for Trump. What do they think they will get from a man who supports laws suppressing voting, pushes rules suppressing business and consumer protections, wants stronger policing, particularly in minority areas, and will not push, one bit, investment in poor communtities? I have certain disappointments in Biden. But I would rather cut off my hand than vote for Trump.
I have not seen responses to those questions. I have only seen the aggrieved parties state their disagreement with Biden's handling of the situation. My sense is that many people want to register their frustration with Biden more than they want to support him as a way to keep Trump from being elected. That applies to ordinary voters as well as politicians. It is hard to imagine Rashida Tlaib would actively provide support after public statements she has made. I also don't see her endorsing Trump.
The situation is becoming more similar to 2016. Populists on the right and the left can sway the outcome. The center needs to come out sufficiently. I think that Biden is doing a pretty credible job of appealing to the center and hope that it results in his reelection. A rejection of Trumpy down-ballot candidates (as in 2020 and 2022) is also necessary, as is the rejection of far-left candidates.
Yet another instance of people letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. They'd rather have 0% of what they want than 50%. They don't consider consequences.
One of my relatives owns a classic imported luxury car. They drove it to a restaurant and when they returned to the vehicle, there was a note on the windshield from what appeared to be a young woman requesting a date and giving her details. Now I am wondering if it was a prankster!
Once a month I spend the day with my former wife and two of my children at my former wife’s house. I always bring the paper version of the Sunday Chicago Sun-Times with me because it has a fun crossword puzzle by Frank Longo, and we always spend part of the day doing the puzzle. Things I miss from paper newspapers with my e-subscription to the Washington Post are the crosswords and the comics.
Society has been through this time and time again for decades. No one argues that news reporting is needed to maintain a democratic society, A zillion comparisons have been made to compare the takeover of news by totalitarian leaders to the crushing of democracy. But when I was growing up, there were limited sources for news. You read newspapers and magazines, watched television news, or listened to radio news. The news one got were often the results of whatever publishers thought it should be. People have more choices now. Unfortunately, many of those choices are poor choices and, more than ever, the result of political bias on the side of the person reporting. It is not necessarily even truthful or accurate. It does not intend to have people make up their own minds. It is intended to make up their minds for them. The effect on readers and listeners is more important than truth or accuracy. Read Fox News and then, the same day, read CNN or one of the daily newspapers. You'd swear you were living in two different worlds with two different sets of events. What does all of this mean for papers like the Tribune? They need to be more sales people than news reporters. They need to try and guess what people want to see and hear. This does not make for good news reporting. Alden's dependence on the bottom line does not help a bit. But don't just blame Alden. We have an American public becoming very close-minded. They only listen to and read what they want to know. I can't count the number of discussions I have had with people i know, particularly on the right, that believe the most outrageous lies, backed up by little or no evidence. But it's not all on the right. Covid shots are full of microchips to provide information to the government. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza are solely for the purpose of boosting the defense industry. The Trump prosecution and illegal immigration are solely to boost the political chances for Biden. Where do people get these? It's not from the Tribune.
Fox is alleged news, as it's the publishing arm of the Re Thug Licon Party which actually appears to take orders from Murdoch's minions much of the time.
I am trying to not be annoyed that my comment on Alder/Councilor got mangled in editing, but it does kinda make me look more like a boob than absolutely necessary.
Also, kind sir, the comment attributed to me on the Mommy/Pole Dance visual tweet was not mine. I made a totally different, more general query on what the rules for visual tweets were.
I want to give all you food for thought. I think there should be discussions of the future of capitalism and a laissez-faire economy. There was a time when these things helped make the United States what it is today. Is it still that way? I have actually been thinking about this for some time. Pure socialism and communism have never worked anywhere. They simply lead to most except the upper crust leaders being equally poor.. But there have been a number of stories the past few days that have me wondering. The taking over of the news business by investment firms that just about always slash costs is a threat to democracy. We also see the same thing in the healthcare business, which threatens patient care for millions without adequate insurance. People, especially older ones, shouldn't need to choose between purchasing food or prescriptions. We need to get over thinking about homeless as being the ones with drug and mental issues. As housing costs skyrocket, there will be a lot of averege joes with housing predicaments. I never thought I would find myself even thinking this, much less saying it. Has capitalism outlived its usefulness? I'm not suggesting a totally socialistic society as I said at the beginning of my message. But I'm not so sure we can depend on investment firms and their leaders to give a damn about how 90% of the population is faring, not when their only concern is the bottom line. And people who are having trouble obtaining the basics of life, such as air, food, water, and shelter, aren't going to give a damn what form of government we have.
My view. Capitalism produces the most wealth of any of the economic systems devised by people. But unrestrained laissez-faire capitalism is amoral and will result in the extinction of the human race either through climate change or war. I think FDR, who was called a socialist and communist by the right wing capitalists of his day, had the right idea. Maintain an overall capitalist economy so that risk takers and inventors will have the incentives they need to do what they do, but intensely tax and regulate in the public interest. The problem we have been having since Reagan is that progressive tax rates on the highest incomes have been cut from 70% to 37% today, and the Republican Party has been successful in eliminating necessary regulation of business corporations, including antitrust regulation. We need more taxation and regulation to have a just society with the power to solve the existential issues facing the human race today. Look at climate change. Without intense regulation, large areas of the world will become difficult or impossible to live in; there will be more and more starvation and food insecurity; there will be more and more mass migration; and the whole mess will be resolved in some sort of horrible way: war or mass starvation. By definition, laissez-faire capitalism cares about only one thing: money. That’s why Noam Chomsky recently said that the Republican Party is the most dangerous organization in human history. Because basically it wants unregulated, unrestrained capitalism.
Thank you. That's a good explanation of what I was trying to say. The main problem with capitalism as I see it, is that it depends on those, whose only goal in life is to amass wealth, to give a damn about the people that have different aims. I don't see that happening as much. Does Donald Trump give a damn about the little people, that can't anything for him other than worship him?
For what it's worth, I'm happy to say I agree with Joanie 100%.
Capitalism, precisely because it incentivizes private pursuit of profit, has been the greatest engine of wealth and economic growth and increased standards of living the world has ever known. It can't be overstated.
The old mercantilist dogma of the absolute monarchs was that nations needed to amass gold -- whoever acquires the most gold wins. And so, you want colonies for resources and markets, you want to be a net exporter, you're very jealous and want nobody else to be very successful and will go to war as needed, and you want to run your economy with a heavy hand toward being as much of a zero-sum winner in this gold game as you can be.
The great and charming Scottish Enlightenment thinker Adam Smith taught us, in his 1776 book called The Wealth of Nations, that all that was stupid. The wealth of a nation does not consist of its piece of the zero-sum gold pie -- wealth is not a fixed commodity, like precious metals -- but rather in the value of everything it has, okay, plus, much more importantly, in the sum-total value of everything, all the goods and services, it produces. Like some sort of gross domestic product, if you will.
And, sure enough, the reason the west (+ Meiji Restoration Japan) got rich and powerful, leaving the rest of the world in the dust, really for the first time -- the "Great Divergence," as some historians call it, the key development of the modern world post-1750, why the west "won" the last two and a half centuries -- is the industrial revolution, which enabled industrial nations to produce a lot, check that, A LOT, more with the same resources. A lot more stuff = a lot more $$$, never mind the gold.
The tremendous productivity gains of that tech-driven revolution (churn out textiles in little England at such a rate that renders the entire Indian textile industry, their whole thing for generations, nearly irrelevant overnight, plus give people, even poor people, their first changes of clothes; later, make a car in an hour and a half rather than 12, and give ordinary people their first car, and so on) owes its success to a capitalist system that incentivizes and facilitates large-scale private investment, through various laws, like those not only protecting private property but also permitting the chartering of limited liability corporations to pool both capital and risk.
You can try to copy it through government ownership and command, the socialist system, and that did work to help communist Russia industrialize overnight (as well as Japan, sort of, albeit centered around family-controlled private businesses, like the Toyoda Loom Works). That's okay for playing catch-up, and Smith himself knew that only governments could afford and carry out certain really big projects (like building highways, say), but it's flat-footed over the long term. Government officials in charge of running industry, never mind a whole economy, are inevitably incompetent and/or corrupt. Why? Because their know-how and incentives are not aligned around pursuing profit in a competitive market. When Ford (or Toyota) faces competition, it has to innovate or die, and its investor-owners place a lot of pressure on it to do just that lest their stock tank. Compare Ford to Yugo, the car company of the old communist Yugoslavia. Remember them? Some American entrepreneurs even tried to sell the dinky hatchbacks over here for a minute. The result is a truly impressively giant state-owned car factory employing many thousands of grateful employees who are well taken care of -- producing, indefinitely, the world's shittiest car.
The industrial revolution was, of course, powerfully disruptive, in the bad sense of that word, before snotty entrepreneurs made a fetish of "breaking things." It created a new immiserated urban working class and much else crap besides (as in, literally, rivers became streams of raw sewage, to say nothing of egregious pollution), which in turn produced two sorts of pushback.
One flavor was Marx. The workers should displace the parasitic bourgeoisie just as the bourgeoisie had, of late, displaced the parasitic rentiers, the landed aristocracy, and this should occur via revolution (akin to the Atlantic ones, like ours) in which, this time, the workers seize industry for the benefit of the masses. Indeed, Marx thought that this simply *would* happen, as a matter of the new science of history. He thought it would happen first in advanced industrial economies, like that of his own Germany. As it turned out, Lenin thought he could push fast-forward on history in his own backward Russia and get to that communist utopia quicker.
The other flavor of pushback was the social reform sort, of the old progressive movement and the FDR liberals -- the grand bargain that defines the economic systems of the western industrial powerhouses to this day, including our own: keep capitalism and all the economic benefits it produces every day, but fix up the bad social effects of laissez-faire with, as Joanie mentions, plenty of regulation to ensure (1) fair competition, and (2) broad-based social welfare. Thus, countries that came to be defined by their spectacular wealth-producing industry took on a new obligation, to worry about the prospects and experience of their citizenry writ large, but without going socialist.
That bargain, that idea, is the one that market fundamentalists, economic libertarians, laissez-faire obsessives -- the conservative Republicans of this country -- have sought to roll back since Goldwater, Nixon, and the far more popular Goldwater mouthpiece Reagan. And it's why I call myself a liberal Democrat. The progressive reformers of yore demanded minimum wage laws, maximum hours laws, anti-child labor laws, workplace safety, and the right to unionize. Later, amid the Great Depression, the liberals demanded not only regulation of business and finance but a cushion against economic misfortune not of their own making in the form of insurance -- bank deposit insurance, modest retirement pensions (Social Security), and unemployment and accident insurance. In more recent times, the push was for universal access to health care. These are, to quote Biden, the big fucking deals that have motivated Democrats of my bent for many decades, some seven of them. And, for decades, Republicans opposed them.
Republicans sometimes had a good idea in this area -- like the Earned Income Tax Credit, for example, to supplement the income of the working poor. And they sometimes had (and continue to have) worthy criticisms of this or that program, as in, it will lead to unintended bad consequences. Economics 101, for example, counsels against a minimum wage as a generator of unemployment and would endorse income supports instead. For another example, conservatives are right to be skeptical of heavy-handed regulations that mandate particular means rather than ends that might be more efficiently had otherwise, and they are right to decry the burden of stupid regulations where they really are stupid. The good faith ones are not without a point or two!
But, good faith ideas aside, in practice, the modern GOP generally and consistently, as in pretty much every time, all the time, stood against all of these efforts to soften the harsh edges of the capitalist machine and ensure a decent measure of government attention to the fundamental needs of ordinary people and, in a land of unmatched, unheard-of plenty, the economic fairness owed them. Their stance, generally, has not been, I agree with your aims but want to tweak your means. They've stood, often hysterically, as in with hysteria, against the ends too.
You might think that things have changed, that with the populist Trump, there's been a realignment. But it's the same old story. Just as Reagan sold, as FDR put it, economic royalism under cover of social and cultural fears, so too Trump's main accomplishments were a tax cut for the rich and appointment of conservative judges eager to roll back business regulation, even as he railed about immigrants, promised great health care and infrastructure plans that never came close to happening, and merely fiddled around the edges of trade to no significant effect (not that you'd want him to do more, insofar as trade restrictions, like inflation, make everyone poorer -- see our old friend Smith).
I'm no Marxist, but there's a lot of truth to one of old Karl's key insights -- that the capitalists can be uncannily effective in distracting everyone from what's really going on. He thought just about everything that defines a people in a modern industrial nation -- culture, religion, nationalism -- was a con job to lead ordinary people to accept their lowly status. That surely goes too far. One is tempted to think, oh come on, people aren't so dumb, and yet we have the spectacle of a rich, petty, un-American, amoral asshole who does the bidding of a tiny cadre of wealthy elites -- elite not in the sense of being a college professor or a journalist but in the actual sense of having shitloads of money -- carrying the flag of God and country, and having a large minority buy it, and a large fraction of them not only buy it but go all in and stand ready to die on that hill. Breathtaking.
You might find this hard to believe, but I read every sentence of your reply. I'm not quite that wordy because I don't see myself as that smart and I never believe that others want to read everything I have to say. But I got the gist. My belief has always been that socialism and communism don't work because they pretend to make people equal and we don't really believe that. It's hard to believe someone else is equal when you realize you are a lot smarter and working twice as hard, so why should you two get the same amount of rations. Furthermore, the leaders always seem to live in luxury, so the workers have little interest in working harder just so they can live in poverty while the leaders thrive. Capitalism works when people accept that it's okay for some to be uber rich as long as they have enough to comfortably survive. The problems start when too many don't feel that they are not surviving very well. When it gets bad enough, they rebel. That's what worries me about the present. Money is not one of the four basic necessities of life. They are air, food, water, and shelter. We have people in Chicago fighting over air pollution because certain businesses located in their communities you never see in rich areas. There are people struggling to put roofs over their heads instead of tents and tarps. There are plenty of examples out there. When the situation gets bad enough, people will rebel, figuring they have nothing to lose. I don't have quite the grasp of economic theory as you. But I know a little history and can read people and how they react to things. We have a serious enough uprising from those objecting to culture changes. It will get worse when those at the bottom economically get tired of being there.
I basically I agree with you here, but my outlook on the present economic situation isn't so glum. If we have a rebellion now, I think it will reflect less the actual economic conditions on the ground -- which are pretty good overall, relative to the past and realistic expectations, notwithstanding the examples you point out -- and more a sort of digital-media-driven temper tantrum. In short, I place less stock in the "legitimate grievance" school of thought on our current moment, and more stock in cultural explanations.
Two small examples of what I mean: The Jan. 6 insurrection Trump incited and set afoot was not a cry for help from the downtrodden. Nor were the rioters just a bunch of skinheads or some such. Lots of white-collar types, lots of middle-aged types, with an unemployment rate similar to that of the country as a whole. In other words, mainstream white, as this article scarily reveals:
Meanwhile, on the other side, where are the angriest lefties coming from? Not from the ranks of the poor or forgotten but rather from, to use their favorite word, privilege. Wokeness is, in my view, a "luxury belief," the ideology of what we used to call limousine liberals, "radical chic" in Tom Wolfe's decades-old withering phrase, people who can afford to entertain notions of abolishing prisons, say, because they are personally well insulated from crime, and one that finds few takers among the "people of color" they claim to represent.
In short, I would have a lot of sympathy with a big outcry from "those at the bottom economically ... tired of being there," especially if it were backed by economic numbers rather than vibes and feels. But I'm skeptical that that's what we're seeing. I think we're seeing the wages of the bullshit IV bag we all carry around now, at once a mark of our improved standard of living and, at the same time, the key cause of our ongoing cultural crackup. Just as that great industrial revolution meant initially rivers of shit and toxic emissions that befouled the earth, the most recent communications revolution appears to be in a similarly vomitous stage. It's far less clear now than then about how to go about cleaning it up.
Oops, I did it again, wordiness-wise. Oh well, cheers.
No need for apology. I found it interesting. I just don't find it totally accurate. The riots on both the left and right were not mostly the privileged. The Capitol takeover was done by a lot of people with cultural grievances. The attack on government was the outcome of something that I predicted several decades ago. That there those who didn't accept and couldn't handle a shift in what was proper. The grievances added up. Whether they saw a decline in our world power, a shift in what was accepted in every day life, such as gay marriage, more poor people deciding that government was there to fund their lives, a change in attitude toward law enforcement, what they perceived as a radical left swing in public education, the push by minorities to be recognized as valuable in society and have their histories heard- I knew eventually the kettle would boil over. Too many people were accustomed to a European centered society and the coming changes scared them. And I disagree with your take on woke. Millions of people have not achieved the higher standards of living you mention. Many of the riots after the police brutality cases were crimes of opportunity rather than actual protest. But protest or not, they stemmed from the same causes, the feeling that a fair share of the population was not entitled to their share of the so-called American dream. The norms of society, which so many of us take for granted, often have little meaning where people feel they have not been treated equally either by the law or the economic system. We can, as white people, disagree with their perception. But it is what it is.
One disagreement, the Yugo wasn't the world's shittiest car, that dubious honor goes either to East Germany's pollution creating Trabant or Romania's Dacia, which essentially the same Fiat designed disaster as the Yugo. In fact, the Wall Street Journal once ran a long article on the Dacia titled: "Dacia, as in Gotcha", on how truly bad it was.
I think that the problems that you are describing are ones of good governance, not economic system. Our economy is nothing like laissez-faire with thousands of government agencies (federal to local) and millions of pages of laws and regulations. We may need new ones to manage the emergence of new business models that have negative effects (as we did with traditional trusts and monopolies). But we also need to correct the effects of poor regulation. For example, the bizarre structure of regulation of the medical industry - hospitals, doctors, pharmacies, pharmaceutical producers, etc has a significant impact on the problems.
Capitalism is the only effective and efficient way to allocate economic resources. Properly regulated capitalism is necessary to protect the public.
I think the issue is improving our parties and politics in order to provide improved governance.
I love my daily paper and I will miss it when it is gone. I believe that all thoughtful citizens understand the value and necessity of good journalism. But the death of newspapers does not equate to the death of journalism. We are living through a period of transition that is surely problematic.
I think the four major issues are the provision of objective news/analysis; the economics of sustaining a sufficient pool of journalist for market segments (local-to-international; business, fashion, etc.); providing clearly segregated opinion/advocacy; and a trustworthy management structure. These things are clearly tightly interrelated.
The current alternatives are either highly fragmented and of widely varying quality or highly concentrated with apparent biases. Search engines provide access to the noisome universe but are but require significant diligence from the individual user to assemble content.
I would pay a subscription fee for a service that provided an editorial standard and definition for the four issues; employed/paid a pool of journalists in each market that met the standard; linked to opinion/advocacy that favored facts and analysis over emotion. This might be accomplished by aggregating across existing TV/radio/paper newsrooms plus independent journalists in e-media.
The management model is to maintain a trustworthy 'tree of knowledge' that allows a user to access objective news and drill down to relevant and trustworthy sources of opinion/analysis/advocacy. Every content provider needs to get paid and all content needs to be protected from theft.
I love raising issues for discussion and debate. Let's try Boeing. There is a big picture here. It's getting really difficult to get young Americans to train for needed professions. Combine this with rich investors buying up big businesses and cutting every corner to cut costs. What's going in in Boeing manufacturing? Are the right people running things and doing the work? I have a friend that just told me yesterday that she refuses to fly, based on the latest news. Yes, I know the government tells us that flying is still the safest way to travel, based on statistics. But there's a big difference. There's a pretty good chance that one would survive a car or bus accident. I know; I was hit from behind by a drunk driver and escaped unscathed. You don't get more than one chance if there's a plane crash.
Boeing's problems started when the merged with McDonnell Douglas & then let the McDonnell Douglas people, who weren't engineers, like the decades of Boeing's leadership was, take over the company, as the McDonnell Douglas leaders, now the Boeing leadership, were crazed bean counters, who cut corners everywhere the could to make more profits for them selves & the shareholders, who they saw as the people to satisfy, not the airlines which bought the planes. That's why the built a factory in South Carolina, had that state pay for educating the barely educated workers there on how to work in a huge factory, which was supposed to make just some parts for the 787, but then converted it to build the entire 787 in competition with Boeing's highly experienced Seattle area workforce, because the South Carolina workers weren't unionized, never went on strike as the Seattle workers often did & got far lower pay.
Then Boeing outsourced as much of the 787 production to cheaper overseas locations, such as a huge factory in Italy, that made the carbon fiber fuselage, which was so poorly run & had so many problems that Boeing was finally forced to buy that entire company & send their experienced people their to fix & then run that mess, so they could get the necessary bare fuselages to build the planes with.
I guess if there is ever a PS pizza party, I will be in the corner with the 8% "shallow edge piece" nerds while 62% of you will be on the dance floor with mild burns on your tongues.
"The Trib is a mere shadow of its former self....and is hardly worth the $4 daily cost."
Geez, does the Tribe really.cost $4 per day at newsstands?
Do newsstands even exist any more?
I used to buy the physical paper for a.quarter at the newsstand at the Jefferson Park L station.
I live near the City News Cafe. Tremendous newsstand.
I remember when there was a huge news stand at Michigan and Randolph, between the entrance to the train station and the steps up to what is now the Cultural Center. They had newspapers from all over the country, all over the world!
In regard to the moronic city council & our utterly rotten & incompetent mayor voting for a vile anti-Semitic resolution condemning Israel, but not Hamas, Michael Che on SNL Saturday night had the perfect response: “In return, Gaza called for a ceasefire in Chicago"
That M&Ms photo reminds me of the old blonde joke of the blonde fired from the M&Ms factory, because she kept rejected all the "Ws"
And "Jiggery-pokery? You're quoting Anton Scalia now?
Woops. I saw that you posted the SNL reference before me.
No problem, as great minds often think alike!
I used to belong to weight watchers. Members used to complain about gaining weight even after eating the WW ‘pills’
Regarding the cease fire resolution. SNL weekend update had a joke. After Chicago passed the ceasefire resolution, Gaza passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Chicago.
Another great line came from John Williams on The Mincing Rascals Podcast. He said "Wait, the resolution is not binding?".
Thank you for your thoughts on the Gaza resolution. They are spot on---except that what matters is that our mayor and alders, whose job is to improve and unite our city, went out of their way to further inflame and divide us over something so inconsequential. Your fears about the far left abandoning Biden and enabling Trump's election are real and very scary. I fear the far left is not only damaging our city, but assisting the far right in their efforts to ruin our country and our democracy. A second Trump presidency will have scary consequences that will reverberate worldwide and could last generations.
You beat me to it! Rats! My question is this. All the Democrats ditching Biden- what do they think they will get from Trump? For example, Arab-Americans say they are ditching Biden. What do they think they will get from Trump, who has heavily supported Israel and, while in office, tried to ban entry of Muslims into the country? Polls are interviewing blacks who say they will vote for Trump. What do they think they will get from a man who supports laws suppressing voting, pushes rules suppressing business and consumer protections, wants stronger policing, particularly in minority areas, and will not push, one bit, investment in poor communtities? I have certain disappointments in Biden. But I would rather cut off my hand than vote for Trump.
Someone must have aaked those questions to indixiduals in the group's you cite.
Anyone in this forum abandoning Biden care to respond?
You are correct. The questions have been asked. I have seen the responses. Thus, the reason for my posting.
I have not seen responses to those questions. I have only seen the aggrieved parties state their disagreement with Biden's handling of the situation. My sense is that many people want to register their frustration with Biden more than they want to support him as a way to keep Trump from being elected. That applies to ordinary voters as well as politicians. It is hard to imagine Rashida Tlaib would actively provide support after public statements she has made. I also don't see her endorsing Trump.
I don't see Tlaib becoming intelligent either, after all, it's pretty sure she actually married her own brother at one point in her life.
The situation is becoming more similar to 2016. Populists on the right and the left can sway the outcome. The center needs to come out sufficiently. I think that Biden is doing a pretty credible job of appealing to the center and hope that it results in his reelection. A rejection of Trumpy down-ballot candidates (as in 2020 and 2022) is also necessary, as is the rejection of far-left candidates.
Yet another instance of people letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. They'd rather have 0% of what they want than 50%. They don't consider consequences.
I voted "councilors" because alders are trees. (Insert joke about dead wood here.)
One of my relatives owns a classic imported luxury car. They drove it to a restaurant and when they returned to the vehicle, there was a note on the windshield from what appeared to be a young woman requesting a date and giving her details. Now I am wondering if it was a prankster!
Maybe not. There's an "influencer" putting signs up all over New York, on buildings, on luxury cars, etc., seeking a rich husband: https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexalisitza/viral-tiktok-looking-for-a-rich-man
Huh, an upside-down M&M's logo is pretty much the Wilson sporting goods logo.
Once a month I spend the day with my former wife and two of my children at my former wife’s house. I always bring the paper version of the Sunday Chicago Sun-Times with me because it has a fun crossword puzzle by Frank Longo, and we always spend part of the day doing the puzzle. Things I miss from paper newspapers with my e-subscription to the Washington Post are the crosswords and the comics.
I have an online subscription to WAPO, and there is, indeed, a crossword (and other games, too): https://www.washingtonpost.com/games/ Also comics: https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/comics/
Society has been through this time and time again for decades. No one argues that news reporting is needed to maintain a democratic society, A zillion comparisons have been made to compare the takeover of news by totalitarian leaders to the crushing of democracy. But when I was growing up, there were limited sources for news. You read newspapers and magazines, watched television news, or listened to radio news. The news one got were often the results of whatever publishers thought it should be. People have more choices now. Unfortunately, many of those choices are poor choices and, more than ever, the result of political bias on the side of the person reporting. It is not necessarily even truthful or accurate. It does not intend to have people make up their own minds. It is intended to make up their minds for them. The effect on readers and listeners is more important than truth or accuracy. Read Fox News and then, the same day, read CNN or one of the daily newspapers. You'd swear you were living in two different worlds with two different sets of events. What does all of this mean for papers like the Tribune? They need to be more sales people than news reporters. They need to try and guess what people want to see and hear. This does not make for good news reporting. Alden's dependence on the bottom line does not help a bit. But don't just blame Alden. We have an American public becoming very close-minded. They only listen to and read what they want to know. I can't count the number of discussions I have had with people i know, particularly on the right, that believe the most outrageous lies, backed up by little or no evidence. But it's not all on the right. Covid shots are full of microchips to provide information to the government. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza are solely for the purpose of boosting the defense industry. The Trump prosecution and illegal immigration are solely to boost the political chances for Biden. Where do people get these? It's not from the Tribune.
Fox is alleged news, as it's the publishing arm of the Re Thug Licon Party which actually appears to take orders from Murdoch's minions much of the time.
I am trying to not be annoyed that my comment on Alder/Councilor got mangled in editing, but it does kinda make me look more like a boob than absolutely necessary.
Also, kind sir, the comment attributed to me on the Mommy/Pole Dance visual tweet was not mine. I made a totally different, more general query on what the rules for visual tweets were.
Fixed, those, sorry. Late night editing.
I think you have good credibility among those who participate in the discussion forum.
I want to give all you food for thought. I think there should be discussions of the future of capitalism and a laissez-faire economy. There was a time when these things helped make the United States what it is today. Is it still that way? I have actually been thinking about this for some time. Pure socialism and communism have never worked anywhere. They simply lead to most except the upper crust leaders being equally poor.. But there have been a number of stories the past few days that have me wondering. The taking over of the news business by investment firms that just about always slash costs is a threat to democracy. We also see the same thing in the healthcare business, which threatens patient care for millions without adequate insurance. People, especially older ones, shouldn't need to choose between purchasing food or prescriptions. We need to get over thinking about homeless as being the ones with drug and mental issues. As housing costs skyrocket, there will be a lot of averege joes with housing predicaments. I never thought I would find myself even thinking this, much less saying it. Has capitalism outlived its usefulness? I'm not suggesting a totally socialistic society as I said at the beginning of my message. But I'm not so sure we can depend on investment firms and their leaders to give a damn about how 90% of the population is faring, not when their only concern is the bottom line. And people who are having trouble obtaining the basics of life, such as air, food, water, and shelter, aren't going to give a damn what form of government we have.
My view. Capitalism produces the most wealth of any of the economic systems devised by people. But unrestrained laissez-faire capitalism is amoral and will result in the extinction of the human race either through climate change or war. I think FDR, who was called a socialist and communist by the right wing capitalists of his day, had the right idea. Maintain an overall capitalist economy so that risk takers and inventors will have the incentives they need to do what they do, but intensely tax and regulate in the public interest. The problem we have been having since Reagan is that progressive tax rates on the highest incomes have been cut from 70% to 37% today, and the Republican Party has been successful in eliminating necessary regulation of business corporations, including antitrust regulation. We need more taxation and regulation to have a just society with the power to solve the existential issues facing the human race today. Look at climate change. Without intense regulation, large areas of the world will become difficult or impossible to live in; there will be more and more starvation and food insecurity; there will be more and more mass migration; and the whole mess will be resolved in some sort of horrible way: war or mass starvation. By definition, laissez-faire capitalism cares about only one thing: money. That’s why Noam Chomsky recently said that the Republican Party is the most dangerous organization in human history. Because basically it wants unregulated, unrestrained capitalism.
Thank you. That's a good explanation of what I was trying to say. The main problem with capitalism as I see it, is that it depends on those, whose only goal in life is to amass wealth, to give a damn about the people that have different aims. I don't see that happening as much. Does Donald Trump give a damn about the little people, that can't anything for him other than worship him?
For what it's worth, I'm happy to say I agree with Joanie 100%.
Capitalism, precisely because it incentivizes private pursuit of profit, has been the greatest engine of wealth and economic growth and increased standards of living the world has ever known. It can't be overstated.
The old mercantilist dogma of the absolute monarchs was that nations needed to amass gold -- whoever acquires the most gold wins. And so, you want colonies for resources and markets, you want to be a net exporter, you're very jealous and want nobody else to be very successful and will go to war as needed, and you want to run your economy with a heavy hand toward being as much of a zero-sum winner in this gold game as you can be.
The great and charming Scottish Enlightenment thinker Adam Smith taught us, in his 1776 book called The Wealth of Nations, that all that was stupid. The wealth of a nation does not consist of its piece of the zero-sum gold pie -- wealth is not a fixed commodity, like precious metals -- but rather in the value of everything it has, okay, plus, much more importantly, in the sum-total value of everything, all the goods and services, it produces. Like some sort of gross domestic product, if you will.
And, sure enough, the reason the west (+ Meiji Restoration Japan) got rich and powerful, leaving the rest of the world in the dust, really for the first time -- the "Great Divergence," as some historians call it, the key development of the modern world post-1750, why the west "won" the last two and a half centuries -- is the industrial revolution, which enabled industrial nations to produce a lot, check that, A LOT, more with the same resources. A lot more stuff = a lot more $$$, never mind the gold.
The tremendous productivity gains of that tech-driven revolution (churn out textiles in little England at such a rate that renders the entire Indian textile industry, their whole thing for generations, nearly irrelevant overnight, plus give people, even poor people, their first changes of clothes; later, make a car in an hour and a half rather than 12, and give ordinary people their first car, and so on) owes its success to a capitalist system that incentivizes and facilitates large-scale private investment, through various laws, like those not only protecting private property but also permitting the chartering of limited liability corporations to pool both capital and risk.
You can try to copy it through government ownership and command, the socialist system, and that did work to help communist Russia industrialize overnight (as well as Japan, sort of, albeit centered around family-controlled private businesses, like the Toyoda Loom Works). That's okay for playing catch-up, and Smith himself knew that only governments could afford and carry out certain really big projects (like building highways, say), but it's flat-footed over the long term. Government officials in charge of running industry, never mind a whole economy, are inevitably incompetent and/or corrupt. Why? Because their know-how and incentives are not aligned around pursuing profit in a competitive market. When Ford (or Toyota) faces competition, it has to innovate or die, and its investor-owners place a lot of pressure on it to do just that lest their stock tank. Compare Ford to Yugo, the car company of the old communist Yugoslavia. Remember them? Some American entrepreneurs even tried to sell the dinky hatchbacks over here for a minute. The result is a truly impressively giant state-owned car factory employing many thousands of grateful employees who are well taken care of -- producing, indefinitely, the world's shittiest car.
The industrial revolution was, of course, powerfully disruptive, in the bad sense of that word, before snotty entrepreneurs made a fetish of "breaking things." It created a new immiserated urban working class and much else crap besides (as in, literally, rivers became streams of raw sewage, to say nothing of egregious pollution), which in turn produced two sorts of pushback.
One flavor was Marx. The workers should displace the parasitic bourgeoisie just as the bourgeoisie had, of late, displaced the parasitic rentiers, the landed aristocracy, and this should occur via revolution (akin to the Atlantic ones, like ours) in which, this time, the workers seize industry for the benefit of the masses. Indeed, Marx thought that this simply *would* happen, as a matter of the new science of history. He thought it would happen first in advanced industrial economies, like that of his own Germany. As it turned out, Lenin thought he could push fast-forward on history in his own backward Russia and get to that communist utopia quicker.
The other flavor of pushback was the social reform sort, of the old progressive movement and the FDR liberals -- the grand bargain that defines the economic systems of the western industrial powerhouses to this day, including our own: keep capitalism and all the economic benefits it produces every day, but fix up the bad social effects of laissez-faire with, as Joanie mentions, plenty of regulation to ensure (1) fair competition, and (2) broad-based social welfare. Thus, countries that came to be defined by their spectacular wealth-producing industry took on a new obligation, to worry about the prospects and experience of their citizenry writ large, but without going socialist.
That bargain, that idea, is the one that market fundamentalists, economic libertarians, laissez-faire obsessives -- the conservative Republicans of this country -- have sought to roll back since Goldwater, Nixon, and the far more popular Goldwater mouthpiece Reagan. And it's why I call myself a liberal Democrat. The progressive reformers of yore demanded minimum wage laws, maximum hours laws, anti-child labor laws, workplace safety, and the right to unionize. Later, amid the Great Depression, the liberals demanded not only regulation of business and finance but a cushion against economic misfortune not of their own making in the form of insurance -- bank deposit insurance, modest retirement pensions (Social Security), and unemployment and accident insurance. In more recent times, the push was for universal access to health care. These are, to quote Biden, the big fucking deals that have motivated Democrats of my bent for many decades, some seven of them. And, for decades, Republicans opposed them.
Republicans sometimes had a good idea in this area -- like the Earned Income Tax Credit, for example, to supplement the income of the working poor. And they sometimes had (and continue to have) worthy criticisms of this or that program, as in, it will lead to unintended bad consequences. Economics 101, for example, counsels against a minimum wage as a generator of unemployment and would endorse income supports instead. For another example, conservatives are right to be skeptical of heavy-handed regulations that mandate particular means rather than ends that might be more efficiently had otherwise, and they are right to decry the burden of stupid regulations where they really are stupid. The good faith ones are not without a point or two!
But, good faith ideas aside, in practice, the modern GOP generally and consistently, as in pretty much every time, all the time, stood against all of these efforts to soften the harsh edges of the capitalist machine and ensure a decent measure of government attention to the fundamental needs of ordinary people and, in a land of unmatched, unheard-of plenty, the economic fairness owed them. Their stance, generally, has not been, I agree with your aims but want to tweak your means. They've stood, often hysterically, as in with hysteria, against the ends too.
You might think that things have changed, that with the populist Trump, there's been a realignment. But it's the same old story. Just as Reagan sold, as FDR put it, economic royalism under cover of social and cultural fears, so too Trump's main accomplishments were a tax cut for the rich and appointment of conservative judges eager to roll back business regulation, even as he railed about immigrants, promised great health care and infrastructure plans that never came close to happening, and merely fiddled around the edges of trade to no significant effect (not that you'd want him to do more, insofar as trade restrictions, like inflation, make everyone poorer -- see our old friend Smith).
I'm no Marxist, but there's a lot of truth to one of old Karl's key insights -- that the capitalists can be uncannily effective in distracting everyone from what's really going on. He thought just about everything that defines a people in a modern industrial nation -- culture, religion, nationalism -- was a con job to lead ordinary people to accept their lowly status. That surely goes too far. One is tempted to think, oh come on, people aren't so dumb, and yet we have the spectacle of a rich, petty, un-American, amoral asshole who does the bidding of a tiny cadre of wealthy elites -- elite not in the sense of being a college professor or a journalist but in the actual sense of having shitloads of money -- carrying the flag of God and country, and having a large minority buy it, and a large fraction of them not only buy it but go all in and stand ready to die on that hill. Breathtaking.
You might find this hard to believe, but I read every sentence of your reply. I'm not quite that wordy because I don't see myself as that smart and I never believe that others want to read everything I have to say. But I got the gist. My belief has always been that socialism and communism don't work because they pretend to make people equal and we don't really believe that. It's hard to believe someone else is equal when you realize you are a lot smarter and working twice as hard, so why should you two get the same amount of rations. Furthermore, the leaders always seem to live in luxury, so the workers have little interest in working harder just so they can live in poverty while the leaders thrive. Capitalism works when people accept that it's okay for some to be uber rich as long as they have enough to comfortably survive. The problems start when too many don't feel that they are not surviving very well. When it gets bad enough, they rebel. That's what worries me about the present. Money is not one of the four basic necessities of life. They are air, food, water, and shelter. We have people in Chicago fighting over air pollution because certain businesses located in their communities you never see in rich areas. There are people struggling to put roofs over their heads instead of tents and tarps. There are plenty of examples out there. When the situation gets bad enough, people will rebel, figuring they have nothing to lose. I don't have quite the grasp of economic theory as you. But I know a little history and can read people and how they react to things. We have a serious enough uprising from those objecting to culture changes. It will get worse when those at the bottom economically get tired of being there.
Hi, thanks for reading, sorry for being so wordy!
I basically I agree with you here, but my outlook on the present economic situation isn't so glum. If we have a rebellion now, I think it will reflect less the actual economic conditions on the ground -- which are pretty good overall, relative to the past and realistic expectations, notwithstanding the examples you point out -- and more a sort of digital-media-driven temper tantrum. In short, I place less stock in the "legitimate grievance" school of thought on our current moment, and more stock in cultural explanations.
Two small examples of what I mean: The Jan. 6 insurrection Trump incited and set afoot was not a cry for help from the downtrodden. Nor were the rioters just a bunch of skinheads or some such. Lots of white-collar types, lots of middle-aged types, with an unemployment rate similar to that of the country as a whole. In other words, mainstream white, as this article scarily reveals:
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2022/01/03/jan-6-rioters-white-older
Meanwhile, on the other side, where are the angriest lefties coming from? Not from the ranks of the poor or forgotten but rather from, to use their favorite word, privilege. Wokeness is, in my view, a "luxury belief," the ideology of what we used to call limousine liberals, "radical chic" in Tom Wolfe's decades-old withering phrase, people who can afford to entertain notions of abolishing prisons, say, because they are personally well insulated from crime, and one that finds few takers among the "people of color" they claim to represent.
In short, I would have a lot of sympathy with a big outcry from "those at the bottom economically ... tired of being there," especially if it were backed by economic numbers rather than vibes and feels. But I'm skeptical that that's what we're seeing. I think we're seeing the wages of the bullshit IV bag we all carry around now, at once a mark of our improved standard of living and, at the same time, the key cause of our ongoing cultural crackup. Just as that great industrial revolution meant initially rivers of shit and toxic emissions that befouled the earth, the most recent communications revolution appears to be in a similarly vomitous stage. It's far less clear now than then about how to go about cleaning it up.
Oops, I did it again, wordiness-wise. Oh well, cheers.
No need for apology. I found it interesting. I just don't find it totally accurate. The riots on both the left and right were not mostly the privileged. The Capitol takeover was done by a lot of people with cultural grievances. The attack on government was the outcome of something that I predicted several decades ago. That there those who didn't accept and couldn't handle a shift in what was proper. The grievances added up. Whether they saw a decline in our world power, a shift in what was accepted in every day life, such as gay marriage, more poor people deciding that government was there to fund their lives, a change in attitude toward law enforcement, what they perceived as a radical left swing in public education, the push by minorities to be recognized as valuable in society and have their histories heard- I knew eventually the kettle would boil over. Too many people were accustomed to a European centered society and the coming changes scared them. And I disagree with your take on woke. Millions of people have not achieved the higher standards of living you mention. Many of the riots after the police brutality cases were crimes of opportunity rather than actual protest. But protest or not, they stemmed from the same causes, the feeling that a fair share of the population was not entitled to their share of the so-called American dream. The norms of society, which so many of us take for granted, often have little meaning where people feel they have not been treated equally either by the law or the economic system. We can, as white people, disagree with their perception. But it is what it is.
One disagreement, the Yugo wasn't the world's shittiest car, that dubious honor goes either to East Germany's pollution creating Trabant or Romania's Dacia, which essentially the same Fiat designed disaster as the Yugo. In fact, the Wall Street Journal once ran a long article on the Dacia titled: "Dacia, as in Gotcha", on how truly bad it was.
I think that the problems that you are describing are ones of good governance, not economic system. Our economy is nothing like laissez-faire with thousands of government agencies (federal to local) and millions of pages of laws and regulations. We may need new ones to manage the emergence of new business models that have negative effects (as we did with traditional trusts and monopolies). But we also need to correct the effects of poor regulation. For example, the bizarre structure of regulation of the medical industry - hospitals, doctors, pharmacies, pharmaceutical producers, etc has a significant impact on the problems.
Capitalism is the only effective and efficient way to allocate economic resources. Properly regulated capitalism is necessary to protect the public.
I think the issue is improving our parties and politics in order to provide improved governance.
I love my daily paper and I will miss it when it is gone. I believe that all thoughtful citizens understand the value and necessity of good journalism. But the death of newspapers does not equate to the death of journalism. We are living through a period of transition that is surely problematic.
I think the four major issues are the provision of objective news/analysis; the economics of sustaining a sufficient pool of journalist for market segments (local-to-international; business, fashion, etc.); providing clearly segregated opinion/advocacy; and a trustworthy management structure. These things are clearly tightly interrelated.
The current alternatives are either highly fragmented and of widely varying quality or highly concentrated with apparent biases. Search engines provide access to the noisome universe but are but require significant diligence from the individual user to assemble content.
I would pay a subscription fee for a service that provided an editorial standard and definition for the four issues; employed/paid a pool of journalists in each market that met the standard; linked to opinion/advocacy that favored facts and analysis over emotion. This might be accomplished by aggregating across existing TV/radio/paper newsrooms plus independent journalists in e-media.
The management model is to maintain a trustworthy 'tree of knowledge' that allows a user to access objective news and drill down to relevant and trustworthy sources of opinion/analysis/advocacy. Every content provider needs to get paid and all content needs to be protected from theft.
Ground News is the closest I can think of to what you're describing: https://ground.news/about
I hope you realize that the results from voting for "Visual Tweets" are always skewed when you include a cat or dog.
Cat lovers will automatically vote for anything cat, and dog lovers will do the same with dogs.
I flat out hate cats & agree, as I will always vote for dogs.
I do agree that kittens are cute, only they unfortunately then grow up & become cats.
I love raising issues for discussion and debate. Let's try Boeing. There is a big picture here. It's getting really difficult to get young Americans to train for needed professions. Combine this with rich investors buying up big businesses and cutting every corner to cut costs. What's going in in Boeing manufacturing? Are the right people running things and doing the work? I have a friend that just told me yesterday that she refuses to fly, based on the latest news. Yes, I know the government tells us that flying is still the safest way to travel, based on statistics. But there's a big difference. There's a pretty good chance that one would survive a car or bus accident. I know; I was hit from behind by a drunk driver and escaped unscathed. You don't get more than one chance if there's a plane crash.
Boeing's problems started when the merged with McDonnell Douglas & then let the McDonnell Douglas people, who weren't engineers, like the decades of Boeing's leadership was, take over the company, as the McDonnell Douglas leaders, now the Boeing leadership, were crazed bean counters, who cut corners everywhere the could to make more profits for them selves & the shareholders, who they saw as the people to satisfy, not the airlines which bought the planes. That's why the built a factory in South Carolina, had that state pay for educating the barely educated workers there on how to work in a huge factory, which was supposed to make just some parts for the 787, but then converted it to build the entire 787 in competition with Boeing's highly experienced Seattle area workforce, because the South Carolina workers weren't unionized, never went on strike as the Seattle workers often did & got far lower pay.
Then Boeing outsourced as much of the 787 production to cheaper overseas locations, such as a huge factory in Italy, that made the carbon fiber fuselage, which was so poorly run & had so many problems that Boeing was finally forced to buy that entire company & send their experienced people their to fix & then run that mess, so they could get the necessary bare fuselages to build the planes with.
Sometimes, content and/or options disappears if JavaScript is turned off
That said, I see no link to the most recent standard Tweet Poll in this edition, unlike most editions