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[alway]

At some point in the future business-owners may decide that the workforce is inadequate and that it is once again in their interest to politically support higher education (mostly funded by taxdollars that they didn't pay), and that policy position is politically easy to implement since it aligns with a constant pressure from the public who desire access to education as a real or imaginary means of personally higher wages.

As a reminder, the solution tech companies came up with for solving rising labor costs was to collude in a multibillion dollar wage fixing scheme.

[redwallzyl]

I say again: Post-Carter, there ceased to be any form of genuine economic debate in this country. The Republicans took Reaganomics and evolved it into an all consuming-monster, the Democrats panicked and stood on the original form of Reaganomics, and there we've stayed ever since. Mostly with the Republicans getting more and more neurotic every year under the stress of having nowhere to go but the an-cap hellscape or communism to escape being comparable to the Democrats.

The Democrats need to shrug off the legacy of triangulation and reignite the existence of an economic left in America. There are plenty of people who would be interested in that, but most of them can't even articulate it because they have no public reference points. Right now, the economic left in the US consists of people copying existing socialist movements or trying to construct an economic theory for themselves piecemeal, which almost nobody will go to the trouble of doing. There are nascent social democratic and libertarian socialist streaks among younger people which might be viable for development into a genuine movement, but as long as Washington Consensus rules, we go nowhere fast and the pressure of financial malaise will keep growing until it crushes the whole world.

yup, as long as neoliberalism is dominant were just spinning around the core of the problem never shifting the power structure. as long as the hegemony persists noting will ever change. I do really recommend reading that link and the related ones in the see also section.

also here's the NYT summery: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/27/us/politics/six-charts-to-explain-the-republican-tax-plan.html

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Tom Price, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, has "resigned". We're now up to minor cabinet members getting the boot.

[Frumple]

Eyup. Long time critic of wasteful federal spending, fiscal conservative, and now former HHS head Tom Price resigns as people are yelling at him for making private plane trips (rather than much cheaper commercial ones) that've apparently cost the tax payer somewhere approaching or exceeding a million USD.

Good new slogan for GOP, I think: Be the problem in government you want there to be.

[misko27]

As scandals go, that sure was a slow-burner, but hey, I guess it caught up to him in the end.

For their Price headline, www.politico.com right now has the single biggest text I've ever seen them use; it looks like a parody of those ww2 headlines. I can't tell if it's a mistake or they're just really proud of their involvement in taking down a cabinet official.

[MrRoboto75]

hmmmm

[smjjames]

Meanwhile, Trump seems to have forgotten his own aphorism of "Lets not celebrate too soon"... because they have gone and done that with Puerto Rico and the situation there is already turning into a Katrina event for him.

[Sergius]

Turns out Puerto Rico is an island, surrounded by big water. Nobody knew oceans were so complicated...

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I'm just waiting for 45 to refuse to send "foreign aid" to Puerto Rico.

[smjjames]

There's also the fact that the, well, territory, if you will, is bankrupt and in debt and their power utilities are also in poor shape among other stuff. So, they were already in a bad shape financially and infrastructure wise, and the hurricane threw a thousand daggers through all of that.

[Frumple]

No need for a "if you will" there, PR's literally a territory. Unincorporated US territory, more specifically, apparently.

And yeah, it wasn't in the best of shape before, now it's in substantially worse, and the chances of the main political body of the US doing effectively fuck all about it is somewhere in the realm of trump declaring the immediate institution of single payer healthcare and amnesty for all undocumented immigrants while liquidating all his business holdings and donating his everything material to charity. We were already kinda' sodomizing the sad bastard of a territory and nature just had its own particularly emphatic go at it. I'd bet the money I don't have there's a number of politicians and gov't admin that are just sorta' writing the place off, even more than they were previously.

True to my geographical location, I haven't really been paying much attention to it, but some of what I have noticed suggests that permanent movement from the island to the US mainland (or friggin' wherever, for that matter) is already starting to pick up even more than it had been before. Jokes about the PR nature reserve might not be so much of a joke in another few decades

... 'course, there's solid odds there's a similar future for most of those islands, not just PR and those other two or three* that last I noticed were begging for other US citizens to not forget they exist since they got worked over pretty hard themselves, but eh.

* Demonstrably enough, I've forgotten what they're called, how many of them there actually are, etc., etc. Probably feel like shit about it if I didn't already feel too much like shit to feel like shit about it.

[smjjames]

It felt like they were more in the wierd limbo between territory and a state.

Anyways, Trump keeps dissing PR and the mayor of San Juan. Not surprised, but I don't get the point of it, there's no political advantage to doing so or anything base wise (the mayor is white and the only thing hispanic about her is her last name), only benefit would be defending his ego.

[sluissa]

It felt like they were more in the wierd limbo between territory and a state.

Anyways, Trump keeps dissing PR and the mayor of San Juan. Not surprised, but I don't get the point of it, there's no political advantage to doing so or anything base wise (the mayor is white and the only thing hispanic about her is her last name), only benefit would be defending his ego.

The governor has been pretty pro-trump through all of this and downplaying the full extent of the damage and giving excuses for why it's not getting fixed (which aren't Trump's fault). If the mayor is telling a different story that may not be as nice to Trump, I can see why he'd be targeting her.

[smjjames]

I know Trump doesn't have a huge lot of control over the recovery and aid effort, but optics are still optics. He is flying down on Tuesday though, which is just the earliest he was able to go there.

[sluissa]

I don't even really care that he's flying down there himself unless he's secretly got a CDL license and is going to be driving shipments of supplies around the island.

Apparently he's prevented congress members from going down there to see for themselves.(Although at some point at least Rubio managed a visit) He's delayed waiving laws that would make it easier for shipments to be brought there. It was only thursday, I think, that a general was put in charge of the military arm of the relief effort.

He may not have a lot of direct control, but at the same time there are a few things he's failed to do or prevented from happening that just flat out made things harder.

I don't like to attack trump for every little thing, but this is a situation that he completely flopped on. And it's not that he made wrong, or bad decisions, but more that he simply didn't do much at all. It all seems to be reactionary to the press coverage. Now granted, he has to have the info to actually do things, but whose fault is it that the white house is staffed (where it is actually staffed, pretty sure important positions still remain unfilled) with incompetents?

In my eyes it seems to be a situation of "Oh, if we just ignore it the problem will go away." And in some ways that might work. People have been talking about the NFL, the wasteful spending and the tax plan significantly more than Puerto Rico. However Puerto Rico still hasn't gone away.

And at the same time, it can't be blamed entirely on Trump either. There are failures at multiple levels here including with the local governments in Puerto Rico. But Trump is not blameless just because others share the blame.