No shit.

BUT.

AT.

WHAT.

COST!

ignoring the states run by dems having higher min wages

Which states have a living wage?

You’re also blind if you just say “America bad” at every opportunity.

It’s shooting fish in a barrel. You don’t need to aim to carefully when you’ve got a target rich environment.

No, many of the things he’s doing are absolutely not in the interest of the billionaire class

Its not in the best long term interests of the country. But then neither is having a billionaire class to begin with. Trump’s looting various cash-rich institutions and easily extorted organizations and individuals for the benefit of his cronies. That’s necessarily bad for the targets of exploitation and good for his in-group, however you might project their futures over the long term.

And yes, he’s serving some of them, particularly Peter Thiel. But he’s mostly serving Putin and himself.

Nobody in Russia, least of all Vladimir Putin, is well-served by the US continuing to arm and instigate conflicts between Russia and Ukraine. And yet that’s exactly what our foreign services continue to do. You can trace this right back to 2018, when Trump shoveled out a bunch of anti-aircraft missile systems and anti-tank weapons to Ukrainian Nationalists.

Trump’s firmly in the pocket of the Military Industrial Complex. And that occasionally breaks for or against Russia, depending on who is buying. But it is always and forever a policy that favors more international conflicts and more arms sales because US exports of weapons is a GOP moneymaker.

And even Hillary isn’t the devil incarnate you think she is.

Hillary and Trump were friends. They’ve been political allies and social circle buddies since the 1990s. She egged him on to run in 2016 because she thought he’d be her cat’s paw.

If you hate Trump, you should despise Hillary.

I assumed the Ghost of Christmas Imperative would just be shouting “CELEBRATE CHRISTMAS!” over and over again, while blowing an air horn that plays carols.

I don’t think the problem with Johnson is untouchable. I just think he’s in the role because there’s nobody better to replace him with.

Also, I just don’t think “Trump dying in office” is a serious part of anyone’s math.

THAT WAS ONE OF HER POLICIES

Democrats run on $15/hr, win in a landslide (2020), and throw up their hands because they don’t have Joe Manchin’s permission to raise wages in the US Senate.

Republicans run on ending abortions and now abortions are fully illegal in a slew of states, with a national ban on the horizon.

Because his brand of “politics” is dumb, destabilizing shit that’s bad for America and Americans.

We’ve had dumb, destabilizing policies in this country since its founding. That’s got nothing to do with the politics of the civil services. Plenty of civil servants are full-on MAGA adherents (and have been even before his first election in '16). Plenty more are die-hard Hillarycrat Libs who have dragged the country in another direction. Trump’s game is to stack his MAGA cronies above the Hillarycrats withint compromising the function of the civil service entirely, rendering it useless.

Trump only serves himself, Putin, and indirectly, Xi.

Jesus fuck dude. Have you really been watching US politics for this long and still not seen Trump acting in the explicit interests of the American billionaire class? Why do you think the Chinese President is closer to his heart than the people he pulled into his own cabinet - Lutnick, McMahon, Vought, and Loeffler? Nevermind Peter Thiel, a man who has become the nation’s premiere military contractor over the last year.

Nevermind fucking Israel.

How are you liberals this fucking blind? Trump’s CIA is systematically picking apart what’s left of Russian industry. His Pentagon is fixated on purging Chinese businesses from the Western Hemisphere. His Treasury has made cryptocurrency speculation a central tenant of fiscal policy. But y’all can’t stop saying “Foreign Men Did This” every time you look at your own decayed socio-economic system.

Also, did you just link me Trump admin propaganda

Go Lib Out to the WaPo if that’s your poison of choice.

Or reference Congress.gov for an official definition.

Or just bury your head in the sand for another four years.

Trump complained that a secret inner cabal of career bureaucrats would oppose him. And he wasn’t wrong. The various federal agencies are a seven layer dip of careerist holdovers from prior administrations, many of who were hostile to his brand of politics for one reason or another.

Trump’s framing of the existence and internal opposition by career bureaucrats was that of some insidious anti-American cabal. But the fundamental problem is one every new President faces. Namely, the Burrowing In of political appointees to civil service career roles.

This isn’t a new problem, either. Thomas Jefferson was complaining about the problem hires left behind under the Adams administration. Burrowed-in Democrats plagued Lincoln for much of his tenure and were behind many of the smears aimed at Kennedy after the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion (an Eisenhower-era plot that cost Allen Dulles his job when it humiliated JFK).

How presidents deal with recalcitrant career staffers and opposition party moles can define their administrations. This isn’t a problem Trump just made up. It’s one he doesn’t know how to deal with gracefully.

So to ignore class and imperialism in your advocacy for trans rights means to effectively throw the majority of trans people under the bus.

I mean… this is literally what the liberals have said they want to do, re: 2024

Democrats Lost Voters on Transgender Rights. Winning Them Back Won’t Be Easy.

The number of policies liberals seem willing to support shrinks with every election cycle as reactionaries in national media flog them for speaking out. Police Brutality in 2014. Health care in 2016. Climate Change in 2018. Student Debt in 2020. Opposition to Genocide in 2022. It seems 2024 was the year we had to stop caring about LGBTQ.

I wonder what we’ll be asked to give up next in our quest to win that “Moderate” voter.

Donald TrumpMike Johnson’s days are number!

I gotta once again ask every pundit who is convinced the Speaker is on his way out… who did the GOP plan to replace him with? Like, the entire appeal of Johnson is that he’s a mediocre compromise who offends nobody in the Republican House Caucus. He never had much power to begin with, which is why the House legislative output in 2025 has been relatively lackluster.

At the same time, getting votes on bills in the House that are unlikely to survive the floor and will inevitably fail (or simply be ignored) in the Senate isn’t a problem for Johnson. The biggest benefit of being Speaker - for Johnson anyway - is the pay and benefits, as he is one of the poorest House Speakers in history.

Forbes estimates that Mike Johnson’s net worth is in the ballpark of $350,000, making him the least wealthy speaker of the century (along with being the least experienced). For comparison, Johnson’s predecessor Kevin McCarthy owned an investment portfolio in the six figures and former speaker Paul Ryan had assets in the millions. On the left, Nancy Pelosi’s net worth has been pegged at nearly $250 million, eclipsing them all.

Johnson’s congressional salary is $174,000.

Johnson got a roughly $50,000 raise to be Speaker of the House, earning $223,000 per year.

I’m sure I’m not the first person to remark upon Johnson being one of the dumbest men to hold the job. Even former gym coach and child sex predator Denny Hastert figured out how to make a few million under the table during his tenure.

I just don’t see any strong reason for as useful an idiot as Johnson to leave his post, unless someone who can make better use of the position can step up. In a legislature that’s increasingly irrelevant to the running of the federal government, there’s very little appetite for a Strong Speaker and very little profit in failing to negotiate changes to legislation on your party’s behalf.

Secondly, I hear most swing voters consider themselves moderates

There’s a joke about the average suburban Wine Mom voting for Pete Buttigieg every two years, while having political opinions consistent with Mao’s Little Red Book. “Moderate” is such a moving target, precisely because its hedged in by who is actually running. I’m sure if you sample the NYC voting pool, you’ll find people who voted for Rudy Giuliani in the '90s, Michael Bloomberg in the '00s/'10s, and Zohran Mamdani in '25, without much cognitive struggle. Hell, there’s no shortage of Obama/Trump swing voters.

In thusly they’re essentially just a brand of conservatism. Sounds a lot like the typical liberal.

Most people don’t care about politics until it affects them. And the art of political discourse is largely trying to get your audience to sympathize with your position by convincing them they are going to benefit from your policies / suffer from your opponents’.

So much of the modern capitalist system is predicated on people believing that they benefit from playing along and contributing their labor/intellect for a share of the spoils. And so much of the socialist system is predicated on people believing their neighbors have their backs in a real material way, so they should reciprocate in kind.

Move a liberal from a system that rewards subservience to a system that rewards solidarity and they’re happy enough to change.

BoTh SiDeS and so on.

One might argue the sides are Labor and Capital, but we only have representatives from the Capital Party to choose from every year

the America you lot voted for

Every two years we vote. Every two years things get worse.

Clearly, the problem is with the people doing the voting. Couldn’t possibly be something fundamentally dysfunctional in our democratic model.

I was gonna say, only now?

We love to play the “Obama/Biden were the good ones, they knew how to bomb people and sanction countries ethically” game.

For all Trump’s poison, he was dead to rights on the idea of the Deep State - the core bureaucracy of the US government that demands global hegemony and just can’t decide how to achieve it.

Trump’s been miserable at executing hegemony the liberal way. And we’re expected to believe this will make his administration a failure.

But then you look at fascist Middle Eastern states expanding their territory, South American dictatorships sprouting like weeds, and far-right parties gaining ground all over Europe. Hard to ignore that Palantir is doing just fine. White Nationalists are having a heyday from Texas to Tel Aviv.

Clearly, US hegemony is expanding, just not in the way the Clinton/Cheney neocons imagined it.

Corporate Media can’t seem to decided whether we’re undergoing a fascist takeover or finally Making America Great Again.

I dread to read what the history books say about our country in another ten years, knowing what kind of fucked up AI is writing them today.

Chile swings between extreme reactionary and soggy liberal, much like most countries trapped within the US sphere of influence.

Boric’s been caught in the same South American dragnet of economic pressure as every other non-US aligned country on the continent. And the heavily privatized economy - vulnerable to market manipulations and outsider financed media influence - is ripe for these kinds of faux-populist shifts, precisely because Boric couldn’t make actual socialization of the economy a part of his platform.

Now we’ve got another Milei running a South American economy. And the US knocking hard on the door of Venezuela, ready to install Maria Corina Machado if they can oust Maduro before Trump/Hegseth get distracted by another spot on the map. Get ready for predictable results.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_diplomacy

Curiously, the three other global leaders in Medical Diplomacy are Cuba, China, and Taiwan. One of the biggest critiques of Trump’s cuts to USAID has been “you’re opening up inroads for evil foreign influence peddling campaigns”.

And there’s been a certain confirmation of this, from the African side of the conversation.

Every time China visits we get a hospital, every time Britain visits we get a lecture.

~ Dr Lubinda Haabazoka, Director of the University of Zambia Graduate School of Business and former President of the Economics Association of Zambia

In South Sudan, specifically, Chinese diplomats have been aggressively peddling direct aid and coordinating international aid.

Meanwhile, the American administrations have persisted in its campaign of economic sanction as a tool to pressure players in the region

First 9 years of school is absolutely mandatory where I come from

Attendance is mandatory. Failure is always an option.

Then after 12 years of school you still need a degree for most job listings.

You can find jobs (even good paying jobs) that don’t require a degree, but they tend to be labor intensive, health hazardous, and with awful working hours. There’s a job I’m always seeing open in Houston for non-college recruits that involves hosing out shipping containers at the port. The job starts around 6pm and you’re in a giant rubber hasmat suit dealing with tanker ships full of toxic chemicals. The bosses want you to work 12 hour shifts, you’re in close with heavy machinery on a dock, and you’re surrounded by carcinogens that you have to meticulously shield and clean yourself of and hope your PPE is keeping you safe on the clock.

$80k+/year. The bigger companies looking for people with experience will pay north of $150k.

You can also work out on a rig for $150k+. You can drive trucks overseas (Americans working in Iraq could earn $200k+/year back during the occupation). If you do have military experience, there’s a ton of money working as a “consultant” in Private Defense. No college necessary. But… you know… there’s trade offs.

The glut of US tech workers is due to the excessive number of H1B visas being issued.

That’s been part of it. But even with the H1B and the outsourcing, there’s a ton of technology to be administered, maintained, and repaired. We’re a technology economy. The glut of US tech workers is due to induced demand.

Why hire an expensive American new graduate when you can hire someone from India with 3-5 years of experience at 60% market rate instead?

Because you need to be able to communicate your needs fluently and India is in the wrong time zone. You can outsource some of your work some of the time, but follow this logic to its conclusion and you begin to ask why you’re even in business in the states. Why not just invest money in India’s private sector if you’re so convinced their workers can do a better job at a lower price? Why have an American business at all?

Replace me with an AI and I will laugh my way straight over to the brokerage where I short your stock.

Chevron replaced their whole IT department with Indian outsourcing companies a year ago and they’re already falling apart from the inside out.