black321 wrote:
 
Yes, I believe that sort of material is what some Trump's supporters are reading, and it's not necessarily unbelievable.  The assumptions and/or speculations are pretty broad and there is an outright bit of disinformation: "...Trump Jr. appeared to have smelled a rat during the meeting and left".  By his own admission, (which is linked to in that line) Jr. said he stayed until the meeting ended - that he did not leave early.  It's not just a deliberate mis-statement of the facts but a clumsy attempt to make the reader believe that Trump, Jr. is savvy enough to understand political intrigue.  Of course the use of the phrase "deep state" doesn't do anything to help the article's credibility either.

 pigtail wrote: 
Agreed. It could make the Puerto Rico disaster look like a summer shower.

The coverage indicates a significant number of people are staying put. Some because they'll lose their jobs if they don't show up (??) It's ridiculous that an employer would be that heartless, but I'm sure it happens.

Katrina death toll was about 2000. It was a cat 5, but did not produce the flooding of, say, Harvey. So it's a crapshoot: if the wind doesn't rip your house apart, the floodwaters will ruin it. Let's hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

c.

 Red_Dragon wrote: 
I've lived in So cal all my life with the threat of the big one on the horizon at any time.  Never have I felt so compelled to go out and prepare my own earthquake kit than now.  Depending on this guy and his administration to act on anything other than what is in his best interest is foolish.  I'm genuinely concerned for those that will be in Florence's path.

 islander wrote:
 
I really dont have a strong opinion on it since it's so speculative.  It's not a source I'm particularly familiar with ...but clearly has a conservative agenda.   The story is hardly convincing, given the number of assumptions.  Notably, that clinton believed trump could win, and needed to build a case against him...but didnt she see him as a gift, nearly assuring here election victory?  So why go through such a deceptive ordeal?  Not to say any of it is unbelievable...especially the  bit about Comey setting him up.  

The point again is to exhibit the type of material his supporters are reading, and believing.  

 cc_rider wrote:
 
Also, the general sentiment I've seen on this tactic used against young Muslim men is "Doesn't matter, they were going to do it, so they are guilty".  Does the same apply here?

 islander wrote: 
Yeah, this is not a new tactic of our government. Cointelpro, anyone?
c.

 black321 wrote:
 

So, I'm genuinely curious what your take on this is?

Not commenting on this one way or the other, but to say this is the type of reporting Trump supporters  are reading:

https://thefederalist.com/2018/...

His lies are his reality.

Sorry, Donnie, but you don't get to call anyone a "poor public speaker".

I'm posting excerpts and a link to a NYT article that touches on a discussion between kurtster and pigtail. I think both of them have relevant thoughts and experiences on the matter of the working poor in the US. The article touches in part on the life of Vanessa, a working mother of three, and her family's struggle with poverty. 


  Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not.


U.S. unemployment is down and jobs are going unfilled. But for people without much education, the real question is: Do those jobs pay enough to live on?

In recent decades, the nation’s tremendous economic growth has not led to broad social uplift. Economists call it the “productivity-pay gap” — the fact that over the last 40 years, the economy has expanded and corporate profits have risen, but real wages have remained flat for workers without a college education. Since 1973, American productivity has increased by 77 percent, while hourly pay has grown by only 12 percent. If the federal minimum wage tracked productivity, it would be more than $20 an hour, not today’s poverty wage of $7.25.

American workers are being shut out of the profits they are helping to generate. The decline of unions is a big reason. During the 20th century, inequality in America decreased when unionization increased, but economic transformations and political attacks have crippled organized labor, emboldening corporate interests and disempowering the rank and file. This imbalanced economy explains why America’s poverty rate has remained consistent over the past several decades, even as per capita welfare spending has increased. It’s not that safety-net programs don’t help; on the contrary, they lift millions of families above the poverty line each year. But one of the most effective antipoverty solutions is a decent-paying job, and those have become scarce for people like Vanessa. Today, 41.7 million laborers — nearly a third of the American work force — earn less than $12 an hour, and almost none of their employers offer health insurance.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics defines a “working poor” person as someone below the poverty line who spent at least half the year either working or looking for employment. In 2016, there were roughly 7.6 million Americans who fell into this category. Most working poor people are over 35, while fewer than five in 100 are between the ages of 16 and 19. In other words, the working poor are not primarily teenagers bagging groceries or scooping ice cream in paper hats. They are adults — and often parents — wiping down hotel showers and toilets, taking food orders and bussing tables, eviscerating chickens at meat-processing plants, minding children at 24-hour day care centers, picking berries, emptying trash cans, stacking grocery shelves at midnight, driving taxis and Ubers, answering customer-service hotlines, smoothing hot asphalt on freeways, teaching community-college students as adjunct professors and, yes, bagging groceries and scooping ice cream in paper hats.

America prides itself on being the country of economic mobility, a place where your station in life is limited only by your ambition and grit. But changes in the labor market have shrunk the already slim odds of launching yourself from the mailroom to the boardroom. For one, the job market has bifurcated, increasing the distance between good and bad jobs. Working harder and longer will not translate into a promotion if employers pull up the ladders and offer supervisory positions exclusively to people with college degrees. Because large companies now farm out many positions to independent contractors, those who buff the floors at Microsoft or wash the sheets at the Sheraton typically are not employed by Microsoft or Sheraton, thwarting any hope of advancing within the company. Plus, working harder and longer often isn’t even an option for those at the mercy of an unpredictable schedule. Nearly 40 percent of full-time hourly workers know their work schedules just a week or less in advance. And if you give it your all in a job you can land with a high-school diploma (or less), that job might not exist for very long: Half of all new positions are eliminated within the first year. According to the labor sociologist Arne Kalleberg, permanent terminations have become “a basic component of employers’ restructuring strategies.”
...

If the working poor are doing better than the nonworking poor, which is the case, it’s not so much because of their jobs per se, but because their employment status provides them access to desperately needed government help. This has caused growing inequality below the poverty line, with the working poor receiving much more social aid than the abandoned nonworking poor or the precariously employed, who are plunged into destitution.

...

Americans often assume that the poor do not work. According to a 2016 survey conducted by the American Enterprise Institute, nearly two-thirds of respondents did not think most poor people held a steady job; in reality, that year a majority of nondisabled working-age adults were part of the labor force. Slightly over one-third of respondents in the survey believed that most welfare recipients would prefer to stay on welfare rather than earn a living. These sorts of assumptions about the poor are an American phenomenon. 

...
In recent decades, America has witnessed the rise of bad jobs offering low pay, no benefits and little certainty. When it comes to poverty, a willingness to work is not the problem, and work itself is no longer the solution.
...


Advocates of work requirements (for welfare support from the government) scored a landmark victory with welfare reform in the mid-1990s. Proposed by House Republicans, led by Speaker Newt Gingrich, and signed into law by President Bill Clinton, welfare reform affixed work requirements and time limits to cash assistance. Caseloads fell to 4.5 million in 2011 from 12.3 million in 1996. Did “welfare to work” in fact work? Was it a major success in reducing poverty and sowing prosperity? Hardly. As Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein showed in their landmark book, “Making Ends Meet,” single mothers pushed into the low-wage labor market earned more money than they did on welfare, but they also incurred more expenses, like transportation and child care, which nullified modest income gains. Most troubling, without guaranteed cash assistance for the most needy, extreme poverty in America surged. The number of Americans living on only $2 or less per person per day has more than doubled since welfare reform. Roughly three million children — which exceeds the population of Chicago — now suffer under these conditions. Most of those children live with an adult who held a job sometime during the year.

...

In July, the White House Council of Economic Advisers issued a report enthusiastically endorsing work requirements for the nation’s largest welfare programs. The council favored “negative incentives,” tying aid to labor-market effort, and dismissed “positive incentives,” like tax benefits for low-income workers, because the former is cheaper. The council also claimed that America’s welfare policies have brought about a “decline in self-sufficiency.”

Is that true? Researchers set out to study welfare dependency in the 1980s and 1990s, when this issue dominated public debate. They didn’t find much evidence of it. Most people started using cash welfare after a divorce or separation and didn’t stay long on the dole, even if they returned to welfare periodically. One study found that 90 percent of young women on welfare stopped relying on it within two years of starting the program, but most of them returned to welfare sometime down the road. Even at its peak, welfare did not function as a dependency trap for a majority of recipients; rather, it was something people relied on when they were between jobs or after a family crisis. A 1988 review in Science concluded that “the welfare system does not foster reliance on welfare so much as it acts as insurance against temporary misfortune.”

...

Here is the blueprint. First, valorize work as the ticket out of poverty, and debase caregiving as not work. Look at a single mother without a formal job, and say she is not working; spot one working part time and demand she work more. Transform love into laziness. Next, force the poor to log more hours in a labor market that treats them as expendables. Rest assured that you can pay them little and deny them sick time and health insurance because the American taxpayer will step in, subsidizing programs like the earned-income tax credit and food stamps on which your work force will rely. Watch welfare spending increase while the poverty rate stagnates because, well, you are hoarding profits. When that happens, skirt responsibility by blaming the safety net itself. From there, politicians will invent new ways of denying families relief, like slapping unrealistic work requirements on aid for the poor.

...

Because liberals have allowed conservatives to set the terms of the poverty debate, they find themselves arguing about radical solutions that imagine either a fully employed nation (like a jobs guarantee) or a postwork society (like a universal basic income). Neither plan has the faintest hope of being actually implemented nationwide anytime soon, which means neither is any good to Vanessa and millions like her. When so much attention is spent on far-off, utopian solutions, we neglect the importance of the poverty fixes we already have. Safety-net programs that help families confront food insecurity, housing unaffordability and unemployment spells lift tens of millions of people above the poverty line each year. By itself, SNAP annually pulls over eight million people out of poverty. According to a 2015 study, without federal tax benefits and transfers, the number of Americans living in deep poverty (half below the poverty threshold) would jump from 5 percent to almost 19 percent. Effective social-mobility programs should be championed, expanded and stripped of draconian work requirements.

...

We need a new language for talking about poverty. “Nobody who works should be poor,” we say. That’s not good enough. Nobody in America should be poor, period. No single mother struggling to raise children on her own; no formerly incarcerated man who has served his time; no young heroin user struggling with addiction and pain; no retired bus driver whose pension was squandered; nobody. And if we respect hard work, then we should reward it, instead of deploying this value to shame the poor and justify our unconscionable and growing inequality. “I’ve worked hard to get where I am,” you might say. Well, sure. But Vanessa has worked hard to get where she is, too.

Under fire over his handling of Russian election meddling, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday meant to strengthen election security by slapping sanctions on foreign countries or people who try to interfere in the U.S. political process.

The order, coming only eight weeks before congressional elections on Nov. 6, drew immediate criticism from both Republican and Democratic lawmakers as too little, too late.

Trump signed the order behind closed doors with no reporters present, a rare departure from what has been his standard practice.

Do as I say...

No... he's not racist or anything.

GOP plan takes food stamps away from 2 million Americans in need

TRUMP ORDERED ILLEGAL REMOVAL OF BRAILLE BECAUSE ‘NO BLIND PEOPLE ARE GOING TO LIVE IN TRUMP TOWER’

human garbage

20,000 pallets of bottled water left untouched in storm-ravaged Puerto Rico

Reddit is cleaning up that Qanon crap. Amazing that it went on for so long.

 kurtster wrote: 
You rarely do.  It was simply an invitation to see reason for a change.

George W. Bush Raising Money to Maintain Trump Cover-up

Dubya working hard to ensure Congress quashes any investigation of Trump’s many scandals.

http://nymag.com/