Embracing the Ultra-Nationalist Paleocon wing of the Republican Party and stuffing your administration with goldbugs and Silicon Valley anarcho-capitalists?
Why does an American President consuming American Propaganda and regurgitating a uniquely American public policy at the behest of his wealthiest American peers and hooting white-nationalist proles waving American flags get flagged as Russian?
Obama was pretty decent no?
How Obama Destroyed Black Wealth
Neil Barofsky, the bailout inspector general, later testified that protecting the banks was the actual goal. The administration’s aim was to “foam the runway” for the banks, as Barofsky witnessed Tim Geithner tell Elizabeth Warren. HAMP failed, in other words, because it was not designed to help homeowners.
As a result, in many cases HAMP actively enabled foreclosure. Its re-default rate — the fraction of people who got a modification and later defaulted out of the program — was 22 percent as of 2013. Only about $15 billion of the original $75 billion appropriation was spent by mid-2016.
Out of an initial promised 4 million mortgage modifications — itself a drastic underestimate — by the end of 2016 only 2.7 million had even been started. Out of that number, only 1.7 million made it to permanent modification, and of those, 558,000 eventually washed out of the program.
…
Former Wells Fargo employees later testified that the bank deliberately tricked middle-class black families (who they called “mud people”) into subprime “ghetto loans.” Overall, a Center for Responsible Lending study found that from 2004 to 2008, 6.2 percent of white borrowers with a credit score of 660 and up got subprime mortgages, while 19.3 percent of such Latino borrowers and 21.4 percent of black borrowers did.
The effects of the foreclosure disaster are starkly apparent in Survey of Consumer Finances data. To start, the homeownership national rate shows a marked decline over almost the whole Obama presidency, reaching the lowest rate since 1965 (before slightly rebounding).
I really want to say Bush’s useless Trillion dollar wars are worse than this.
I would say Bush’s bailout of the O&G sector in '01 and the Financial Sector in '08 laid the seeds for worse social and ecological conditions over the subsequent two decades. Similarly, NAFTA and the subsequent midwestern de-industrialization was nightmarish for US industry and Mexican agriculture.
These blunders set us up to need international trade. What’s crazy about Trump’s tariffs is that he’s not addressing the underlying infrastructure problems or the crushing post-Great Recession debt traps. He’s just squeezing at the point of the supply chain in order to punish American industry and labor for adapting to the sabotaged economic landscape of the neoliberal era.
It is the economic equivalent of kicking a guy in the kidneys after he’s already been laid out on the ground.
The US has been sanctioning Russia for the better part of the last decade. We aren’t tariffing them because we aren’t trading with them.
We also aren’t tariffing Venezuela, Cuba, or North Korea, for the same reasons.
Neoliberals were. But the backlash to even guys as hard-right as Vivek suggests tolerance for the any amount of diversity is plunging.
any other foreign Student ist going to avoid American Universities now
I think you’ll find plenty of Euro-White Nationalists - particularly Orban-stans, Le Penn fans, Reform UK types, and AfDers - welcomed in with open arms.
Also, lots of Israelis.
Not too Long until they are going to target the education to cater to this exclusive group, removing all diverse topics and critical Thinking teaching subjects.
Liberty University For All
it will seriously hurt universities by making them lose tuition and talent.
You’re presuming universities exist to cultivate talent and procure tuition. But what if their primary purpose is to cultivate propaganda, gatekeep social clubs, grant bragging rights to fail kids, and provide sinecures to elite alumni and their friends.
By extension it’ll hurt university towns by making them lose business and labor.
New Haven, CT has one of the highest poverty rates in New England, despite being next door to Yale, home of an elite business school.
Few alumni seem to mind.
Making US universities “Whites Only” again is a feature of this policy, not a bug.
Ketamine is the new Meth
Unfortunately, the people pushing AI are the same ones selling recreational flamethrowers
It’s great for getting off the ground in a language you’re unfamiliar with. But a recipe for technical debt when used long term. You’re inviting spaghetti code with some real hair pulling bugs.
So me invading your home with a weapon and threatening to kill your family, you would just let it happen?
Obviously not. I’d hand my young son, with no combat experience, a rifle and send him out to meet you. And when you shot him, I’d send my next son, who is even younger and easier to kill. And then I’d send my infant daughter, with a grenade tapped to her chest. And then I’d send my neighbors and my neighbors’ kids and their neighbors and their kids, until everyone on the block was dead.
And if one of them finally got you, I would consider all that bloodshed worth it. Because now we’ve secured the most important thing in the entire world - private property.
And if none of them got you, and you were still camped out on my lawn, I’d blame the Woke Leftists, the Transgenders, and the Jews for my defeat, because they caved to Russian propaganda when one more salvo would have done it.
You have been treading on the side of falsehoods
If you’ve been through basic or seen people who have, you’d recognize how difficult it is to fail out and how easy it is to simply be abused into a sufficient state of compliance.
Given the degree of physical, psychological, and - not uncommonly - sexual abuse you experience along the way, I wouldn’t recommend the experience.
A large military force massing on the border of a quasi-neutral country, with the stated intent of restoring order and securing its territory against invasion, has a certain 2022 ring to it.
Have you not heard about the Maidan Revolution and subsequent civil war? The sharp divide between East and West, resulting in militia violence and hundreds of thousands of displaced residents? The billions in property destruction resulting from eleven years of armed conflict? The wholesale privatization of the remaining Ukrainian economy? Collapses in education, health care, transport, and energy within the country? Mass conscription and casualties resulting in depopulation of working-aged Ukrainians?
Or do you believe “Civil Wars are bad for your country” is a Evil Foreigner talking point?
Ukraine is fighting an existential defensive war
It’s bleeding out over a proxy war certainly. But it’s existence was foreclosed during Maidan. The civil war was the end of Ukraine. This is just dogs fighting over the corpse
You only fall out of basic if you’re an invalid. The military is very good at beating compliance into anyone else.
Go back to WW1 and you’ll have a hard time pointing to good guys. Even WW2 was heavily sketch. The US was halfway in bed with the Nazis under Hoover and only at odds with Japan because it was encroaching on the British opium trade through Hong Kong and Shanghai.
These wars were, at their hearts, the end consequences of a century of industrial imperialism. The good guys were in Latin America and North Africa and the South Pacific, fighting for their independence and sovereignty.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1306859/us-imports-by-commodity-from-russia/
It does look like we import about $3B/year. Mostly fertilizers, which make up 1/3 of total imports, and some raw metals and a bit of heavy machinery. But that’s minuscule beside our trade balances with the top of his tariff list - China, the EU, Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan, and India. We do $20B/year with tiny little South Korea, as a point of comparison. We bring in $6B/year from South Africa.
To my knowledge, we don’t import Russian vodka in any significant quantity. Anything “Russian” branded is typically imported from one of the neighboring states - Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Romania. Red Army Vodka, for instance, is from a Polish company.