#economic debates

[coopsday]

About the UN Trade & Development and its 60th-anniversary events.

Today represents a milestone for UNCTAD, marking our rebranding as UN Trade & Development and the beginning of our 60th anniversary. We want our vision of the global economy to be understood and our voice heard in the global economic debates where decisions that affect developing countries are made.

Find out more

[ivyclawthewolfski]

this man does NOT know what tariffs are!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[the-gro-goroth]

“I wake up sometimes to the horrifying images of heads of state, friends of mine, who died violent deaths because they refused to betray their people. Like Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, I try to scrub the blood from my hands. But the blood is merely a symptom.” HOLY SHIT THIS SPEECH IS GONNA GO SO INCREDIBLY HARD

[perplexed-penguin]

What plan? He only has concepts of a plan.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Craig Harrington at MMFA:

When Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump meet for the September 10 debate, the public will hopefully gain some perspective into both candidates’ plans to deploy the immense powers of the presidency. If the past nine years have been any indicator of what to expect from Trump, the disgraced ex-president will go off on a confusing tangent if pressed for a specific answer on any number of policy issues, and mainstream reporters covering the debate will meticulously parse Trump’s addled statements to divine meaning from the mess. This predictable process played out for all to see last week as mainstream news outlets struggled to cover Trump's September 5 appearance at The Economic Club of New York, which included a dangerously incoherent response to a simple question about child care policy that stunned many observers and attendees.

News outlets “sanewashed” Trump’s incoherent appearance at The Economic Club of New York

In their coverage of Trump’s appearance last week at The Economic Club of New York, the major broadcast evening news programs completely failed to inform viewers about the disgraced ex-president’s dangerously incoherent response to a simple question about child care policy.

There is a name for this type of sanitized coverage — “sanewashing” — and it’s a disservice to the public.

On September 5, Trump appeared at The Economic Club of New York for an event hosted by the group’s board and trustees. Over the course of more than an hour of often-confusing and disorganized remarks, Trump touched on various economic, tax, and trade policy talking points with a particular focus on making tariffs (taxes paid by consumers on imported goods) a centerpiece of his second term agenda. At the end of the event’s question and answer session, Trump was asked to name a “specific piece of legislation” he would champion as president “to make child care more affordable” and he proceeded to ramble for nearly 2 minutes.

[...]

In a September 4 column published in The New Republic, Parker Molloy pointed to sanitized mainstream news coverage just days earlier of a “rambling, insult-ladden, conspiracy-riddled wall of text” Trump had recently posted on his social media site:

[This “sanewashing” of Trump’s statements isn’t just poor journalism; it’s a form of misinformation that poses a threat to democracy. By continually reframing Trump’s incoherent and often dangerous rhetoric as conventional political discourse, major news outlets are failing in their duty to inform the public and are instead providing cover for increasingly erratic behavior from a former—and potentially future—president.]

Donald Trump’s incoherent responses to policies must be a major focus of election coverage, and too many outlets fell for the “sanewashing” (termed by Parker Molloy) of Trump’s incoherentness.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Mike Luckovich

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

September 9, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Sep 10, 2024

Last night, Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign launched a new section of its website detailing her policy positions. Titling her plans “A New Way Forward,” Harris vows to build the American middle class through an “opportunity economy.” Her vision for the future, she says, “protects our fundamental freedoms, strengthens our democracy, and ensures every person has the opportunity to not just get by, but to get ahead.” 

Harris’s economic plan builds on that of the Biden-Harris administration. This makes sense, since their focus on investing in the middle class has created the strongest economy in the world. Harris is emphasizing the need to bring down household costs of food, medicine, housing, healthcare, and childcare, all issues important to Americans.  

The website provides concrete economic actions she plans to take with a willing Congress. They include expanding the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit, investing in more housing, and supporting the PRO Act, which protects the rights of workers to unionize, while continuing the crackdown on business consolidation that kills competition and rolling back the Trump tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.

The biggest economic shift from the current administration is pegging a new capital gains tax for those earning more than a million dollars a year at 28%, significantly lower than the 39.6% President Joe Biden proposed in his 2025 budget. The plans also call for the first-ever national ban on corporate price gouging on food and groceries (37 states already have such laws). 

Aside from strictly economic plans, the policy pages say Harris backs passing the bipartisan immigration bill that Republicans killed on Trump’s orders, protecting reproductive healthcare and restoring Roe v. Wade, and protecting the right to vote and ending partisan gerrymandering through the John Lewis Voting Rights and the Freedom to Vote Acts.

Republicans have charged that Harris has not offered specifics for her policies, but much of what is now clearly laid out is already in the public record. By the standards of American history, it is a strikingly moderate agenda that reflects the belief that the best way for the government to protect opportunity and nurture the economy is to make sure that the system is fair and that ordinary people have access to opportunity.

The “New Way Forward” in Harris’s plan seems to be less a new set of policies than a rejection of the politics of the past several decades. She and her running mate Minnesota governor Tim Walz appear to be attempting to reshape the political landscape to bring Americans of all parties together to stand against Trump’s MAGA Republicans. The campaign has actively reached out to Republicans, several of whom spoke at the Democratic National Convention. On Saturday, Harris said she was “honored” to have the endorsement of former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) and former vice president Dick Cheney, both staunch Republicans. “People are exhausted about the division and the attempt to divide us as Americans,” she said. “We love our country and we have more in common than what separates us.” 

Trump’s website offers slogans rather than policies, so Harris’s website compares her policies to the comparable sections of Project 2025, the playbook for a second Trump term laid out by a number of right-wing institutions led by the Heritage Foundation. Trump and his campaign have tried to distance themselves from Project 2025, but at his rallies, he has offered the policies in it—like firing nonpartisan civil servants and replacing them with loyalists, and abolishing the Department of Education—as his top priorities. 

While Harris focused on policy, as critics have demanded, MAGA Republicans today spread slurs about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, claiming they are eating other people’s pets and local wildlife. Right-wing media figure Benny Johnson, who was one of the six commenters whose paychecks at now-disbanded Tenet Media were paid by Russia, was one of those pushing the false stories. So was X owner Elon Musk. 

The story was debunked almost immediately by the Springfield police, but Republican politicians ran with it. The X account for Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee ran it; so did Texas senator Ted Cruz, who shared an image with two kittens saying: “PLEASE VOTE FOR TRUMP SO IMMIGRANTS DON’T EAT US.” And the Republican vice presidential nominee, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, posted: “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn't be in this country.” (The Haitians in Springfield are in the U.S. legally.)

Perhaps most significantly, Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno, who is challenging Democratic Ohio senator Sherrod Brown, pushed the story. That Senate seat is crucial to the Republican attempt to take control of the Senate, and Moreno has just launched a $25 million ad campaign against Brown, accusing him of giving undocumented immigrants taxpayer-funded benefits. Today’s disinformation was well timed for that ad campaign. 

The Justice Department today announced  charges against two leaders of the white supremacist Terrorgram Collective, an international terrorist group that operates on the platform Telegram. Dallas Humber of California and Matthew Allison of Idaho have been charged with “soliciting hate crimes, soliciting the murder of federal officials, and conspiring to provide material support to terrorists.” They “solicited murders and hate crimes based on the race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, and gender identity of others,” U.S. Attorney Phillip Talbert said. They had a hit list of federal, state, and local officials, as well as corporate leaders, and they encouraged attacks on government infrastructure, including energy facilities. Their plan was to create a race war. 

“Hate crimes fueled by bigotry and white supremacy, and amplified by the weaponization of digital messaging platforms, are on the rise and have no place in our society,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said.

Congress is back in session today and must fund the government before October 1 or face a government shutdown. Although Congress negotiated spending levels for 2024 and 2025 back in June 2023, the House has been unable to pass appropriations bills because MAGA extremists either refuse to accept those levels or insist on inserting culture war poison pills into the bills. 

Now, Trump has demanded that a continuing resolution to fund the government must include a measure requiring proof of citizenship to vote. Since it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in elections for president or members of Congress and there is no evidence it is anything but vanishingly rare, the measure actually seems designed to suppress voting. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) went along and put the measure in the bill. He also designed for the measure to last until next March, making the budget so late a new president could write it, but also blowing through a January 1 deadline set in the June 2023 bill to require automatic cuts to spending.

House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) wrote to his colleagues: “House Democrats have made it clear that we will find bipartisan common ground on any issue with our Republican colleagues wherever possible, while pushing back against MAGA extremism.” Jeffries called the Republican bill “unserious and unacceptable.”

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told House and Senate leaders that the cuts required by law if Congress pushes the budget into March would drastically affect the military. “The repercussions of Congress failing to pass regular appropriations legislation for the first half of [fiscal] 2025 would be devastating to our readiness and ability to execute the National Defense Strategy,” Austin wrote.

Meanwhile, Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) is back to his old trick of blocking a military promotion, this time of Lieutenant General Ronald Clark, one of Austin’s top aides. Tuberville says he placed the hold because he has concerns that Clark did not alert Biden when Austin had surgery. Biden has nominated Clark to become the Commanding General of the U.S. Army Pacific, a position currently held by General Charles A. Flynn, younger brother of Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, Trump’s first National Security Advisor who resigned after news broke that he had hidden conversations with Russian operatives. 

Today, ten retired senior military officials endorsed Harris, saying she “is the best—and only—presidential candidate in this race who is fit to serve as our commander-in-chief…. Frankly stated, Donald Trump is a danger to our national security and our democracy. His own former National Security Advisors, Defense Secretaries, and Chiefs of Staff have said so.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[ahalliance]

fighting for my life for dark-skinned heathcliff in this wuthering heights class

[alwaysbewoke]

x

[brittlebutch]

have i been insane about this throughline on here yet?

[anarchomitsumi]

guys....the filthy siren calls of academia are getting to me.....the prehistory department at this uni is way too nice, professionally and personally. what if i got a Phd in prehistoric archeology here.....

[arostormblessed]

first rule of college is to never have a favorite professor because inevitably there will come a semester where you can’t take a class with them and then you will feel like dying all the time

[rlyehtaxidermist]

I do think that any discussion of "real art" in the whole AI debate is like. actively harmful to legitimate criticisms of the technology and sociopolitical environment around it.

that last post really didn't need to bring up Marcel Duchamp. the point that most of it was making - "the problem isn't that it's not being creative or whatever, it's that it's yet another means of moving control from labour to capital" - is outright contradicted by taking a moment to step aside and talk about how ACTUALLY it's important to Be Creative and Make Decisions. i agree with most of your post (which is often why i reblog things) but buddy

[suuho]

every day i open twitter and read the dumbest take of a 4th gen stan imaginable. or a 3rd gen stan, for that matter.

[themangledmess]

challenging all policy debaters to not fearmonger war and extinction next year ( IMPOSSIBLE!! 99% FAIL!! )

[crimeronan]

life hack: if a random guy on youtube gets pissed at you in the comments section because you talked factually about a topic with which you're familiar, just reply that you're sorry but you don't debate with hysterical handwringers who are too emotional to accept cold hard facts. this will solve nothing but neither would an actual debate. and this will FEEL a-maz-ing.