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State Terror, American Style

paulkrugman.substack.com

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Re: State Terror, American Style

#91

Post by npteljes »

iseletsk wrote: post #47

I visited Portland a month ago. There are security guards at each pharmacy and supermarket. I got screamed at by a violent/homeless person because I walked on her block. Some streets - and we are talking downtown/center - I was just afraid or disgusted to walk on. So, yes, Portland is a dump that needs to get cleaned up.

The problematic part is usually the solution, not the assessment part of these regimes, politicians, ideologies. Are there issues in Portland? Certainly. Will Trump's actions lessen them actually? Highly doubtful.

Doubly doubtful for the following reason: these people need the problems to exist, so that they can write their narrative around them, and offer their "solutions" for them. Same as how cults target vulnerable people.

Re: State Terror, American Style

#92

Post by JeremyNT »

glenstein wrote: post #17
evelant wrote: post #2

It certainly doesn’t feel good to have turned out being correct after warning that this is where we were headed way back in the dubyah years. This has always been the plan, it hasn’t been hidden, corporate media has just succeeded in sanewashing it for decades. Abdication of journalistic responsibility in the name of profits has allowed construction of alternate realities for so many people that these atrocities are…

The only part I would disagree with here is that there was a plan dating back to the George W. Bush Admin. I think "the plan" in earnest came into being between 2020 and 2024, and I don't think anyone from the Bush years would find a home in the party let alone the current administration. It's not that they had no plans necessarily, they just weren't the ones in charge anymore. I do think the Bush years were the firs…

Yeah viewing it as a single plan is wrong.

I think the more complete view is that the current generation of fascists learned from the Bush admin's mistakes (or, I suppose you could say, they feel unshackled by Bush era "restraint").

Combined with a cult of personality frontman to distract, aided by a captured media ecosystem and a radicalized judiciary, they are empowered to build on the shoulders of giants.

It was not self evident in the 00's that we would end up with Miller/Vought running the show - the actual form could have been something completely different. Indeed, Rove himself recently popped back up to chastise them!

Re: State Terror, American Style

#93

Post by JuniperMesos »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #10

Are they limiting their raids to be within 'blue' states / districts to minimise the collateral damage their reputation may receive from those sympathetic to this cause? Chicago was 77% Democrat in the last election. These behaviours won't stop if there's no blowback from the MAGA base.

Blue states and heavily-Democratic urban areas are also likely to have explicit local laws preventing local police authorities from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement, since whether it is good or bad to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement is a central point of disagreement in partisan American politics right now. For the same partisan reasons involving political support for illegal immigrants, there are probably more illegal immigrants physically residing in heavily-Democratic urban areas and in blue states. So if you're federal immigration enforcement and you want to mass-arrest illegal immigrants, blue states and districts are where you're gonna be inclined to conduct raids anyway.

In any case, visibly arresting illegal immigrants is a core political demand of the MAGA base, and they eagerly want to see more raids like this one. The fact that prominent figures from Democratic-party aligned institutions like prestige news media and academia (which certainly describes Paul Krugman) strenuously object to these raids and think they are deplorable is not a critique any member of the MAGA base will take seriously. There's not gonna be blowback from the MAGA base over the government doing precisely the thing that the base wants and that their political enemies hate.

Re: State Terror, American Style

#94

Post by nozzlegear »

iseletsk wrote: post #47

I visited Portland a month ago. There are security guards at each pharmacy and supermarket. I got screamed at by a violent/homeless person because I walked on her block. Some streets - and we are talking downtown/center - I was just afraid or disgusted to walk on. So, yes, Portland is a dump that needs to get cleaned up.

I visited Fargo a couple years ago where a drunk homeless guy got way too close to my wife and dogs while asking us for money. He made my wife feel unsafe and my dogs nearly bit him, so it's clear we should deploy the national guard to Fargo.

/s

Re: State Terror, American Style

#95

Post by JuniperMesos »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #78
CGMthrowaway wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friend lives in a rich neighborhood in inner Chicago and they all chip in to pay extra for private security patrols through the neighborhood because they don't have enough cops. On top of one of the highest property tax in the country (2.1%) and sales tax (10.75%), etc etc.

Yes, but they pay for it and know exactly where it's going. Not so much for raising local taxes. We've seen how common it is for rich people to spend more on private matters, even though paying via a tax would be cheaper for them.

Someone in who can afford to live in a wealthy neighborhood in Chicago and who is concerned about being a victim of violent street crime in their neighborhood might reasonably prefer to pay a neighborhood association for additional private security, rather than engage in a city-wide political process and agitate for raising their taxes and using the proceeds to pay for additional police. Paying for neighborhood-level private security solves an immediate local problem, and in a place like Chicago there are a lot of political forces who do not want to see additional policing done and would want to use additional local taxes raised to pay for things unrelated to or perhaps even counterproductive to the goal of decreasing local crime by increasing policing.

Re: State Terror, American Style

#96

Post by johnnyanmac »

lapcat wrote: post #72
johnnyanmac wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Democrats cannot escape the corrupting influence of money. They could. These are not people struggling to pay rent, they do not live paycheck to paycheck. Heck, the median age of congress is 58 so a good portion of them are free to retire and never work another day in their lives. But they in general choose not to escape it. The money, the networks, the power. I guess the sad thing is that the populace aren't aware…

By "Democrats" I meant the Democratic Party. Democratic politicans are not a fixed group of people: anyone can run for office. The issue is not so much that money is corrupting otherwise good people. Rather, the issue is that political campaigns are self-financed, and wealthy donors put their money behind candidates who they know to be friendly to their interests. The wealthy do not fund candidates who are unfriendly…

>The fundamental problem is that primary campaigns require money, just like general election campaigns

That's part of the thing that irks me. In the age of the internet, I just don't get how and why money needs to correlate with outreach. As the most extreme examole: is 1 billion in funding really getting your name out there more than 2 billion? And is 1 billion really doing a better Job than 50m that's hyper focused on engaging the right audiences smartly? That's a big part of how you "disrupt an industry" here in tech. Get modest funds and focus efforts on what the core. Not all the bells and whistles.

Maybe among older audiences who rely on traditional media, but the internet doesn't scale that well with throwing money to compete (we can look at Google+, Mixer, and many gaming storefronts as examples). I feel there's gonna be a shift in this thinking as legacy media dies out and there's too many internet newscasters to pay off and weave a narrative.

Re: State Terror, American Style

#97

Post by thrance »

throwaway173738 wrote: post #34
piva00 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might take a couple more generations, a lot more misery, and maybe even a complete breakdown of democracy in the USA, for its population to finally learn that Democrats or Republicans are bound to the same higher power in the USA: money. Money is what decides everything, the speeding up of its accumulation brought by neoliberal economic policies under Reagan and onwards just made it abundantly clear that either pa…

How convenient that you have an argument for lumping together both a party that wants to continue the liberal democracy and a party that wants to cling to power at the expense of creating an actual authoritarian state complete with a secret police.

In short: republicans are the effectuators, democrats are the enablers. The democrats have been deferring to moneyed interests too over the last decades, just in a less agressive way. They spend a great deal of energy pushing actual leftists out of the party or keeping them ineffectual. And most importantly: they don't push back against the GOP's terrible policies and destruction of our democracy at all.

Re: State Terror, American Style

#98

Post by atmavatar »

myvoiceismypass wrote: post #88
atmavatar wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are a frog in a pot of water placed upon a stove. Every time the Republican party gains power, they turn up the burner. When the Democratic party gains power, they don't turn the burner up any further, but the most we can give them credit for is they may occasionally toss an ice cube in the water. They do not turn the burner down. They do not remove the pot from the stove. They do not take the frog out of the wate…

> how often do you really see them repealing bad laws passed by Republicans - especially the disastrous tax cuts and sabotage of government agencies? how often do you see a D majority in the House AND the Senate with a D president?

We saw (an admittedly razor-thin) majority in the first half of Biden's term and a much more solid majority in the first half of Obama's first term. Clinton also had a solid majority in the first half of his first term, and Carter had a solid majority throughout his entire term.

It may feel skewed in favor of Republican majorities across the executive and legislative branches due to GWB having it for 6 years, but the fact is, every president in the last 30 years has had a majority in both branches at the start of their first terms.

Re: State Terror, American Style

#99

Post by [deleted] »

iseletsk wrote: post #47

I visited Portland a month ago. There are security guards at each pharmacy and supermarket. I got screamed at by a violent/homeless person because I walked on her block. Some streets - and we are talking downtown/center - I was just afraid or disgusted to walk on. So, yes, Portland is a dump that needs to get cleaned up.

[deleted]

Re: State Terror, American Style

#100

Post by array_key_first »

foogazi wrote: post #31
tdeck wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was after Trump's secretary of war said the following on the same stage: “We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy,” Hegseth said. “We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement.” It's not exactly subtle. The message i…

All very vague We all have an understanding of the power of the US military and its foreign agencies But it’s tough to square this quote with that - what is going to change ? What does a nuclear superpower need to be untied ? Mass world surveillance, bombing foreign countries? All of that has happened - what more is needed and why ?

The main difference is that the US doesn't flex it's imperialistic attitudes on its own citizenry. That's reserved for the global periphery, where we can conveniently ignore it.
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