LATimes posted:

Joel Cotto and Jesús González picked up their fishing nets after a full day at a lake in Cidra, Puerto Rico, feeling good about their bucket full of shrimp and fish known as chopas. The friends said they had become fishermen after Hurricane Maria devastated the island, because food had become so scarce for their families.

Cotto, 50, said the hurricane ripped the roof off his home in Aguas Buenas, a municipality in the island’s central region, and damaged virtually everything, including the refrigerator. “The roof, the house, everything is stripped away,” Cotto said. “We have to fish for what we are going to eat today.”

Like Cotto and González, 57, many Puerto Ricans are making substantial adjustments to their lives based on hurricane-related devastation to the island, a U.S. territory. Despite some aid reaching residents during the past four weeks, many people have had to find new ways to at least temporarily feed their families, filter water and care for the young, elderly and sick.

Food, water, medicine, electricity and shelter all remain desperately scarce on the island. The hurricane wiped out thousands of homes, decimated agriculture and cut power and phone lines, making it difficult for most of Puerto Rico’s 3.4 million residents to communicate with family or aid services. Some roads in mountainous regions contort and contract with mudslides that expose precipices on each side. In some cases, people have been left isolated by collapsed bridges in communities that already were off the beaten path.

The number of deaths associated with the hurricane rose to at least 49, Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rossello said Friday, and that number was expected to go up again. Officials said dozens of people are still missing.

Despite help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other agencies as well as private fundraising and aid efforts, many residents in Puerto Rico remain in trouble. Thousands have left the island to be with or near relatives on the mainland.

Magdanell Quiñones, a teacher in San Juan, said the island is in crisis despite a tendency for many people to put on a brave face. “For everybody who hears we are OK, that means we are alive. But there has not been a day when I have not come home crying because I am thinking of a mother who came to me saying that we have no food,” she said. Quiñones said she feels hopeful when she sees members of her community working to rebuild neighborhoods with their own hands. She has a child with special needs who has taken to working on their vegetable garden, which they replanted days after the storm hit.

Marinilda Rivera Diaz, a social worker in Rio Piedras, is part of an interdisciplinary team of professionals working at one of the “Stop and Go” centers, a government initiative where residents go for food, medical care and help filling out paperwork for federal aid. “I am worried about the people who have bedridden family members living in their homes who depend on a respirator,” she said. “Can you imagine what it is like to need to breathe and not have oxygen?”

Officials said the water reaching about two-thirds of the homes on the island is now considered safe to drink, but they acknowledged that damage to the main laboratories responsible for measuring water quality has made it difficult to conduct rigorous testing. The Environmental Protection Agency has urged residents to boil water before drinking it. Among the warnings from government officials was that people should not take water from natural streams because fluid from sewers was leaking into some rivers.

The lake where Cotto and González were fishing is not far from the La Plata River, which officials say has been contaminated by sewage runoff. The friends said they hoped for the best. “I don't think it is contaminated because we have eaten fish from it before,” Gonzalez said.

Chicago Sun Times posted:

“I’ve lost everything,” Castro said. “I have no place to go, nothing to do. I’ve never experienced this before. My home — the whole island — is completely destroyed.”

Like an estimated 1,000 or more from the hurricane-ravaged island, Castro has found refuge in Chicago. Mayor Rahm Emanuel has made clear the city could open its doors to tens of thousands more.

Castro has been staying with a friend since Oct. 12, and even though city officials are trying to help him find housing, he still is saddened when he thinks of his home — and what he says is the federal government’s lackluster response to the humanitarian crisis he witnessed firsthand. Emanuel, as well as other elected officials, are collaborating to welcome evacuees in a style similar to Houston after Hurricane Katrina. Ald. Gilbert Villegas predicted the influx could roughly double the city’s Puerto Rican population of 103,000. Others aren’t so sure the number will get that high.

The number of evacuees in the city isn’t completely clear. Alicia Tate-Nadeau, director of the city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications, said at least 1,600 have passed through O’Hare Airport — a number that comes from the Department of Aviation, which keeps track of humanitarian flights from disaster zones. A welcome center at the Humboldt Park field house will open in Maldonado’s ward, the alderman says on his web site. It will connect evacuees to clothing, food and housing as well as other resources they may need after landing in the city.

Point people have been designated for evacuees within Chicago social-service agencies, too. If the number of evacuees spikes, plans call for a multiagency resource center to help meet their needs, said Cristina Pacione-Zayas “Even though many are staying with family, that’s not sustainable over time. We need federal help,” Pacione-Zayas said. “The city needs to flex its political muscle to put pressure on the federal government.”

Pacione-Zayas and politicians like U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez have flexed their own muscle in directing aid to Puerto Rico, as President Donald Trump has suggested that the financially troubled island — whose 3.4 million residents are American citizens — would soon have to bear the brunt of rebuilding.

Asked if the city’s plan will be helpful, Omar Torres-Kortright said he believes the city is doing a good job so far. “I think how the city handles this situation will become more evident as the number of people increases,” said Torres, who is hosting his parents. “We’re going to be able to measure the city’s response later when Puerto Ricans who may not have family [in Chicago] come and try to continue their lives.”

The city’s plan also includes coordination with Chicago Public Schools to make sure children can be enrolled while they’re here — a move that shouldn’t overcrowd schools if the numbers remain low, officials said.

Jobs are another point of concern. Maldonado said he and others in the 26th Ward were reaching out to labor unions in hopes of placing trade workers. An association of those labor unions — the Chicago Federation of Labor — is part of an investor group that recently purchased the Chicago Sun-Times.

Castro, a retired water infrastructure worker, would like that. “Puerto Rico is part of the United States, and we need help,” Castro said. “I’m proud of those who are trying to do everything they can to help us, but I don’t think this will be fixed quickly. I’ll probably spend the rest of my life — whatever is left of it — in Chicago.”

Koalas March posted:

Carter does not sound great here. It reads like "White man passive aggressively disappointed that black person did their own thing."

Which isn't to say, I don't like Carter, because I do. It just reads strange to me. Not just his quotes but possibly the way the piece was written as well.

Koalas March posted:

Carter does not sound great here. It reads like "White man passive aggressively disappointed that black person did their own thing."

Which isn't to say, I don't like Carter, because I do. It just reads strange to me. Not just his quotes but possibly the way the piece was written as well.

BarbarianElephant posted:

I'm lazy, just count all the guys who've replied to me with something like "YOU POSTIN BAD"

quote:

"I’d love the Teamsters to be worse off. I’d love the automobile workers to be worse off. You may say that’s inhumane; I’m putting it rather baldly but I want to eliminate a situation in which certain protected workers in industries insulated from competition can increase their wages much more rapidly than the average without regard to their merit or to what a free market would do, and in so doing exploit other workers. 10 "

This is a Democrat, remember, and what he was objecting to was the way unions supposedly allowed workers to prosper “without regard to their merit.” It is a view we shall hear again as we proceed. All these Democrats worked to sever their ties with the past, but for the nation’s mainstream political commentators the Democrats’ reorientation was always and forever insufficient. Regardless of what they did, they still hadn’t distanced themselves from the New Deal finally enough; they were still too beholden to manufacturing and blue-collar workers.

Frank, Thomas. Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (pp. 54-55). Henry Holt and Co.. Kindle Edition.

quote:

Democrats would run for the presidency on a professional-friendly platform of high-minded post-partisanship and be rejected by the electorate— and then, in the aftermath, those same Democrats would be ritually denounced by Washington’s TV thinkers as examples of the New Deal’s exhaustion and irrelevance. It happened to the post-ideological Jimmy Carter in his bid for reelection; it happened to the budget-balancing Walter Mondale; it happened to the technocratic centrist Michael Dukakis— each one of them magically transformed on the day of their defeat into an instructional film on why Democrats needed to embrace post-ideological, budget-balancing, technocratic centrism. 11 “The collapse and end of the New Deal is one of the most frequently announced events in American media,” wrote a political scientist in 1985. It was announced so often and so predictably in those days that cataloguing it became an academic exercise in itself. The historian William Leuchtenburg filled several chapters of his 1989 book, In the Shadow of FDR, with New Deal death notices of this kind. For example, after Carter’s electoral disaster in 1980, Senator Paul Tsongas said, “Basically, the New Deal died yesterday.” After the electoral disaster of 1984, syndicated columnist Joseph Kraft announced that “the repudiation of Mondale was a repudiation of the Democratic Party that had emerged from the old Roosevelt coalition.” After the electoral disaster of 1988, it was the same, even though candidate Michael Dukakis had worked hard to distance himself from the New Deal and even from the word “liberal.” On the eternal return of the death-of-the-New-Deal, Leuchtenburg himself wondered, “It was far from clear why if, as Gary Hart claimed, the New Deal was dead in 1974, it was necessary for him to kill it off in 1980 and again in 1984.” 12 Can we really blame the media for telling the story this way, time after time? All the bright young Democrats with the post-partisan ideas were saying the same thing. All through the Seventies and Eighties, in fact, new waves of liberal thinkers kept washing up, divining from the political stars the same ideas: that labor unions were an economic drag and/ or dying fast; that industrial society itself had gone into eclipse; and that the future belonged to people like them, meaning— always— affluent professionals or some other highly educated and market-savvy cohort.

Frank, Thomas. Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (pp. 55-56). Henry Holt and Co.. Kindle Edition.

RuanGacho posted:

Every time the Democrats have failed since McGovern, they have blamed The New Deal, and basically, everything they're currently resisting:


The difference this time around is the young people have had enough of pretending the New Deal didn't happen.

RuanGacho posted:

Every time the Democrats have failed since McGovern, they have blamed The New Deal, and basically, everything they're currently resisting:


The difference this time around is the young people have had enough of pretending the New Deal didn't happen.

Democrazy posted:

Do you know who said the first quote from your first excerpt?

quote:

Carter adviser [Alfred E. Kahn], an economist, had this to say about the fights over deregulation and inflation:

RuanGacho posted:

Ardennes posted:

Granted, I seriously wonder how the West is going to transition at this point without a broader meltdown. There seems to be pretty much zero-flexibility among liberals, while right-wing populists are continuing to clean-up shop.

BrandorKP posted:

Or a world war. That might be worse than the global warming.

BrandorKP posted:

Or a world war. That might be worse than the global warming.

Lightning Knight posted:

Broad meltdown at this point means game over, because global warming. It's do or die.

Ardennes posted:

So the question becomes can you actually change the system from within in enough time, or do you force it to change from outside of it?

Ardennes posted:

Granted, I seriously wonder how the West is going to transition at this point without a broader meltdown. There seems to be pretty much zero-flexibility among liberals, while right-wing populists are continuing to clean-up shop.

Corbyn seems to be one of the few exceptions and that was because he was able to catch liberals with their pants down essentially. However, he can into his leadership election with the expectation that New Labour was going to do poo poo on him from the get-go, and also Momentum was both well organized and very resistant to infiltration.

BarbarianElephant posted:

Because I'm pretty left wing myself, and I see younger left-wingers spiraling into hate and despair and wanting to burn the whole country down, hating people a smidge more right-wing than them more than actual fascists. I see people who would rather Trump become dictator for life than entertain the thought of taking the responsibility of electing an imperfect politician.

I've been voting 20 years now and I can tell you that *every* politician is imperfect. If you look close enough to any of them, they are all lousy. But some of them have left the world a little better than they found it, and that's how things get better.

Lightning Knight posted:

So I don't buy that there's this great silent majority of left-wing blue collar workers who support labor politics but also will buy into anti-racism initiatives and support women's rights in the Midwest, but like.

https://twitter.com/IronStache/status/922528358696660993

This guy. He exists. And I want him to win so bad.

Mustached Demon posted:

The Iron Stache is a real American hero.

Lightning Knight posted:

My dad has been insisting for months that this guy was going to totally beat Paul Ryan because Paul Ryan is BAD and WRONG, and I kept telling him Ryan has too much money and our home district is too lovely and right-wing and gerrymandered.

But gently caress man I want this guy in Congress. He's from my neighborhood!

Mustached Demon posted:

Join his campaign and be his boots on the ground.

quote:

At the Labor Temple Lounge in Eau Claire, nine gruff, tough-looking union men sat around a table. One had the acronym of his guild, the Laborers International Union of North America, tattooed on a bulging bicep. The men pinned the blame for most of their problems squarely on Republicans, from Trump to Governor Scott Walker. School funding, the minimum wage, college debt, income inequality, gerrymandering, health care, union rights: It was all, in their view, the GOP’s fault. A member of the bricklayers’ union lamented Walker’s cuts to public services: “If we can’t help each other,” he said, “what are we, a pack of wolves—we eat the weakest one? It’s shameful.”

But their negativity toward Republicans didn’t translate to rosy feelings for the Democrats, who, they said, too frequently ignored working-class people. And some of the blame, they said, fell on their fellow workers, many of whom supported Republicans against their own interests. “The membership”—the union rank-and-file—“voted for these Republicans because of them drat guns,” a Laborers Union official said. “You cannot push it out of their head. A lot of ‘em loved it when Walker kicked our rear end.”

Debriefing after this particular group, the Third Way listeners said they found the union men demoralizing. “I feel like they can’t see their way out,” Hale said.

“They were very negative,” Paul Neaville, another researcher, concurred.

They were so fixated on blaming Republicans, Hale fretted. “It was very us-and-them."

quote:

“Isn’t this underwritten by the DNC?” a local cafe owner asked Watson after his just-here-to-listen opening spiel. “I read somewhere you’re spending $20 million,” another man said. Another participant asked about corporate donors.

This was all pretty much true—Third Way, not the DNC, was paying for the project, but the “New Blue” campaign was hardly a nonpartisan effort. But Watson tried to deflect. He acknowledged that the session was “part of” the $20 million project, but he insisted it had nothing to do with any political party. “This is not about Democrats or Republicans—it’s about what’s going on beyond the Beltway,” he said.

quote:

According to the report, the community’s “biggest frustrations” are “laggard government and partisan squabbling.” “The idea that such bickering can be tolerated in D.C. is appalling to most,” it states. The good people of western Wisconsin, Third Way found, wanted nothing so much as a society where people could put aside their differences. The report quotes a man who said, “We come together on projects and solve problems together.” It doesn’t quote any of the Wisconsinites we met who expressed partisan sentiments or questioned the prospect of consensus.

The researchers had somehow found their premise perfectly illustrated. Their journey to Trump’s America had done nothing to unsettle their preconceptions.

Lightning Knight posted:

I probably will. I won't be able to vote for him though. I moved.

^ https://www.randybryceforcongress.com/why-im-running/

He's basically approaching Bernie, which is not properly leftist per se but I mean.

Crowsbeak posted:

Be honest, what do you think the end game is.

Lightning Knight posted:

I probably will. I won't be able to vote for him though. I moved.

^ https://www.randybryceforcongress.com/why-im-running/

He's basically approaching Bernie, which is not properly leftist per se but I mean.

Ytlaya posted:

Eh, the only thing noteworthy is his support of single payer, which a number of other Dems have come out in support of also. Otherwise he's a fairly standard left-leaning Dem.

The reason why I think Bernie stands out among other progressive Dems is that he has explicitly brought up stuff like wealth taxes (in the context of funding single-payer, IIRC). Wealth taxes are far beyond anything other Democrats generally propose. I feel like he would be willing to keep pushing us at least until we became a genuine social democracy, and even though I would like to go further than that, it would still be a dramatic improvement upon the status quo and is well beyond anything other Democratic politicians are willing to consider.

I mean, I'd still vote for Bryce, but I don't think he's really comparable with Sanders in terms of his overall ideology and long-term goals. He could possibly be convinced to go that way, though.

Chomskyan posted:

In what way was Carter's criticism racially charged?

Crowsbeak posted:

How is he wrong? outside of the Iran deal, which I will give Obama credit, he did do alot to get that done. In fact I would say if he had pursued other policies, say a public option on healthcare, or even had some of the bankers thrown in prison we wouldn't have Trump. But enough with the might haves, the actual facts are as fallows with him on foreign policy.. He allowed HRC to support wahabis in Syria, allowed Libya to collapse into a place that now has slave markets, and in doing so set the North Koreans off the deep end. Oh and he did back the Saudi;s war in Yemen. That is directly on him. Why can't he be criticized for any of that?

Lightning Knight posted:

I mean this is a phenomenally far left platform for the district he's running in lmao.

I guess I just don't perceive Bernie to be materially that far away from other progressive Democrats in practice, rhetoric notwithstanding.

Office Pig posted:

Carter is the best post-President in modern history which is why it’s a goddamn shame he was also an Actual President.

Ytlaya posted:

Regarding Bryce, he just doesn't seem that coherent in terms of his ideology. Like, it wasn't long ago he responded positively to a Louise Mensch tweet or something. IIRC he responded well when people pointed out how bad she is, but it just paints this greater picture of him as someone who genuinely means well but is sort of ideologically ignorant/naive (which, granted, is still better than most other Dems, but I'd still prefer someone who has consistently been on the left ideologically).

Lightning Knight posted:

So I don't buy that there's this great silent majority of left-wing blue collar workers who support labor politics but also will buy into anti-racism initiatives and support women's rights in the Midwest, but like.

https://twitter.com/IronStache/status/922528358696660993

This guy. He exists. And I want him to win so bad.

mcmagic posted:

Getting into the minds of an electorate that voted for Ron (89 IQ) Johnson over Russ Feingold twice and elected Scott Walker 3 times is hard to do. If they want this hokey shtick maybe he'll win. Who the gently caress knows.

Ardennes posted:

For the US or humanity?

(I am going to get plenty of poo poo for this) but for the US I am pretty pessimistic. At this point so much power is concerned in such a small cluster of organizations and individuals, it is hard to see them letting that system following apart willingly. If you start looking at a number of impediments in our electoral system (an enforced party system, gerrymandering, money in politics etc etc) it is easy to see why so little changes in it. The US is still a very wealthy country, but an extremely inflexible one as well and we are becoming slower in our adaptation to the world around US and the problems inside our own borders.

As for humanity, I don't think humanity will collapse on itself, we have the technology to continue forward (in some fashion...), but it is going to be a much more chaotic future than many would expect. Climate change isn't going to be stopped, there just isn't the will and even when we have the technology to stop it and coal/oil is going to continue being enticing. Also, I think the 1990s/2000s was a "democracy bubble" and the future is going also look more authoritarian as different governments rely on the hope of their populations that something...anything will change in order to stay in power. Some of them won't make it and will be replaced by instability or yet another authoritarian regime. Beyond that, the world is also going to be a lot more multi-polar, and we haven't seen the end of proxy wars against the developing world.

I guess not anything too unique, but I do think technology (in terms of power-relations) is generally working more against the public at this point.