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evilweasel posted:this does indeed boil down to "the rich are smarter." the key insight into people that economic analysis always leaves out is that people are tribal. it is an instinctive behavior that is generally helpful in a social animal (such as humans), but it specifically leads to you placing your tribal identity over your personal self-interest. sports teams being one of the silliest yet most obviously apparent one, where people will do stupid, stupid things to demonstrate their loyalty to their specific tribe of sports fans. okay if your analysis is that people are irrational animals that have an immutable tribal nature that is so both overwhelmingly powerful they will put it before their perceived best interests (while also somehow being distinct from their perceived best interests) and that that tribal identity actually isn't an identity and can't be supplanted by a class identity -- that what might appear to be a principally economic issue (maintenance of an easily-exploitable incredibly precarious labor force that will work for less than the minimum wage) is actually us hooting apes getting big mad about the browns there is absolutely zero chance we're ever going to do anything than talk past each other. I will say, though, that your worldview is both utterly horrifying as well as being completely unscientific. But I do give you credit in as much as it is a worldview.
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Jul 21, 2021 18:08
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evilweasel posted:the key element you are missing is social policy: there are scads of republican voters who don't like lower taxes on the rich, but vote republican anyway because of social issues. they make a choice knowing its against their economic interests because it is in their perceived social interests. it's not like republican voters are too stupid to know they're not paying upper-class tax cuts and polling is pretty consistent about that (as is trump's 2016 primary win renouncing republican economics). they just swallow their annoyance at that to stick it to liberals on guns, abortion, church, racism, etc. The GOP cut taxes for poors as well as richies (and expanded the child tax credit), to the extent that the Dems now plan to extend those tax cuts (and further expanded the child tax credit).
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Jul 21, 2021 18:12
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evilweasel posted:in the voting rights thread you make the concession (that you must) that destroys your argument: people do not act in accordance with their class interests. the working class clearly doesn't. This is wavering a bit from the topic, but the people in power generally* act in their class interests...and one of those class interests is using their considerable power, influence, and voice to manipulate other classes into supporting (or at least not opposing) the class interests of the wealthy and powerful. Just as the rich get richer by investing their money into things that can increase their wealth more, the powerful get more powerful by using their power to influence the system toward increasing their power. *Human beings are not beep-boop robots with infinite knowledge and perfect rational thought, so while they will tend to act in ways that they believe will serve their personal or group interests in some way, there's plenty of ways that they can be misled** or taken down the wrong path. **The idea that poor GOP voters know the Dems are better for them economically but are voting GOP anyway for social policy reasons doesn't seem to stand up among the GOP diehards I've seen. Instead, the general explanation is that they believe that the progressive policy promises are either misleading, false, impossible to accomplish, or will backfire and fail. This perception is, yes, sometimes based on social policies...but that's not surprising, given that bigoted social policies usually have (false) economic excuses attached, such that social reform would bring economic ruin if even a fraction of those excuses turned out to be true.
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Jul 21, 2021 18:19
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:I am not responsible for anyone else's posts and I am trying to engage with you earnestly. If you don't want to follow suit then just close the browser window. This "but he gets to do it why can't I?" is pathetic. I don't doubt your earnestness, I just refuse to entertain your silly notion that finding class analysis laughable as a framework is somehow an unacceptable position, and that simply saying so is insufficient and instead warrants a more detailed response, and that not providing that detailed response merits mod action. It is possible that a moderator will frown upon one of my posts and probate me for it, but at the end of the day I don't feel like repeating what poster evilweasel typed out, especially since it is out of topic for this thread. I believe I've done a reasonable job discussing the contents of the article itself, and I'm content to leave things at that.
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Jul 21, 2021 18:19
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:okay if your analysis is that people are irrational animals that have an immutable tribal nature that is so both overwhelmingly powerful they will put it before their perceived best interests (while also somehow being distinct from their perceived best interests) and that that tribal identity actually isn't an identity and can't be supplanted by a class identity -- that what might appear to be a principally economic issue (maintenance of an easily-exploitable incredibly precarious labor force that will work for less than the minimum wage) is actually us hooting apes getting big mad about the browns there is absolutely zero chance we're ever going to do anything than talk past each other. you could convince people to view their class identity as their social identity - that is the whole point of organizing the working class. but the key thing is that people act outside their best interests (defined in a material way) in service of their tribal identity/interests all the time. it's a truism of how people act. every effort to find people who act in a rigidly economic way has failed miserably, with the extremely precise category of "economic students aware of the Rational Actor theory, and aware they are being watched" it is absolutely obvious that people are "hooting apes getting big mad about the browns" to use your terminology all the loving time. it is the core of racism, a thing that exists. your theory implies that only the poor can be racist in opposition to their material interests, a theory that has no grounding in reality. to understand immigration policy it is necessary to understand that this is an area where the republican base overthrew the business wing of the republican party back in the Bush II era (or before). remember: under Bush II there was also a real attempt at immigration reform, driven by the business wing. it was blocked by the nutters. that is a key data point because it is a specific, easily-examined and clear counter-example to the claim that our immigration policy is economically driven. we can go into the details of why your economic analysis is wrong but it's pretty clearly implied by the fact the business wing of the republican party has been in favor of legalizing the undocumented for decades (also within the Democratic coalition, it is the blue-collar white voters who are most anti-legalization, not the wealthy members of the party, but this is less directly relevant to disproving the point as that can be in the blue-collar workers' material interests to crack down on immigration).
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Jul 21, 2021 18:21
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Main Paineframe posted:This is wavering a bit from the topic, but the people in power generally* act in their class interests...and one of those class interests is using their considerable power, influence, and voice to manipulate other classes into supporting (or at least not opposing) the class interests of the wealthy and powerful. Just as the rich get richer by investing their money into things that can increase their wealth more, the powerful get more powerful by using their power to influence the system toward increasing their power. oh i don't doubt that people often act in their economic interests. the problem comes when you take that general tendency and universalize it as the only driving force. and here, that's basically the claim that is being made. i do not think a pure economic analysis is going to be insightful on the immigration debate, because immigration triggers the stuff that leads people away from acting in their self-interest a lot. economic analysis as an explanation for people's political behavior in immigration issues is at its nadir at explanatory power, it just isn't very useful. Main Paineframe posted:**The idea that poor GOP voters know the Dems are better for them economically but are voting GOP anyway for social policy reasons doesn't seem to stand up among the GOP diehards I've seen. Instead, the general explanation is that they believe that the progressive policy promises are either misleading, false, impossible to accomplish, or will backfire and fail. This perception is, yes, sometimes based on social policies...but that's not surprising, given that bigoted social policies usually have (false) economic excuses attached, such that social reform would bring economic ruin if even a fraction of those excuses turned out to be true. polling on republican economics shows that not even republican voters like it very much. again - trump ran (in the primary) on raising taxes on the rich. you have a lot of tribal identity being used to reinforce that Tax Cuts Are A Thing We Like, and when explicitly identified with Trump republican voters begrudgingly liked the Trump tax cuts (though at levels that weren't all that high for a partisan policy, something like high-70s low-80s). but their base just never really liked it all that much, hence trying to move away from it and towards social issues as the foundational policies of the party.
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Jul 21, 2021 18:28
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Slow News Day posted:Can we talk about the ridiculousness of this headline for a second? Manufacturing Consent refers to corporations manipulating media to further economic objectives. This is based off activists trying to bring attn to something that is hurting ppl.
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Jul 21, 2021 20:31
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evilweasel posted:oh i don't doubt that people often act in their economic interests. the problem comes when you take that general tendency and universalize it as the only driving force. and here, that's basically the claim that is being made. i do not think a pure economic analysis is going to be insightful on the immigration debate, because immigration triggers the stuff that leads people away from acting in their self-interest a lot. economic analysis as an explanation for people's political behavior in immigration issues is at its nadir at explanatory power, it just isn't very useful. A pure economic analysis isn't going to be useful by itself, but subjecting it to a purely non-economic analysis and assuming that economics play no role is equally useless. Economic and non-economic factors are deeply entwined in the minds of the people, intentionally so. That's especially true for racism in American culture, which has spent literal centuries mixing economic considerations with social considerations with tribalism with pseudoscience, all to create the toxic slurry known as white supremacy. Approaching it from just one angle is useless to the exclusion of all else is useless precisely because all those other elements are tied in, forming a complex web of interwoven justifications that shore up whatever single pillar you try to take a crack at. Republican voters don't have to like the big business wing's tax cut policies. They just have to be convinced that the actual policies that Democrats will pursue are even worse, and will lead to the imminent social or economic collapse of the country if not voted against at all costs - even if it means supporting some unsavory policies from the GOP. And sorry, but I can't take it seriously if you're saying that a law polling at ~80% among Republicans is only reluctantly, begrudgingly supported by the base. Yes, I know politics are hyper-partisan now, but that's still a pretty high number!
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Jul 21, 2021 20:48
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Willa Rogers posted:The GOP cut taxes for poors as well as richies (and expanded the child tax credit), to the extent that the Dems now plan to extend those tax cuts (and further expanded the child tax credit). temporarily vs the permanent and greater ones for the rich, your phrasing here seems like you are trying to ignore that to make the Republicans look better then they are for some reason.
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Jul 21, 2021 20:54
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socialsecurity posted:temporarily vs the permanent and greater ones for the rich, your phrasing here seems like you are trying to ignore that to make the Republicans look better then they are for some reason. The tax cuts were in effect & practically guaranteed to be extended no matter which party held Congress or the presidency, in spite of Dems moaning about how they were "temporary." It's been a pattern for the last several decades: GOP pols cut taxes for all tax brackets; then Dems retain the lower-end tax cuts while fiddling with (but not fully restoring) the tax cuts for richies when Dems are in power; then the GOP cuts taxes across the board once in power again. I'm p. sure non-richies' personal tax rates are at record lows, and "middle-class" people making a quarter-million/year (ie: the 1 percent) won't see anything in the way of increased income taxes under Biden, although Dems love doing poo poo like Medicare surcharges for anything above that bracket (thus undermining the universality of earned benefits). eta: See, e.g., the "Bush" tax cuts that were extended by Obama for all but the .1 percent. Those were "temporary," too. etaa: Although given the ACA mandate penalty, come to think of it, I guess one could say that Obama raised taxes on the poors. Looking forward to seeing if Biden restores the financial penalty thru the reconciliation bill with the excuse of it being an "offset" for spending. Willa Rogers fucked around with this message at 22:47 on Jul 21, 2021 |
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Jul 21, 2021 22:39
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evilweasel posted:you have this idea that rich people do not suffer from tribalism (nonsense) or have carefully aligned their tribal interests with their class interests in a way that is just beyond the ability of the working class. to the extent you are discussing purely economic issues you might have a point - capital gains taxes, etc. but you're not, you are claiming class interest is the driving explanation for human behavior in an intensely tribalistic area - immigration. it's not. wealthy business interests have tried, and failed, to grab the tiller on immigration for decades. economic analysis is not a useful way to explain activity on immigration, and trying to use a modified homo economicus as your way of explaining immigration policy in the united states is utterly doomed to failure. The point of "class drives the behavior and ideology of those with wealth/power" is not "all wealthy people are a hivemind who agree about all things." The best way to think of this isn't "the wealthy will always make the optimal choices and never disagree" but instead "wealthy people will naturally be disinclined from choices that threaten their position in society." This means there's room for tribalism and ideological differences, but only to a point. The minute an idea has a significant negative impact on them as a class, you'll find that they're in agreement. The main consequence to this in reality is not "politicians and the media always agree about everything." It's "certain ideas (the ones that are obviously opposed to the material interests of wealthy people) are strongly opposed by nearly all powerful institutions and individuals." There's a line that won't be crossed, and that line happens to fall far before "the bare minimum to have a decent society or address issues like climate change." With immigration specifically, there are certain areas where there are disagreements (because different business sectors benefit differently from different forms of immigration policy), but most wealthy people are going to be ambivalent about something like "stopping abuses at the border." As a default, people with power are going to be disinclined from changing things if they don't have anything to clearly gain from doing so. As a result, even though ICE could be dismantled without significantly affecting their bottom line, they're not going to want to "shake things up" like that if they can help it. And, probably more importantly, from the perspective of the actual politicians, on one end they have "the existing government organization ICE + the businesses we contract to provide facilities, etc" and on the other they have "immigration rights activists and the undocumented immigrants themselves." It's pretty obvious which is going to weigh more. They don't lose much by loving over the latter (it's just maintaining the status quo, after all), so they're not going to be inclined towards ruining some existing relationships in exchange for "the support of immigration rights activists, who mostly are already voting Democratic to begin with." It also doesn't help that most Democratic politicians probably buy into the idea that they'd lose more voters from taking action to fix the situation than they would from not doing so (and hell, they might even be correct about this, though I doubt it would be electorally consequential either way).
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Jul 21, 2021 23:46
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Race reductionism is just as totally useless as class reductionism, and is anything is far more common than the latter. (In fact, 'class reductionism' tends to be thrown around as an accusation against people bringing up class to any degree at all)Main Paineframe posted:A pure economic analysis isn't going to be useful by itself, but subjecting it to a purely non-economic analysis and assuming that economics play no role is equally useless. Economic and non-economic factors are deeply entwined in the minds of the people, intentionally so. That's especially true for racism in American culture, which has spent literal centuries mixing economic considerations with social considerations with tribalism with pseudoscience, all to create the toxic slurry known as white supremacy. Approaching it from just one angle is useless to the exclusion of all else is useless precisely because all those other elements are tied in, forming a complex web of interwoven justifications that shore up whatever single pillar you try to take a crack at. Yeah, it goes with the whole idea that liberals/leftists mean well, but their demands for things like 'a habitable planet' and 'stop brutalising people for no reason' are like little kids who want ice cream for breakfast every day and have to be told off, sometimes with tear gas and rendition to black sites.
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Jul 22, 2021 04:26
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Ytlaya posted:The best way to think of this isn't "the wealthy will always make the optimal choices and never disagree" but instead "wealthy people will naturally be disinclined from choices that threaten their position in society." This means there's room for tribalism and ideological differences, but only to a point. The minute an idea has a significant negative impact on them as a class, you'll find that they're in agreement. I'm still not really getting why this doesn't apply equally to working-class people, who seem to be plenty willing to trade off exonomic class benefits in favor of racial, ethnic, and other social benefits.
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Jul 22, 2021 19:13
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Muscle Tracer posted:I'm still not really getting why this doesn't apply equally to working-class people, who seem to be plenty willing to trade off exonomic class benefits in favor of racial, ethnic, and other social benefits. Because it's a far more diverse group of people and there is active propaganda efforts to the contrary? That is the usual response.
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Jul 22, 2021 19:20
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Main Paineframe posted:A pure economic analysis isn't going to be useful by itself, but subjecting it to a purely non-economic analysis and assuming that economics play no role is equally useless. Economic and non-economic factors are deeply entwined in the minds of the people, intentionally so. That's especially true for racism in American culture, which has spent literal centuries mixing economic considerations with social considerations with tribalism with pseudoscience, all to create the toxic slurry known as white supremacy. Approaching it from just one angle is useless to the exclusion of all else is useless precisely because all those other elements are tied in, forming a complex web of interwoven justifications that shore up whatever single pillar you try to take a crack at. I don't claim that economic analysis plays no role: but this is the case where it plays the least role - and the fight between the two (and which one is stronger) is dramatically illustrated by the fact the business wing of the republican party is in favor of immigration reform, yet keeps not getting its way compared to the racism wing and has failed for at least two decades. An "this is what Global Capital wants, and is the only meaningful input here" analysis has the problem that (a) it's not what "Global Capital" wants, given what has been expressed through the business wing of the Republican Party, their most reliable mouthpiece, and (b) the whims of Global Capital is obviously not the most determinative factor in the politics of immigration considering that the business wing keeps losing that argument in the Republican Party. now, obviously pentecostal elites believes that Global Capital controls both parties - but if they can't even get their way in the republican party, where they've had a much stronger, clearer, whip hand, why would that be relevant to an analysis of the democratic party either? the problem is not that there is no place for "here is what is in the interests of certain groups or individuals" - people are self-interested and that impacts what they do. people are also, as i discussed, tribal so they may act in their group's interests. however, it is plain that economic analysis is not the be-all and end-all and that should be a factor in how you are analyzing people's motivations; not the only factor. there is a seperate problem that people act like "global capital" or 'the wealthy' are a hive mind. they're obviously not. there are things that are generally in the direct interests of the very rich - low capital gains taxes, low estate taxes, lax IRS enforcement, etc - where the rich will generally move as a class. immigration is definitely not one of those. specific industries rely on undocumented immigrants in the united states; others do not. many industries that have a generalized interest in super-cheap labor just solve it by moving the factory outside the united states; it is only those industries that have a need for inside the US very cheap exploitable labor (most notably, anything to do with food) that have a vested interest in having a large group of undocumented immigrants that are not legalized. like take amazon and jeff bezos, for example. jeff bezos has no real interest in that - he wants more legalized workers for his warehouses. or possibly not, as other people being unable to match amazon might be part of their strategy to keep an effective monopoply on the ability to have their logistics chain - in which case he'd want less at all (i.e. get rid of the undocumented entirely). more likely the former though, as those are more potential customers for amazon. either way, his interests will be diametrically opposed to whoever owns Tyson Foods or other big agri-business companies. jeff bezos doesn't give a gently caress what the costs to Tyson Foods are, while Tyson Foods cares deeply about how much they can underpay and exploit people picking crops in fields and working in slaughterhouses. further, jeff bezos may have a vested interest in Tyson Foods having problems with their workers and their abuses coming to greater light - specifically, to distract from the problems amazon has with their warehouse workers and make them look less bad. so they'll act in the benefit of their "class" when they all benefit. both bezos and whoever owns Tyson Foods care deeply about their capital gains taxes. but to the extent they care about immigration policy there's no real good reason to believe they strongly identify their interests in the same way. nor is it likely they consider each other's interests the interests of their class to the extent they'll work to benefit their class at their own personal expense (which seems out of character). it's just trying to force everything into the round hole of True Marxist Thought. which, to be fair, is generally much better than Rational Actor Libertarianism, but suffers from the same problem of seeking a universalist model of human behavior. it is pleasing to have a universal model that gives an answer for everything, but when it comes to human actions we do not have one.
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Jul 22, 2021 19:35
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Muscle Tracer posted:I'm still not really getting why this doesn't apply equally to working-class people, who seem to be plenty willing to trade off exonomic class benefits in favor of racial, ethnic, and other social benefits. Where does the pressure to make the trade offs come from? Capital has all the cultural and social benefits. What social or cultural forces are pushing them to act to sabotage their own class? What can they not get without acting in a way that imperils their class position or the stability and cohesion of the capital class?
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Jul 22, 2021 19:48
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:Where does the pressure to make the trade offs come from? Capital has all the cultural and social benefits. What social or cultural forces are pushing them to act to sabotage their own class? What can they not get without acting in a way that imperils their class position or the stability and cohesion of the capital class? self-interest, a notable driving force of the very wealthy. it is, after all, the very wealthy and powerful who are most likely to mash the "betray" button; what makes you think they don't with each other where there's even greater potential rewards. adam newmann, after all, mostly got rich by stealing from softbank. to get their own way because they want their own way, and expect to get it, even if that does not have direct economic benefit, because they can afford to act outside their narrow economic self-interest because they're stupid, short-sighted, or acting irrationally, just like anyone else. you might be familiar with noted rich man, donald trump. like man, the rich aren't some class above. they're morons just like anyone else. often they are greater morons than usual, because their wealth insulates them from the rude slap upside the head reality gives to poorer people when they're monumentally dumb
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Jul 22, 2021 19:53
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The rich stabbing each other in the back to get more wealth isn't operating outside of class interests. The only class interest the capital class has it to increase their wealth! The machine can only ever maximize profit. Capitalism tends towards one capitalist with all the money and everyone else with none of the money, and is why it's a fundamentally unstable system. Donald Trump is a totally insane example to use because all he ever did his entire life was talk poo poo and stab people in the back and he was not only constantly rewarded with more and more money, but eventually became the loving president of the United States of America. Surely you remember this!
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Jul 22, 2021 20:51
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:The rich stabbing each other in the back to get more wealth isn't operating outside of class interests. The only class interest the capital class has it to increase their wealth! The machine can only ever maximize profit. Capitalism tends towards one capitalist with all the money and everyone else with none of the money, and is why it's a fundamentally unstable system. stabbing other rich people in the back to appropriate much of their wealth for myself (but not all, there is some leakage to workers as a necessary result) can be in my interest, yet not in the interests of the "capital class" to the extent that we are redefining acting in the interest of "their class" to the interest of themselves alone, then we're just at libertarian Rational Actor theorem
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Jul 22, 2021 20:57
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evilweasel posted:stabbing other rich people in the back to appropriate much of their wealth for myself (but not all, there is some leakage to workers as a necessary result) can be in my interest, yet not in the interests of the "capital class" Class solidarity amongst capitalists isn't a class interests: capitalists have immense personal power. Workers only have power collectively. Capital doesn't have that issue, and so one capitalist stealing from another doesn't harm the class, it just makes (at worst) someone drop down into the working class but their wealth, the thing that actually matters here, is still floating around the top. It's still fully captured by the capitalist class. Capitalist betrayal of class interests would look something like eg. the ultra-wealthy promoting unionization. Or Jeff Bezos becoming a Maoist-Third Worldist. Something that would cause the wealth of the class to be distributed outside of the class. And actually, because they're individuals this can happen to a limited extent where if someone has some foresight they can promote the long-term health of the class (such as after WWI), but those specific events are very much the exception to the rule and (I'd argue) are more difficult to pull off today. Class betrayal is possible, but it's not how you can expect the class to operate.
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Jul 22, 2021 21:08
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:Where does the pressure to make the trade offs come from? Capital has all the cultural and social benefits. What social or cultural forces are pushing them to act to sabotage their own class? What can they not get without acting in a way that imperils their class position or the stability and cohesion of the capital class? This seems too single-minded or one-dimensional to me. A rich black trans woman has a tremendous amount to gain from siding with more socially progressive forces that would also be more economically progressive and pro-immigrant. Something is syntactically off with your last question.
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Jul 22, 2021 21:57
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How many billionaire trans women are out there? The point is not that we can't invent a hypothetical person that might have reason to exhibit some sort of personal interest that is contrary to class interests -- or really in this argument contrary to the societal pressures produced by class interests (racism, transphobia) -- but our black trans woman billionaire probably wouldn't pursue broad working class interests that would materially help working class black people, trans people, and women at the expense of her own class (stuff like unionization, universal healthcare, universal childcare, etc etc) but instead look for "progressive solutions" that don't involve material concessions to the working class at the expense of the capital class. We don't have to invent a hypothetical rich person for this, though, we find them throughout the upper strata of the Democratic donor base!
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Jul 23, 2021 00:14
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:How many billionaire trans women are out there? Statistically speaking, about a half of a percent of them. Weird that you can only imagine rich people being white men, but you do you.
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Jul 23, 2021 02:21
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evilweasel posted:I don't claim that economic analysis plays no role: but this is the case where it plays the least role - and the fight between the two (and which one is stronger) is dramatically illustrated by the fact the business wing of the republican party is in favor of immigration reform, yet keeps not getting its way compared to the racism wing and has failed for at least two decades. An "this is what Global Capital wants, and is the only meaningful input here" analysis has the problem that (a) it's not what "Global Capital" wants, given what has been expressed through the business wing of the Republican Party, their most reliable mouthpiece, and (b) the whims of Global Capital is obviously not the most determinative factor in the politics of immigration considering that the business wing keeps losing that argument in the Republican Party. See, this is the thing. You're assuming that there's a "business wing" which cares solely about economics and a "racism wing" that doesn't care about economics at all. And then you're assuming that the "racism wing" believe that immigration reform would be good for them economically but vote against it anyway. Obviously, that's not the case, because one of the first things you'll hear from any immigration opponent is some more racist, less civil version of "they're an economic drain and we can't afford to support them" or "there's plenty of Americans who need jobs, why should we let foreigners take those jobs". Those arguments are wrong, of course, but that doesn't change the fact that most of the people voting based on those arguments honestly believe that more immigration would be an economic negative for them. And while I'm mostly talking about the working-class voters who been manipulated by these lies, this does in fact go all the way up to the top. Sheldon Adelson joined the GOP because he was having labor troubles and believed that the complete destruction of the Democratic Party was necessary to crush unions once and for all. One of the billionaires who bankrolled the modern anti-immigration movement in the US, banking heiress Cordelia Scaife May, was an ecofascist who believed that overpopulation was responsible for all sorts of economic and environmental issues, and felt that only population reduction could save America. I'm sure no one will be surprised to hear that she thought non-whites were disproportionately responsible for those issues, and therefore should be the focus of population restriction and reduction. Yes, some other billionaires were fine with immigration and believed that it would be good for the economy and for their personal and class interests. It depends on the circumstances, advisors, and ideological beliefs of each individual billionaire. It's not something with a lot of direct economic importance to each individual billionaire. That's why the economic analysis that really matters here is each side's success in selling their message to working-class voters. The pro-immigration moderates and centrists try to appeal to the same economic arguments they've used in support of free trade and other liberal orthodoxy, but given the tumultuous economic history of the last couple of decades under those theories, public trust is low and most of the mouthpieces for it are boring thinktankers. Anti-immigration advocates, on the other hand, can appeal to a straightforward "stealing your jobs, stealing your taxes, stealing your resources" argument, and they can rely on traditional local and regional influence centers supporting them by opposing immigration as a potential threat to said influence.
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Jul 23, 2021 09:11
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:How many billionaire trans women are out there? You do see her politics shift to be more Liberal and she begins questioning the Republican Party—a party we can assume she felt met her economic needs better than other options. She also does try to leverage her business to cajole Tennessee to not be lovely to trans people. I think my bigger critique of your posts is that I think you sometimes treat class based analysis less as a lens and more as dogma. I think Prtizker’s case does illustrate that being part of a marginalized group and having power does matter to some degree, but a person who becomes a billionaire in the first place is still a capitalist. Her main tool for fighting trans discrimination is threatening to take away jobs from workers. And in the context of the nation we live in that might not be a horrible action in the face of saving tans lives, but it’s important to note. Pritzker does care about trans people besides herself, but her way of expressing care is rooted in the fact that she has a disproportionate amount of economic power. She can trash people’s lives on a whim. Regardless of the intent when that power is wielded, that’s not great.
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Jul 23, 2021 11:44
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Main Paineframe posted:See, this is the thing. You're assuming that there's a "business wing" which cares solely about economics and a "racism wing" that doesn't care about economics at all. And then you're assuming that the "racism wing" believe that immigration reform would be good for them economically but vote against it anyway. Immigration is a massive net boon to business and business knows this. A handful of anecdotes about rich nutbars does not change that calculus. It also doesn't change the fact that the business interests in the GOP were in very recent history agitating for immigration reform. This isn't theoretical, it's an observable thing that's already happened, multiple times.
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Jul 23, 2021 12:12
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Muscle Tracer posted:Statistically speaking, about a half of a percent of them. Weird that you can only imagine rich people being white men, but you do you. Statistically speaking? What's the point of that? Women, black people, and trans people are all subject to structural bigotry which leads to them being quite underrepresented among the powerful. Which the white cis men dominating the power structures feel is in their personal and class interests, of course. Jarmak posted:Immigration is a massive net boon to business and business knows this. A handful of anecdotes about rich nutbars does not change that calculus. People will act in what they perceive to be their best interests, both personally and as a class, that perception won't necessarily match reality, since people have neither perfect information nor perfect ability to evaluate information. And the farther down the class hierarchy they are, the more likely they are to be exposed to targeted misinformation intended specifically to manipulate them and sway them into thinking that their own personal and class interests match the personal and class interests of someone else in a different personal and class situation. Some business interests were agitating for immigration reform, while others opposed it. This conversation is suffering a lot from people insisting on making big sweeping generalizations about large and diverse groups, rather than looking within each group to drill into the details and properly identify actual individual or factional stances. And in fact, the "business interests" or "business wing" of the GOP is not actually representative of the majority of businesses or even GOP-supporting businesses, it's just a modern name people use for the moderate socially-liberal wing that used to be referred to as "Rockefeller Republicans".
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Jul 23, 2021 13:49
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Main Paineframe posted:Which the white cis men dominating the power structures feel is in their personal and class interests, of course. Is it? White Men in the Western World have ridiculous standards from their personal to professional lives to a fault so much that it's literally destructive and even occasionally killing them. I get that it's often brought on by themselves but I don't think having power structures that are completely ruled by a completely uniform group are even in that groups own best interest. Gucci Loafers fucked around with this message at 15:10 on Jul 23, 2021 |
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Jul 23, 2021 15:06
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Main Paineframe posted:Statistically speaking? What's the point of that? Women, black people, and trans people are all subject to structural bigotry which leads to them being quite underrepresented among the powerful. Which the white cis men dominating the power structures feel is in their personal and class interests, of course. If you are making the assumption that 100% of the capitalist class are older cishet white men, how can you tell if the way they are acting is because of their class or because of these other aspects of their identity? Seems impossible to me without considering the rare but still real set of capitalist minorities. Idk why there is such resistance to this other than that it is inconvenient to an analysis that says class is the only thing that matters.
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Jul 23, 2021 15:31
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Main Paineframe posted:People will act in what they perceive to be their best interests, both personally and as a class, that perception won't necessarily match reality, since people have neither perfect information nor perfect ability to evaluate information. And the farther down the class hierarchy they are, the more likely they are to be exposed to targeted misinformation intended specifically to manipulate them and sway them into thinking that their own personal and class interests match the personal and class interests of someone else in a different personal and class situation. I just don't think you've adequately demonstrated that that generalization is inaccurate. Immigration reform is in the class interest of pretty much everyone above unskilled labor. That's not liberals trying to make economic arguments to convince right wingers, that's the broadly accepted orthodoxy of the business community. No offense but I feel like I'm having deja vu to arguments over whether anthropogenic climate change was a matter of scientific controversy just because there were a handful of idiots putting up bullshit with motivated reasoning.
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Jul 23, 2021 15:46
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Timeless Appeal posted:Jennifer Pritzker is actually an interesting case study of a Republican Trump supporter Billionaire who came out during the Trump administration. I think she would actually prove a lot of your thinking. I think Pritzker is an excellent example, yeah. It's not that she can never do anything to help another trans person ever, but that she won't* help trans people in a way that diminishes the power of the capital class in relationship to the working class. To put it another way, we can expect her to help on an axis of anti-bigotry but not really on an axis of anti-exploitation because, for the most part, the material needs of working class trans people are the material needs of working class people: food, housing, medical care, a good job, leisure time, etc. Which is also to say she's not not doing anything. Things can be done to limit the destructive power of anti-trans bigotry and its rampancy in our culture and Pritzker and others can do something against it, but only in the cultural realm. I don't think, though, that this is going against class interests: because none of this is tied to identity as workers or broad-scope material concessions it just remains a cultural issue, and importantly one that the other team can tee off against. Trans workers may not be as separated from the greater working class as they once were, but it deepens the divide between self-identified liberals and republicans and further alienates them from each other -- and obviously the liberals are correct here, but this is just how the system is adapting to include social justice without having to include economic justice. * this is also not never ever, because there are examples of individuals doing this from time to time, but they're the exception and I think it's becoming harder and harder to pull off in an age of globalized finance capital. Eg. Elon Musk, despite getting the profits, does not have the same degree of raw control over Tesla that, say, Rockefeller had over Standard Oil. Muscle Tracer posted:If you are making the assumption that 100% of the capitalist class are older cishet white men, how can you tell if the way they are acting is because of their class or because of these other aspects of their identity? Seems impossible to me without considering the rare but still real set of capitalist minorities. Idk why there is such resistance to this other than that it is inconvenient to an analysis that says class is the only thing that matters. Because class analysis provides a explanatory framework for both how the class has acted historically and lets us predict, broadly, how the class will continue to act in the future. If you think race, or gender, or sexuality, or whatever can provide a more coherent analysis of the socioeconomic landscape I encourage you to post it. At the very least it'd be way more interesting than reading another "nuh uh!!" shitpost.
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Jul 23, 2021 15:52
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Going to interrupt this actually interesting class discussion with some random immigration thoughts https://twitter.com/JCisnerosTX/status/1418404859108380674 https://twitter.com/DetentionWatch/status/1418197480060203010 https://twitter.com/FIRM_Action/status/1417167352257388560 US immigration/refugee policy continues to be loving trash, and there's no excuse as to why it has to remain this human rights abusing atrocity. Immigration advocates already got led by the nose throughout the entire Obama admin, so I highly doubt they'll be happy doing it again in the Biden admin. And if Democrats think they can outracist the GOP in this area and win some immigrant-hating votes by stepping up the abuse themselves, then they're in a for a real bad time in 2022, 2024, 2026, 2028, and so on.
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Jul 23, 2021 17:49
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Lost Time posted:Going to interrupt this actually interesting class discussion with some random immigration thoughts i disagree with this one. first back when i did asylum work, the timeline to get a hearing was measured in years. that has pros and cons - once the application is in, they can stay with work authorization until its heard - but it took loving forever to get a hearing and remove that sword of Damocles hanging over their head. second: the ICE attorneys back then at least (pre-trump) weren't awful, at least in new york: i talked one into letting an asylum client who blew a very hard deadline by a very long time slide without contesting the aslyum application, and the judge was very pleased to rubber-stamp it. they are heavily overloaded, and that's not great (except, say, when a biglaw attorney who has only one client can make it politely clear they will be buried in paper if they don't give my client asylum while they need to deal with their 50+ cases) - but most of them are just young-ish lawyers getting the best job they can get, and lawyers lean heavily liberal (to a genuinely absurd degree not well understood outside the legal community). third: you want to replace and dilute the existing trump-era immigration judges. biden and garland appointing new immigration judges to replace or dilute people who were around under Trump is very good news fourth: overloading immigration judges makes it much more likely they dispense with due process to clear their docket, not less. a judge who has way, way, way too many cases is going to churn through them as quickly as possible and that means rejecting applications and deporting people, and trying to do it before they can get legal counsel. evilweasel fucked around with this message at 18:23 on Jul 23, 2021 |
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Jul 23, 2021 18:19
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evilweasel posted:i disagree with this one. Yeah, it's utterly bizarre to hear an immigration attorney rage against expanding immigration courts to address backlogs. I have a couple of buddies who work in immigration law and the several years of backlogs is a source of immense frustration for them and their clients.
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Jul 23, 2021 18:48
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evilweasel posted:i disagree with this one. Here's the problem: https://prospect.org/justice/build-back-better-biden-needs-to-promptly-staff-justice-department/ quote:Nearly six months into President Biden’s tenure, his Department of Justice is understaffed and unprepared to tackle the pressing issues facing the administration. Under Attorney General Merrick Garland’s leadership, the Justice Department has remained without a nominee or appointee for several key posts, including the solicitor general, director for the Executive Office for Immigration Review, and assistant attorneys general for the Office of Justice Programs and the Antitrust and Tax Divisions. This system cannot be reformed. More to the point, the Biden admin does not want the system to be reformed. We heard the same justifications during the Obama administration. Results were less than good. And so far now we're literally going backwards. No benefit of the doubt should be given to this administration, so Cisneros's fears are clearly justified here.
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Jul 23, 2021 19:17
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Lost Time posted:Here's the problem: further, nothing in the article you posted supports the conclusion you are reaching. the sole thing of relevance is the 17 trump judges which, as i recall, had received their job offers under trump and there was some dispute over if they could be revoked, but the stronger legal position was they could not - they have civil service protections. but more to the point your argument is stuck between a rock and a hard place - if your claim is trump judges are so bad that not bending the law to sack 17 (out of 530) being a complete betrayal means that, uh, you gotta work pretty fuckin hard to dilute down the existing trump lean of those judges. failing to appoint new us attorneys isn't great, but the old trump ones have largely been fired (there's one or two exceptions) and the offices are being helmed by career deputies who are not trump appointees.
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Jul 23, 2021 19:26
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Slow News Day posted:Yeah, it's utterly bizarre to hear an immigration attorney rage against expanding immigration courts to address backlogs. I have a couple of buddies who work in immigration law and the several years of backlogs is a source of immense frustration for them and their clients. I have an ages old post somewhere on this subject, but briefly, a factor in the seemingly intractable immigration mess is that some in immigration advocacy have a strategic/rhetorical incentive to make the administrative apparatus work worse. It's basically a brand of accelerationism, sometimes with a bit of self-dealing for the less sincere ones.
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Jul 23, 2021 19:51
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evilweasel posted:nothing you've posted here rebuts anything I posted, so I'm not real sure why you posted it in response to me. it is "i don't trust the biden admin" which is, ok, sure, not relevant to my point. You're right, it's not a rebuttal. It's just description of my complete lack of faith in the Biden admin to actually affect any good with these measures. It'll be expensive, it'll take a long rear end time, and in the meantime - ICE is still being funded, private prisons to host detainees are still being funded, and the courts will remain incredibly rightwing and devastating towards all immigrants and refugees. We're seeing it real-time right now. So the other path is to grind the entire thing to a halt and pressure Congress/Biden to do more than just beef up a thoroughly corrupt system. Discendo Vox posted:I have an ages old post somewhere on this subject, but briefly, a factor in the seemingly intractable immigration mess is that some in immigration advocacy have a strategic/rhetorical incentive to make the administrative apparatus work worse. It's basically a brand of accelerationism, sometimes with a bit of self-dealing for the less sincere ones. It's the other way to play. When you make the system less of a threat, it gives you more time to unravel it. Think: every USA sanction or embargo that gets argued in the positive here. Its affects are to grind the system to a halt and inflict change that way. Usually this path is taken once all other avenues have been exhausted, and the longterm outlook of the status quo works against your interests. But unlike a sanction or embargo, grinding the entire immigration system to a halt and forcing a filibuster fight around the many other things Democrats could do is something I don't think you can mock activists/organizations for, not after the last 12 years of broken promises and TODOs.
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Jul 23, 2021 20:09
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Jarmak posted:I just don't think you've adequately demonstrated that that generalization is inaccurate. Immigration reform is in the class interest of pretty much everyone above unskilled labor. That's not liberals trying to make economic arguments to convince right wingers, that's the broadly accepted orthodoxy of the business community.  A good example of those going against their own class would easily be back in the 2000s when Bush Jr. tried to pass his own immigration reform. It failed and he was essentially kicked in the teeth by his own party but this legislation would have easily have been beneficial towards Republican politicians. Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007
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Jul 24, 2021 01:04
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:... I don't think anything anyone has posted was meant to amount to "completely abandon class analysis, use __________ instead." We're not obligated to stick to one framework for explaining everything ever. Like the split in the republican party in the W days, there are cases where the behavior of people theoretically acting on behalf of capital diverge enough from factual reality it seems perverse to say "that's how they understand their class interests." And after all, it's not exactly a damning indictment of class analysis to say that sometimes people can be stupid in ways that are hard to cover in a singular model. Blue Footed Booby fucked around with this message at 20:25 on Jul 26, 2021 |
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Jul 26, 2021 20:23
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