Pres. Obama’s popularity with working-class white Americans increasingly grows during presidency?

... Nobody mass produces by hand anymore

Certainly not by 19th Century standards, or mid 20th Century either. But, thats what the industrial revolution has been all about, replacing hand made and muscle power with powered tools. Powered looms were analog, but still far more automated than previous weaving equipment. The Sabotuers saw the future in the powered loom and threw their shoes at it. Fat lot of good it did them. There is still a place for small quantities of hand made craft items, but hell even the Amish furniture makers in Indiana are installing automated tools in their factory made work buildings.
 
. . . Powered looms were analog, but still far more automated than previous weaving equipment. The Sabotuers saw the future in the powered loom and threw their shoes at it. Fat lot of good it did them. . .
I'm glad you brought up the luddites. I should have brought them up earlier. We can come up with medium disruption after medium disruption in which technology seems to create more jobs than it destroys. But in big, macro terms, I'm counting one and only one transition which went well:

AGRICULTURE —> MANUFACTURING, and that is it.
 
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youtube: Humans Need Not Apply

And please look at the two horses talking 3:30 into it, Hey (Hay!), even if this car thing really takes off, there'll be lots of other jobs for horses, jobs we can't even imagine.
 

youtube: In response to Humans Need Not Apply

This guy is optimistic that getting UBI (Universal Basic Income) will just be a bump in the road, and we'll be able to live far freer lives.

I'll say this, UBI avoids mean testing and thus avoids all our imaginings that someone else is cheating while we're playing it straight, and yes, to make it worse, other people do sometimes cheat. There is some truth to the urban legends!
 

Ian_W

Banned
That's not what I meant to say. Barack Obama graduated from Harvard Law School, so maybe . . . upper-, upper-middle class! :cool:

Look, a goodly number of our fellow citizens had a ton of resentment toward the guy, which of course was a swirl of rational and irrational.

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Obama first attended Occidental College in Los Angeles from 1979 to '81 and then switched to Columbia University in New York City where he graduated in '83. And then he worked and did other things for five years and began Harvard Law School in 1988. If these facts had been better known, I think it might have helped to humanize him.

That's what I mean about socially mobile - yep, he went to Oxy and then transferred to Columbia. At that point, he's solidly middle class. But what broke him into the American ruling class wasn't him just graduating from Harvard Law, it's his editorship of the Harvard Law Journal while he was there.

That's what qualifies him in the eyes on the American elite to go from a community organizer who lost a primary for a Congressional seat to a potentially viable Senator.
 
. . . his editorship of the Harvard Law Journal while he was there.

That's what qualifies him in the eyes on the American elite to go from a community organizer who lost a primary for a Congressional seat to a potentially viable Senator.
Even more so, to work at one of those upscale, big time law firms!

As a contrast and compare, Richard Nixon was not able to get a job at one of those in spite of good grades. I think in part because he had a darker, swarthy complexion, and in part because Dick Nixon could be a socially awkward guy who sometimes tried too hard.
https://books.google.com/books?id=F... in his duke law class of twenty-six"&f=false

Yes, there is essentially a money and fundraising primary in most big American elections if course there is, but the ironic thing is, the elites may not be able to control this as tightly as they control the levers of economic power
 
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Honest to gosh, I think one reason Clinton and the Democrats supported bank deregulation in the late ‘90s was that Germany and the UK had large mega banks and the idea that we needed to “compete.”

I wish we had taken a deep breath. Just because they’re doing something reckless and foolhardy is no reason for us to, too.
Meanwhile, Germany and the UK repealed much of their welfare state in order to "compete" with the US.
 
It'll help if there's no "bitter clingers" controversy IMO, as might some line in the ACA itself reaffirming the "Hyde amendment".
 
Meanwhile, Germany and the UK repealed much of their welfare state in order to "compete" with the US.
That’s part of the logic of capitalism.

For example, if I were to own a company leveling homes and providing foundation repair, there’d be only so much I could do out of really sterling reputation. The rest would have to be cutting costs.
 
It'll help if there's no "bitter clingers" controversy IMO, . . .
On page 3, I agreed that this was a big, in fact HUGE mistake on Obama’s part. It probably would have been a stronger and more interesting thread if I’d led with it on page 1, and I kind of wished I would have.
 
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. . . as might some line in the ACA itself reaffirming the "Hyde amendment".
The Hyde Amendment, which I think is added to budget bills most every years, says no federal funds can be used for abortion. I do not want to see this expanded more widely.

I am in favor of such things as prenatal care and paid maternity leave so that low-income women have more of a realistic choice on whether or not to continue to carry a pregnancy.
 
The Hyde Amendment, which I think is added to budget bills most every years, says no federal funds can be used for abortion. I do not want to see this expanded more widely.

I am in favor of such things as prenatal care and paid maternity leave so that low-income women have more of a realistic choice on whether or not to continue to carry a pregnancy.
I get that, but the bill''s lack of Hyde amendment language turned off would-be supporters and helped cost Democrats their majority in the House of Representatives.
 
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