Because I knew our media would give me a short, objective, non-judgmental response this morning.
That is accurate. No pinocchios. It is true, if the Republicans deport 12 million people, that will make more housing units available for purchase or rental. That actually is a kind of housing proposal.
Q: What should we do about housing.
A: Don’t.
Well apart from the idea of deporting millions of people being morally fucked up Nazi shit, removing a few million people from the workforce would come with a few drawbacks, like nobody to fix your nice new cheaper flat, no food in the stores and no one to collect your garbage.
But then Trump and Vance and their fans are a bunch of racists, and racists don’t like to think.
Deporting people doesn’t solve a housing problem, it just shifts it to a different part of the world. And since the economy is global, that still affects us, just in different ways.
And as pointed out, it creates a labor shortage. Without immigration, the US population will not grow, and that leaves a smaller workforce with a greater share of retirees. The housing problem would probably get worse with fewer builders around.
There’s a housing problem because slumlords are buying up properties to rent out as Air B&Bs, because unfettered capitalism.
Alabama not too long ago, passed an anti-immigration law. It was a disaster.
If I remember correctly, mostly what happened is that undocumented immigrants just moved out of Alabama.
It’s not enforced any more either.
Most of the bill was unconstitutional and not enforceable.
By the time the courts ruled, Alabama wasn’t all that interested in enforcing it anyway.
@ #4: It’s not just AirB&Bs, there’s a huge amount of activity from Private Equity landlords buying up single family homes to rent out long-term too – both existing homes and new build-to-rent properties.
Doesn’t matter. The media has dubbed Vance the winner while “Coach” looked nebbish and accommodating.
Trump will win. Doesn’t matter if Harris wins the popular vote, his army of loyal election officials and the SCOTUS will give him the presidency. Then the Dems, who worship the system and the process, will hand power to a murderous fascist because that’s what the rule say and we must always obey the rules. “We can only hope that the people vote him out next election,” they’ll say.
When Trumps wins, there aren’t going to be any more elections.
@7
I would encourage people to please for FSM’s sake vote anyway, even if you think the Dems are doomed, because (just for starters) I’m one of the people who stands to get killed if Trump gets in again.
As someone in the midst of trying to sell a house, I’ve been getting all these requests to buy it, sight unseen, from mysterious people who don’t seem to care about the state of the house. I know what they want to do: they want to buy it and rent it out to their personal profit.
I’m not selling it to these wanna-be slumlords.
I’m going to fly off to Seattle in a week and a half to make arrangements with a realtor to try and sell if to a real human being who wants to live in it.
I was looking to buy a house for the last couple years. I’ve jumped on several of them right away, within hours of then coming in the market. Only to have them sell before I could see them. On 2 or 3 occasions, literally as I was driving to see them.
I suspect they were all bought by financial firms that just wanted to add $100,000 or so to the price and just list them again. The way the market was going they’d just sell six months later. I saw some places I was initially interested in had a history like that. Some mysteriously doubled in value from one month to the next.
@9 Some of the mysterious people might be planning to cover the floors with gray fake wood, spray the brick black and resell at a profit.
Walz was WAAAAY to gentlemanly when he should have been hammering Vance about Trump’s incessant stupid grifting, up to and including his latest grift — hawking fake-ass Swiss watches as a money-laundering scheme. Politely discussing “the issues” with con-men and bullshitters only gives them a platform to pretend they’re Serious People.
It is that at the least.
A lot of the people we deport are young people brought to the USA when they were little kids.
They don’t speak their former language very well or sometimes not at all.
They are also very Americanized to the point that they don’t know their former “native” culture at all.
Then they get dumped back to a country where they might speak broken Spanish or whatever if at all, don’t understand the culture, and don’t know anyone.
It doesn’t work. At best they end up being a problem for whatever country they get deported to.
I’ve heard of Korean-American kids, who don’t speak Korean getting sent back to Korea.
You could multiply this by a million to get an idea of what could happen.
Colbert’s post Veep (vs) Veep Debate interview with Chris Hayes here – J.D. Vance’s Most Audacious Debate Lie: “Donald Trump Saved Obamacare” (7 mins 7 secs) plus here – J.D. Vance “Is Not Ready To Be President Of The United States” – Chris Hayes (5 mins) as well as here – We’re In Treacherous Times On The International Scene – Chris Hayes (under 5 mins long) was intresting and made some rather good points I think esp regarding Vance’s blatant gaslighting. Just watched on late nght TV here in Oz.
StevoR @ 14
We (by which I mean Americans) are at the point where the media is mostly useless, and we must rely on satirical late show hosts (Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Myers, Jon Stewart and that British guy) to elaborate on what is really taking place.
Akira MacKenzie @7: Veep debates really don’t matter. Voter registration by young women has been unusually high. Including in the swing states. And Dems have a much better GOTV effort than the GQPs. My biggest worry is people displaced by floods not being able or willing to vote (I am writing to voters in North Carolina, and I have plenty of addresses in Asheville). There is a good chance for Harris to win the EC, maybe even better than Biden in 2020. But we must all do our part. The bigger the popular vote difference the less willing the SC will be to cheat.
Thank you. That’s a very decent thing to do.
In my neck of the woods a rule was instituted that enables municipalities to enforce that you can only buy a house if you’re going to live in it; you’re not allowed to rent it out for the first 3-5 years, with very few exceptions. And a good thing too. I’ve seen apartments like mine rented out for around three times what I paid for my mortgage. That is shamelessly taking advantage of people.
Let’s be real:
No one is going to be deported, not least because a lot of the people the Trump regime plans to “deport” are natural-born US citizens. A major failure of both the media and Governor Walz last night was in their not pointing that part of the Trump plan out- you cannot “deport” people who were born here. That’s not what the Trump plan is.
Rather, the plan is to round up tens of millions of people, stick them in camps, and use them for forced labor. Those unable to work will be quietly shuffled off somewhere out of sight, where the regime will “forget” to provide for their most basic human needs until they no longer have any needs, at which point they’ll be dumped en masse into unmarked mass graves.
Perhaps the Trump will regime will use their new slave labor force to build more houses, maybe even on top of the mass graves, but they’ll immediately be sold off to equity companies who will rent (and rent only) them at a premium.
That’s the Trump plan to fix housing. If it seems like that has nothing to do with any actual problem, well, that’s because it doesn’t have anything with fixing any actual problem. It’s all about genocide.
No. 18: That kind of hysterical rhetoric helps nobody. I yield to no one in my disdain for Trump and his enablers, but there is no reason to think there will be camps, genocide, or or unmarked mass graves. For the love of all that is holy, take a valium and calm down. Even if he tried, that would be too much even for his packed Supreme Court to swallow. Sheesh.
@9. Pz Myers. I’m only joking a little bit about the house here. I have a sister and her husband who are looking to buy a house. They live in King County and want to start family but can’t find a home. They rent and have somewhat good jobs (not enough to buy an affordable home in King county obviously). Once you find a realtor, make us aware as soon as possible so I can pass the info to my sister. What a world in where an atheist activist I followed since I was young can list a house so close to where my family lives.
@19. Yeah I agree, it won’t be that extreme. However, I think a second Trump administration will be far worse than his first, especially with the cronies he has. He used to at least have some mainstream conservatives in his cabinet. The second one will have far-right activists, actual anti-semites, racists, technocrats, online personalities, fundie Christians, conspiracy theorists, science deniers, etc. with no establishment Republican in sight. And if Trump gains a trifecta, there will even less balances to his impulses or attempts to stifle his critics, seeing as most of the GOP is a cult of personality now and are little more than stormtroopers for his bidding now.
Here is where I’m mostly concerned about: that a second Trump administration will erode the country enough that the foundations will be laid for the next psychopathic, Trumpian and actual intelligent Republican president that can potentially be even worse than Trump. Condition the masses to accept that far-right reich talking points are normal and legitimate political policies for a major party (and saying otherwise is biased) while making the sane opposition look like they just as bad or extreme if not more. The media is already doing that for Trump, once a clever GOPer who knows how to play with the media takes advantage, we will see bad things. Not now but later. And later will be coming sooner than you expect if Trump wins.
@ awomanofnoimportance, #19
You’re right. There’s no reason, apart from the rhetoric of the Trump camp, the plans the Trump camp has publicly laid out, the lessons of history, and the eagerness of the general public (more than 60% of whom apparently approve of “mass deportation,” according to a recent poll) to rid this country of “invaders.” Certainly, the United States of America has never, ever engaged in similar enterprises.
I mean, it’s not like anyone from the Trump campaign has been regularly engaging in blood libel, or anything. Well, save for the two at the top of ticket, and all their advisors, that is. But other than those few, and the millions of bloodthirsty cultists who will happily kill or die for Donald Trump, there’s absolutely no one who’d do anything as crass as mass murder.
Again, that is. We mustn’t allow the fact that the Trump administration (something officials admitted doing) deliberately encouraged the spread of Covid-19 in the US general population in hopes of using it as a pretext to cancel the 2020 election, ultimately resulting in the deaths of over a million people in this country alone, color our thinking in this matter! Surely they’ve gotten all the murder out of their systems by now, right?
But other than those facts, you’re correct.
Yes yes, I’m sure the man who idolizes Andrew Jackson and Adolf Hitler will scrupulously obey any and all mild tut-tuttings of his 6 fanatically-loyal lapdogs on the Supreme Court.
Also, on a more personal note…
…and I really can’t stress this enough…
…you can just fuck aaaaaaallllll the way off. Like, if you can still see the light of the Milky Way, please keep on fuckin’ off, because you haven’t fucked off far enough yet.
The Trump admin’s policies during the early pandemic are estimated as having killed over 300,000 people. He had PPE and medical supplies to cities in blue states blockaded by federal agents FFS. There is a mass grave in Central Park, and you can bet he contributed to the number of corpses in it.
Don’t anyone dare tell me that this wasn’t genocide. Don’t anyone dare tell me it couldn’t escalate further. Don’t anyone dare tell me that he wouldn’t do it again.
@9: PZ Myers
Odds are that most, if not all, those offers to buy sight unseen are from flippers offering well under market value in order to turn a quick profit after a giving the property a lick of paint.
Selling a house can be very stressful and I’m sure there are plenty of people ready to take advantage of that by making a lowball offer in exchange for a frictionless sale.
tallora
I will dare to tell you it isn’t genocide, because those who died were not of a national, racial, religious, or ethnic group. Yes, what he did killed people who he perceived as being of a different political party to him and that is awful, terrible appalling, but it is not genocide.
PZ I hope you can find a sympathetic realtor. We tried a couple of estate agents before we found the one who sold our last place to a young couple. We were surprised how many offers we got from cash buyers as the house didn’t have it’s own parking, was on an urban clearway ie you couldn’t park there during morning or evening rush hour, and was at the bottom end of the market for it’s size with no interesting features. We realised they were clearly trying to buy-to-let, which we didn’t want to benefit from, but even fourteen years ago it was a problem in the UK too, and its only got worse.
Vucodlak, No. 22: OK, I was wrong about you. You need to take two valium and calm down; maybe with a nice warm bath and a cup of tea.
If Chicken Little says that the sky is falling long enough, eventually Chicken Little will be right and the sky really will fall. Every now and then, a genuine Hitler really does come along and kill a lot of people. It’s not really likely because of all the checks and balances we have specifically designed to limit the amount of damage a Hitler can do, but I can’t rule out to a 100% certainty that you may be right.
However, you have the opposite problem, which is the Boy who Cried Wolf. Your totally outlandish predictions simply make it difficult to talk to people about all of the damage a Trump administration actually is likely to do, because they hear your hysterical claims and say, “Oh, that’s just Trump Derangement Syndrome talking.”
I have zero interest in finding out which of us is right. I hope with every fiber of my being that Trump gets his butt kicked in November. If he is re-elected, life will be harder for lots of people and it will be a long, miserable four years. I just sent the Harris campaign a $10,000 check to reduce the odds of it happening. But camps? Genocide? Unmarked masked graves? Dude, chill.
@18 There are plenty of cases where American citizens were seized at internal immigration checkpoints and sent out of the country because ICE refused to acknowledge the documents they had as proof of citizenship because the person was the wrong color. Those iron-clad American rights become illusory once they spring the catch-22 that they say you’re not a citizen and thus don’t have those rights.
@27 my point being that it is certainly possible to set up “checkpoints” to execute mass deportations of people who are really American citizens. Immigration agents have never been too concerned about following the law.
The definition of genocide is more complex than being presented here and there is significant debate among genocide scholars about the best definition. The definition used by Jazzlet is reasonable given it’s the official UN definition…but it is far from ideal. It was codified in 1948, which is probably why it does not include sexual minorities in the definition even though they were subjected to the same genocidal intent as Jews and Romani during the Holocaust, the triggering event for the term. I would suggest that the rhetoric used by Trump and the GOP is very much genocidal towards transgender people even if it does not meet the UN definition.
Raphael Lemkin’s original concept defined genocide as ‘the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups’ — note how broad ‘national groups’ is, basically he was including any targeted group. The 1948 UN convention chose to exclude political groups and many scholars have pointed out how easy this has made it for perpetrators of genocide to cover their actions by redefining targets as political or military enemies. There is an example of this playing out right now.
I would suggest that the deficiencies of the UN definition arise from the need to find political acceptance across a broad range of nations, necessary and important yes, but it should be seen for what it is: the most expedient definition in the geopolitical landscape of eighty years ago.
And it is not that hyperbolic to talk about American internment camps. America has a long history of building such camps for First Nations people during the westward expansion, for Filipinos in the Phillipine-American War, for German descendants in WW1, for Japanese, Italian, and German descendants in WW2, for ‘political dissidents’ in the 1950s (built but fortunately never used for that purpose), for prisoners in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, and for border immigrants (with deliberate separation of families, i.e. genocide) as recently as Trump’s presidental term.
I’m only a second-generation natural-born US citizen — all four grandparents through Ellis Island — so I’m pro-immigration. <sarcasm> Otherwise, maybe all the white people can just go back where we came from, right? </sarcasm>
I can name someone else who is also a second-generation natural-born US citizen (grandfather — undocumented draft-dodger, I might add — from Germany, grandmother from Ireland). He’s… umm… not pro-immigration. (And as far as elitism goes: He has an Ivy League degree; so does his running mate. The other ticket: an HBCU and a state university.)
@26: awomanofnoimportance
vucodlak has clearly outlined how their concerns are justified both through historical precedent and Trump’s directly stated plans.
I think you need to take a good, hard look the mirror and ask yourself why instead of concluding that just because Trump’s idiotic supporters dismiss rational fears as “Trump Derangement Syndrome” doesn’t mean we should be quiet about it, you’re telling someone who should be your ally to sit down and shut up.
No doubt CBS treated the two housing proposals as equally serious and valid.
@26) awomanofnoimportance wrote: “I just sent the Harris campaign a $10,000 check”
How did you get around the $3,300 contribution limit for individuals?
I remember when that “progressive” Jimmy Dore also bleated about how Donald Trump’s presidency wouldn’t be so bad because blah, blah and blah back in 2016. Then right afterwards he committed fully to the right-wing bubble.
Sorry “ms” agrifteroflackingintelligence, didn’t fall for that eight years ago, won’t fall for it now.
Huh. I dont think that last line was necessary but I also don’t agree with awomanofnoimportance’s stanmce here. I don’t think its “crying wolf” or “Trump derangment syndorme”* to point out the threats and worst case scenarios here given Trump’s record. Trump did do huge harm and did indeed end up kiling may inhis first term adn his threats and potential for thesecond, well, look around, think.
.* A term the reichwing cycnicallyand inaptly stole fromthos ewho pointe dout tehmuch more real Obama derangement syndrome. Recal all the lies the reich told about Obama eg Jade Helm and how none of that happened when Obama was POTUS or when he left office? Now compar eand contrast with trump whand say jan 6th and what he did and tried to do.. I dunno about Mental-illnessing the fears and concerns but there’s clearly more casue for concern given Trump’s character and action than Obama
Ridana, No. 33: By using political action committees (PACS). The law is that a person can only donate $3,300 directly to a campaign. However, there is no limit on donations to political action committees, and every candidate has them. So, if you want to donate a million dollars (assuming you have a million dollars), you donate it to the PAC rather than to the campaign. The PAC then spends it to get the candidate elected. Google “Harris PAC” and you’ll find a few of them.
As with so many other things, campaign finance laws are more about political theater than they are about actually solving problems.
@awomanofimportance:
Hate to pile on – but Trump will absolutely be reestablishing Schedule F on day one of his new regime if he’s reelected. That will allow him to fire basically anyone in government responsible for setting policy (which could include anyone from just SESers to GS-13s or even GS-12s by some reckonings.) With the entire upper echelons of government agencies reduced to zilch he’ll fill them with his sycophants who’ll just enact the policies laid out in Project 2025. Nothing in that text is impossible for a unitary executive to accomplish.
Mark, No. 31, Augustus No. 34, and StevoR, No. 35: While I think these apocalyptic predictions are not going to happen, I already did acknowledge the possibility that they might. However, what I really want is to avoid the issue altogether by ensuring that Trump isn’t elected. And you don’t win elections by convincing the swing voters who actually decide the election that you’re nuts.
The United States has the political system that it has (a system in which I have been involved at the national level since 1976). Like it or not (and I frequently don’t), that is the system we have to work within. And under that system, the presidency is going to be decided by a few swing voters in a few swing states. They need to see the Democrats as the voice of sweet reason; the alternative to Trump’s manchild tantrums. If they conclude that both sides are crazy, we’re toast. So, even if I agreed with Vucodlak’s predictions, my strong advice would be to keep quiet about them because they will cost us votes. It costs us nothing politically to not say them in public, and potentially costs us a great deal if we do. If, God forbid, Trump is elected, we’ll have no choice but to deal with it then.
There are times when the emotionally satisfying thing isn’t the politically savvy thing. This is one of them.
Okay, clarifying and expanding #35.
Huh. I don’t think that last line of #34 was necessary and I don’t think awomanofnoimportance deserved that but I also don’t agree with her stance here – or her condescedning attack on vucodlak either.
I don’t think its “crying wolf” or “Trump derangment syndorme”* to point out the threats and worst case scenarios here given Trump’s record. Trump did do huge harm and did indeed end up killing many tens of thousands (more!) in his first term and his threats and potential for the second, well, look around, think. Vucodlak made some excellent points in their #22.
There’s a spectrum of views on how bad a second Trump will be.
What’s the best case scenario for a second Trump term? Still pretty bad as Trump pushes the country to reichwing, oversees massive environmental and social damage, alters the powers of the POTUS and SCOTUS permanently, sets the USA back.. how far? Ukraine and Gaza get genocided, likely other nations in Europe, allof theWest bank also gets annexed and maybe large southern Lebanon too. The USA weakens its alliances badly with the USA turning isolationst and enabling Putin & China to have far stronger infuences and power globally. Lots of refuggeees die, sveral genocides take place -foreign and domestic. The USA gets more racist, more xenophobic and crueller. If we’re lucky there’s önly”mass deportations and internal displacent of left-leaning people, feminists, trans and queer people from red states to blue. In some states there’s opposition and enough hold on to some rights to stop the USA from outright genocide?
.
Is that too optimistic? Too pessimistic? I dunno. I really don’t want to find out.
Its okay to argue that maybe it won’t be as bad as the very worst case scenarios but its definitely not correct in my view to completely deny that the very worst case scenarios – the USA going full fascist or Christianist White Supremacist, or collapsing into Civil War – are disturbingly plausible even likely.
I understand why people ar eliterally infear of their lives here. I’m stressing abadly about this and I’m the world’s biggets ocean away from the USA. Okay, half that ocean and half my continent for the case of Hawaii.
I don’t think telling people to just chill and take a valium or however many is helpfulat all as wellas being patronising A F. People have very good reason to be very worried here. Yes, don’t panic, don’t assume the worst but fer fuck’s sake don’t assume the best either. Especially, if you are relatively privileged and ar eignoring what a Trump presidency will mean for those who aren’t.
The left generally needs to unite and work t gether tomake sure Kamala Harris gets in and Trumpism is stopped. That needs to be our main priority.
A term the reichwing cynically and inaptly stole from those who pointed out the much more real Obama derangement syndrome. Recal all the lies the reichwing told about Obama (eg theJade Helm Conspiracy) and how none of that happened when Obama was POTUS or when he left office? Now compare and contrast with Trump and say Jan 6th and what he did and tried to do.. I dunno about “Mental-illnessing” the fears and concerns but there’s clearly more casue for concern given Trump’s character and action than Obama. It was “deranged” (metaphorically?) to think Obama was secretly Muslim and commin’t’git ya guns!!!1ty!! To think he was plotting a coup or puppet-mastering Biden and that Michele Obama was really a man ad nauseam. Knowing that Trump is a vile racist who is willing to use Hitlerian language, a blatant misogynist rapist, a wanna be dictator based on the solid evidence of so very much he’s said and done over the years including recently is a whole different thing and entirely NON-deranged.
@38. awomanofnoimportance : I see where youare coming from.
Obvs we don’t want to come across as “nuts” so we use evidence and I see why youwant toavioid what could seem like hyperbole but I also don’t think we should downplay the piotential and issues and possibilities even the worst case ones which as you note may actually occur. Ithink we should warn people about the worst things and not keep quiet Adding the reasons for we think X because and providing the evidnec efor it which I think I and Vucodlak among others have done.I don’t think downplaying how bad Trump could be is a wise idea.
I also really don’t think you’re condescending approach telling Vucodlak to take valiums “:”don’t worry” and basically shut up is at all helpful here.
[kibitzing]
“Mark, No. 31, Augustus No. 34, and StevoR, No. 35: While I think these apocalyptic predictions are not going to happen, I already did acknowledge the possibility that they might.”
— Obvs we don’t want to come across as “nuts” so we use evidence and I see why youwant toavioid what could seem like hyperbole but I also don’t think we should downplay the piotential and issues and possibilities even the worst case ones which as you note may actually occur. —
&
“There are times when the emotionally satisfying thing isn’t the politically savvy thing. This is one of them.”
— I also really don’t think you’re condescending approach telling Vucodlak to take valiums “:”don’t worry” and basically shut up is at all helpful here. —
—
(I notice these things)
@ ^ John Morales : I don’t.. My typos especially sorry folks.
Um, I’m actually not quote sure what the point of the above post of quotes there is sorry.