• BynarsAreOk [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    Person earning 7 figures just to tell some clowns about made up fake shit predicting if the chips in the casino will fall face up or down is now also having an opinion on PoLiTiCs.

    • Juice [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      Joe Biden: I don’t want to be president anymore

      Overpaid JPMC sicko: Joe Biden doesn’t want to be president anymore

      Business Insider: soypoint-1 soypoint-2

  • Red_Sunshine_Over_Florida [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    If Biden drops out in the early primaries, it would complete this 4-year farcical play he’s been doing where he tries to be the dollar-store brand LBJ. The last act involves retiring following your complete alienation of the youth vote over a foreign policy issue they overwhelmingly oppose you on.

  • JohnBrownsBussy2 [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    At this point, it would probably be a major boon to the Democrats, since Biden polls incredibly poorly compared to a generic Democrat (as long as they pick someone other than Kamala or Gavin Newsom).

    • Comp4 [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      Im not really “that” tuned into US politics. Are there really any democrat politicians people are into at the moment ?

      • Justice@lemmygrad.ml
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        10 months ago

        Sinc Oct when all the “progressive” Democrats collectively smashed their “support genocide” buttons, no, not really.

        The only democrat at the federal level qualified as this point, in my view, is Tlaib. I know others have since joined her, but I consider anyone who wasn’t IMMEDIATELY against Israel’s genocide to be basically dead to me forever… on the political stage anyway. Some random dipshit can learn and change their mind, ok. But politicians should have already known and been anti Israel before Oct. So, whatever, fuck em all. For the rest of my life, or until Palestine is free, I’ll be looking at each candidate and it they take money from AIPAC or express any support for Israel, not voting for them. If that means writing in or not voting, ok. The dems can get my vote if they value it. But they gotta give up genocide and that means give up Israel.

      • CommunistBear [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        10 months ago

        Unironically Pritzker is someone to watch out for although imo not this election cycle. Of the democrat governors, I’ve seen more positive and less negative from him. Motherfucker got me legal weed and a paid vacation. That’s powerful energy going into the future

          • star_wraith [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            10 months ago

            I have met more than one rich person IRL who gets what’s going on and understands how to actually keep capitalism running. Weirdly it’s the CEOs and people who have inherited vast sums (like Pritzker) that are the sharpest on this. Entrepreneurs and business owners are completely off the deep end though, they all think they’re characters in an Ayn Rand novel.

            If I was a soulless billionaire I would be pushing for social democracy tout court.

        • star_wraith [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          10 months ago

          I don’t want to say I “like” Pritzker, but I’m not sure I have the right words for it. He’s definitely made me ask myself which is better: a “leftist” politician like AOC or Bernie who won’t even try to get anything done (or just not very good at getting things done; to me AOC is the former or Bernie is the later), or a more centrist lib like Pritzker who at least can be funny and also an asshole who can actually get shit done, even if it’s just meager improvements.

    • buh [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      Biden polls incredibly poorly compared to a generic Democrat (as long as they pick someone other than Kamala or Gavin Newsom).

      so basically the concept of a generic democrat but not any particular generic democrat?

            • macerated_baby_presidents [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              10 months ago

              Been talking to socialist alternative about this recently. I think that since bourgeois politicians are in the end only going to do things businesses want, they prefer to run on bullshit over lying when possible. So they’re “a President you could have a beer with”, not the other guy, etc. They try not to make specific promises, in my local elections half the time they don’t even bother putting together a policy platform until they’re elected. When they are dumb enough to make a specific claim, they obfuscate and say it’s some other politician’s fault the thing didn’t get done and they’re “in talks” about it, or they have to try and gaslight everyone that they meant $2000 total instead of $2000 checks, or whatever. People remember that stuff; there’s a limited amount of lying you get before you lose re-election to the other party (representing a different slice of capital).

              The thing SAlt really liked about Bernie is that he made Medicare For All more important than the guy himself. Every time he got up on stage he talked about it and if elected he might have even tried to do it*. I think there is some value to getting specific policy proposals in the public eye. Everybody’s been calling for “police reform”, whatever that means, for the better part of a century. But once people started to say “defund the police” - literally decrease the police department budget - the gloves came off and we got a tremendous backlash from the bourgeois parties. It’s too specific. In a few decades they’ll probably be renaming police departments to Department of Resident Health and Wellness and calling it defund, but for now candidates who say they support defunding actually mostly mean it, voters believe that they mean it, and so the rest are forced to tell you straight that they won’t defund. In Chicago Lightfoot ran on “police reform”, but Johnson did not run on defunding the police and strenuously tried to avoid talking about it.

              * no enforcement mechanism obviously

                • macerated_baby_presidents [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  10 months ago

                  I mean there’d be no enforcement mechanism to make President Bernie do M4A, once he’s in office he can do whatever. You could maybe theoretically have an accountable politician in a bourgeois democracy if their entire campaign apparatus was done by a worker’s party, and if they did bad stuff in office the party would guarantee that they would not be reelected. But dubious on a national level or with term limits - think of all the stuff the lame duck presidents do. Right now the social democrats have their own campaigns that get support from a bunch of different orgs, so when DSA helps elect a promising politician they can generally just fuck off, break all their promises to the org, and get reelected on their own as an incumbent.

  • macerated_baby_presidents [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    important to note that this is basically a “just for fun” section, dunno why BI is picking it up. source

    Market Strategist Byron Wien passed away last year at the age of 90. For over 30 years whether at Morgan Stanley or Blackstone, Byron published a top ten list of surprises for the following year. I never read any of the articles that kept score on how well Byron’s predictions did since that’s not the point. They were an exercise in thinking against the grain about what might happen in an industry dominated by consensus. In Byron’s honor, for one time only, here’s my list of top ten possible surprises for 2024.

    neat newsletter. I have a soft spot for capitalists who nevertheless face economic motivation to be truthful. You can get some nice stuff reading from a Marxist perspective and at the same time laugh at them complaining that the EU has been “underspending” (<2% GDP) on war.

    Tidbits (emphasis mine):

    We also expect wage inflation to decline based on the decline in advertised wages (second chart); observed declines in temporary help, manufacturing and overtime hours worked, unit labor costs, the “job switcher vs job stayer” premium, the share of private industries with rising employment and the voluntary quits rate; and rising female labor force participation. While negotiated pay raises are still at peak levels, union workers are only 7% of the workforce, below the 20%-30% range which prevailed during the 1970’s.

    new wave of union militancy starting to show up in the data. fuck yeah

    The problem for the US is the starting point; every round of fiscal stimulus brings the US one step closer to debt unsustainability. I don’t think we’re there otherwise we wouldn’t recommend long duration US government bonds. We also wrote last year on how there has been no material change in the dollar’s role as reserve currency.

    to give accurate financial advice, you have to recognize that the US national debt doesn’t really matter much. JPMC also recognizes as realistic possibilities

    • a wealth tax
    • further pushback against pharmaceutical capital in the form of Medicare negotiation and stuff.

    Estimates of US household excess savings

    now that’s a trendline, check out this graph. something funny will happen when it hits 0

    China’s challenge stems from misallocated investment in real estate rather than from excess industrial capacity. Its home ownership rate peaked at ~90% and 20% of Chinese households own more than one home.

    China’s 430 square feet of housing stock per capita is double the levels in Europe or Japan (D. Gros/Project Syndicate)

    66% of US households own the home they live in. Whole section is interesting. Bigger Chinese households?

    • Sushi_Desires [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      That’s also true, maybe he will bleed from both eyes at once during the debates this time. I was astonished at the reversal (recovery) of his health once the stress of the campaign had ended. No way his body can withstand whatever racehorse adrenaline/ drag racing nitrous concoction they were pumping him full of at his appearances last cycle

    • fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de
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      10 months ago

      It’s pretty much a made up story. Who knows where this guy said this thing and in what context.

      “Yeah biden might withdraw, yeah Godzilla might terrorise ny.”

  • SerLava [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    biden-supervised Hey listen Jack, we in the administration, has, I have… I have information that will lead to, frankly, the arrest of uh ah

      • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.net
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        10 months ago

        Think about it, genocide and student loans are not gonna sway boomers or Gen Xers one way or the other

        Trump’s legal battles are gonna bog his campaign down and many of his supporters don’t trust voting because of his “2020 steal” narrative

        Housing prices and the line are up which means everyone in the top 30% income percentile who isn’t online adores Biden

        Biden will probably win with a slightly larger margin than last time

          • YearOfTheCommieDesktop [they/them]@hexbear.net
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            10 months ago

            he certainly isn’t going to ride in on a populist wave but I’m not convinced he’ll lose either. People not knowing or caring about his pitiful policies is a double edged sword, they don’t give a shit enough to know that his policies are terrible.

            Not doing anything good is still better to most people than actively making things worse (not that biden isn’t doing that, but it doesn’t get covered like it did under trump), and frankly there’s gotta be a contingent that just doesn’t want to hear the media go back to full on trump derangement syndrome round-the-clock coverage.

          • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.net
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            10 months ago

            I mean that’s all true, but only American leftists care about that stuff, the vast plurality of the population are totally disengaged from politics and won’t vote anyway, so none of the facts you mentioned matter to them

            The actual freaks who vote like the fact Biden is a fascist, of course they don’t use that word but to them Biden is “tough on crime”, “tough on the Arabs/muslims terrorists”, “doesn’t take shit from the Kremlin Republicans”

            And the the economy is doing good (line is up and housing is expensive), “the New York Times said so”

            Old dude is gonna win it outright, it’s 2004

              • YearOfTheCommieDesktop [they/them]@hexbear.net
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                10 months ago

                anecdotally I do know some people who’ve finally moved past “but if you don’t voot blue you’re voting for trump” in the past year or so. Not a ton, but a couple, and they aren’t necessarily hardcore leftists either just done with genocide joe’s shit

                • Adkml [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  10 months ago

                  After decades of constituting the majority of voters, Baby Boomers and members of the Silent Generation made up less than half of the electorate in 2020 (44%), falling below the 52% they constituted in both 2016 and 2018. Gen Z and Millennial voters favored Biden over Trump by margins of about 20 points, while Gen Xers and Boomers were more evenly split in their preferences. Gen Z voters, those ages 23 and younger, constituted 8% of the electorate, while Millennials and Gen Xers made up 47% of 2020 voters.

                  Biden barely won and a big part of it was record voter turnout from younger voters

                  The narrative that young people don’t vote fell flat on its face in 2020

                  If by youth vote you mean Gen z yea still not great, and not to fall for the trap of saying millenials are young but those groups everybody scoofs at make up the majority of voters now.

                • SerLava [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  10 months ago

                  The youth vote might not matter, but youth support does. They contribute labor to these campaigns that would cost incredible amounts if the DNC had to pay people.

          • RonPaulyShore [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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            10 months ago

            Nah. Biden’s numbers have returned to pre Oct 7 levels. The corporate donors and the new suburban members of Biden’s coalition don’t care about genocide; his defense of Israeli terror probably redounds to his benefit. The economy is working for the people the economy is supposed to work for, inflation has slowed, and the fed will ease rates in the coming year, spurring sentiment and allowing young people into homes. The student loan policy has discharged billions, and income driven repayment frees kids from snowballing debt. Labor participation is up, labor is crushing w public polling, labor is winning concessions. No one remembers about Biden and the railroad, but they will see him again and again in ad spots standing w the auto workers. He is hawkish on the border, which dampens one of the few possible salient conservative talking points (his position is also quite popular). Bidens serious mistake was arguably, if one squinted, his most progressive – fleeing Afghanistan.

            Trump has a hard ceiling and little room to grow. His refusal to accept the 2020 results, along with self destructive culture war overreach, led Republicans to the worst midterm showing in modern history. Both remain albatrosses on the party’s neck. Referenda on abortion restrictions have lost literally everywhere, and the issue will mobilize otherwise unenthusiastic dems in November. Trump, avoiding news cycles thanks anemic Republican challengers and geopolitical drama, will again become the center of national attention, and remind the electorate of how tired it is of him. He is looking at serious criminal cases, which are seen as legitimate (at least outside of the New York state one), and which touch on serious issues of constitutional order and democratic values. The liberal media is staunchly against him, and will use their networks to underscore Trump as existential threat. He very well could be jailed, reducing enthusiasm among sober conservatives.

            Dems have won the last three election cycles. Hillary is not on the menu, Trump is a known quantity and is deeply disliked, and the current legal cases, unlike the Mueller matter, are compelling and understandable and are being prosecuted and undertaken by adversarial institutions. Unless the economy tanks (not impossible surely, given some global shock) this is going to be a slim but comfortable Dem W.

            Everything else is wishcasting, hoping you can dunk on libs for not listening, but there will be no karma at the ballot box; the libs never needed you.

        • BurgerPunk [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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          10 months ago

          Biden will probably win with a slightly larger margin than last time

          Big doubt there.

          I don’t think its possible to call this election at the moment, but i do doubt he does better than in 2020. It’ll be interesting to see what the turn out is compared to 2020 as well. I wouldn’t be suprised if its lower on both sides

          • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.net
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            10 months ago

            Definitely lower turnout on both sides but I think biden will hold on to his margins in total

            The coming dem campaign against Arab Americans and Muslims in general will convert some reactionaries who soured on Trump the last 4 years, while Trump will still be talking about the “steal” and court minutiae

            • BurgerPunk [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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              10 months ago

              That sounds more realistic to me. Biden could win and he could hold his margins. I just doubt he does better, if he does win. I agree that overall the “steal” and court shit aren’t great angles for Trump to maintain appeal to the Republican party as a whole. I’m not sure they’ll pick up the swing reactionaries though

        • YearOfTheCommieDesktop [they/them]@hexbear.net
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          10 months ago

          I’m not sure I exactly disagree with you but the wildcard here might be further inflation driven by supply chain disruption in the red sea… (whether it’s real or just companies seizing on disruption to price gouge), or other escalation in the middle east leading the US to get directly involved or severely embarassed

          Also people who aren’t in the top 30% of income do absolutely still vote. At lower rates sure, but they do vote. in major elections turnout doesn’t go below 50% until you get to severe poverty levels of income

        • Adkml [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          10 months ago

          Anythings possible and I’m not gonna pretend logical analysis is even meaningful when it comes to electoralism

          That being said, he barely won last time and has worked hard to piss off union members, environmentalists, and anybody who is against genocide while completely failing to do anything about roe or student debts.

          I don’t see how he’s picked up any new voters since barely winning and I’m sure there’s millions of people who just vote for whoever isn’t rhe incumbent since they didn’t get rich in the last 4 years.

        • Great_Leader_Is_Dead [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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          10 months ago

          Yeah I’ve had similar thoughts and gotten similar pushback from people on here. Biden is polling bad rn cuz of general bad vibes, but the demos who actually turn out to vote are still comfortable with the status quo, and I think a lot of the angrier young people will get scared back into backing the blue once the election is closer and the media starts scare mongering about Trump again. Trump diehards are still gonna diehard but I think his support among the broader right is wavering a bit.

          • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.net
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            10 months ago

            It will tho, Trump’s hogs want racial animus and anti-lib owning, courtroom drama is for Sorkin fans

            Courtroom sketches and liberal pudents on TV controlling the output of information from the court is gonna bore the hogs to tears and again bog his campaign down

    • FALGSConaut [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      It’s possible, but anything can happen before November. I’m not bothering to make any (real) predictions until like a week before the election, though I am hoping the year of four presidents ends up happening