President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

Remember when we had presidents who did care?

Quaint time.

 

Correct.

The Republican Party has been co-opted by a bunch of hot-taking DJs and their callers, who always know what play coach shoulda called.

 

Say you are one of the millions of Americans who work for a major corporation. It could be Apple or Amazon or Walmart or Exxon or Disney. You could be an engineer or a warehouse worker or a sales clerk or a gas station attendant or a person who dresses up in a Mickey Mouse costume. Here is the big picture of the economy, as it pertains to you: In the past decade, the value of major American stocks has more than doubled. The people who invest in your company have made great gains. Corporate profits are high. The average CEO of a major American company makes, by one measure, 347 times the salary of the average worker. Forty years ago, they made around 30 times your salary. During that same period of time, your wages have stayed essentially flat, even as your productivity at work has greatly increased.

Everyone involved in your company is making money except for you, the worker. ...

So here’s a much more straightforward idea: Share the profits. Your company makes a certain amount of profit every year. Take a percentage of that and give it to the workers. A hefty percentage. When your company has a good year, you get a substantial bonus. This bonus is not subject to the whims of your boss, or the predations of short-selling hedge funds targeting your stock price. Is a direct percentage of profits. And that percentage is large enough to make a meaningful financial impact for the average worker. This is a true, direct, alignment of economic interests between company and employee.

Corporate executives and investors may object that peeling off a chunk of profits for employees will hurt the growth of the stock price. Good. This sort of profit sharing is nothing but a realignment of the flow of money to make it more fair. Corporate executives and investors themselves do little else but peel off their own chunk of corporate earnings every year, and do everything they can to insulate that stream of money from the ups and downs of the business cycle. I can assure you that simple profit sharing for workers is far more fair than the way your CEO gets paid. If corporate executives and investors had spent the past 40 years ensuring that your wages kept pace with the growth of the company and the economy as a whole, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. They didn’t. Instead, they looked out for themselves, and got rich, while you did not. Forced profit sharing is a basic way to begin to remedy this. It’s not as good as, say, forcibly removing 60% of the wealth of the top 1% and redistributing it downwards. But it’s a start.

http://splinternews.com/share-the-profits-1818654245

 

Trump went on Twitter about an hour ago to rescind the invitation to the Warriors to visit the White House. If his Presidency ends this ridiculous tradition, it will have done some small service to its country.

 

As much backbone as oatmeal, that guy. What will he say tomorrow when dozens of NFL players take knees during the anthems, including big stars, and maybe even some white big stars (Aaron Rodgers?)?

 

As much as it feels weird to say, I'm reminded of something Drew Magary wrote. He pointed out the president's No. 1 job is to get shit on. You're blamed for a lot, trashed and directed on a daily basis. And the man in the job is one of the least capable folks on the planet of getting shit on and not throwing a tantrum.

On the plus side, we spent some time on some version of this thread during the last guy's time discussing if he was "weak," usually in an international relations setting. And now we truly have the weakest president in recent memory. Maybe weakest in the history of the union, considering the fact this one can broadcast his weakness in a way few could. What a time to be alive.

 

I don't know if the oatmeal thing was referring to Trump or Goodell. I was pretty stunned that the league called a sitting President's comments divisive and lacking respect. The league pretty much said Trump is not a friend of the NFL.

 

Our previous President forced nuns to take him to court to protect their religious rights, which are guaranteed in the First Amendment.

 

HOW THE RIGHT LOST ITS MIND
AND EMBRACED DONALD TRUMP



For a quarter of a century, I was a major part of the conservative movement. But like many on the right, in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory I had to ask some uncomfortable questions. The 2016 presidential campaign was a brutal, disillusioning slog, and there came a moment when I realized that conservatives had created an alternate reality bubble—one that I had helped shape. ...

We were naive. By failing to push back against the racist birther-conspiracy theory—among other harmful, batty ideas—conservatives failed a moral and intellectual test with significant implications for the future.

We failed it badly.

How the right lost its mind, sold its soul and embraced Donald Trump

 

Damn that was funny.

It wasn't why Trump won the presidency. It's why he won the nomination, but not the presidency.

He won the presidency because, in a couple states Clinton should have won, she didn't. Why she didn't circles back to her own flaws and, what's more, black voters who just didn't trust her, perhaps because she was tied to a 23-year old crime bill, and perhaps because black voters were told, more than once, not to vote for her.

 

He's a friend of the 32 rich shits who own the teams, however. As has been pointed out by many folks on Twitter, Tom Brady skipped a White House visit and Trump didn't say boo about it. What could be different about Steph Curry?