CleverOleg

Politicizing the Fed - which is something Trump and the GOP are absolutely going to do - is great for the accelerationists. The Fed was always political to an extent but they’re a key cog in the imperialism machine. Force to make short-term politically based actions and they will hurt America’s imperialism in the long run.

Tbf housing (buying or renting) has gotten a lot more expensive since 2016-2020. I’ve been in the same line of work making steady increases and houses I was looking at buying in 2018-2019 are now out of my ability to pay (even by equalizing the interest rates). I looked up my old apartment from 2016-2017 and the rent increases since then are way more than my pay increases.

When it comes to consumer goods, I would agree that pay increases have gotten closer to inflation (but still not there), so I do think people will focus on the price increases without pay increases. But then again a lot of Trump supporters probably bought a house before 2016 so their griping is unwarranted.

It’s, uh… the 300 year anniversary of Marx’s *Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844”.

And California has only counted like half the votes, that probably another 30-40k there at least.

This is it. Peace & Freedom Party has been around for a long time and has ballot access in CA.

The fact that Biden and the dems couldn’t get voter reform passed is honestly pathetic. I know Sinema was doing… her thing. But you can’t tell me the political parties don’t get real dirty (like threatening the lives of family members or something) when they really need someone to fall in line.

The narratives are starting to congeal. Black men, Latino men, and young men let down not only their queen, but all women in the country. They’re gonna break out Obama for even more scolding.

Edit: I should add that so far I haven’t seen any compelling data that these demographic groups lost the election for Harris in any way.

Overall, I think ballot measures regarding abortion did… ok. I mean, 7 of 10 states voted to protect abortion access. Two states that were close but not layups (MO and AZ) went in favor of protections, which is good. The others were never really in doubt.

But tbh given how popular access to abortion seems to be, I can’t help but think it should have gone 10 for 10. Mitigating circumstances in FL and NE (Florida requires 60% to pass and it was never polling that high, NE is a basket case where there are competing ballot measures so now no one knows what’s gonna happen). But SD was a surprise to me. A conservative state for sure, but I’m personally convinced abortion rights should do better than 50% in all 50 states, so idk.

fr though, all I want is for Claudia and Karina to beat Chase Oliver (the Libertarian Party candidate) in California

I mean, the Libertarian Party is fairly popular for a third party. For a principled, Marxist-Leninist party who only uses electoralism as a way to build a movement to beat them in CA is definitely something.

The tendency for the rate of profit to fall.

I mean, yeah, it looks like Kamala didn’t get the dem base out to vote for her because no one wants “more of the same” when following an incredibly unpopular president. Kamala was very openly telling the base to fuck off, and made her race singularly about attracting white, upper middle class suburban women at the cost of everyone else.

But that’s the micro view. In the macro view, Michael Roberts’ analysis of rates of profit shows it’s been falling for a while now. Capitalism was in crisis during the Great Depression, only to be “saved” by WW2. The reconstruction of the industrial world led to good times for a couple decades until there was a profitability crisis in the 1970s. Capital’s response starting the 80s was offshoring, privatization, and financialization - neoliberalism in other words. But the gains from that was only able to keep things going until 2009 or so. Since then profitability has been shit. Capital has no answers beyond just tightening the screws (austerity at home and imperialism abroad). Just increasing misery in order to slow the decline of the rate of profit.

The US needs that surplus value extracted primarily from the global south to keep running. That surplus value is how capital is able to buy off the domestic working class. But that slice of the pie keeps shrinking, i.e. material conditions keep worsening. Things are getting worse as every year goes by and everyone knows it, even if they don’t understand it. That’s why we keep bouncing between parties every four years instead of the steady 2 term presidents we had in the era of neoliberalism. Most people are not doing in depth political analysis. They are just seeing their situation get worse and blaming whoever is in charge.

Of course the economy won’t recover under Trump. It will almost certainly get worse, and I happen to think the odds of a major economic crisis are pretty high. I would bet everything we get a dem president in 2028. Things just get worse and people are fumbling around for a solution.

And that’s where we come in. WE HAVE THE ANSWERS. It’s our job to bring the light of Marxism to the world. I’m not even gonna pretend we can make much of a dent in 4 years but this is a multi-generational project.

Until tonight, based on what happened in the 2022 elections I thought the GOP was way overplaying their hand on the anti-trans stuff. I thought most Americans are way more ambivalent than the GOP thinks they are. I still think that’s basically true, but the Democrats now can look at these results and completely back off from supporting trans rights (I mean, even less than their pathetic efforts before).