Miles Davis
Prince of Darkness
How we got leverage on him when majority of black folks just jumped on his campaign just cause of Obama and him being “electable”.
2020 Democratic Primary Thread: Focus on House & Senate races
- Thread starter mc_brew
- Start date
King Kreole
natural blondie like goku
No one is saying Pete was CEO of McKinsey and is responsible for all the shyt they've done. He didn't have to be having 1-on-1 meetings with Putin for his work experience to rise to the level of public interests. There were interns and low-level consultants who worked on their project to advise ICE to restrict food and medical supplies to refugees. If that's the type of work Pete was doing, that's relevant to the public interest and the question of his fitness for office. The reflex to immediately protect the interests of corporate elites is disturbing.He was at most Sr Consultant level. There is zero power at that level. He was putting somewhere in a back room putting together power point decks or running spreadsheet models not commiserating with world leaders.
Let's say they performed analysis and they found a company was not being efficient and needed to cut it's workforce. Are we going to hold that against him?
Don't put me in the position to defend management consultants and Mayor Pete though. I hate the profession and the people it attracts. They are double talking scammers. Mayor Pete actually reminds of these types. I worked at a Big 4 on the technology side (where we actually build stuff and are from diverse backgrounds )and the people on the advisory side were always super smug self satisfied top 25 MBA types.....and this was at a big 4 which is a step down from the elite consulting firms like McKinsey, BCG and Bain.
Have at it. I'm not dying on a hill defending McKinsey alums
I'm just cautioning what they end up finding will be some mundane shyt.
Pete's asking to be let out of his NDA because he knows he wont 
Thats the same thing Trump does when he says he's under audit and it prevents him from releasing his taxes
Thats the same thing Trump does when he says he's under audit and it prevents him from releasing his taxes
The majority of black people are being encouraged by black leaders to vote for Biden. If they wanted to switch their allegiance to Warren tomorrow they could.
But Biden is more willing to give us GUARANTEES on things we're asking for.
Pay attention to who Trump fears
washingtonpost.com
Eyeing populist challenge from the left, Trump seeks plan to tackle student debt
Laura Meckler
President Trump is demanding aides present a plan to tackle student debt and the rising cost of a college education, worried that he has no response to expansive plans from Sen. Elizabeth Warren and other Democrats he may face on the ballot next year, several administration officials said.
But a battle is underway inside the administration over what to propose, with little appetite for the big spending that Democrats want and no success identifying a more modest plan that will satisfy the president, aides said.
The internal frustrations and failure to come up with a student debt plan are feeding the president’s anxieties that Democrats such as Warren will tap into populist impulses that propelled his 2016 victory, and that he will need policies beyond his signature areas of immigration and trade to counter them.
After seeing Warren (D-Mass.) promise to forgive $640 billion in student debt, Trump began asking Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and White House aides what the administration was doing on the issue, and in August he demanded a blueprint.
“We don’t have a plan,” he complained to aides, according to administration officials.
But months have passed after several contentious meetings with no consensus internally about how to attack the problem. Administration officials at the White House and the Education Department are scrambling to produce a plan before Trump departs Dec. 20 for Christmas at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. On Nov. 21, DeVos huddled at the White House with top administration officials for a senior-level meeting on the issue, officials said.
The internal frustrations and debate were described by a half-dozen administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose internal discussions.
Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, said the president “recognizes the serious situation many Americans find themselves in with rising student loan debt and has already taken significant administrative and regulatory action.”
Americans are grappling with the burden of $1.5 trillion in student loan debt. College enrollment soared during the last recession, but students bore more of the cost as states dialed back investment in higher education. Stagnant wages and an influx of students with limited resources made borrowing more of a necessity.
At the same time, the cost of attending college has increased almost eight times faster than wages in the past 30 years.
Beyond forgiving debt, Warren’s plan would make tuition free at all two- and four-year public colleges, for a total cost of $1.25 trillion over a decade. She says she will pay for it with a 2 percent annual tax on Americans with more than $50 million in wealth.
“The time for half-measures is over,” she said in introducing her plan, which she often describes as costing the wealthy just “two cents” of every dollar they have.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), another presidential contender, wants to eliminate all outstanding student debt by taxing Wall Street firms to offset the cost. Other Democratic candidates have rolled out more targeted debt relief proposals. South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg would cancel the debts of students who attended predatory for-profit colleges.
The ideas are popular. A Hill-HarrisX poll in September found 58 percent of registered voters supported plans to eliminate education debt, including 72 percent of Democrats and 40 percent of Republicans.
Two administration officials, describing the internal discussions, said the challenge is coming up with something to rival expansive and expensive plans without proposing massive spending.
Aides said ideas that have been discussed include a risk-sharing plan that would leave colleges on the hook if students default on education loans. They also have considered imposing limits on tuition hikes at schools participating in the federal student loan program. And they have weighed caps on student loans tied to expected future earnings.
Internally, DeVos has touted her agency’s work to boost transparency on college costs and changes to the accreditation system that allow more distance-learning and other alternative programs to qualify for federal student loans.
But senior officials regard ideas presented so far as unworkable or too small and lacking the appeal of Warren’s approach.
One official said it is possible Trump would be willing to propose a big spending plan, but his advisers, including DeVos, have little appetite for a huge expansion of government. To the contrary, DeVos has worked to shrink the footprint of the Education Department.
“He’s trying to figure out what is the big idea for the campaign that I can use with the sizzle to match the sizzle the Democrats are talking about,” one administration official said. But coming up with something is difficult. “You don’t get direction from the president on anything, so you have to go and try to figure it out and see what happens. It’s a very difficult environment to try and make policy.”
Amid these tensions, some in the White House are blaming DeVos, saying it’s her job to produce a proposal — and some are recycling complaints to the president that DeVos has not done enough to advance a vision for the administration.
The education secretary is hugely unpopular among Democrats but has survived to become one of the administration’s longest-serving Cabinet secretaries.
Other administration officials said any blame should be spread around. They said policy experts based at the White House budget office and the Domestic Policy Council have also failed to come up with ideas to satisfy the president and that Trump has offered no guidance.
A DeVos spokeswoman declined to comment.
The anti-DeVos contingent also points to court defeats for various proposals. And in October, a federal judge held the secretary in contempt and fined the department $100,000 for violating a court order to stop collecting federal loan payments from former Corinthian Colleges students.
Some at the White House still blame DeVos for a dust-up this year over a proposal to eliminate $17.6 million in federal funding for the Special Olympics. In March, DeVos spent three days defending the proposal, although her aides said it had been ordered up by the White House. Trump then overruled it.
In any case, Trump has suggested to advisers that DeVos’s position as education secretary is secure because of her influence in her home state of Michigan, which he sees as essential to winning reelection. DeVos and her husband have long been active in GOP Michigan politics.
At the Education Department, DeVos has staked out a conservative approach to policy that questions the federal role in student lending and is far removed from the Democratic plans to boost Washington’s role.
Her agency has made it harder for students who say they were defrauded by colleges to erase their debts. It also has repeatedly proposed cutting loan forgiveness for public sector workers and caps on student lending.
That track record has rankled liberal consumer groups, but it has been lauded among conservatives who want to limit federal spending in higher education.
Still, addressing student debt levels must be a priority for conservatives, said Mary Clare Amselem, an education policy analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank. She said a thoughtful plan should start with preventing more Americans from borrowing money they cannot afford to repay.
“This is something conservatives should be engaging on and not simply defaulting to those on the left who have seemingly attractive proposals,” she said. “We know that high levels of student debt have negative effects on the economy, with people putting off buying homes, putting off starting families.”
@wire28 @Th3G3ntleman @ezrathegreat @Jello Biafra @humble forever @Darth Nubian @Dameon Farrow @Piff Perkins @BigMoneyGrip @Lucky_Lefty @johnedwarduado @Armchair Militant @panopticon @88m3 @Tres Leches @ADevilYouKhow @dtownreppin214 @A.R.$
Last edited:
King Kreole
natural blondie like goku
Maybe, maybe not. It depends on how he views that work. So far, he's been promoting his time there as pretty foundational to his worldview. He's been proud of the work he's done there. If it turns out that work was getting working people fired in the name of efficiency, then he should have to answer for that.
King Kreole
natural blondie like goku
Yeah, If I had to guess, he was probably doing pretty mundane, low-level grunt work for these efficiency projects, and the reason his team doesn't want that to come out is that it's a bad look in the 2019 political atmosphere. I don't think he was yukking it up with MBS, advising the Saudis on how to dismember Khasoggi or anything.
Have at it. I'm not dying on a hill defending McKinsey alums
I'm just cautioning what they end up finding will be some mundane shyt.
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
Let's say they performed analysis and they found a company was not being efficient and needed to cut it's workforce. Are we going to hold that against him?
Bruh...
Uhhh, I don't think we should make a man a president( especially not the dem nominee) that was cutting throats during the greatest recession of our lifetimes and that many families are still reeling from...
The messaging there really isn't great and I'm thinking about it...
I graduated high school and college during that period and it's something a lot of Americans and I probably dwell on...
Will you defend Deval Patrick? I don't remember you defending Mitt's business practices.
I say all of this in jest but come on
dora_da_destroyer
Master Baker
one...who cares? two, if i'm president of company X and hire mckinsey to figure out which departments need to be laid off, that's a company x thing. consulting firms don't come in on some "let's lay people off", when it comes to workforce reductions, management knows that's the course they want to go, they look to consulting firms to figure out exactly where the head count should come from.
washingtonpost.com
Perspective | Five myths about black voters
By Theodore R. Johnson
8-10 minutes
For the past30 years, the Democratic presidential candidate who received the most primary support from black voters won the party’s nomination. All but one — John F. Kerry in 2004 — won the popular vote in the general election. But developments in the currentDemocratic contest, including former vice president Joe Biden’s continuedpopularity among black voters and Sen. Kamala D. Harris’s departure, show that the black electorate remains widely misunderstood. Here are five myths about the voting bloc that may be especially relevant for the 2020 election.
Myth No. 1
Black voters are liberal.
One of the defining phenomena of contemporary American electoral politics is the black electorate’s large and enduring support for the Democratic Party, which has concurrently moved leftward: its presidential candidates have received an average of nearly 90 percent of the black vote for the past six decades. Many conclude that black voters’ liberal preferences, carried over from economic and racially progressive policies of the civil rights movement and Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns of 1984 and 1988, led this shift. MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid wrote that Jackson’s radical liberalism helped pave the way for Bernie Sanders’s rise. And the Black Lives Matter movement tried to push Hillary Clinton left, changing liberal politics in the process. As a result, senior politics writer David Catanese held in U.S. News & World Report, “the most liberal list of policy positions” would beSanders’s “best gambit to win over African Americans. ” And Noah Millman made the case in the Week that Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s liberaleconomic populism may be the key to winning black voters.
But black voters’ support of Democratic candidates is a function of electoral pragmatism — voting in a risk-averse fashion to preserve gains, instead of ideologically in hopes of immediate transformative change — not devotion to left-wing ideology. In surveys, more than half of black Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents prefer a public option for health care over Medicare-for-all, and two-thirds of black Americans favor charter schools and choice programs, which run counter to party orthodoxy.
Only 28 percent of black Democrats consider themselves liberal, according to the Pew Research Center, while 70 percent identify as moderate or conservative. And black liberal Democrats constitute just 17 percent of the left wing of the party, Gallup found. Black voters’ political diversity is more visible in local and state politics: A 2007 study of direct-democracy referendums in California found that black voters were split between the conservative and liberal positions, for example. And Republicans have succeeded in appealing to moderate and conservative black voters in state races, as Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan did in his 2018 reelection campaign, when he won more than a quarter of the bloc.
Myth No. 2
Black candidates arewhat matters most to black voters.
When black candidates run for office, observers assume that they can rely on group solidarity. The Los Angeles Times notedthatHarris and Sen. Cory Booker were “banking on racial pride” to win black voters. When former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick entered the primary race last month, Bloomberg News reported, “As an African American, Patrick could diminish Biden’s strength with black voters.”
It’s certainly true that black voters support black Democratic candidates at higher rates, often in terms of both turnout and vote share. But analysis of past elections and campaigns shows thatblack voters have never prioritized simple descriptive representation over other factors, like party affiliation, campaign viability, candidate electability, preexisting relationships with the black community and a sense of authenticity. Sen. Barack Obama had to prove his viability by winning white Democrats in Iowa before his black support materialized, a hurdle that many black candidates, from Shirley Chisholm and Al Sharpton to Booker and Harris, have not managed to clear. As several black voters recently told the New York Times: “Representation is not enough.”
Myth No. 3
Trump can win black voters in significant numbers.
While campaigning in Michigan in 2016, Donald Trump claimed, “At the end of four years, I guarantee you that I will get over 95 percent of the African American vote.” That assertion is clearly outlandish. But it has long been a Republican axiom that winning 1 in 5 black voters is the magic number for party dominance. Trump and the GOP point to low black unemployment and federal prison reform as winning messages.
Yet Trump will be fortunate to get to half of that 20 percent threshold in 2020. The 8 percent of black voters he won in 2016 was certainly more than John McCain and Mitt Romney received in 2008 and 2012 while facing Obama’s historic candidacy. Still, between 1968 and 2004, Republican presidential nominees averaged nearly 12 percent of the black vote, and Trump underperformed each one. Meanwhile, Gallup reports that just 10 percent of black Americans approve of the job Trump is doing, and more than 3 in 4 have an unfavorable view of him, according to a recent Economist/YouGov poll. The party’s relative silence after the president’s comments about black countries, majority-black cities like Baltimore, and black athletes and women appears set to play a larger role in black voters’ choices than specific policy proposals.
Myth No. 4
Democrats lose elections because of black voters' apathy.
In 2016, a seven-point drop in black voter turnout was perceived to have cost Hillary Clinton the election. Political commentators often cite black voters’ “enthusiasm gap” as the primary reason for low turnout. After last month’s elections, an NBC headline claimed, “Democratic wins come with a warning sign: Low African American voter turnout,” suggesting that unless black voters are energized, Democrats cannot prevail.
But the 7 million to 9 million voters who backed Trump after supporting Obama four years earlier played a larger role in Clinton’s loss than lower black turnout. And state voter-suppression measures — from ID laws to longer lines — had become more prevalent, targeting black Americans “with almost surgical precision,” according to a federal court. Subpar outreach and mobilization efforts, coupled with voter suppression, hurt Democrats more than a disinterested black electorate.
Finally, higher black turnout does not equate to Democratic wins: Though it increased in 1984, 2000, and 2000 2004 Republican nominees won the White House.
Myth No. 5
Black voters won't vote for gay candidates.
South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s support among black votershas been dismal:at 2 percent nationally in the Economist/YouGov poll and at less than 1percent in South Carolina, where black voters arenearly two-thirds of the primary electorate. A much-publicized rationale for this lack of support, largely based onan internal campaign memo, is that black voters can’t get past the fact that Buttigiegis openly gay. Rep. James E. Clyburn remarked that “there’s no question”Buttigieg’s sexuality is a problem for older black voters. These sentiments are grounded in the social conservatism and strong religiosity often found in parts of black America, demonstrated most publicly during state referendums and lawmakingon same-sex marriage between 2000 and 2015. For example, black parishioners in North Carolina helped pass a 2012measure to define marriage as between a man and woman, and mobilized in Maryland against a 2012 statute legalizing same-sex marriage.
But Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who is black and gay, won thanks to black voters — despite the open acknowledgment that if she’d kissed her partner in a black church, she’d be asked to leave. Socialconservatism does not have a large effect on black Americans’ voting behavior, according to research published in Social Science Quarterly. In fact, black voters view Buttigieg about as favorably as white and Hispanic voters do, and fewer black voters view him unfavorably, according to the Economist/YouGov poll. A range of issues impairs his ability to win black support (including lack of endorsements from prominent black officials); homophobia probably isn’t one of them.
dora_da_destroyer
Master Baker
this is my stance too...brehs got me in here defending MBB, but the reality is the vast majority of people are working on common ass business problems - expansion, m&a, new products, cost reduction, revnue growth, etc. - people take one or two ties and sensationalize it to all the workers, like that's not how it works
Have at it. I'm not dying on a hill defending McKinsey alums
I'm just cautioning what they end up finding will be some mundane shyt.