So Rubio is hyping #nevertrump, and selling a bunch of #nevertrump crap in his store. However, he went on to clarify that this only means he’s vowing not to vote for or support Trump in the primaries. Of course, if Trump is the nominee, Rubio will dutifully vote for him in November. All that stuff about Trump being a monster? Unqualified to be president? A liar? A cheat? Tiny dong? Water under the bridge at that point.
Meanwhile, Rubio complains that it’s an unfair question. “You don’t see Bernie Sanders being asked, ‘Would you vote for Hillary Clinton?”, he said. Ummm … maybe because Bernie isn’t tweeting #neverhillary hash-tags, or selling #neverhillary chachkies?
What a spineless turd.
CraigM
6424
This, this shit right here, this is what gets my blood boiling. It is not uncommon either. It is why, in large part, I prefer Bernie to Hillary, he is the only one who would dare speak out against this unethical bullshit.
Have these people not read their history? Theirs will be the first against the wall if we continue this path, and if that day comes they will deserve every bit of it.
CraigM
6425
It takes a lot of courage.
That’s the biggest tradeoff. Children do much better when they have two hands on parents.
I really think it is short sighted - look at how the large family run businesses outperform their competitors over the long haul.
Tax policy can address those issues. It doesn’t have to be that what’s for the good of the corporation has to be bad for the country.
@Strollen re: the guy in my office-
The conglomerate of which my company is a division is making money hand over fist right now, so much so that people at my level who would ordinarily not get a bonus are getting one this year (which is a nice to have, but I’d rather see people not getting their work shipped to India, thanks. Just like I’d rather the whole company take a 10% pay cut and have every other Friday off in order to avoid some layoffs–which actually happened during 2009 IIRC).
Yes, there have always been bullshit layoffs and replacements by younger workers or whatever. Age discrimination (while illegal) is very hard to prove, which makes it doubly shitty to lay off a productive loyal worker when the business is not under any kind of financial duress, because he or she will have an awful time getting a comparable position, especially now with overseas outsourcing, because all the other comparable companies are doing it too. Sure, the prospective employer can’t ask for a candidate’s age directly, but it’s not rocket science to get a ballpark figure when they look at the year the person graduated from high school on the resumé (which probably goes straight to the “round file” if $year_of_graduation < X).
And yeah, the guy’s going to get severance and has a 401k, but there’s very high chance that he and his wife are going to have to deplete that well before retirement age.
This sort of thing is very likely to keep happening, unfortunately, which means that eventually we’re going to have to move to some kind of universal guaranteed minimum income system.
Timex
6429
Florida man kicked out of Trump rally for wearing penis on head.
The guy in the blue shirt or the white?
I’m not disagreeing with you, it is shitty. I’m just saying that finding cheaper sources of labor has been a function of a capitalist system pretty much forever. The slave trade is one of the earliest forms of outsourcing, hum we can’t get white colonist from Europe to pick cotton or convince the native Indians to do so let’s look for a global supplier of cheap labor.
The reason I’m not a libertarian is because while I generally believe the market system work well. If you treat your employees like shit, you get shitty employees and/or a union. I also recognize there are times like your friends where the employer has way too much power and the government job is to balance the playing field.
What I don’t believe is the average worker is less powerful today than they were 30 or 50 years compared to business. What I find ludicrous, is that there is some magic bullet, stop outsourcing, stop immigration, enact tariffs, end globalization, outlaw robots, that is somehow going to stop business from looking at ways to lower labor cost. Capitalism produces losers as well as lots of winners. They have names and families and I’m happy to figure out ways of helping the losers.
Very well said, both regarding the nature of capitalism and the need for responsible regulation. There is no magic bullet, especially when you look at the level of individuals or small groups.
Timex
6434
The thing is, too, that a major part of the decline of things like manufacturing in the US is directly linked to massive increases in the standard of living in other parts of the world. Globalization is definitely good for a few billion people.
This is certainly true, although somewhat of a mixed blessing even for them when safety and environmental standards are low to nonexistent. If wages were the only thing different between a factory in Indonesia and a factory here producing the same thing, I suspect a lot of people here would have a lot less of a problem with it.
Yes, I know the First World had its own growing pains regarding those things, but since it was the first wave, it’s understandable that it happened. It’s a shame the people of all the other countries that are industrializing are having to go through the same problems due to greed and the collusion of corrupt (and often authoritarian) governments.
Oghier
6436
We all know about the smog covering some parts of China, and it’s as bad as it looks on TV. Some of the safety violations I have seen in the plants, though, boggled the mind even more.
For example, I was inside a plant in Xidu (near Shanghai) owned by a US company but managed locally. The primary production facility had high ceilings (perhaps 50 feet), with overhead cranes running on beams at nearly that height. I wandered in to see their preventative maintenance routine at shift-close, and I saw a pair of guys working on that crane. Neither was strapped in. One was standing on the platform of another crane, on a stack of pallets. The other had evidently climbed that onto the overhead crane, where he hung by one hand, with a tool in the other. The supervisor leading me around didn’t bat an eye at this.
I used to do some mining work. I won’t let my teams go into underground mines there.
Yup, it’s going to be Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fires, Love Canals and Upper Big Branch mine collapses for the next few decades at least, the way things are going (and that last one happened in our very recent history, thanks to regulatory capture and an Administration–or rather Administrations that were way too cozy with the coal mining industry).
ShivaX
6439
Holy shit, a lot of them know exactly what they’re doing with the way they did it.
I’d say about a third to one half went full on Sieg Heil! without a second of hesitation.
It isn’t just non-Western places, either, though in Europe at least the stuff that goes on is more localized, as the EU rules and standard practices are pretty consistent. In Germany, back in the eighties (pre-Euro era), I was on an Air Force installation in Berlin. We had some German welders doing some sort of repairs on something–there was a lot of metal there, all those antenna towers, etc. I came out of my trailer and saw this dude welding something, without gloves, without goggles, just sort of blasting away. I stopped him and scrounged up some goggles and welder’s gloves and insisted he use them. He shrugged, put them on, and went on with it.
Of course, the Germans would also routinely operate heavy machinery while drinking beer, too, so…
Well, they want to make America great again, so maybe they’re harking back to Ye Olde Pledge of Allegiance (circa 1892 or so)…
So, really, they’re just old-fashioned patriots.
