Happy New Year!

Oy vey, the new year is eight days old. Enough with the frivolities, back to work …

Those of us that came out of the woods and the sawmills know this to be true …

(Atrios) The idea that 55-year-olds who have spent their lives in a very localized highly specialized profession should just take a few classes and then go move somewhere else for a new lucrative career is just… nuts. It’s been nuts for decades. It was nuts when “job retraining” was supposed to make the NAFTA medicine go down. It’s especially nuts when “tech” is a field known for elitism and age discrimination.

There aren’t many coal miners so the focus on them is a weird fetish, but to the extent that “coal miners” is a metaphor, it’s one for people who had hard jobs that went away and no amount of job retraining can reset their lives.

(Paul Campos) The belief that there’s a lot of structural unemployment in the American economy, so people can get good jobs if they retrain themselves to work in areas where there are lots of such jobs going unfilled because of a shortage of qualified workers is one of those zombie ideas that survives because it’s such a convenient belief for people who think the economic system is basically fine, and you just need to tweak it a little here and there.

The Y2K nuts got it right, they just didn’t quite get their grubby little fingers wrapped around it. Fascism, climate change, income inequality, the New Gilded Age, Twitter, reality television … Donald Trump. Status-quo Joe. Isn’t the first time I’ve pointed this out. How much more will it take?

We have to stop doing what we’re doing. It isn’t working.

Best Wishes to everyone. I don’t think Ian generally overuses his optimism, so I hope he has brought it out to be effective next year. Improvements to him and to us all.

Be as happy as you can… because most of you will be crying by the end of the year.

Donald Trump will win the 2020 re-election.

If you recall: back in 2016, all the election polls and pundits predicted that Hillary had “90-plus percentage” chance of defeating Trump in a landslide. All of them EXCEPT TWO:

Professor Helmut Norpoth and Professor Alan Lichtman.

Norpoth used his “Primary Model”. Lichtman used his 13-point predictive method. Here is the peculiarity shared by both Norpoth’s model and Lichtman’s 13 method: The main focus of the model and method was not even based on the candidates themselves. The models mostly looked at the performances of the SITTING PRESIDENT, who was Obama at the time. So, in essence, they looked at the 2016 election as a referendum on Obama’s second term.

It was NOT Hillary who lost the 2016 election. It was OBAMA who lost the 2016 election — because outside the Black communities and the neoliberal circles, Obama’s policies had harmed and were disliked by the average Americans. The Primary Model even predicted that: even if Bernie had defeated Hillary in the 2016 primary, Bernie would have also lost to Trump — by an even bigger margin. Hillary or Bernie had very little to do with the outcome. The 2016 election outcome had already been pre-determined by the second-term performance of then-sitting president, Obama.

Which brings us to the 2020 election.

On December 5 in the New York Emma Clark Memorial Library, Norpoth offered his very first tentative forecast for the 2020 result based on his Primary Model. A month before that, Lichtman also went on the MSNBC to make an early 2020 prediction based on his 13-points. BOTH professors predicted Trump will win the 2020 election, regardless who will be the Democratic candidate. It is simply because Trump’s PERFORMANCES — outside his insensitive/offensive/sexist/racist comments and his un-presidential behaviors — especially his performances on economy, have actually been objectively good. AND, he has kept most of his campaign promises (even though I disagree with almost all of his policies/promises; I have to admit: he has kept most of his promises to his supporters.)

Mind you: Lichtman is a Democrat who hated Trump, and Norpoth seems to be a progressive. But that was their early prediction for 2020. I encourage you to google those professors and their forecast methods/models. So, unless the economy crashes before the 2020 election, Trump will have his second term.

happy new year!

hope everything continues on the up-slope for you, Ian.