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2018 Democrats thread


southsider2k5

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1 hour ago, Balta1701 said:

Did the super rich pay you to use the biggest font possible?

At least on my computer there is a "Paste and match style" option in this forum that avoids disasters like that.

Nyet!  I am Ruskie bot paid for by the Spencer’s.

I switch font now, comrades, you see how ubiquitious and innocuous the damage is, almost imperceptible to the naked eye.

Dos Vadanya

Edited by caulfield12
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13 hours ago, caulfield12 said:

Reddy’s “progressive” candidate gets some national hype.

Also, her lead was reported at 6%, Fwiw.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/07/abby-finkenauer-iowa/566159/

 

Given that Reddy is working for her, she's way more progressive than I would've thought. Public option was a phrase I didn't expect to see. She's still a little too corporatist for my taste, but tolerable.

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26 minutes ago, Dam8610 said:

Given that Reddy is working for her, she's way more progressive than I would've thought. Public option was a phrase I didn't expect to see. She's still a little too corporatist for my taste, but tolerable.

?? ?You truly don't listen to the things I say.

I support progressive policy. I support Democrats who can win. When one has both, great. Often times that's not the case. (What about her is corporatist, out of curiosity? Her family lived paycheck to paycheck, her sister runs a farm with her husband. There's not a corporate bone in her body)

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43 minutes ago, Reddy said:

?? ?You truly don't listen to the things I say.

I support progressive policy. I support Democrats who can win. When one has both, great. Often times that's not the case. (What about her is corporatist, out of curiosity? Her family lived paycheck to paycheck, her sister runs a farm with her husband. There's not a corporate bone in her body)

On the issues page, under the "Creating Jobs and A Strong Economy" tab. The policies and priorities scream corporatist. There's no plan to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy or to lift the cap on social security wages, for example.

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1 hour ago, Dam8610 said:

On the issues page, under the "Creating Jobs and A Strong Economy" tab. The policies and priorities scream corporatist. There's no plan to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy or to lift the cap on social security wages, for example.

ah yes, in Iowa's first district where we're desperate to keep manufacturing jobs in the state while they try and leave for Mexico: calling for raising their taxes is a fucking brilliant idea.

Also, I'm pretty sure you've argued that you're not a progressive puritan in the past, but that's not what this sounds like. All or nothin', am I right y'all? Who cares about fitting a district, you're either with us or you're against us! #PurityTestsAreDumb #SheCaresAboutHerFamilyAndFriendsAbilityToKeepTheirJobs

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4 hours ago, Reddy said:

ah yes, in Iowa's first district where we're desperate to keep manufacturing jobs in the state while they try and leave for Mexico: calling for raising their taxes is a fucking brilliant idea.

Also, I'm pretty sure you've argued that you're not a progressive puritan in the past, but that's not what this sounds like. All or nothin', am I right y'all? Who cares about fitting a district, you're either with us or you're against us! #PurityTestsAreDumb #SheCaresAboutHerFamilyAndFriendsAbilityToKeepTheirJobs

So did you miss the part where I said she would be tolerable, or where I said she was much more progressive than my expectation?

You asked a specific question and got a specific answer. If you didn't want the answer to how your candidate was corporatist, you shouldn't have asked.

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7 hours ago, caulfield12 said:

What is her position on the Great $12 billion Tariff Bribe/Bailout to soybean and pork producers?

Follow her on twitter. Her position on that is the backbone of the campaign.

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7 hours ago, Dam8610 said:

So did you miss the part where I said she would be tolerable, or where I said she was much more progressive than my expectation?

You asked a specific question and got a specific answer. If you didn't want the answer to how your candidate was corporatist, you shouldn't have asked.

Saying "corporatist" in a negative light, when your criticism involves wanting her to support a policy that would directly crush the economy of her district is asinine.

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14 minutes ago, Reddy said:

Saying "corporatist" in a negative light, when your criticism involves wanting her to support a policy that would directly crush the economy of her district is asinine.

How would raising taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations or removing the social security wage cap "directly crush the economy of her district"? Businesses seemed to operate just fine under Eisenhower's 90% tax rate, and no one even wants anything close to that now. The Laffer curve did have a point, but we passed the point of diminishing marginal return on it in the 1980s.

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1 hour ago, Reddy said:

Saying "corporatist" in a negative light, when your criticism involves wanting her to support a policy that would directly crush the economy of her district is asinine.

Restoring the corporate tax rate to sane levels wouldn't crush her district. Accepting that framing is corporatist and deserves to be criticized.

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1 hour ago, Dam8610 said:

How would raising taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations or removing the social security wage cap "directly crush the economy of her district"? Businesses seemed to operate just fine under Eisenhower's 90% tax rate, and no one even wants anything close to that now. The Laffer curve did have a point, but we passed the point of diminishing marginal return on it in the 1980s.

This is incorrect. Piketty and Saez studied this a number of years ago and found that the inflection point is actually up around 70%! The US corporate tax rate has never been anywhere near this, briefly peaking out around 52%.

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7 minutes ago, StrangeSox said:

This is incorrect. Piketty and Saez studied this a number of years ago and found that the inflection point is actually up around 70%! The US corporate tax rate has never been anywhere near this, briefly peaking out around 52%.

Well, crap, you're right on that. The 90% thing must have been the effective rate when considering corporate and individual tax. Change the number to 52% or 50% and it's still a valid point for the individual side (where rates were much higher) and shows how much power and sway corporations have held in our country for a very long time.

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LEO PANITCH: All the more frustrating. But it also indicates that he’s sitting on top of the Democratic Party and a Democratic Party establishment that is very much part of the problem.

PAUL JAY: And he’s very much involved in actively managing- I was saying off camera, I’ve been told by many people who know the story that when Perez was fighting with Keith Ellison for being head of the DNC, Obama was actively working the phones to defeat Keith Ellison. Did not want the progressive candidate to be head of the DNC. So he’s not just out there as, you know, [inaudible] and all this. He’s, he’s in the pits fighting. And Thomas Frank, the author who did What Happened to Kansas, he made an interesting comment in one of our interviews where he says, you need to understand, the corporate Democrats don’t dislike the left of the party. They hate the left of the party. Yes. And this is because this is a class contradiction. It’s not just some difference of opinion.

LEO PANITCH: Well, it’s because they’ve decided that they’ve got to be pragmatic with capital. They need to live with capital. They think that socialism is a bad thing. They think that capitalism is the best of all possible worlds. Although they think you can- stupidly, they think it can be a humane capitalism.

PAUL JAY: Well, actually, let me, let me play a clip of Obama right here, that he speaks to the point you’re just making.

BARACK OBAMA: But we can learn from the last 70 years that it will not involve unregulated, unbridled, unethical capitalism. It also won’t involve old-style command and control socialism from the top. That was tried. It didn’t work very well. For almost all countries, progress is going to depend on an inclusive market-based system. One that offers education for every child. That protects collective bargaining, and secures the rights of every worker. That breaks up monopolies to encourage competition in small and medium-sized businesses. And has laws that root out corruption, and ensures fair dealing in business. That maintains some form of progressive taxation. So that rich people are still rich, but they’re giving a little bit back to make sure that everybody else has something, to pay for universal health care, and retirement security, and invest in infrastructure and scientific research that builds platforms for innovation. It involves promoting an inclusive capitalism both within nations and between nations.

PAUL JAY: So this seems to be the nub of the problem with President Obama. The rich, and one should say the super rich, can still be rich and super rich. And if only they give up a little everything will be OK.

LEO PANITCH: You know, I keep referring to these guys as pragmatists. And it’s true, they are. That that’s what drives them. They’re pragmatic, unlike me and you who are, indeed, idealists. That said, you listen to those words and you think, what a romantic. What an idealist. You cannot have what he’s talking about within capitalism. The room for reform within the system as it’s evolved does not allow for that any more. That is what one needs to learn.

And we’ve seen the failure not only of his but of Blair’s and the Third Way’s politics, of Schroder’s, et cetera. Of a whole range of them who said that we can have all these things while riding with the wind of global competition and accumulation. And that’s simply proven not to be the case. And much of his speech makes that case. So for him to then turn around and say, well, we want to have all these things within an inclusive capitalism, there’s no grounds for it. He’s standing on no ground. And in that sense, I think the fact that he points to how this has all evolved in such an ugly way, in my view this actually helps make the case of the socialist left. Moreover, insofar as he says we’ve tried top-down socialism and it didn’t work, that leaves space to say, well, we haven’t tried bottom-up socialism. We tried social democracy, but we haven’t tried democratic socialism. We’ve tried authoritarian communism, but we haven’t tried democratic socialism. And the first thing we need to do in democratic socialism is turn the financial system into a public utility. The second thing we need to do is fundamentally transform the institutions of the state so they aren’t organized and structured so as to reproduce private property, and reproduce the power of the very people that he says are the greedy bastards they are.

So I think one can do something with this. And I think- you know, we were saying this off-camera as well. His rhetoric in the run up to the 2008 election, and then the disappointment that it was already felt by 2010, is what I think contributed to creating Occupy. And what created Occupy, since Occupy with its anarchistic impulses meant you could protest forever but not change the world, quickly lead- the bridge was very short- quickly led to the candidacy of a democratic socialist within the Democratic Party that almost turned American politics on its ears as much as the Trump one did.

PAUL JAY: But I think the speech and Obama as the preeminent spokesperson for this whole class of meritocracy, and billionaires in the tech sector, and Wall Street who are somewhat liberal; if that class gets to pick the next president after Trump, and again we get lots of nice words over here but even more growing inequality over there because that’s how the system is built, to create such more inequality, then the problem is going to be the next round will be another Trump except this time it won’t be a clown. This time the deep economic crisis, the challenge, the threat of the climate crisis, and the geopolitical rivalries that are being spurred by the current state of capitalism, it’s going to be a far more dangerous situation. Which makes this 2020 election so decisive.

 

https://therealnews.com/stories/obama-says-inequality-led-to-rise-of-the-right-but-takes-no-responsibility-for-it-2-2

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Probably charge interest as well...might as well, for Millennials, might be worth the risk of getting nothing back from SS.

America has worst family leave policies in the industrialized world, especially for men. Only thing Ivanka has right, although it’s mostly lip service.

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Seems like a normal guy. 

The Sandy Hook truther people may be the worst of the conspiracy theory nuts.  Was reading about one of the Sandy Hook families that is suing Alex Jones.  They've had to move like 17 times because of these people harass them.  Imagine harassing parents whose child was lost in a mass shooting.  Disgusting.

 

 

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