All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[Mister Mets]

Andrew Yang isn't very qualified -- he's a rich businessman and philanthropist not a bureaucrat -- and giving an important government post to a rich dude because he ran a cool attention grabbing campaign is kind of the whole "Anti-Trump" thing innit. Yang doesn't have a sense of day to day, of doing paperwork and so on.

Bernie Sanders has expressed interest and I think he would be excellent but he's a Senator from a state with a GOP governor, meaning should Sanders enter the cabinet, GOP Governor back home could send a Republican or a nominally Independent right-winger to take his place and the Senate is Dems 1 short right now, and will merely be neck-and-neck if the Dems take GA. That also means no Warren, because same deal, Senator from MA which has GOP governor.

I honestly don't know who they should pick but it shouldn't be any corporate shill for sure.

Yang's not even that rich.

I would add that it would seem a bit weird to offer Secretary of Labor to someone whose platform was free money regardless of employment.

I do wonder if blue-state Republican Governors could announce that they think it's important for their state to be represented in a cabinet, so that if anyone is nominated to higher office, they pledge to appoint an acceptable placeholder until a special election. What would be there to keep that from happening?

Yeah, it's almost like the party you spend a lot of time defending has a history of suppressing the vote or something because it's scared more people voting means them being less likely to win. I mean, it's not like we don't have prominent Republicans out there saying 'if we don't do something about mail in voting republicans will never get elected again!' I already told you I'd be fine with having a 'national primary day' too, but we both know, for accuracy's sake, that there an election that has to happen regardless of the outcome of a primary, and that increased turn out in no way garauntees a democratic victory... as we saw just a couple weeks ago.

The argument against mail-in voting is that it helps Democrats cheat and fabricate votes, not that larger turnout dooms Republicans.

I'll note that there are probably safeguards available to prevent anyone from using mail-in voting to fabricate votes (IE- careful records of who voted to allow anyone to check if someone deceased/ non-existent sent anything in), so I'm not as worried about it. But the safeguards are non-negotiable.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Yeah, this is politics. Personal relationships matter.

A Chief of Staff is a dude you are going to be hanging out day by day at the White House (which is both Biden's office and his home for the next four years), so hiring someone you don't like would be a bad choice. Likewise, for a guy been in the senate for 30 odd years, VP for 8 years, Biden pretty much knows everyone, so it would be hard for him to find a complete unknown.

A lot of Northern industrialists came against Jim Crow by the 1960s. They were the people MLK and Malcolm X were talking about when critiquing the privileged Northern elites that were against segregation but didn't want to fight racism anywhere else.

Some did, but they were a minority. Look businessmen and rich dudes even supported the USSR. Karl Marx's best friend and buddy, and lifelong patron, Friedrich Engels was the son of a factoryowner and all-around rich playboy slacker. The Civil Rights Movement was genuinely one of the great progressive left-wing achievements in US History. Dr. King spoke against the Vietnam War long before that became the public opinion and he did that at great personal cost, since it alienated him from other leaders and from Lyndon Johnson. It's demoralizing to negate that, even if you don't mean that. For one thing, doing so, in addition to being untrue, yields ground to centrists and conservatives who will then be free to claim MLK and the Civil Rights Movement themselves. It's a self-inflicted wound. Sure there are limits, I mean trying to embrace Hamilton as a cool guy is a stupid move (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...y-new-research) and we shouldn't try and make MLK into a saint. But the nearest thing to a modern founding father (which is what King is) and one who was very much on the left-wing is a figure we shouldn't cast aside.

I don't buy the framing that it's all about class, or that the Trump phenomenon is 50% about class and 50% about race (or whatever other numbers we substitute). I think all the framing around trying to split these things into pieces of pie and how big each slice is is the wrong way to think about it. A better way of looking at it is that economic inequality creates artificial scarcity, which leads to people becoming bitter and angry, which then leads to them being convinced by propaganda that it was the minorities who took their wealth. What I just said acknowledges the existence and prevalence of racism without blaming anyone for systemic problems or drawing attention away from economic issues.

That makes sense, yeah.

One more note on personal responsibility: I am not denying that Trump supporters are partly responsible for their racism and for endorsing the man. Everyone is partly responsible for their actions because everyone has some agency. The question is what's with the laser-fixation on Trump supporters when they are not the main agents that lead to Trump's rise.

They did vote for him on November 2016. Sure you can say they were lied to, that conspiracy theories and social media posts tricked them, but still when the Access Hollywood tape dropped, when this guy unambiguously attacked immigrants, when he ran a phony conspiracy about the birth certificate, they all voted for him anyway. In 2020, after this guy became the greatest American mass murderer in the last century (next to Trump's body count, Bin Laden comes across as a school shooter), where he oversaw more deaths in 8 months than US Soldiers and Civilians dead in World War 1, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, every terrorist attack in the interim and every school shooting...he exceeded them all, and a sizable chunk of them voted for him anyway.

The rich, the neoliberals, the Republican Party, and the media* are all far more culpable in the rise of Trump than most of Trump's voters are. Even if we boil it down to just people being racist, the Establishment is still more culpable than your average Trump voter because of years of propaganda and things like the Southern Strategy.

*I'm including the media because they propped him up for years as a TV personality even though he was always a conman, and later gave him free airtime during the 2015-16 election so they could get rich. That and they lied to the American public for years which Trump exploited to his advantage.

I agree that the entertainment industry has "blood on its hands" (in the words of a WGA chapter president) vis-a-vis Trump.

At the same time as happened in Post-War Germany, the Nazi Party being evil and so on doesn't excuse or absolve the great popular support and appeal German society had for Hitler's imperialist policies and actions. There was no big popular movement to rise against Hitler comparable to how the Italians rose against Mussolini, and the French against Petain.

I apologize if I came across stand-offish or like I was scolding. Some of your initial wording I admit I found frustrating but that has nothing to do with you specifically. I've seen people get radicalized before, both online and in real life, and it usually had to do with the way the media (and sometimes ordinary lefties) can be dismissive towards their grievances. So I can get pretty invested in this because I've seen it happen directly and it genuinely scares me.

Trust me, I am the last person who is going to judge you for that.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

I do wonder if blue-state Republican Governors could announce that they think it's important for their state to be represented in a cabinet, so that if anyone is nominated to higher office, they pledge to appoint an acceptable placeholder until a special election. What would be there to keep that from happening?

McConnell and the RNC or whatever has to whisper to the Blue GOP in question and tell them to take one for the team, i.e. do something that will finish them in election and compromise themselves in exchange for a higher reward later on.

In the current scenario where Senate majorities are slim and it's an all or nothing bloodpsort that kind of goodwill is a thing of the past if it ever existed to start with.


Somewhat related news. Marco Rubio is suggesting that the GOP go woke:
https://thehill.com/homenews/news/52...g-class-voters

Gotta say that Rubio needs a dictionary because what he describes as working class:
“What I mean by ‘working-class party’ is normal, everyday people who don't want to live in a city where there is no police department, where people rampage through the streets every time they are upset about something."
Is in fact the middle-class, both the lower middle class and the upper middle-class.

Still, if Rubio can do this, it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. Wouldn't vote for him obviously but it's not a bad idea. Still it smacks a little too much of Hispanic Romney and given the way the party is right now, it's not a direction ready for it, and his whole anti-free market idea is going to fall flat pretty fast in the GOP. Furthermore the working-class, even the fabled white working class, went significantly against Trump in 2020

[Tami]

Yeah, this is politics. Personal relationships matter.

Politics, business, whatever, it never hurts to have good personal relationships and it could even make the work easier to do.

[worstblogever]

This would be the same Marco Rubio who was within a fortnight ago cheering on Trump supporters trying to run a Biden/Harris bus off the road.

F*** Little Marco, he's a spineless little s***.

[numberthirty]

While Trump has failed as a businessman and we see that with his refusal to read reports and more. I don't see that from Yang who seemingly is successful and likely does read reports etc. Now I do think he will get it ? Ehhh don't know. Biden will likely weigh who can do the job and won't fall into Trump's trap of placing moronic people in positions for the hell of it.

if he isn't the Secretary of Labor, he's going to know who is

and yes, he's going to crawl up Vinces ass with a microscope

While it probably should happen eventually?

I don't know if it should be up on one of the front burners when they are getting started.

[CJStriker]

Biden Will IMMEDIATELY Reverse List of Trump Disasters!

[Tendrin]

Biden Will IMMEDIATELY Reverse List of Trump Disasters!

He's also planning to cancel the first 10k of student debt, possibly more.

[Kaitou D. Kid]

A Chief of Staff is a dude you are going to be hanging out day by day at the White House (which is both Biden's office and his home for the next four years), so hiring someone you don't like would be a bad choice. Likewise, for a guy been in the senate for 30 odd years, VP for 8 years, Biden pretty much knows everyone, so it would be hard for him to find a complete unknown.



Some did, but they were a minority. Look businessmen and rich dudes even supported the USSR. Karl Marx's best friend and buddy, and lifelong patron, Friedrich Engels was the son of a factoryowner and all-around rich playboy slacker. The Civil Rights Movement was genuinely one of the great progressive left-wing achievements in US History. Dr. King spoke against the Vietnam War long before that became the public opinion and he did that at great personal cost, since it alienated him from other leaders and from Lyndon Johnson. It's demoralizing to negate that, even if you don't mean that.

Fair enough.

For one thing, doing so, in addition to being untrue, yields ground to centrists and conservatives who will then be free to claim MLK and the Civil Rights Movement themselves. It's a self-inflicted wound.

Not if the reasoning is entirely opportunistic. They themselves won't admit to it because of this. I mean, capitalism is in the long run anti-racist because it's anti-human, if we think about it (to paraphrase Chomsky).

For example, Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States talks about how some abolitionists in the North held that position because they feared the slaves revolting on their own would cause a similar revolt by workers in the North. That's why they preferred to turn the chattel slaves into wage slaves like the Northern workers were. But bragging about something like that is very inhumane, because the person would essentially be saying they're an opportunist that wants to exploit others.

They did vote for him on November 2016. Sure you can say they were lied to, that conspiracy theories and social media posts tricked them, but still when the Access Hollywood tape dropped, when this guy unambiguously attacked immigrants, when he ran a phony conspiracy about the birth certificate, they all voted for him anyway. In 2020, after this guy became the greatest American mass murderer in the last century (next to Trump's body count, Bin Laden comes across as a school shooter), where he oversaw more deaths in 8 months than US Soldiers and Civilians dead in World War 1, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, every terrorist attack in the interim and every school shooting...he exceeded them all, and a sizable chunk of them voted for him anyway.

Voting is technically what gets someone elected, but in the US it's equivalent to pushing a button.

At the same time as happened in Post-War Germany, the Nazi Party being evil and so on doesn't excuse or absolve the great popular support and appeal German society had for Hitler's imperialist policies and actions. There was no big popular movement to rise against Hitler comparable to how the Italians rose against Mussolini, and the French against Petain.

Hitler is a perfect example. He didn't have that much popular support either. He lost the election he ran in (the Nazis got less than 40% of the overall vote), and then was appointed to Chancellor (which was kinda the equivalent of the VP position) because the Centrist President and his corporate donors thought he could draw in crowds. They thought they could keep in under control, then the President died and Hitler took over. Artificial scarcity and elite support for Fascism are what primarily lead to the rise of Hitler, just like how neoliberals are fueling the Far-Right today.

[The no face guy]

I have to wonder if Andrew Yang will get the Secretary of Labor position. He wants it and has sent signals to Vince McMahon he's coming to lay the smack down on his ass soon. I'm sure Vince is NONE TO HAPPY about this election and the thought Yang has already said he plans to push the company on its Independent Contractors deal ahead.

I love Andrew Wang and would like him to get a position in the Whitehouse that would raise his profile for the primaries, but...

I would rather have someone more left wing and pro union as Secretary of Labour in the United States, who will repeal right to work laws passed by states.

(As a Canadian this is important to me because they've been trying to bring that union busting bs up here.)

Below is Biden's promise, so the upcoming senate races in Georgia are very important.

Ban state laws prohibiting unions from collecting dues... who benefit from union representation that unions are legally obligated to provide. Currently more than half of all states have in place these so-called “right to work” laws, which in fact deprive workers of their rights. These laws exist only to deprive unions of the financial support they need to fight for higher wages and better benefits. As president, Biden will repeal the Taft-Hartley provisions that allow states to impose “right to work” laws.

https://joebiden.com/empowerworkers/#

[Tendrin]

Hitler is a perfect example. He didn't have that much popular support either. He lost the election he ran in (the Nazis got less than 40% of the overall vote), and then was appointed to Chancellor (which was kinda the equivalent of the VP position) because the Centrist President and his corporate donors thought he could draw in crowds. They thought they could keep in under control, then the President died and Hitler took over. Artificial scarcity and elite support for Fascism are what primarily lead to the rise of Hitler, just like how neoliberals are fueling the Far-Right today.

I wouldn't call Hindenberg a 'centrist', myself. Certainly, there were conservative interests to the right of him, but that does not by default make him a centerist.

[CJStriker]

He's also planning to cancel the first 10k of student debt, possibly more.

That is good to hear Tendrin, I am looking forward to hearing what the more is going to be down the road.

I hope that with some of these excutive reversails Biden is doing that after that the next step could be finding a way to make them harder to overturn in the future so that any future president that is again hostal to them does to reverse them again. I think that likely be a path threw congress to do that.

Also I know I am new here on that political forum, so I am not as well verse in poltical speak and dicussion as many of you, so forgive me not being as well verse in allot of this and the talk. But I do pay attention and the Recent events of the last few years as well as the election, the waiting and the result that we Finally Got of Biden and Harris winning made me want to finally just share on this forum some of my thoughts and feelings abit, Thanks.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

I mean, capitalism is in the long run anti-racist because it's anti-human, if we think about it (to paraphrase Chomsky).

Not Chomsky's best moment if he actually did say that.

For example, Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States talks about how some abolitionists in the North held that position because they feared the slaves revolting on their own would cause a similar revolt by workers in the North. That's why they preferred to turn the chattel slaves into wage slaves like the Northern workers were. But bragging about something like that is very inhumane, because the person would essentially be saying they're an opportunist that wants to exploit others.

That book is useful and interesting as popular history goes, but the stuff on the American Civil War (among others) is more than a little dated. Eric Foner, the greatest historian of the Civil War and Reconstruction, wrote a book on Reconstruction (as did W. E. B. Dubois) and the actual politics of the time, which doesn't fit with the schema Zinn used (for the obvious fact that Foner worked in the '70s onwards). That abolitionists had a mix of motives is well known and even Frederick Douglass admitted that in that time but it's not a case at all, that the North went to war because they wanted to prevent a lower-class uprising and alliance between workers and slaves.

Voting is technically what gets someone elected, but in the US it's equivalent to pushing a button.

No it isn't. In America, voting is registering, waiting in line, in this election making a plan to either vote early or vote by mail. It involves a lot of hurdles and in no way is it something like pushing a button. People have to be motivated to vote. For the GOP to go through that and vote for Trump means fewer excuses.

Hitler is a perfect example. He didn't have that much popular support either. He lost the election he ran in (the Nazis got less than 40% of the overall vote), and then was appointed to Chancellor (which was kinda the equivalent of the VP position) because the Centrist President and his corporate donors thought he could draw in crowds. They thought they could keep in under control, then the President died and Hitler took over. Artificial scarcity and elite support for Fascism are what primarily lead to the rise of Hitler, just like how neoliberals are fueling the Far-Right today.

It's true that the Nazi Party never did win any majority mandate by the German electorate and Hitler himself was never voted in by the ballot (in that regard he won the Weimar Republic's version of the Electoral College) but that doesn't matter because as the Third Reich continued and Hitler went to war, popular support for Hitler genuinely did come around and people did buy into the hype. The German public absolutely knew about the Holocaust at the time and supported his illegal wars in the hopes of German Supremacy. A lot of the stuff Hitler did was genuinely popular with the German public right until the bitter end. Again recent histories by Volker Ullrich and Ian Kershaw have moved past a lot of this.

Hitler did have a lot of support from German Industrialists and so on, but for most of the '20s the Nazis were a fringe party and the German Industiralists gave most of its funding to Center and Catholic Parties, not to Hitler for the simple reason that Hitler didn't look like a winner after the failed Putsch. It was the Depression that gave the Nazis its chance and even then a lot of shenanigans and stuff had to go Hitler's way. Ultimately, the Nazis did ally with big business and crushed the unions and so on and big business was all in on the plan to crush the USSR and make Russia into the German version of the Wild West and Manifest Destiny but it took a while to get there (and even then German Imperialism in the East was something even Catholics and Centrists before Hitler shared).

[Tendrin]

That is good to hear Tendrin, I am looking forward to hearing what the more is going to be down the road.

It's believed he has the authority to cancel up to 50k for people who attended public universities and HBCs, if I'm not mistaken.

[numberthirty]

I love Andrew Wang and would like him to get a position in the Whitehouse that would raise his profile for the primaries, but...

I would rather have someone more left wing and pro union as Secretary of Labour in the United States, who will repeal right to work laws passed by states.

(As a Canadian this is important to me because they've been trying to bring that union busting bs up here.)

Below is Biden's promise, so the upcoming senate races in Georgia are very important.

Ban state laws prohibiting unions from collecting dues... who benefit from union representation that unions are legally obligated to provide. Currently more than half of all states have in place these so-called “right to work” laws, which in fact deprive workers of their rights. These laws exist only to deprive unions of the financial support they need to fight for higher wages and better benefits. As president, Biden will repeal the Taft-Hartley provisions that allow states to impose “right to work” laws.

https://joebiden.com/empowerworkers/#

While That would be great, I'm not gonna keep my fingers crossed.