Democratic (Party) Direction

hey c_k if you can't do as you promised and stop posting, a mod will do it for you. there's no point in waiting for you to get 51'd since that already happened to your previous alias

uh can someone tell me what this tweet is in reference to:

I find it disgusting that Bernie Sanders allows his fans to slutshame Kamala Harris when he himself has an out of wedlock child. Hypocrite.

— Bravenak Reclaimed (@bravenak) August 3, 2017

no earthly idea

it's about Bernie Sanders being a total slut

hotttt

I'm already tired of the 2020 primary

i'll vote for whoever vows to dismantle twitter

at the risk of coming across kaiser-y I don't get what's dumb about the Cooper piece either tbh

I've never liked Booker, don't really care about Patrick, but Harris is like my people so I'm kinda annoyed by the weak sauce getting thrown at her

I feel like the "seriousness" of charges thrown against her in that article are on a par with people holding Bernie's pro-NRA votes against him, ie largely immaterial and not reflective of broader policy priorities

and the fact that the article neatly elides mentioning that all three candidates just happen to be black is very O I SEE WHAT U DID THERE

The sum total of the cases against Booker and Patrick are invoking the name "Bain Capital" and the case against Harris doesn't actually mention the main thing people are currently pillorying her for, then says these are "substantive reasons" and moves on to some self-congratulatory game theory. There's no indication that the person who wrote it even spent five seconds looking into any of these people's records, where you can find more tangible things to write about than "overpromises" and "Bain Capital". It is a completely facile, shallow take on what problems these three might have in presenting themselves as progressive; I've seen editorials in high school newspapers that were better researched and argued.

I guess the last two paragraphs get defensive on that point but still

xp

Copper implying that the Islamophobic attacks against Ellison were way more widespread than they were is pretty sleazy. He's implicitly accusing sone of the very people who denounced it as perpetuating it.

It also says this in @ryanlcooper's piece, but it is not true. @neeratanden and others defended Keith Ellison. https://t.co/D64gHAfcCC pic.twitter.com/fghcG14wKc

— Zachary Fedell 🌐 (@zatchry) August 3, 2017

The Patrick bit is particularly galling because literally 10 seconds of research reveals a pattern of Patrick spending his professional career going into shitty situations at shitty corporations and attempting to bring some measure of accountability to the corporation. That has been the cornerstone hallmark of his career. It also completely ignores that his job at Bain is to build a fund off of investing in companies who produce a tangible social good to their communities as well as a profit. What he is doing is nothing like Romney's role as a business liquidator and it's fundamentally dishonest to elide the two by saying "and worst of all, Deval Patrick WORKS AT BAIN".

In summation, get a better source than The Week, which is weak.

yeah a lot of this is guilt-by-association shit

full confession: part of my eye-rolling at this kind of thing is that I really don't give a fuck about the "donor class". There's really very little legislative quid-pro-quo that anyone can point to when it comes to the kind of campaign donors that this refers to. And what's more, some of these billionaires (Steyer, Soros, etc.) actually do a lot of good with their money. And the greatest liberal Presidents we've ever had were knee-deep in that shit (FDR, LBJ etc.), I just don't accept this kind of simplified view that money = bad policy, because it isn't borne out by the legislative record.

(That being said, I am fully supportive of getting rid of Citizens United, publicy funded campaigned, campaign finance reform, whatever you want to propose - but we don't have it and this is the system we're currently in, so we might as well make it work)

yeah a lot of this is guilt-by-association shit

You mean like 'lefty' Dems who washed their hands of Sanders bcz of nasty TwitterBros?

sure

if you wanna consider twitter trolls and Dem donors equivalent classes of people

(reminder that I am not Fred B and never really had a problem w Sanders beyond thinking he couldn't win in the general and had some rhetorical/political blindspots)

If I washed my hands of someone just because lots of their fans were obnoxious bros I wouldn't still love Pavement as much as I do

This notion that the donor class has absolutely no effect on policy is ludicrous to me. banks and major corporations throw their money at people out of the goodness of their hearts, or out of some vague notion of "stability" or something? legislation that is not proposed, wording that is not used, is just as important as legislation that is. Didn't a leaked memo note that donors were uneasy w/ Warren's rhetoric?

I'm pleased this thread has returned to its usual inanity.

yr welcome Alfred

Ah, there's what I was thinking of

This notion that the donor class has absolutely no effect on policy is ludicrous to me.

I didn't say this. I said there is rarely a direct quid-pro-quo - which is what a lot of these criticisms of candidates usually amount to (ie, "They received a donation, therefore they are going to pass whatever legislation their donors want!") - primarily because legislation is so complex and there are multiple centers of powers/interests involved.

This notion that the donor class has absolutely no effect on policy is ludicrous to me. banks and major corporations throw their money at people out of the goodness of their hearts, or out of some vague notion of "stability" or something? legislation that is not proposed, wording that is not used, is just as important as legislation that is. Didn't a leaked memo note that donors were uneasy w/ Warren's rhetoric?

If you ask the extreme libertarians, they'll tell you that the "donor class" isn't buying legislative preferences, they're paying protection money/being shaken down by the government. Yes, it's as stupid as it sounds.

(Obama made well-covered remarks that his thinking DID IN FACT change when exposed to/dependent on the donor class)

"They're like the police dept for wise guys."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDbgkIkTVUk

Whether or not you believe there's a direct quid pro quo relationship, why should voters rally behind anyone who isn't fiercely advocating for anything short of the complete removal of corporate influence over the political sphere? How will you restore public trust otherwise (barring, again, an Obama-level rhetorical talent)? The popular perception, accurate or not, is that establishment Dems are bought and sold.

why should voters rally behind anyone who isn't fiercely advocating for anything short of the complete removal of corporate influence over the political sphere

because there are bigger problems

like, I agree, that's one problem and excluding corporate money from campaigns and policy decisions is a good goal. It's secondary to a lot of other shit going on imo.

I find hat difficult to believe when, f'rinstance, 100 companies account for 71% of emissions.

and yet Exxon supports cap-and-trade and the Paris accords. go figure.

that's reductive as all hell, Shakey

oh and Simon's statistic isn't?

Aren't the Paris benchmarks considered too tame by most scientists? PR wins are important for exceptionally toxic companies.

they represent a groundbreaking international agreement and a framework for future project, even if the goals themselves are not as aggressive as they should be

they also - not entirely coincidentally! - present a path for companies like Exxon to make a shit-ton of money. sometimes interests overlap.

the main opposition to dealing with climate change is not coming from huge corporations - coal companies just aren't that powerful anymore - it's coming from a small cadre of completely ideologically driven idiots in the Republican party. And they are not - at least not primarily - cynically motivated by being beholden to corporate interests! They are just very, very stupid people like James Inhofe.

so it's frustrating when I see people try to draw these simplified conclusions like "X corporation's $$$ = Y policy decision" because the reality is usually more tangled and complex

Deval Patrick might be a saint and have meant well at every stop, but convincing the social democratic left that he was the good guy at Coke while they were abetting murdering union organizers, the good guy at Ameriquest while they were heavily contributing to the Great Recession, the good guy at a private equity firm that exists primarily as a corporate raider... I don't see it happening. Call the social democratic left stupid and myopic if you want but do so at the risk of Trump 2020.

Call it guilt by association, but who you choose to associate with matters.

they represent a groundbreaking international agreement and a framework for future project

sorry meant to say "future progress" here

xp

Deval Patrick might be a saint and have meant well at every stop, but convincing the social democratic left that he was the good guy at Coke while they were abetting murdering union organizers, the good guy at Ameriquest while they were heavily contributing to the Great Recession, the good guy at a private equity firm that exists primarily as a corporate raider... I don't see it happening. Call the social democratic left stupid and myopic if you want but do so at the risk of Trump 2020.

Call it guilt by association, but who you choose to associate with matters.

― El Tuomasbot (milo z), 3. august 2017 22:49 (thirty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

But on the other hand, good luck at trying to convince the democratic base in the south that a civil rights veteran is unacceptable as a nominee because the companies he worked at did something bad once. And therefore the social democratic left won't lift a finger to vote out trump and sessions. I mean...

he was the good guy at Coke while they were abetting murdering union organizers

this was in Columbia in the 90s right...? Coke is a huge corporation, was he really involved with this?

I remember it as an issue in the early 2000s but it might have been new reporting on something older.

why should voters rally behind anyone who isn't fiercely advocating for anything short of the complete removal of corporate influence over the political sphere

because there are bigger problems

climate change is one of the biggest problems we have and we have been giving corporations a free ride on taking our natural resources and polluting not just the planet but our environment. look at Flint. Clinton didn't even visit. corporations have a lot to answer for irt pollution. i read two books on medieval history and the original corporations were also started to plunder fossil fuels and gold and precious metals, and the water was so polluted that it was unsafe to drink. there are places in the USA that are living like medieval times. this is unacceptable.

and I mean, I'm not saying he was involved in anything specifically awful with any of them, it's just a chain of awful companies that he's happened to be involved with as a very high-level executive