2020 Democratic presidential primary thread, pt 3: life is very long

more of an issue w/ the messenger than the message AFAICT

I thought Sanders himself polled very well?

Bernie is a moderate

Besides, people had an option of a different messenger w a v similar msg and she barely dven registered.xp

stamp of*

yeah maybe you shouldn't be looking at national politics for inspiration morbs

ah I see only the nuts on the other side get to be inspired by Reagan and Trump

Sanders's platform was p hard left by the standards of any wealthy anglo democracy imo.

Besides, people had an option of a different messenger w a v similar msg and she barely dven registered.

what if.....she failed in completely different ways?

in terms of candidates w any shot of winning head-of-govt elections.xp

3rd most popular and 4th most famous Dem, acc to this: https://today.yougov.com/ratings/politics/popularity/politicians/all

i think evangelicals have reason to be happy with what trump has gotten them (at least vis-a-vis the supreme court tho overturning roe v wade seems elusive still) but they did not seem enthusiastic about voting for him

― Mordy, Tuesday, 31 March 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Very true and 'What will the candidate of the party I normally vote for do for me?' is something Democrat voters on this thread are clearly looking at as well.

In this era to expect consistency from the Democratic Party is impossible -- too fractious a caucus. Unlike the GOP, the Dems remain a coalition party with genuine conservative and moderate wings; you might say it absorbed the remaining GOP moderates during the Bush era and has accelerated under Trump.

And my position is that the Democratic Party needs to give these people back. The Republican Party appears to have jettisoned its moderate elements and lost little of its national viability.

Or, to put it another way, where is the Democratic Steve King?

Still question the notion that voters decide based on "stances" on the "issues," but again this is rehashing that hash which hath already been hashed and re- etc.

Or, to put it another way, where is the Democratic Steve King?

― Why, I would make a fantastic Nero! (PBKR),

Am imbecile who breathes out of his ass?

We haven't had a fervid thread in * checks date * days. Welcome back, friends.

Who serves in Congress and whose vote counts the same as any other.

xp

The Dems have their share of mountebanks and tree sloths but center-left ideology doesn't accommodate the stupidity of a Steve King.

I think you mean stupid, not fervid

and we always have plenty

We haven't had a fervid thread in * checks date * days. Welcome back, friends.

it seems listless and pro forma

I'll defer to your expertise

Sanders's platform was p hard left by the standards of any wealthy anglo democracy imo.

Like, I don't know in which of these a $16T Green New Deal, 20% worker ownership of large corps, and aggressive wealth taxes would be moderate policies. I don't even think tuition is free in many English-speaking countries? Single-payer health care is 'moderate' if you live somewhere where it has already been implemented and you don't have to do anything to 'support the policy'. It's not a moderate proposal in a country with a powerful and entrenched private industry that currently controls the sector.

these aren't moderate times. coronavirus has shown how much we need strong public institutions that people can trust. bold collective action, international action, is needed to confront climate change.

bernie is the man for the moment.

however, the moment didn't choose him.

keeping the planet habitable is communism I guess

Don’t ever waste your time arguing with sic about what words mean

ok I won’t

again, wasn’t talking to you

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbJOFbZmtH4

thought this was a really, really fantastic essay from keeanga-yamahtta taylor, whatever your thoughts about sanders' continued candidacy

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/reality-has-endorsed-bernie-sanders

This is a virus that will thrive in the intimacy of American poverty. For years now, even in the midst of the economic recovery from the 2008 financial crisis, rising rents and stagnant salaries and wages have forced millions of families to improvise housing; nearly four million households live in overcrowded homes. This is the cruel irony of the San Francisco Bay Area’s shelter-in-place mandate: the region is at the epicenter of the U.S. housing crisis, as exemplified by its growing unsheltered homeless population. How do you practice social isolation without privacy or personal space? There are the crowded public offices that poor people congregate in to navigate access to services and income. There are the emergency rooms that function as primary health-care providers—not to mention the county jails and state prisons.

Economic inequality is exacerbated by racial injustice, both held in place by a threadbare social-safety net. Black and brown populations are particularly vulnerable to infection because poverty is a fount of underlying conditions, such as diabetes, hypertension, pulmonary disease, and heart disease, that make it more likely that the virus will be deadly. They are also more vulnerable because greater rates of poverty and under-employment have hindered access to health care. In Milwaukee, the most segregated city in the U.S., where black unemployment is four times the rate of white unemployment, the majority of diagnosed coronavirus cases are middle-aged black men. And as anyone who has ever had to wonder how they will make their rent payment knows, the stress of economic uncertainty is corrosive, eating into the capability of the immune system.

When Bernie Sanders’s critics mocked his platform as just a bunch of “free stuff,” they were drawing on the past forty years of bipartisan consensus about social-welfare benefits and entitlements. They have argued, instead, that competition organized through the market insures more choices and better quality. In fact, the surreality of market logic was on clear display when, on March 13th, Donald Trump held a press conference to discuss the covid-19 crisis with executives from Walgreens, Target, Walmart, and CVS, and a host of laboratory, research, and medical-device corporations. There were no social-service providers or educators there to discuss the immediate, overwhelming needs of the public.

The crisis is laying bare the brutality of an economy organized around production for the sake of profit and not human need. The logic that the free market knows best can be seen in the prioritization of affordability in health care as millions careen toward economic ruin. It is seen in the ways that states have been thrown into frantic competition with one another for personal protective equipment and ventilators—the equipment goes to whichever state can pay the most. It can be seen in the still criminally slow and inefficient and inconsistent testing for the virus. It is found in the multi-billion-dollar bailout of the airline industry, alongside nickel-and-dime means tests to determine which people might be eligible to receive ridiculously inadequate public assistance.

The argument for resuming a viable social-welfare state is about not only attending to the immediate needs of tens of millions of people but also reëstablishing social connectivity, collective responsibility, and a sense of common purpose, if not common wealth. In an unrelenting and unemotional way, covid-19 is demonstrating the vastness of our human connection and mutuality. Our collectivity must be borne out in public policies that repair the friable welfare infrastructure that threatens to collapse beneath our social weight. A society that allows hundreds of thousands of home health-care workers to labor without health insurance, that keeps school buildings open so that black and brown children can eat and be sheltered, that allows millionaires to stow their wealth in empty apartments while homeless families navigate the streets, that threatens eviction and loan defaults while hundreds of millions are mandated to stay inside to suppress the virus, is bewildering in its incoherence and inhumanity.

Naomi Klein has written about how the political class has used social catastrophes to create policies that allow for private plunder. She calls it “disaster capitalism,” or the “shock doctrine.” But she has also written that, in each of these moments, there are also opportunities for ordinary people to transform their conditions in ways that benefit humanity. The class-driven hierarchy of our society will encourage the spread of this virus unless dramatic and previously unthinkable solutions are immediately put on the table. As Sanders has counselled, we must think in unprecedented ways. This includes universal health care, an indefinite moratorium on evictions and foreclosures, the cancellation of student-loan debt, a universal basic income, and the reversal of all cuts to food stamps. These are the basic measures that can staunch the immediate crisis of deprivation—of millions of layoffs and millions more to come.

The Sanders campaign was an entry point to this discussion. It has shown public appetite, even desire, for vast spending and new programs. These desires did not translate into votes because they seemed like a risky endeavor when the consequence was four more years of Trump. But the mushrooming crisis of covid-19 is changing the calculus. As federal officials announce new trillion-dollar aid packages daily, we can never go back to banal discussions of “How will we pay for it?” How can we not? Now is a moment to remake our society anew.

This was excellent. Thanks.

I am reminded of that line from The Leopard: For things to remain the same, things must change.

best book

wonderful piece.

It's silly to pretend "money" had nothing to do with Biden's (presumptive) triumph because 'Bernie wasn't outspent.'

'Earned media' doesn't exist without all the oligarch money behind the media, one donor-class leech put 4X more money into Warren on Super Tuesday than ILXors have earned in a collective lifetime.

Just finished The Leopard a couple weeks ago, there’s a lot of “that's not saying what it may seem to be saying,” but very engaging.

Plus ça change, it is quite true.

Sending a letter.

SCOOP: Today, Elizabeth Warren sent letters to the CEOs of Uber, Instacart, DoorDash, and Grubhub calling on them to stop misclassifying workers as contractors and start offering them a minimum wage, paid sick leave, health benefits, and more. https://t.co/H1iJ2Ewozp

— Edward Ongweso Jr (@bigblackjacobin) April 1, 2020

But now they've been "called on". It's the difference maker.

this is better than politicians not adopting and promoting this interpretation of gig-economy labor, though.

just because Elizabeth Warren is no longer participating in the Democratic primary for president, that's no reason not to continue shitting on her in the Democratic primary for president thread! truly inspiring to see.

i don't understand xyzzz's problem. gig workers should of course get the same salary, benefits and security employees do.

i don't understand xyzzz's problem

brain damage, afaict

damn Shakey spittin

i don't understand xyzzz's problem. gig workers should of course get the same salary, benefits and security employees do.

― treeship., Wednesday, 1 April 2020 bookmarkflaglink

You don't understand much. Shakey understands less.

that evil woman!

i think we can safely ignore what our resident tankie has to say about elizabeth warren

idk how xyzzzz__ has escaped being 51'd yet, but I guess other people have a higher tolerance for the deliberate posting of inaccurate misinformation, conspiracy theories, alarmist nonsense, poorly sourced garbage etc. than I do

enh it's fair to be skeptical of the efficacy of "sending a letter to the manager"

In a 1968 interview, McCartney said that the song was "about the hole in the road where the rain gets in, a good old analogy—the hole in your make-up which lets the rain in and stops your mind from going where it will." He went on to say that the following lines were about fans who hung around outside his home day and night, and whose actions he found off-putting:

See the people standing there
who disagree, and never win
And wonder why they don't get in my door

Years later, McCartney acknowledged that the song was an "ode to pot".

perhaps less pertinent but still a good story:

The first of two recording sessions for "Fixing a Hole" was at Regent Sound Studios in London on 9 February 1967, in three takes. Regent Sound was used because all three studios at EMI's Abbey Road Studios were unavailable that night, so this was the first time that the Beatles used a British studio other than Abbey Road for an EMI recording. Also present at the session was a man who had arrived at McCartney's house in St John's Wood, shortly before McCartney was due to depart for the studio, and introduced himself as Jesus Christ. McCartney later recalled: "I thought, Well, it probably isn't. But if he is, I'm not going to be the one to turn him away ... There were a lot of casualties about then. We used to get a lot of people who were maybe insecure or going through emotional breakdowns or whatever. So I said, 'I've got to go to a session but if you promise to be very quiet and just sit in a corner, you can come.' So he did, he came to the session and he did sit very quietly and I never saw him after that."

That's all it was. I doubt a tankie is spending a nanosecond thinking about Warren xp