Interesting article on Citizen's United

Fuck

Wealthy people are more ideologically balanced than academics and journalists? He states that as a statement of fact; he doesn’t even need to back that up. It’s just true, apparently.

Cuz academics and journalists are liberal. Studies say so.

You know what else studies show?

Studies show that EVERYBODY is liberal. That’s the weird thing. Large majorities of people think global warming is accelerated by human activity and that we should do something about it. Large majorities of Americans are in favor of national health care, more spending on education, less spending on the military, more protections of the environment, and on and on.

So one wonders…why do they always single out academics and journalists? Would it be to imply that one can’t really trust the two segments of society that are more highly informed than other segments?

So we have this weird society where people don’t trust what they themselves believe.

Besides which, I still don’t know how money = speech. I would think speech is speech, and money is money, and they are different things. But one thing I am pretty sure of is that the authors of the first amendment did not even conceive of corporations having “speech rights.” I doubt the concept would have made any sense to them in any way. For the same reason it makes no sense to me.

And if the cost of getting corporate money out of elections means getting union money etc. out of elections, sign me up. Only humans should be able to individually contribute, and institutions are welcome to pay for advertising on their own…but not directly contribute to the political process.

waterfield wrote:

I have no idea where you get she’s a crusher of poor people. To be honest that just sounds to me like some revolutionary, anarchist, unsophisticated and simplistic statement right out of the 60s…

All just to make a statement? Fine -go ahead.

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Yes, i know that’s how your your brain interprets it, W. I know.

Voting for Jill Stein — the candidate that best reflects humane, compassionate views — the candidate whose policies would help the poor — is not just ‘making a statement’. My hope would be that leftists abandon the Duplicat Party, and a Trump victory would once and for all fracture the Rich-folks (DNC) hold on the democrat party. The Party might take a look at itself. Might change. Might move to the left. Likely? Maybe not. But there’s a chance. Every other road leads to crushing-the-biosphere.

So, ya know, we see things differently.

w
v

Sanders beats Trump in every major poll.

http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/2016-general-election-trump-vs-sanders

I haven’t decided who I will vote for if Sanders doesn’t get the nomination, but I think it’s the Clinton supporters who fail to look at the issues. If they did they wouldn’t be supporting a candidate who promises to maintain the status quo of endless wars, environmental degradation and government by the rich for the rich. It is the Clinton supporters who have given up, because it is they who claim to care about these issues but insist any positive changes must occur so slowly and incrementally they could be measured on a geologic time scale.

And you know your ‘only moderates can see the truth’ schtick isn’t going to make any headway around here, right?

Waterfield,

Nader didn’t cost Gore the election. That would have been mathematically, physically and, due to the way we structure elections, impossible from an electoral point of view. Presidents win via a cumulative count in the Electoral college. No one state can possibly be “decisive” because of this. You need a lot of states to get to 270. Gore won 20. Bush won 30 and received 271 electoral votes to Gore’s 266. Take any of those 30 states for Gore, leave Florida in Bush’s column, and Gore wins.

It’s akin to saying that a missed field goal, in the last second of the last game of the season, cost some NFL team a chance to get to the playoffs. Wrong. If they had won another game prior to that last one, it wouldn’t have mattered, and if they had scored more points prior to that last-second field-goal attempt, it wouldn’t have mattered, etc. etc.

It’s become an article of faith among too many Democrats, but it’s really nothing more than a copout and a refusal to take responsibility for Gore’s terrible campaign, the lack of turnout among Dems, and the fact that more than 300,000 Democrats in Florida voted for Bush. Nader cost Gore roughly 27,000 likely votes there. If just 564 Democrats had stayed with their own candidate, instead of voting for Bush, Gore wins. And if the ballots hadn’t been so confusing to people in Palm Beach — even Buchanan said he believed at least 95% of his votes should have gone to Gore — Gore wins. And if Gore takes his own state of Tennessee, he wins, etc. etc.

If, if, if. Too many Democrats want to cherry pick just one possible counterfactual among a sea of them, while ignoring 99% of the rest. They need to do some real soul searching, or just let all of that go.

Nader had nothing to do with Bush’s victory. He couldn’t possibly.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 7 months ago by Billy_T.
• This reply was modified 8 years, 7 months ago by Billy_T.

Thanks, W. That was a thoughtful post. There is a lot there, much of which I agree with, and some of which I disagree with. But your argument for voting for Hillary as a practicality has a lot of merit. There is no reason whatsoever to think that Donald Trump is a suitable candidate to occupy the White House. He is unpredictable, and therefore dangerous. Every moment he is in office, I will be figuratively holding my breath. There is no doubt in my mind he will make things worse for minorities, even if he is unable to go anywhere near as far as he claims he will. (I mean, the sheer impracticality of building a wall and/or deporting 11 million people is staggering. He can’t do it).

I also fear his SC appointments. The man is rash, and unprincipled. His unpredictability makes him a real loose cannon – not what one wishes for the most powerful position on the planet.

However, I can’t say I have any faith in Hillary Clinton, either. I assume her appointees will uphold Roe, but I don’t have any faith at all that they will overturn Citizens United. What has she ever done to make anyone think she would?

There is no question that organized wealth controls our politics, and that when a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. What happens on Capitol Hill is different from what is promised on the campaign trail, and what is promised on the campaign trail is different from what happens on Capitol Hill because what the majority of voters want is something different from what the organized wealth in this country wants. So we get lip service, and when the oaths are taken, and the doors are closed, the government gets busy serving organized wealth. Everybody knows this. Everybody. And everybody has known it for a long time. And from time-to-time, a candidate comes along and promises to change that, but like Lucy pulling the ball away from Charlie Brown, the government keeps up business as usual. Obama promised Hope and Change. Meanwhile, he took huge money from banks. So Obama bailed out the bankers, but not the homeowners. We got some incremental progress on a couple of things, but no change to the system.

So while I agree that Trump will be bad, I really have no reason to see Hillary as anything but Lucy. The entire Clinton fortune has been generated in the wake of Citizens United, and she has expertly used the system to landscape the democrat party to support her presidential bid. It’s what got her where she is. And, heck, she has scooped up more than $13 million from the healthcare industry alone, including over $2.8 million in speaking fees that went straight into her personal checking account. Millions of Americans believe that $2.8 million in personal money plus another $10 million in campaign money may just be at the root of her “practical” approach to healthcare. Hillary may be better than Trump, but she is not a reformer.

She talks about incremental progress. I am not sure incremental progress is acceptable anymore. I have waited 3 decades now for progress, and for 3 decades I have accepted the “lesser of two evils” argument (though I didn’t vote that way because it hasn’t mattered in California). But I believe we are running out of clock. And right now, I am weighing whether the risk of Trump against the value of destroying the democrat establishment. Is it better to risk 4 years of Trump on the gamble that he will be a one-term president, thus opening the door for a Warren run in 2020, or is it better to avoid risking possible Trump excesses by rewarding a corrupt democrat establishment, thus making a progressive run unlikely until 2024?

Because, you see, I don’t think we can afford to wait another minute on taking action on the environment. We need to make a serious move – not an incremental move – away from poisoning the biosphere. Life itself is at stake. And Hillary isn’t going to make a serious move. She’s already told us that repeatedly. We are killing the planet’s ability to support human civilization, and incrementalism is the same as doing nothing at this point. That is the dilemma.

Moreover, you misread the seriousness and scope of the movement Sanders happens to head up right now. Millions of other Americans are unhappy with the current system/establishment, and that is the story of this election. That is the story of Trump and Sanders. Yes, they have one thing in common: they both have called out the system for being a payola scheme, and neither has taken money from that system. That’s why they are getting the support they are. And you can dismiss it as childish – “lack of any analytical inclination,” “simplistic,” “juvenile,” “schoolyard politics” – but that attitude from Hillary and Hillary supporters does not warm us up to vote for her. Just so you know. And it is that smugness that informs us that the Democrat establishment just doesn’t get it. The writing is on the wall. This is the last gasp of Clintonism. The Clintons, the Rubins, Emmanuels, Wasserman Schultzes, are at the end of the road. The environmental pressures are building, and Sanders has just made it okay for the first time since the 70s to talk about certain issues. Half the party is for a self-described democratic socialist right now. Maybe more than half. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those votes cast in early February for Clinton would go to Sanders if those primaries were held now. And Hillary supporters are talking about half the party as if it is a child who needs to be removed from the room while the adults handle the serious business of the nation.

I am telling you that a vote for Sanders or Trump or Stein is not a immature, self-serving “statement.” It is a deliberate blow to the establishment which keeps breaking its promises to the American people. It will not stand. I do not accept the argument that what Sanders is calling for – a more equitable distribution of wealth, a national health care system, “free” college education – is juvenile, or unrealistic. Dozens of countries have those things. So we can, too. And the only thing stopping us is popular insistence upon those things. But 58% of Americans want single-payer health care, including 41% of Republicans. Not only is it feasible, we’re going to get it. Within 10 years is my bet. The pendulum that Reagan started swinging to the right has crested, and its rightward arc is within a whisker of being complete. This country has started looking to the left.

And if I am wrong about that, then may god help us because the shit is going to hit the fan.

Last note: it isn’t that corporations are evil, or that corporations are even to blame. Corporations are just a stack of legal documents, nothing more. But the playing field is tilted towards organized wealth, so the executives of corporations are just playing by the rules, and in fact rewriting the rules in their favor all the time. So the rules have to be changed. That is all.

Billy_T wrote:

WV,

(Austria just elected a Green. Barely, but still. Why can’t we?)

————–

Dunno anything about the political history of Austria. I would
speculate wildly that Austria’s people werent harnessed by
forces of religion and corporate-propaganda as much as Americans were.
I guess. I dunno.

Religion and Corporate-Power. Put’em together and ya got the End of the World.

w
v

I personally am not persuaded by predictions of positive outcomes of a Trump presidency (like a collapse of the party etc.). No one knows those kinds of things. Those kinds of things are never knowable.

I am hanging my hat on one thing, which I’ve said before. Worse really IS worse, and it is worse in far more ways than you can ever imagine or predict. I remember when LePage got elected in Maine and people would say “well how bad can it get really.” Those people ain’t saying that now. They got a taste of it.

I am probably not going to convince anyone and that’s fine. Just putting my 2 pennies in.

PA Ram wrote:

…As for this article and it’s conclusion that this ruling confirms that corporations are entitled to free speech, and that money is free speech–I’d say that is a very divided view along political lines. The vote itself was 5-4 along political lines. I think it’s utter bullshit and yes–I’m no lawyer. But others who are agree with that.

Anyone who does not see the harm being done by money in politics is either willfully ignorant or on board with that agenda..

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First off as I’ve said many times, a trained monkey could be a lawyer. Law School is not hard. You wanna know what’s hard? Nursing school.

Anyway, yeah lawyers all disagree on the Corporate-Personhood and the Santa Clara cases up through and past Citizens United. And yes, it fractures along political lines.

…The powers-that-be have never liked folks who wanted big-change. Gandhi was not a popular man with, as zooey called it, ‘organized wealth’. Gandhi was called naive and infantile and a gazillion other things. Not by poor people, though, for the most part.

“It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer of the type well-known in the East, now posing as a fakir, striding half naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.”
-Comment on Gandhi’s meeting with the British Viceroy of India, addressing the Council of the West Essex Unionist Association (23 February 1931)

“Gandhi-ism and everything it stands for will have to be grappled with and crushed”
-Churchill, on the independence movement in India, 1930

“For the poor, the economic is spiritual.”
Gandhi

w
v

Zooey wrote:

Z, for some reason, your images are not posting.

When I search the image url in this case, I get this:

The URL doesn’t refer to an image, or the image is not publicly accessible.

One guess is you may be trying to post images from facebook (maybe?) FB is very tricky about letting images be copied.

zn wrote:

Zooey wrote:

Z, for some reason, your images are not posting.

When I search the image url in this case, I get this:

The URL doesn’t refer to an image, or the image is not publicly accessible.

One guess is you may be trying to post images from facebook (maybe?) FB is very tricky about letting images be copied.

Interesting.

I saw that one of my bean images wasn’t posting, so I downloaded the image and uploaded it to a defunct school website that still exists, but to which nobody is directed any longer since the school moved to a different place. It is with googlepages. Let me try something. Does this work?

zn wrote:

That disappears with public health insurance.

Which WORKS where it exists. (I am originally Canadian for example.)

One of my favorite one-image comments on this. Oldie but goodie.

…

Old world monkeys and apes mainly see as humans do – they are trichomats, so they pick up red, green, and blue. But many new world monkeys do not. There is no real pattern among species. In fact, in the same family of monkeys there can be up to six different types of color blindness or vision. As with their human cousins, color blindness is more common in males than in females.

Basically, the way I see it, is that red lights are unfair to monkeys, and they should not have to abide by them.

Okay–if you won’t wv–I will.