Forum Replies Created
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Not sure if it’s particularly useful to say “the racism was always there.” Perhaps. But a key here is that the two parties really are quite different now when it comes to dealing with racism and bigotry. It’s one of the few, real areas of difference. Of course, it wasn’t always that way. Pre-1960s Dems were filled with racists, especially in the South, where they owned that part of the political map. The Republicans own it now. But, it’s really the religious right that swung the balance throughout the country. They decided to “get political” primarily as a reaction to federal efforts to desegregate schools (especially Bob Jones University), businesses, workplaces, etc.
So one party has made a conscious effort to just flat out make the appearance of racism and bigotry unacceptable. The other hasn’t. The other, in fact, encourages it, primarily as a way to deflect attention from its donor class — the real reason for everyone’s economic woes. It’s the 1%, and the system they control, that screws everyone over. Not brown and black peoples, or women.
The Dems have yet to make that clear, though Sanders has started the shift for the Dems. But the GOP is still of the mind to consciously scapegoat POCs, along with the entire public sector, which, for many Republicans, are synonymous.
Boiled down: Trump is just using the GOP playbook, without the usual filters. He has no filters. Which is part of his appeal. The thing is, however, he doesn’t have any policies or programs, either, and every speech he gives is just incoherent word salad, like Sarah Palin. So his supporters are mostly just projecting their own fears and dreams onto him.
WV,
Am with you on that. I don’t have the energy for arguments these days, either. Though, every now and then, things boil up inside me and it comes out. Then I go back inside, way inside, and think: Why on earth did I bother? It’s not worth it, etc.
Too old, too tired, too many other things to do — too many much better things to do. So, yeah. I get that.
Also: I’m obviously new to this version of the board, and I don’t know bnw, really, at all. So I probably shouldn’t have included him with the general group I referred to. I also think it’s preferable to try to find common ground if it’s there. So, basically, just ignore what I said.
:>)
Beyond all of that: You’ve always been far more patient online, with all kinds of different people, and I give your props for that. I think I do a pretty good job of that in the real world, but not always online. Something to work on.
Anyway . . .
In solidarity.
Anyway, back to my point — which was NOT about what ‘label’ we arbitrarily chose — the point is, do you understand that we are NOT Democrats. And do you understand that there are such things as “leftists” (or whatever label u want to use) who cant stand Obama, Clinton, the Republicans and the rest of the “system” politicians. Do you get that? Not lecturing here, just asking if you get that?
WV, I think you’re asking too much from “conservatives,” who really aren’t conservatives anymore. They’re right-wing radicals. The current American iteration is well to the right of the Reagan conservative, and they keep moving to the right. They pretty much do this each time the Dems stake out more of their old territory — which is constant — and feel the need to always and forever be to their right. The Dems are now planted firmly on the center-right, own it, after it was vacated by Republicans. The Republicans have in turn purged their ranks of the old guard, the Eisenhower Republicans, etc. . . . even the McCain of 2000 version.
This new breed of faux-conservative has been brainwashed to unprecedented degrees for forty years, and pretty much everything is the End of the World!!! for them. The slightest move from the Federal government means the Apocalypse is nigh. Reagan played into this with his talk about Medicare meaning the total end of all freedom for Americans. And with Obama? A year before he took office, you had large numbers of Republicans thinking he was the anti-christ. That number is roughly 25% now. Majorities believed he was foreign-born, a Muslim, a secret agent sent to destroy America, a Marxist, socialist, bogeyman, etc. etc.
They were fed this nonsense 24/7 by hate radio, their churches, and their reps, and it’s never stopped. This is why they can never see Obama for what he is — a true conservative, an pre-Reagan Republican. They’ve been told for years and years that he was, quite literally, the devil, that he “palled around with terrorists,” that he’s a Muslim secret agent, blah blah blah.
So they’re just never going to see how lucky they were that he was elected. They got an actual conservative in office, who implemented actual conservative policies, most of them falling waaaaay short, which was to be expected. But who gets the blame? “The left.” Even though Obama implemented center-right government. They couldn’t have written a better script.
And while you’re obviously, self-evidently correct about the massive gulf between leftists and Obama, if you spend any time on “conservative” websites or websites with large participation by “conservatives,” it’s pretty much an article of faith among them that Obama is “far left,” as are the Dems in generally. They simply believe in the myths, legends and propaganda handed down to them from hate radio, the Birchers, the religiously wrong, the Randians and so on. Now, bnw may not be like his peers, but I haven’t seen any evidence that he differs from them on this issue. He thought it was absurd when I said Obama has governed as a conservative — which he has — and I don’t think he’ll ever understand that the Republican party is no longer conservative in the slightest. It’s a radical, far-right party now. The Dems are now the true conservatives in America.
Obama doesn’t,t govern as a conservative! how bizarre!
Bizarre, fer sure. But it’s true. Obama has governed as a conservative.
Of course, no American president has ever governed with complete ideological consistency/purity. But, overall, the vast majority of Obama’s policies and proposals would have been supported by Republicans, as is, if he were a Republican. In many ways, in fact, Obama has been a much better Republican than presidents Reagan, Bush Sr. and Dubya.
As in: Obama pushed for massive deficit reduction and a deficit commission in the midst of a terrible economic downturn. He oversaw the loss of 800,000 public sector jobs during that downturn. He froze federal pay and hiring during that downturn. Reagan, Bush Sr. and Dubya all wildly increased spending in the face of recessions; oversaw the hiring of more than one million new public sector employees, each, on their respective watches; and they never held deficit commissions.
Obama re-upped the (supposedly temporary) Bush tax cuts twice and made them permanent. He rehired Bush’s Fed chairman, and his defense secretary. He kept Bush’s bailouts of Wall Street and Detroit going. He never went after Wall Street crooks, shielding them from prosecution. He shielded Bush/Cheney and their respective admins from prosecution, when they easily could have and should have been frog-marched into the Hague.
He expanded the Bush wars, increased the size and scope of the “GWOT.” He expanded the surveillance state, and went after Occupy. He pushed for TPP and other very conservative trade agreements. His state department was/is aggressive in ramming capitalism down the throats of other nations, especially in Central and South America, advocating (for our capitalists) the privatization of public sector after public sector.
The ACA is a very conservative law, based on the Heritage Foundation proposal, later implemented by Romney in Massachusetts. Obama and the Dems prevented any talk of Single Payer, and kicked even the public option under the bus. Rather than try to resolve our health care debacle through non-profit, universal care, he and the Dems chose the “market solutions” approach, by keeping it for-profit and selective, which is why it’s so expensive in the first place.
The above is just for starters.
I’m pretty confident you can’t name any of his policies that aren’t conservative, outside a coupla “culture war” things like Same Sex Marriage. When I bring this up to conservatives, they never can. But they still insist Obama is a “liberal,” despite the record.
I first bumped into Hanauer via his TED talk.
The thing is, while he is a breath of fresh air, he doesn’t show how to fix this mess, either. He’s of the “reform it, don’t end it” school, which is preferable to the current mode, but still falls waaay short.
In reality, in a properly functioning, moral, humane, sustainable economy, no one should ever be able to accrue vast fortunes — even if their purpose is to someday give it all away to charity. And if employers paid employees fair wages, they couldn’t. It’s mathematically impossible. Vast fortunes are only possible because of the massive difference between workers’ pay and the value of their production. The massive difference comes from unpaid labor, essentially. Close that gap, match up surplus value with wages, end the legal practice of unpaid labor, and no capitalist can make his or her personal fortune.
Another key. Watch any movie about the rich. Think about their interactions with all “the little people” along the way . . . the waiters, maids, go-fers, taxi drivers, bellhops, etc. etc. . . . the armies of the seen and unseen “downstairs” folk. Ask yourself how long rich people would keep their vast hoardings if they had to pay fair wages to all of these people they interact with.
Our system is set up to make life very, very nice for the wealthy, all across the board, 24/7, in millions of ways, big and small . . . . not only because they can legally treat their own employees like slaves, but everyone else’s, too. Extreme wage suppression is a part of the woodwork, and it’s what keeps the rich rich — in myriad ways. The system itself endlessly reproduces fundamental, profound inequality and unfairness at pretty much every turn.
About this test:
On another forum, nearly a year ago, I had the toughest time trying to get through to a right-libertarian (propertarian) about how the scores were done. No matter how I reworded things to say the top to bottom scores had nothing to do with the left to right scores, he just wasn’t buying it. In his mind, apparently, the further left someone goes on the spectrum, the more authoritarian they have to be. I actually placed well below him on the anti-authoritarian scale — almost to bottom (meaning extremely anti-authoritarian) — but because I was also very much “far left,” he refused to believe I was anything but a Stalinist. He was incapable of seeing any leftist as “libertarian” or anti-authoritarian, even though, historically, the left wrote the book on those things, not the right.
Societal brainwashing, etc. etc.
One would think in the Age of the Internet this would be less prevalent than it is. But if you investigate how leftist thought is depicted (when it isn’t silenced altogether), how “socialism” is defined (and by whom), it’s not surprising. Web software, the kind used to customize your news sources on this or that app, for example, has become blatantly tilted to the right. Search for “socialism” in the Itunes library, for instance, and you’re likely to find “definitions” from mises.org or some other propertarian organization, and pretty much never by actual leftists. Same goes for Google apps.
Silicon Valley is dominated by right-libertarian billionaires, as gatekeepers, and they do what they can — consciously or subconsciously — to steer the average Joe or Jane away from leftist thought. The main method for doing this appears to be . . . never let leftists speak for themselves. Never point to actual leftist writers and writings, if you can, instead, point to third and fourth-hand accounts coming from the right.
We were forced into a “bargain” of sorts, with the capitalist system. No one asked us for our accent. We were forced. But the basics are:
Democracy is not allowed within the boundaries of capitalist commerce. It is not allowed in the workplace — if that business is still to be “capitalist.” It is not allowed inside the employer/employee relations, or they wouldn’t exist. Democracy has its own sphere, the public sphere. It doesn’t get to be in the private sphere, though it can sometimes act upon that private sphere from the outside.
The reason why this is a major problem is because capitalism’s laws of motion force it to forever seek expansion into new markets. It must always grab up more, Grow or Die. It is the first truly imperialistic economic form in world history, and one of the results of this internal drive is the wiping out of the Commons, all over the world, including in America. Its internal desire is to commodify all things, make everything a sale, a private sector exchange for dollars. And that includes matters of life and death, as in, health care.
We the people should fight back against this intrinsic, internal, perpetual drive and take back as many life spheres as we can — if not all of them. We the people should “democratize” and de-commodify as many aspects of life and death as we possibly can. That means grabbing hold of health care, from the payment and the delivery sides, and yanking it out of the private, for-profit sphere and placing it all, instead, in the Commons. Once in the Commons, we can radically reduce costs for care from the ground up. All of it. Not just from the payment side, and not just from the provider side.
To me, if we don’t do this, we will continue to have “rationing,” “death panels” and long waits for a very large portion of society. Only the wealthy do fine, basically, in our current system. That, to me, is obscene.
I think it’s disingenuous for an organization of doctors to call for Single Payer. They’re actually just as much a part of the problem as the insurance companies. They have every incentive in the world for a Single Payer system to come into place (they’ll make more money), and no doubt believe they could “capture” it via lobbying, as do Big Pharma, Hospitals and Medical Equipment folks, among others.
Yes, we need Single Payer for the insurance side. We need non-profit health insurance for everyone. But in America, if we leave it at just that, the costs of medicine itself will not go down overall, and may well go up in many cases. As long as medical providers operate under capitalist laws of motion and incentives, those prices will continue to escalate. They, not just the insurance companies, keep raising their prices too on everything from simple 10-minute (almost symbolic) checkups, to surgery, to chemo — with cost pressures also coming from Big Pharma, etc.
The cost of one chemo treatment, for instance, has literally doubled since I started on this journey. From roughly $15,000 to $30,000. And that’s for a single treatment, roughly 4-5 hours in a chair, with a single chemo drip bag and maybe two nurses in attendance (who also look after other patients). I’ve never had an insurance company turn down the chemo, though I have had them say no to a PET scan. Change it to a CT scan, and we’ll cover it, they said.
To make a long story short: We need to make both insurance and delivery of health care a right, not a commodity. Decommidify all of it. Remove it from the capitalist laws of motion. End the profit incentives from both sides of the equation. If we do just the insurance side, we open ourselves up to a gold rush of abuse from medical providers, who will attack the new cash cow with armies of lobbyists and kill it, if they can’t control it.
ZN,
But the point of recent historical research is that it (dropping the bombs) didn’t bring an end to war. I listed all kinds of key military personnel who said, at the time, and later, that it was totally unnecessary and had little to do with Japan’s surrender. There is debate about what those other causes were, but it’s pretty much agreed upon by recent historians that it wasn’t the bomb that did it . . . . and, that Japan was ripe for full surrender months before it. If only we had been willing to grant one condition that we later granted anyway.
Zinn, Chomsky, Gar Alperovitz, among others (including Einstein and most atomic scientists), all say this. And Chomsky adds the horrific note that Nagasaki wasn’t even the end of our bombing. We continued after that world-historical war crime to kill more Japanese civilians.
Personally, I can’t begin to wrap my mind around the idea that it was at all necessary to kill 300,000 unarmed and totally defenseless civilians, especially in order to “save lives.” As Zinn points out, we would be horrified at the suggestion that we should drop a bomb on our own children, which would kill 100,000 of them, for the purpose of shortening the war. But it’s okay to do so on Japanese children?
It didn’t save any lives. It slaughtered 300,000, in the most horrific way imaginable. We had no need to continue on with the invasion (prior to the bomb), as several generals noted at the time. Japan was on the brink of national death. Russia was about to end its neutrality with Japan. It was over. We could have surrounded the islands, blockaded them, worked toward a surrender, and Japan would have taken it. They only had one condition, going back months: let the emperor remain the symbol of the nation. That’s it.
IMO, it was an unforgivable act. Unconscionable and indefensible.
Some more articles showing why the bombs were not necessary.
From Wikipedia: Opposition to the BombThey include a host of very high-ranking military personnel who felt the same, at the time, along with a commission from 1946 which also determined the bombs weren’t needed.
Howard Zinn later came to this conclusion. He was a bomber in WWII himself.
The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan.
— Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, [69]The use of [the atomic bombs] at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons … The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.
— Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to President Truman, 1950, [79]The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.
— Major General Curtis LeMay, XXI Bomber Command, September 1945, [80]The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment … It was a mistake to ever drop it … [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it …
— Fleet Admiral William Halsey, Jr., 1964, [80]
