2020 Democratic Nominees - Page 10

On May 15 2019 06:05 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:


Yall trippin if you think we have a Communist Socialist lineup.

On May 06 2019 20:45 iPlaY.NettleS wrote:
Gabbard is the best of a real bad bunch.
I mean half of them are talking about reparations to descendants of slaves 150+ years ago.If theres ever a system ripe for abuse and chaos it’s that.
Dems = Lunatics.

On May 15 2019 07:29 Meta wrote:
My top picks are:
Bernie
Warren
Yang
Gabbard

The rest are not inspiring, in my view.

On May 15 2019 06:05 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:


Yall trippin if you think we have a Communist Socialist lineup.

On May 15 2019 14:52 Cricketer12 wrote:
I really don't understand how Yang isn't the most well received nominee

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will announce her first major bill today, in partnership with Vermont Sen. and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. It’s something Sanders has proposed for many years: a 15 percent interest rate cap on all consumer loans, which would reduce what many Americans pay on their credit cards and effectively eliminate the payday loan industry.

On May 06 2019 22:00 don_kyuhote wrote:
Jeez, so many candidates! I hope the debates will be as entertaining as the 2015~2016 republican debates, but I'm probably in for a disappointment.

On May 15 2019 01:34 deadmau wrote:
Why yall trippin, we got the most Communist Socialist lineup in history, this is the dream. Keep calm, it's gone be an easy election, the voter base only getting younger.

On May 15 2019 01:26 Liquid`Drone wrote:


The government does it because the other people don't. There are occasional sunshine stories of bosses sharing unexpected profits with all the workers of a company, there are examples of worker-owned enterprises (which I absolutely love!), and there are a lot of bosses that genuinely care about the welfare of their workers. But the former two are extreme outliers, and the latter seems to happen more frequently the smaller the company. (Which makes sense, as having fewer employees means you will logically be more attached to each individual.) The more of a capitalist you are, the more you are in favor of undercutting workers as much as it is possible to undercut them. For skilled workers part of a limited work force, the system works out fairly well, because they are not easily replaced and thus they end up being paid more in line with their actual contribution. For unskilled labor, it's a fucking disaster of a system. And as a skilled worker myself, I will absolutely argue that my daily hours are worth much more to me than my education is; I'm paid about 20% more per hour as a teacher than I was doing manual labor in a warehouse. And while I'm happy about those 20% - and think it's fair that I make more now, doing a more difficult job with more responsibilities, I think that number is pretty much spot on. It's enough of an incentive to make me want to use my skills in a way that benefits society more, but it's not so much more that there's a sea of luxury distancing myself from my former coworkers.

I would far, far prefer if CEOs self-policed and operated everywhere based on a rule of 'I can only make 4 times as much as an entry level worker' (meaning they would have to increase entry level salary to increase their own salary, meaning a thriving company would have a thriving work force), or whatever, but they don't. So the government has to do it. I'm not a fan of government redistribution, but it's far better than growing inequality and no redistribution. And I'm not really a fan of government giving money to people period - I'm a fan of government building infrastructure throughout society in a way that gives equal opportunity to succeed regardless of your luck drawing the birth lottery ticket. In a country like Norway, where even the lowest paid workers make $35k per year assuming they work 37.5 hour weeks, you can fund this through collective, not all that progressive taxation. In a country like the US, where people can work full time and still need food stamps and where the top 0.01% make 5% of the total income (not even mentioning wealth), significantly more progressive taxation must be enforced to have any hope of building a more meritocratic society.

Because that's the real joke of it all. You have a fundamentally unjust society where part of the population is convinced of its meritocracy, all while lineage greatly determines future success. I mean, lineage greatly determines future success in Norway, too, but firstly, less so than the US, and secondly, failing isn't as big of a disaster.



This is a graph indicating social mobility by country. The further left, the less inequality, and the closer to the bottom, the more social mobility (= more meritocratic). While inequality cannot be deemed the sole factor, it's fairly easy to spot the trendline.

On May 15 2019 17:45 Grumbels wrote:
Hopefully there will be a dynamic where the recent wave of class resentment brought to the surface will cause candidates such as Warren and Sanders to propose increasingly radical legislation, with sufficient mobilization to allow them to campaign on it in the general election. Because the nominally far-left policy platform actually has majority support of the population and it's been a long time since there was a non-centrist Dem candidate for the GE. The theory is that this sort of campaign can mobilize many groups of voters that have otherwise given up on the political process, correctly perceiving it as corrupt. And this might actually effect the transformative change that is so necessary for both the USA and the rest of the world (which often follows in its footsteps), hopefully also leading to a reduction in US imperialism and a reversal of climate change denial, with investment in clean energy.

If this is a wave election there are a handful of reforms that could be made immediately in order to further the left political project, such as voting for felons, statehood for PR, DC, automatic registration, ending gerrymandering, voting holidays, stacking the supreme court and so on. The GOP can be decimated just by re-enfranchisement, because they have dug themselves into a far-right corner, campaigning purely on racism and cultural grievances, disconnected from the majority of the population. Chomsky has said the GOP is the most dangerous organization in the world in recent history and I'm inclined to agree.

Climate change denial alone amounts to essentially a death cult, meanwhile there is an ongoing, man-made extinction event happening around us and the planet is going to boil to death. The GOP response is to create fortress America, which casts climate refugees as savages trying to breach the walls of the civilized world. It's rhetoric that already leads to mass suffering, but with its appeal to ethno-nationalism is honestly only a few steps removed from certain historical groups I won't need to mention. So yeah, it's important that the Dems win the next election with an ambitious program to completely reverse the descent into fascism and corporate dystopia that is becoming ever more apparent.

On May 15 2019 12:53 deadmau wrote:


If this lineup ain't good enough for ya, I dunno what else to say, you askin for way too much. This the best bet we gots, why beg for more