YSK: No Labels is a political party trying to run a spoiler candidate for President in 2024 that should not be taken seriously.
WYSK: There funded by dark money PACS, but some good reporting has brought out these names: David Koch, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Mark Cuban, Harlan Crow, and Michael Bloomberg. Some of there members are most famous for stopping big bills. Joe Leiberman, for example, single handedly stopped the single payer portion of the ACA. Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsen Simena kept the John Lewis voting rights act from passing, and famously kept the senate from repealing the filibuster.
Biden is doing a good job given the circumstances. If you don't want the total destruction of the United States, there is really only one choice for president... Joe Biden. All other roads lead to the Dark Lord Trumples, the Silly Piggy.
Joe Biden should be in an old folks home. He can barely stand up let alone lead a nation. No fan of the other guy either, but let's face it. Both of them are only puppets on a string.
"a historic bipartisan infrastructure bill, generational investments in clean energy and semiconductor manufacturing, the first gun safety law in almost 30 years, a bill codifying same-sex marriage, a bill aiding veterans who suffered health effects from burn pits and an electoral reform to prevent a repeat of Trump’s attempt to use Congress to undermine the election."
Yeah but what about drag queens and fighting about childrens movies? Clearly those issues are far more important than infrastructure, strengthening the economy and taking care of veterans
In today's news, people can think about more than one thing at a time. Border policy doesn't negate the fact that the Climate Bill and the Infrastructure Bill were objectively good, historic pieces of legislation.
I don't think that answers my question? How many children are still locked up in concentration camps on the border? What is the number? Do you even know or are you just completely checked out from the issue because you are morally reprehensible? Let me illuminate it for you, 1 in 3 of all migrants held in america's concentration camps is a child.
The fact the US has concentration camps on the border and that liberals have just conveniently forgotten about it and gone back to brunch as soon as Biden became president is the problem here. You make claims before an election about issues and then do nothing about them when you have every power to do so. Then you wonder why nobody is enthused to vote for a gaggle of liars.
Pretending that the US is doing literally anything about climate is also a joke. The bill is worthless because it does not change the fact that fossil industries have a higher rate of profit than renewables and until this is resolved every single action on climate is completely performative that only brings us closer and closer to the inevitable disaster that capitalism has caused. What you are doing is greenwashing concentration camps.
It wasn't asked in bad faith. If you knew the answer beforehand I would have happily conceded you do in fact care about having concentration camps. Not knowing is absolutely a sign of being checked out, which is half the issue here, none of you actually do anything except vote. You see politics as something you do once every few years and as a spectator sport the rest of the time. You have no concept of electoral vs non-electoral politics, you literally do not take part politically except as entertainment consumption outside of voting. You all have this embarrassing mindset:
The definition of a concentration camp is: "a place in which large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities".
They are concentration camps. Calling them "migrant detention facilities" does not change their function. It also does not change the fact that the US has been forcefully sterilising women in them either.
"If families were detained, they would be held for short periods of time, perhaps just a few days, and their cases expedited through immigration court"
Not concentration camps. You don't get to leave a concentration camp after having your day in court. Are detention centers ideal? No. But neither is leaving people in the desert without food, water, or shelter, (or worse, leaving them prey to local vigilantes).
Yes, the Trump administration was keeping people in horrific conditions, forcibly sterilizing women, and separating children from their parents without cause and without tracking. If you have some specific evidence that those abuses continue to this day under the Biden administration, please feel free to share.
"If families were detained, they would be held for short periods of time, perhaps just a few days, and their cases expedited through immigration court"
Not concentration camps. You don't get to leave a concentration camp after having your day in court. Are detention centers ideal? No. But neither is leaving people in the desert without food, water, or shelter, (or worse, leaving them prey to local vigilantes).
Yes, the Trump administration was keeping people in horrific conditions, forcibly sterilizing women, and separating children from their parents without cause and without tracking. If you have some specific evidence that those abuses continue to this day under the Biden administration, please feel free to share.
They're both far from the best the USA has to offer, but it's better to understand and attack the structural barriers to viable 3rd parties here than to get pissed off at the state of disenfranchisement of the average voter and elect a ' wild card' out of spite
Nope, terrible idea. You've walked into their trap card: First past the post voting. It takes advantage if your impatience and lack of understanding of the system to lure you into throwing your vote away.
I'd say it starts with bringing ranked or approval voting to your state, supporting voter initiatives in your state that erode the 2 party systems power.
You need to understand
how party primaries function to prevent real candidates from getting in
how the 2 parties have sequestered funding and resources that the other parties don't have access to
how the 2 parties have changed the US government to entrench their power
The dems are never going to pass voting reform for the same reason the UK labour party (a considerably further left party than the dems) has never passed it despite pretending they would consider it for multiple decades now. They benefit from FPTP. All they would be doing is diluting their power and handing over a huge portion of the political landscape to socialists who would immediately become relevant, they would then be forced to actually come to agreements with those socialists as opposed to just completely and totally ignoring them as they do currently.
And you think that the dems wouldn't magically find someone else to do a spoiler vote on issues they don't really want to pass? Lmao why are americans this hilariously naive? These people do not represent the average working class person, they represent millionaires and billionaires, they represent the very corporate owners that the fediverse exists to escape from. When you finally realise this you will begin to start seeing through the bullshit. Half of this stuff can be done via Executive powers. They don't do it because they do not want to.
The point of this entire post is to try to illustrate how you do not have to buy out an entire political party, when you only have to get to those on the margins of a majority.
You put all democrats into a little box, things are more nuanced than that. Yes, people with tons of money have tons of influence is US politics, this post illustrates specific names and examples.
Do you have anything to add to this conversation, or do you just want to paint with broad strokes?
I will paint party politics with broad strokes because that is exactly what party politics is. Collectives representing collectives. You don't get to individualise it as and when it suits you, then collectivise it as and when it suits you at other times.
The path of America from now until its end is liberals increasingly doing nothing to prevent the declining standards of living of millions of people while enriching the people they actually represent up until the population becomes so alienated that they give up on them. Then? Fascism. Until the country is torn into pieces.
There is no off ramp. And I will continue to advocate that people organise around planning for this inevitability through means outside of the useless dems ushering in this fascism. Anything else is morally reprehensible.
The Supreme Court just decided that businesses refusing business to protected minorities is free speech. The door is open for segregation again. What are the Dems going to do about it? Actually fucking use any powers in their hands or just tell people to voooooooote? They'll do nothing, because they're complicit.
There's nothing "unhinged" about recognising the fact that I as a trans person am the subject matter of genocide legislation today and that all rights across the board are regressing as fascists continue to make gains even at times when Dems hold every single power necessary to stop them. The fact that you hand wave the direction of the country away when oppressed groups are screaming at them to do something (spoiler: they'll keep doing nothing) is part of the reason that you're seeing this enormous leftwards radicalisation and shift away from liberalism.
Resorting to ableism because you don't like people to your left critiquing you is also partially responsible.
Unfortunately, we're all so polarized left/right, red/blue, that everyone's become blind to this. The big wigs started a culture/political war to keep us away from the class war. And they've won unfortunately. Part of the reason I can't get I to politics with anyone, because while they all scream left or right, I'm out here on my soap box screaming tear the whole government down and start over. The "progressive" parties will only push as hard as they can without losing any of their/their corporate overlords excess income.
The liberals will never recognise the trend of history that they've created, or take blame. They will blame the people instead, choosing to blame ontological factors over a materialist understanding of history.
Ranked choice voting, fix gerrymandering and voter suppression, end disenfranchisement of felons. Such things. I would love to hear any ideas if you or lemmy had some.
Don’t confuse president with presidency. Obama did a poor job of negotiation and was unable to achieve any give and take with republicans. Biden just prevented a government shutdown and has passed far more progressive legislation and has made much more decisive decisions. Biden’s DOD knew Putin was going to attack Ukraine for months and prepared for it.
Biden’s DOD knew Putin was going to attack Ukraine for months and prepared for it.
As if that matters to a wage earner.
Under both Obama and Biden, the following statements are true for at least 40,000,000 Americans (probably a whole lot more now): You need multiple jobs to live. You can't afford health care. You can't afford to educate yourself or your kids. The majority of the taxes you pay go overseas to fight between eight and ten wars, some of which aren't ours. Israel gets more in aid from your tax dollars than you do. You are never more than one paycheck away from being ruined and homeless.
We're likely going to be an outright fascist state within the next ten years because Democrats, when we gave them power, used it to make the rich wealthier. It's that simple.
Why does no one making this kind of dumbass comment ever acknowledge the very obvious role that Republican obstruction has played in stopping any Democratic attempt to fix this shit in the past 40 years?
Stop gerrymandering, implement approval voting (easier for most people to understand than ranked choice), watch good legislation actually get passed.
Republican policies have destroyed the middle class since Reagan. You just said “you can’t afford to educate yourself or your kids” yet fail to acknowledge Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan.
You are complaining about problems ENTIRELY CAUSED BY REPUBLICANS yet are blaming Democrats. You call when the shuttle lands crazy man.
Republican policies have destroyed the middle class since Reagan.
And we've given Democrats several majorities in the last four decades, and they've used them to empower the wealthy and kill the middle class even more. At some point a reasonable person has to acknowledge that a failure to act constitutes policy.
Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan
Biden can forgive student loans unilaterally, and he already has in the case of people who were defrauded, so his so-called plan only served to add red tape to a process that didn't require it. Effectively, he's running cover for his wealthy donors on this issue and trying to retain positive optics, which apparently worked really well in your case, but I'm guessing you never had student loan debt, or maybe you'd expect more than performative gestures and empty promises.
It's an acknowledgement of 40 years of history and incremental progress backward. When Reagan took office you could support an American family with a high school education and one employed parent. Now, you need two post-graduate degrees to guarantee success in this country. Clinton, Obama, and Biden all had control of Congress during their presidencies. (Obama even had a supermajority for six months.)
They all had the power to make real, meaningful change. They made and broke promises. That's not a matter of opinion. It's a matter of historical fact, and again, a reasonable person has to acknowledge that 40 years of failure to act constitutes policy on the part of Democrats.
tbh I think if Biden gets reelected, america will inevitably collapse as a nation. we're already close to the tipping point and biden has done nothing but accelerate that collapse.
I think biden is actually an extremist in social policy, and an emboldend corporate shill in economic policy. So while he might be "milquetoast" in terms of democrat vs republican, he's far from what regular people want/need.
Ironically, most establishment republicans are also this way. They're happy to push insane social policy stuff, while bootlicking the corporations.
I honestly think that the GOP will probably split or collapse due to the establishment GOP's resistance to their populist voterbase. Democrats call it 'unhinged' but when informal polls show literally hitler as preferable by both left and right to biden/trump, I would say that both dnc/gop are the unhinged ones, not the people sick of the two parties.
"milquetoast" is the literal polar opposite of what we need right now.
See here. Obviously informal, obviously people expressing "as a joke" or just trolling. These polls bias towards right wing followers. But still revealing nonetheless. In my circles I'm seeing both far left and far right move towards populist "centrist" rhetoric and labeling. Andrew Yang's Forward Party being emblematic of that (who I just found out support No Labels).
We also saw things like Jimmy Dore go onto Tucker Carlson's show, both Dore and Carlson expressing discontent with the Biden/Trump matchup, and both being pushed out from more establishment MSM/DNC/GOP stuff.
To me it looks pretty clear that many people are eager for drastic change, in a way that would clearly benefit and help the average person; with severe opposition to the establishment talking points and organizations. We also recently saw this with the covid stuff, both far left and far right joining to express skepticism over the mainstream establishment narrative.
People are very clearly upset with the way DC politics are going. Biden is historically unpopular with everyone except his core base and progressives. Trump is pretty universally disliked except among the right (who are growing discontent with him).
When I say a Biden election will lead to the collapse of America I say this mainly because I see the way things will go in the next few years if Biden gets reelected. The automation crisis will worsen, wealth inequality will worsen, progressive extremism will worsen, geopolitical conflict will worsen, the border crisis will worsen. And when push comes to shove it's obvious to most people that biden will side with the larger wef/un agendas.
America is starting to reach around 250 years, which is historically shown to be the point of collapse for empires. The establishment organizations are planning for a big 2030 political event, and I'm sure already have an entire plan for 2028 election. I imagine growing discontent with a biden or trump second term will roll in nicely to people flocking to the candidate picked for 2028 who will almost certainly be addressing automation crisis and geopolitics.
Most people are aware biden and trump are awful, and do not like them. Most people already do not vote. and those who do vote feel "stuck" with biden/trump. Many are saying things like "I don't like biden, but I vote for him because I don't like Trump" and vice versa.
Strong action is needed, but not the kind that Biden is doing.