Baloogan posted:

Rand alPaul posted:

There are studies showing the US would gain like 2-3 million jobs if everyone had healthcare and the burden was taken off companies but Obama kept talking about how America has a "tradition" of employment-based insurance so that's what we got!

Concerned Citizen posted:

who are these people? even in hillary's case, she basically said the coal industry is dying and we need to support those workers, which is true and going to happen regardless of what government did bar massive subsidies.

and "classism" is a bizarre attack - insurance industry jobs often have comparable pay to those factory/coal jobs you're talking about, or pay less. no one is giving a poo poo about $200k+/y insurance executives, but rather the legions of medical billers who make $40k/y. 2.5 million people work in the insurance industry, with many hundreds of thousands having no analog to their work in a single payer world. and even if they do, that work isn't likely to exist where they live.

Main Paineframe posted:

who are these people? democrats, mainly

it's not about pay, it's about white collar vs blue collar. killing jobs for well-paid union workers who do skilled physical labor is one thing, eliminating jobs for non-union paper-pusher office drones whose only qualification is a college education is another thing entirely

besides, if you start trimming down pointless bureaucracies of people whose only job is to shuffle papers for someone else or make phone calls, that threatens the political class

Rastor posted:

Concerned Citizen posted:

who are these people? even in hillary's case, she basically said the coal industry is dying and we need to support those workers, which is true and going to happen regardless of what government did bar massive subsidies.

and "classism" is a bizarre attack - insurance industry jobs often have comparable pay to those factory/coal jobs you're talking about, or pay less. no one is giving a poo poo about $200k+/y insurance executives, but rather the legions of medical billers who make $40k/y. 2.5 million people work in the insurance industry, with many hundreds of thousands having no analog to their work in a single payer world. and even if they do, that work isn't likely to exist where they live.

Tight Booty Shorts posted:

Wow CC, I didn't expect someone to whitewash what Hillary said about coal miners so badly but here we are.

quote:

So for example, I'm the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right?

And we're going to make it clear that we don't want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories.

Now we've got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don't want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on.

Concerned Citizen posted:

pretty clear unless you have a weird reading disorder

Shear Modulus posted:

The Democrats had a chance to win back the working class and reactivate the majority of working-class voters of all races who have largely tuned out of politics but they nominated Hillary and have since been doubling down on that so their coalition is a mix of middle- and upper-class white people who trend towards "socially liberal, economically conservative" and minorites who can't go anywhere else because the other party is openly white-supremacist. And now they can't come up with a coherent economic policy because the interests of the two parts of the party are diametrically opposed.

Penisaurus Sex posted:

It's very strange that this came up as a way to 'fix' rural America, when there's very little skill overlap between the two industries, they have vastly different labor requirements, and so on.

It's almost like someone in Hillary's camp thought 'We use coal for electricity. What else do we use for electricity? poo poo, make them farm wind.'

Penisaurus Sex posted:

It's very strange that this came up as a way to 'fix' rural America, when there's very little skill overlap between the two industries, they have vastly different labor requirements, and so on.

It's almost like someone in Hillary's camp thought 'We use coal for electricity. What else do we use for electricity? poo poo, make them farm wind.'

zegermans posted:

yeah, you'd think tourism would be a better industry to market towards Appalachia, but that's not exactly a high-volume job market.

Concerned Citizen posted:

tourism can be an incredibly high volume industry, it just requires you to have not blown up all your mountains and poisoned all your lakes. non-resident tourism is montana's second largest industry, for example.

unfortunately, appalachia blew up all their mountains and poisoned all their lakes.

The Nastier Nate posted:

We spent a lot of time laughing at the fractured republican party during last year's primary and that was great, but I think the lesson that democrats should take is going down this road can lead to a really damaging primary. I've said before, but in my lifetime I fully expect a black lives matter activist running on the platform of "kill whitey" to win the democratic nomination, sooner than later because white democrats are shrinking or voting republican, while the minority segment of the party is expanding.

Raskolnikov38 posted:

democrats always talk about retraining people to take new jobs after their policies kill the old ones but has any of it actually happened? I'm completely unaware of any.

Raskolnikov38 posted:

democrats always talk about retraining people to take new jobs after their policies kill the old ones but has any of it actually happened? I'm completely unaware of any.

Neurolimal posted:

While not super labor intensive, building new research centers in the midwest and expanding state colleges could help in the longterm with specializing the workfor e and bring money into the states (as well as funding new research projects, obv). The construction jobs that would bring could serve as a stopgap while a concrete solution is worked on.

Offering free trade school courses (hell even adding a finamcial incentive) would also go a long way to diversifying the workforce beyond demolition and unskilled labor.

Penisaurus Sex posted:

If I'm a 30 year old person with 2 kids and 1 decent job in my family, I don't want training or education with the distant possibility of maybe a job if I'm lucky.

I want real change to make my life better, I want hope for my future and stability, and I want my dignity.

Neurolimal posted:

Thats why I mentioned the financial incentive. Being paid to learn for a new job is far better than doing nothing or working a Wal-Mart job. And its a very Coast attitude to think the prospective of a skilled non-STEM trade job is undignified.

Neurolimal posted:

a very Coast attitude

zegermans posted:

could hydroelectric be a thing with all those mountains or does that just gently caress up the environment even more?

paranoid randroid posted:

lol

Penisaurus Sex posted:

Paid training is a good idea, but what happens when you finish your training?

If you still can't find a half decent job, then you're just as hosed as you were to start with.

And I'm from the most profoundly depressed place in the United States. There is absolutely an attitude that everyone looks down their noses at people from Appalachia and that there's little dignity in jobs like gas station attendant or elderly care for $8/hr.

Neurolimal posted:

This is a good question, and would require knowledge of our economy at that time. In an ideal scenario we'd either have healthcare unfucked (freeing up a ton of citizen spending money) or would finance new businesses involving said trade jobs. We could also make it less of a gamble by incentivizing specializing in a profession we are currently lacking in.

MizPiz posted:

Kill whitey can still be a neoliberal policy. The party power brokers can easily get someone like DeRay to run for office to try to attract the activist wing without sacrificing their economic policies too severely.

The Nastier Nate posted:

The kill whitey candidate isn't going to get drafted by party power brokers, but rather win in spite of them, just like Trump.

This is something I would like to avoid, because no matter how progressive I can claim to be on paper, as a middle class white suburbanite, I'll definitely be on the wrong end of the kill whitey platform.

The Nastier Nate posted:

The kill whitey candidate isn't going to get drafted by party power brokers, but rather win in spite of them, just like Trump.

This is something I would like to avoid, because no matter how progressive I can claim to be on paper, as a middle class white suburbanite, I'll definitely be on the wrong end of the kill whitey platform.

Terror Sweat posted:

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/13/14750528/barack-obama-trump-post-presidency

obama and his team spent the last month lobbying and calling every single dnc elector to vote perez

jon ossof hasnt heard from them whatsoever

quote:

Before he entered the DNC race, Perez spoke with Obama several times about why he should run. Obama personally argued that Perez was particularly qualified to win back onetime Obama voters who then supported Trump in November, according to one aide.

Ellison requested a meeting with the president, but never got it, according to two sources.

quote:

Observers have been mystified by the Obama White House’s decision to spark a Democratic Party civil war over the DNC chair race so soon after its clobbering in November. After all, most agree that Ellison and Perez are similarly progressive — and that there didn’t seem to be any real substantial gaps in their strategies for fixing the Democratic Party.

Obama aides say the intervention was related to the former president’s reluctance to openly criticize Trump. By helping ensure a close ally like Perez is running the DNC, they said, Obama felt like he was liberating himself from having to personally respond to Trump over the next several years.