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Tom Perez B/K/M? This poll is closed. |
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77 | 25.50% |
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160 | 52.98% |
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65 | 21.52% |
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fyi, zerohedge is the breitbart of financial news.
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May 17, 2017 05:29
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shrike82 posted:fyi, zerohedge is the breitbart of financial news. Honestly that's unfairly insulting to Breitbart.
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May 17, 2017 14:52
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If the Democrats are planning to govern with a bunch of centrist or right wing votes to prop up their majority we are in need of the return of earmarks. The inability to make deals with dissenting viewpoints has really hampered the governments ability to accomplish anything worth while.
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May 17, 2017 15:46
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flashman posted:If the Democrats are planning to govern with a bunch of centrist or right wing votes to prop up their majority we are in need of the return of earmarks. The inability to make deals with dissenting viewpoints has really hampered the governments ability to accomplish anything worth while. Yes! I'll take a billion bridges to nowhere if it means we can pass a loving budget!
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May 17, 2017 15:48
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flashman posted:If the Democrats are planning to govern with a bunch of centrist or right wing votes to prop up their majority we are in need of the return of earmarks. The inability to make deals with dissenting viewpoints has really hampered the governments ability to accomplish anything worth while. The killing of pork spending was the dumbest move in retrospect, it's led to the gridlock we have now.
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May 17, 2017 16:03
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WampaLord posted:The killing of pork spending was the dumbest move in retrospect, it's led to the gridlock we have now. it's also pretty strongly implicated in why our infrastructure has gone to poo poo; traditionally your reward for going along with the other party on such and such bill was "here, have, a couple billion dollars, buy your district some roads" a large part of why blue states have significantly better infrastructure, hilariously enough, comes down to the fact that the last time Republicans could say "gawrsh, i'd love to vote for your bill, buuut-" followed by pointing to their wallets was before Newt Gingrich.
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May 17, 2017 16:09
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rudatron posted:It's an analogy to demonstrate how broke-brain 'we can't improve their working conditions or they'll be unemployed' is. So long as labor has to be done, someone's getting paid to do it. Clothes aren't going to stitch themselves together. JeffersonClay posted:Actually my argument is that narratives where sweatshops are closed and the jobs come back to the US must imply unemployment for the former sweatshop workers, which makes them worse off. I'm loving the leftists who now have a deep, abiding faith that the market will not let unemployed labor go idle.
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May 17, 2017 16:19
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if we don't let employers burn people to death because they think employees are sneaking out for smoke breaks we're being insufficiently leftist
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May 17, 2017 16:36
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JeffersonClay posted:I'm loving the leftists who now have a deep, abiding faith that the market will not let unemployed labor go idle. gee i wonder if the policies improving working conditions would by necessity include provisions that ameliorated this problem
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May 17, 2017 16:48
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JeffersonClay posted:I'm loving the leftists who now have a deep, abiding faith that the market will not let unemployed labor go idle.
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May 17, 2017 17:07
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JeffersonClay posted:I'm loving the leftists who now have a deep, abiding faith that the market will not let unemployed labor go idle. There are three options w/r/t sweatshops and the undocumented workforce. 1: Do nothing. 2: Use measures like laws banning these practices, and punishing companies that uses them with enforcement methods. 3: Use other measures that somehow continues the employment of the people working. Now let's pretend that 3 is not on the table. Which is better, 1 or 2?
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May 17, 2017 17:36
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Pretty sure 2 is already in effect (laws exist), but treated as if it were 1.
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May 17, 2017 17:49
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Kilroy posted:I'm loving motherfuckers like yourself who believe slavery is preferable to unemployment. If you're talking about wage slavery, where workers are taking jobs because the alternative is starving to death, yes unemployment is worse. If you're talking about chattel slavery, no, being an unemployed but free wage laborer is probably preferable. You are, again, conflating wage slavery and chattel slavery like a confederate apologist. White Rock posted:There are three options w/r/t sweatshops and the undocumented workforce. If #2 results in the sweatshop/undocumented laborers becoming unemployed, they'd probably prefer #1. R. Guyovich posted:gee i wonder if the policies improving working conditions would by necessity include provisions that ameliorated this problem If these were internal labor reforms, sure. But I'm not criticizing those proposals. I'm criticizing proposals where trade agreements are structured to penalize sweatshop labor and subsequently bring manufacturing jobs back to the US. Those proposals do not commonly provide for the newly unemployed former sweatshop workers. Which is, I think, why some have fallen back on market fundamentalism to handwave away the problem. There will be new jobs for these workers, better ones in fact, because the market is a benevolent force and a friend of the wage laborer when it's convenient.
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May 17, 2017 18:28
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JeffersonClay posted:If you're talking about wage slavery, where workers are taking jobs because the alternative is starving to death, yes unemployment is worse. If you're talking about chattel slavery, no, being an unemployed but free wage laborer is probably preferable. You are, again, conflating wage slavery and chattel slavery like a confederate apologist. the people crushed to death in a Bangladeshi sweatshop collapsing probably preferred that to the alternative, not being dead thank you, Matt Yglesias
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May 17, 2017 18:30
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It seems like they were in a terrible situation, forced to choose between two awful alternatives. And faced with that awful choice, they preferred the risk of death at work to the risk of death from no work. Eliminating one of the choices does not make the alternative better. The only way to improve their lives is to provide better alternatives. That isn't impossible, but it's not an element of the trade regulation proposals I'm criticizing.
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May 17, 2017 18:46
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Assuming banning sweatshops results in these countries being unable to export goods (and not just improving conditions and selling stuff for a few nickels more) there are still options open to them other than "starve to death". They can sell to other countries, redistribute existing resources, and reorient their economies away from exports. At the very least a move back to agriculture would give people more personal freedom and autonomy than they'd get in factory work.
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May 17, 2017 18:47
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JeffersonClay posted:It seems like they were in a terrible situation, forced to choose between two awful alternatives. And faced with that awful choice, they preferred the risk of death at work to the risk of death from no work. Eliminating one of the choices does not make the alternative better. The only way to improve their lives is to provide better alternatives. That isn't impossible, but it's not an element of the trade regulation proposals I'm criticizing. or proposing. and actively fighting against on the occasions they are proposed. it's okay to admit you're cool with third world people dying to keep your stuff cheap, JC. the Clinton Foundation came out rather firmly pro-this position re:Haiti.
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May 17, 2017 18:54
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Diversify production. An economy that produces multiple products is harder to force into negative conditions.
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May 17, 2017 18:55
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readingatwork posted:Assuming banning sweatshops results in these countries being unable to export goods (and not just improving conditions and selling stuff for a few nickels more) there are still options open to them other than "starve to death". They can sell to other countries, redistribute existing resources, and reorient their economies away from exports. At the very least a move back to agriculture would give people more personal freedom and autonomy than they'd get in factory work. If the sweatshop laborers don't lose their jobs because the sweatshop products can just be sold to different countries, or they can somehow juggle resources and make autarky work, then the intervention didn't do anything to end sweatshop conditions. If subsistence farming is actually preferable to sweatshop labor, and the land and capital are available to support additional farming, why are laborers migrating to cities where they're forced to choose between a sweatshop job and starving in the first place? This is just more faith that the market will provide--it won't. JeffersonClay fucked around with this message at 18:59 on May 17, 2017 |
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May 17, 2017 18:57
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JeffersonClay posted:If you're talking about wage slavery, where workers are taking jobs because the alternative is starving to death, yes unemployment is worse. If you're talking about chattel slavery, no, being an unemployed but free wage laborer is probably preferable. You are, again, conflating wage slavery and chattel slavery like a confederate apologist. Or, perhaps, like noted abolitionist and actual former slave Frederick Douglas. quote:The difference between the white slave, and the black slave, is this: the latter belongs to ONE slave-holder, and the former belongs to ALL the slave-holders, collectively. The white slave has taken from his, by indirection, what the black slave had taken from him, directly, and without ceremony. Both are plundered, and by the same plunderers
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May 17, 2017 19:02
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readingatwork posted:Assuming banning sweatshops results in these countries being unable to export goods (and not just improving conditions and selling stuff for a few nickels more) there are still options open to them other than "starve to death". They can sell to other countries, redistribute existing resources, and reorient their economies away from exports. At the very least a move back to agriculture would give people more personal freedom and autonomy than they'd get in factory work. Yeah, but good luck getting JC to accept any of that since his sweatshop shilling rests on the assumption that all the workers will immediately die if a sweatshop closes down. I guess this is the only justification he could come up with for why it's acceptable that bangladeshi workers have to burn to death or why haitian women have to endure rape so that the capitalist class can wring a little more wealth out of the third world. JeffersonClay posted:If the sweatshop laborers don't lose their jobs because the sweatshop products can just be sold to different countries, or they can somehow juggle resources and make autarky work, then the intervention didn't do anything to end sweatshop conditions. If subsistence farming is actually preferable to sweatshop labor, and the land and capital are available to support additional farming, why are laborers migrating to cities where they're forced to choose between a sweatshop job and starving in the first place? This is just more faith that the market will provide--it won't. Look at this ghoulish bullshit right here. You trying to coopt the language of the left is failing almost as hard as your political ideology.
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May 17, 2017 19:04
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DnD Democrat thread, in which a centrist bootlicker makes an argument for the benefits of slavery and sweatshops.
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May 17, 2017 19:37
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reignonyourparade posted:Or, perhaps, like noted abolitionist and actual former slave Frederick Douglas. You're badly misinterpreting the quote, here. The context is in bold. quote:The slaveholders, with a craftiness peculiar to themselves, by encouraging the enmity of the poor laboring white man against the black man, succeeded in making the said white man nearly as much of a slave as the black slave himself. The difference between the white slave, and the black slave, is this: the latter belongs to ONE slave-holder, and the former belongs to ALL the slave-holders, collectively. The white slave has taken from his, by indirection, what the black slave had taken from him, directly, and without ceremony. Both are plundered, and by the same plunderers. the slave was robbed by his master of all his earnings, above which was required for his bare physical necessities, and the white laboring man was robbed by the slave system of the just results of his labor, because he was flung into competition with a class of labor who worked without wages. He's arguing that slavery hurt free laborers by lowering their wages. He did not think there was no difference between the two. Which makes sense, because had he thought there was no reason to prefer wage labor to chattel slavery he wouldn't have tried to escape the latter for the former.
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May 17, 2017 20:29
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I didn't mean to suggest he was saying there was literally no difference between the two but at the same time "the white slave [...] belongs to all slave-owners, collectively" is not the words of someone who is MERELY saying that the existence of slaves drives down white wages.
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May 17, 2017 20:34
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shrike82 posted:fyi, zerohedge is the breitbart of financial news. Sorry, here's better sources I guess: http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/home-capital-friday-1.4089781 quote:After news of the HOOPP lifeline emerged on Thursday, the CEO of the pension fund announced he would step down from his job on Home Capital's board of directors, citing the potential conflict of interest. lol
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May 17, 2017 20:40
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reignonyourparade posted:I didn't mean to suggest he was saying there was literally no difference between the two but at the same time "the white slave [...] belongs to all slave-owners, collectively" is not the words of someone who is MERELY saying that the existence of slaves drives down white wages. He doesn't mean capitalists colloquially when he says slave owners. He means literal slave owners. And yes, the point of that passage is chattel slavery forces white laborers into slave-like conditions because it's unfair competition. This was a common argument against slavery at the time.
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May 17, 2017 20:44
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Phi230 posted:DnD Democrat thread, in which a centrist bootlicker makes an argument for the benefits of slavery and sweatshops. Um, yes? That's pretty much the Democratic party position on sweatshops. "Oh, sure, they're bad, but non-symbolic action on issues isn't our thing"
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May 17, 2017 20:46
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Arguing for keeping sweatshops because there is no alternative is evil because keeping this outsource based system is not only lovely for the people working in these places (because sweatshops are lovely places to work) but also for everyone else who has no live in economies who bleed out in favor the corporate conglomerates who take all the profit from free flowing capital. This view is sustained mainly by something known as the Ladder Theory of country economics where subsistence farming is the worst and sweatshop industry is an actual step up for a lot of people. What this obfuscates is that sweatshop outsourcing model isn't some type of natural economic progression but an actual fabricated system based on free flowing capital that gives huges profits to the one's who benefit from perpetuating lovely work conditons, and labor laws. In a globalized world it's dumb to look at countries as if they're alone scaling some organic economic ladder system and not as part of a global dynamic. The liberal blackmail that is applied by the likes of JC, that some oposition against this system that perpetuates shity labor conditions is actually some type of FYGM from the working classes of the west just takes this narrative to an even worse level of disgusting and boot-licking corporate apoligism. Fados fucked around with this message at 21:01 on May 17, 2017 |
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May 17, 2017 20:55
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JeffersonClay posted:He doesn't mean capitalists colloquially when he says slave owners. He means literal slave owners. And yes, the point of that passage is chattel slavery forces white laborers into slave-like conditions because it's unfair competition. This was a common argument against slavery at the time. for instance, it was the basis of the Free Soil Party, which became the Republican Party.
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May 17, 2017 21:11
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The thing that is obscured by all the rethoric about the necessity of "job creation" (including sweat shops) is that there's a reverse to the medal: regions where people have no choice but to take the worst kind of jobs or else they'll starve are under these conditions because of the same politics that then point to sweatshops as the solution. They are regions that used to have local economies and where people could survive autonomously as peasants or small-time producers. The economy was "underdeveloped", which means that when the local market gets flooded with cheap imports from regions with high-tech production methods (or with slavery or quasi-slavery), these producers are unable to compete in terms of prices because their methods are less efficient and labor is not exploited as much. They go bankrupt or are forced to take on debt to keep going, they turn to growing cash crops for export instead of sustainable and self-sufficient agriculture, and eventually peasants are forced to sell their land which are then consolidated into slave plantations or high-tech corporate megafarms that employ very few workers. Now the country has a mass of people who have lost everything they owned, and are so desperate that they'll sell their labor to anyone just in order to be able to survive, a very "business friendly environment" for our benevolent sweatshop job creator overlords. This process is called "proletarianization", and is how capitalism produces the class that will eventually rise up against it. It is usually set in motion after local democracy is suppressed and a neocolonial puppet regime is installed by imperialist nations for the sake of "opening it up to free trade" or whatever. For a while it used to be exported to colonial nations by the west, but today with neoliberal "austerity" etc it's also happening here (this is what Trump means when he says he's going to "bring industrial jobs back"). Bob le Moche fucked around with this message at 21:24 on May 17, 2017 |
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May 17, 2017 21:13
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WhiskeyJuvenile posted:for instance, it was the basis of the Free Soil Party, which became the Republican Party. for instance: http://www.nytimes.com/1860/07/14/news/political-miscellany.html?pagewanted=2 quote:The Missouri Republican State Central Committee has issued its address, urging upon the members of the party the State ticket just put in nomination. It says, among other things: "There are now in Missouri at least fifty thousand men who cannot get full employment for their energies and enterprise, owing to the depressions of the past two years, and there are now in Missouri more than one hundred thousand slaves, occupying and filling the most lucrative agricultural and mechanical positions of the interior. It is the demand of the Republican Party that slave labor shall make room for free white labor, and take itself away."
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May 17, 2017 21:17
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JeffersonClay posted:If #2 results in the sweatshop/undocumented laborers becoming unemployed, they'd probably prefer #1. See the problem with this logic is that anytime your short term goals will cause any sort of negative consequence for anyone then you should never ever do them. Which in turn means you should always do what the free market has decided, because otherwise "ECONOMIC DISASTER" leading to human misery. Will your actions lead to fewer jobs? Will people die in your protest? Will any of your policies have any negative consequences? THEN DO NOTHING. Not only is this politically poison (as you can notice by your great popularity in this thread), it's utterly defeatist in attitude. It is literately, a "DO NOTHING" strategy towards fixing a problem. JeffersonClay posted:If the sweatshop laborers don't lose their jobs because the sweatshop products can just be sold to different countries, or they can somehow juggle resources and make autarky work, then the intervention didn't do anything to end sweatshop conditions. If subsistence farming is actually preferable to sweatshop labor, and the land and capital are available to support additional farming, why are laborers migrating to cities where they're forced to choose between a sweatshop job and starving in the first place? This is just more faith that the market will provide--it won't. Okay could you sit down to explain your political ideology or framework here? Because the thing you are defending ("sweatshops are not ideal but they are better than the alternative  *SPARKLE SPARKLE*") is the calling card of a market worshiper, yet you seem to be... against that? Or? Do you believe in the holy spirit of free market capitalism or have you accepted our lord and savior Karl Marx into your heart?
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May 17, 2017 22:07
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JC believes in whatever he needs to believe in order to not ever have to admit that he's wrong.
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May 17, 2017 22:09
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Fados posted:The liberal blackmail that is applied by the likes of JC, that some oposition against this system that perpetuates shity labor conditions is actually some type of FYGM from the working classes of the west just takes this narrative to an even worse level of disgusting and boot-licking corporate apoligism. I don't think that JC actually believes himself to be a corporate bootlicker or whatever. I think the main flaw in his logic is the issue I mentioned earlier with disproportionately valuing the status quo relative to any potential significant changes. This isn't to say he thinks the status quo is ideal or anything (I'm sure he's willing to admit there are many problems), but more that he overvalues the potential downsides to change relative to current, observable downsides to the status quo. For example, his first concern when presented with a potential idea for change is "but what about this bad stuff can happen", and by itself that wouldn't necessarily be illogical, but the problem is that he doesn't apply this same standard to all the terrible stuff that is already happening right now. I think it's easy for someone to slip into this mindset, especially if they're fortunate enough to be middle/upper-middle class people in a developed nation who have the freedom to intellectualize these issues. People in this situation frequently undervalue suffering in the present because they aren't personally exposed to it. As far as they're concerned, it doesn't really matter if a problem is solved in 10 years or 50 years, as long as we get there at some point. As a result they feel no pressure to seek out an immediate solution to the sort of issues we're discussing. This isn't to say they don't genuinely want to fix those issues, but they don't feel much pressure to do so, and they aren't willing to risk any sort of negative change to a status quo that they're comfortable with. If he were actually concerned about issues like poverty, etc (as anything beyond just an intellectual problem to solve), he would be focusing the discussion around ways to improve the status quo, rather than doing almost literally nothing but attempting to contradict people proposing their own ideas for change. Disagreeing is okay (I disagree with the people who think protectionism is a good idea that will revive American industry, for example), but the problem is that folks like him make it extremely clear that they don't actually care much about fixing these problems.
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May 17, 2017 22:18
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You can't 'improve' that the status quo as it is. The future of «liberal-democracy» is singapure/chinese style authoritarian capitalism, there is no improving the system, you gotta operate structural change mainly in the ideological framework that frames everything in the market/state false dichotomy, the system that naturalizes current free-flowing capital as well .. natural.
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May 17, 2017 22:25
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Fados posted:You can't 'improve' that the status quo as it is. The future of «liberal-democracy» is singapure/chinese style authoritarian capitalism, there is no improving the system, you gotta operate structural change mainly in the ideological framework that frames everything in the market/state false dichotomy, the system that naturalizes current free-flowing capital as well .. natural. By "improve the status quo" I just meant "make things better than they are now" not "improve within the context of the current status quo system of political/power relationships."
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May 17, 2017 22:28
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Ok, I get you now, fair enough. I also agree that it's useless to moralize ideological opinion as personal flaws, it's just that for all intents and purposes centrists ARE bootlickers, even if they don't know it.
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May 17, 2017 22:39
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JC Insists that he's a Bernie style democrat yet he's never once praised the man and has taken literally every chance to poo poo on him, his followers, and his ideas. He is literally hellofellowyouths.jpg and probably the most disingenuous poster in D&D save for overt trolls like Effectronica. LOL at the idea that he believes in anything outside of whatever will further enrich the wealthy. Edit: To contribute, I think Ytlaya's analysis is pretty spot on for most of the sincere centrist liberals. They understand the problems we face on an intellectual level but due to having privileged places in society they don't really feel them on an emotional one. This makes things like free trade easy to rationalize and the victims of their policies easy to dismiss. readingatwork fucked around with this message at 23:18 on May 17, 2017 |
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May 17, 2017 23:05
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JeffersonClay posted:If the sweatshop laborers don't lose their jobs because the sweatshop products can just be sold to different countries, or they can somehow juggle resources and make autarky work, then the intervention didn't do anything to end sweatshop conditions. If subsistence farming is actually preferable to sweatshop labor, and the land and capital are available to support additional farming, why are laborers migrating to cities where they're forced to choose between a sweatshop job and starving in the first place? This is just more faith that the market will provide--it won't. Why do you keep pushing this false narrative that leftists, who are avid supporters of state intervention in bringing markets to heel, would suddenly promote policies that advocate that government bans sweatshop practices and then rinse their hands of the workers whose jobs are lost? gently caress no, we say that banning the horrible jobs is just the beginning. People here have explained this to you multiple times, but you keep reverting to this idiotic narrative that really just reflects your own lack of imagination and worship of the status quo. Rather than confront these types of arguments, you construct the simple binary ones you'd rather address and then you run away when pressed on this point.
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May 17, 2017 23:44
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reignonyourparade posted:Or, perhaps, like noted abolitionist and actual former slave Frederick Douglas. Thanks for posting that. You know I wonder if Douglas ever read Marx because that sounds vaugley Marxist. Meanwhile the Nation calls out the wonderful peoiple at the Center for American progress and their joke of a conference. Nation posted:Why Bernie Sanders Wasn’t Invited to CAP’s Ideas Conference
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May 18, 2017 00:32
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