In the Colosseum posted:

Gaupo Guacho posted:

remember when everyone on the new left decided to expand their appeal by going after John lewis for insufficient radicalism and mocking him for being beaten by racist cops in the 60s

mcmagic posted:

I don't think the 15 dollar minimum wage is either a perceived or real threat to capital or that there is any big donor opposition to it. How thin skinned and stupid they are just means that if they viewed it as a real threat, Biden would not have even been allowed to run on it in the election. It just ended up being SUPER easy for Biden to abandon it which is the issue.

Probably Magic posted:

Bernie is a committed incrementalist, someone who believes that any improvement, any shift left, no matter how small, justifies itself. It's why he's a Democrat, it's why he supports Democrats, it's why he caucused with Democrats as an independent. The thing is, there's such improvement as so marginal as to be irrelevant, and poo poo like global warming or immigrant death camps aren't something you can play horseshoes with. It sounds all very noble, getting whatever possible skim of good you can, until you believe that this kind of thinking would not have ended the Holocaust or American slavery, so on, so forth.

I'm not entirely sure what AOC's deal is, or the rest of the squad. Maybe similar, though leaving FTV to die doesn't even seem incrementalist. The Democratic Party in general, though, is not dedicated to doing any good whatsoever, and has obviously become much more concerned "beating the socialist" as Biden loves to say than being an opposition party. I think Bernie understands that America is a hypercapitalist country, one that will never turn left, and he's on a Quixotic mission to "make the best of it." I don't think he ever wanted to be president, not even in 2020, certainly not in 2016, he just wanted to move the platform left. When that's the extent of your ambitions, of course you satisfy yourself that you did good when there's a minor rhetoric change or a promise that might not otherwise have been delivered. It's the way of sleeping at night. In much the same way that "hopeful" Obama was one of the most cynical presidents we've ever had, Bernie is the most resigned, least revolutionary ones despite his framing. What's important is some glacial move in some vaguely leftward direction. In that sense, he shares a lot with D&D. In also that sense, he absolutely wasn't the president for all the people who I met who believed in him, who worked lovely-rear end minimum wage jobs and need healthcare yesterday and need their college debt forgiven if they ever want to get married. Those people don't get to have a candidate. They can just get hosed by the United States of America in perpetuity.

theCalamity posted:

https://twitter.com/usembassykabul/status/1425465791340818432?s=21

Ytlaya posted:

I think that the individual-centric nature of US politics combined with the internet has a way of making people support this sort of stuff. Like you can point to "some guys who are racist" and there's social pressure to never push back against anything negative/aggressive that people say, and this gradually leads to people becoming madder and madder until they inevitably start saying things like "We must kill The Nazis before they kill us. If you disagree with this, you're defending or downplaying The Nazis." The irony of course being that, by focusing on people like the Proud Boys, these people are actually the ones downplaying the people and institutions enforcing real white supremacy.

It's also conveniently very easy for people/institutions with real power to manipulate this sort of sentiment. Just make sure people keep focused on other powerless people and condemn anyone who disagrees as "carrying water for the nazis" or whatever. It's why the FBI is fine with declaring such groups to be terrorists/hate groups.

TheIncredulousHulk posted:

General Bullshit posted:

I don't even know what is in any of these bills except tax cuts and tax credits.

BRAKE FOR MOOSE posted:

most of the appropriations are through existing federal grant mechanisms which do have a decent amount of oversight, so it's not just an openly corrupt handout to contractors. there's always a ton of nonsense grift with these things but most of it will end up translated into real construction and R&D

So it's not really a bad bill, the problem is that it's comically insufficient so people will not notice any effects from it, won't believe any of the effects came from the federal government, and the direct human aid all comes from the bill that was supposed to be paired with this one so that all the direct human aid wasn't eviscerated before it got to Biden's desk

OOPSIE DOODLE!!!

BRAKE FOR MOOSE posted:

it is, administered by the NTIA, but there aren't exactly a lot of players in the broadband game, and we all know what their general response to regulation has been, they are sufficiently powerful to take the money and tell the feds to get hosed

Lansdowne posted:

I went hunting around the last time I saw that line thrown around. cba to find it again but everything points back to a some university-aligned center (columbia?) doing a study where they look at one measure of poverty that tries to model a household's total income and expenditures using like cost of living and dollar figures of all possible government assistance available and then on balance see if that falls above or below some poverty line. they broke down the impact of some proposed policy changes and then had a big table where they listed the change in poverty of groups broken down by race/age and the under 18 group change was a decrease of over 50%

originally when $15 minwage was in the proposal this was one of the things that was boosting the income side of the balance in the methodology to reduce poverty, but then that was taken out and the numbers guys ran it again and wouldn't you know it the numbers kinda stayed the same?!

WorkerThread posted:

https://twitter.com/joncoopertweets/status/1501995329406840836?t=4gAqJ0tPA5VNLVDZyvw0wg&s=19

yes! i will allow poor people to pay any price to stick it to the russians!

punk rebel ecks posted:

Okay, it's clear that everyone here dislikes Biden and state that he hasn't done anything of not while in office. I'm curious though, why isn't he given some credit for reducing child poverty significantly. Now the elephant in the room is that he wasn't able to make it permanent, but he did try and the initial bill was passed that improved the lives of millions of people.

punk rebel ecks posted:

I've been trying to find the bolded on Google but could only find criticisms from chud leaning websites.

To be fair, the sites that support child poverty going down are poo poo like the economist and cnn.

Do you have a source saying that it didn't reduce poverty as much as people claimed?

Yeah I realize that, but he was blocked from continuing it.

punk rebel ecks posted:

To be fair if that was the case wouldn't child poverty remained stagnate instead of shooting back up once the tax credit ended? I mean minimum wage jobs are still high due to the "labor shortage".