2020 Election Thread (formerly: 2020 Presidential Candidates Thread) (Part 1)

Work that mainly serves the neoliberal death cult of which Summers is a high priest.

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It was a start. By the end of Obama’s second term the median income in the US was nearly 20% higher than it was before the collapse. Structural inequality was worse than ever, but making it possible for people to feed their families is not unimportant.

Which of course I didn’t…

is kind of fundamentally at odds with your stated thirst for pushing back against Biden’s bad policies.

Biden does not currently control the White House. I hope that won’t be the case after January. There isn’t a hell of a lot we can do now, but I have no beef with people pointing out that Summers is a jackass and trying to get him off the team, as long as it doesn’t turn into a protracted damaging attack on the Biden candidacy itself.

I think after the election – even before the inauguration – if he wins, every single thing he does should be under the microscope.

Meanwhile, as I suggest above, there is an easy way to get Summers out, namely get Warren into the team

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What part of the outside world are you speaking of?

The non-academic world where they don’t have tenure and where they can’t demand that everyone on campus defer to their authority. The part of their world where they have to deal with people calling them on their readily apparent gaslighting BS.

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And make no mistakes… they are dismantling the tenure system, bit by bit. This is going to be the last generation of academics who can get tenure, or at least it will be restricted to the elites from the ivy league schools going forward. More and more of us are going to be carving out a living in low wage, precarious positions, with little time or ability to work on what will get us tenure (publishing). The hard right has been coming for academia since the 60s, and thanks to the neo-liberaliziation of many public universities, they are getting their wish.

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All true. To be clear, I’m not opposed to tenure per se, since it’s a key element of academic freedom. But I’ve been around enough professors, including tenured ones, to know and hear plenty about those who abuse that privilege and honour on a casual basis.

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Almost like there are some people who, once they attain great power, forget the part about great responsibility.

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All correct. Happens all the time. As is true with other systems of power, it was historically used as a means to empower and privilege certain groups over others… then in the 60s, the “riff-raff” started to get in, and it went from a sacred institution to an illegitimate form of protection for marxist and radicals… yet it continued to protected the already overly privileged, even those who clearly committed forms of abuse of their standing.

image

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No matter how many die, he’ll just say the numbers are far lower than they would’ve been if he hadn’t been doing such genius work all along, etc etc

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It’s Russian assets all the way down.

That matters because without those statewide delegates, it would be nearly impossible for Sanders to clear the 25 percent delegate threshold needed to secure a spot on convention committees.3

Why does a seat at the table on these committees matter? Well, the answer circles back to the concessions that Sanders, his campaign and his supporters would like to extract from the DNC and Biden. Making up 25 percent or more of the delegates on the various convention committees means that the Sanders contingent at the convention would have a seat at the table.

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Ender’s game was an awesome book when I was a kid.

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The new math: Will enough survivors of sexual assault be able to suppress their trauma enough to vote for him?

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Also from the article:

Here’s the thing, though: The delegate math may not actually matter all that much. The Biden campaign seems keen to avoid the mistakes of 2016. They have already moved toward Sanders’s position on a number of issues, like expanding Medicare and student loan forgiveness programs, and have even floated letting Sanders keep his statewide delegates, rather than have them reallocated to Biden.

Party unity — or at least the appearance of it — is at a premium for Democrats, and the Sanders campaign knows this. It’s this third factor that Sanders’s leverage hinges on, and arguably, it’s the one that could work best to his advantage.

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Biden repeatedly unloaded on big business and big banks, noting that “this is the second time we’ve bailed their asses out,” accusing the Trump administration of managing the stimulus for their benefit. He railed about banks like Wells Fargo that are “only alive because of the American taxpayer” giving their large corporate clients the first shot at CARES Act aid intended for small businesses.

He said that repealing the bulk of Trump’s $2 trillion tax cut would help limit the red ink — “It wasn’t worth the powder it will take to blow it to hell”

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Well well, there’s some fairly pretty words. I hope he means them, keeps meaning them, and keeps saying them. I’m not fine with him, but I am fine with him channeling some Bernie.

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Yeah, having consolidated the right wing of the party (and even what’s left of the non-batshit wing of the GOP) he seems to be going after the Democratic base. He also recently reversed himself and endorsed the Warren bankruptcy plan.

For me the real test will be the role he gives Bruce Reed, who apparently has been an important part of his campaign planning so far. If Reed is kept to campaign side of things, and not allowed anywhere near policy, I’m just about OK with that. However, Reed was practically the architect of the DLC subversion of the Democratic party, he is far worse than people like Larry Summers and tends to operate under the radar.