Or, as TDS correspondent Dulce Sloan put it, Familiar Dick.
I really hate this stupid reality sooo much.
No can do; I’m outliving all these despicable muthafuckas, out of sheer fucking spite.
Oh, I’ll still vote for the decrepit, senile fucker if he’s what we end up with for the nominee; I just won’t fucking like it.
Agreed, sadly, that’s just the tip of iceberg of why he’s so fucking problematic.
Ya know the worst thing? Even though he dropped out around noon today, I’m still fucking hearing Bloomberg commercials on the radio. I have a nearly 2 hour commute, and I am sick unto death of them. Every G-d Damned station. When one comes on and I smash the preset buttons to change stations, its there too.
I hope to G-d his ad buy ends soon. I can’t take anymore
He could have fixed Flint’s water supply. He could have set up free healthcare clinics in every city in America.
He could have compensated every one of the innocent people that his cops brutalised.
It wasn’t “wasted”.
Bloomberg never had a shot at the Presidency, and he knew it. The point of his massive ad buys was to drive up the prices and flood the airwaves so that none of the leftish campaigns could use the media to make an impact before super Tuesday.
Mission accomplished.
Well that’s impossible. GOP won’t let progressive nominees through, the only chance is for maybe an inoffensive moderate justice. It will take more than 2020 to shift the Senate and get progressive nominations through, and it’s too late for any to make it onto the Supreme Court. The damage is done, and will continue for some time.
The only path forward is legislation that continually reacts to the inevitable bad rulings. The GOP has killed what they call “legislation from the bench”. That era is over. Now that we can’t count on the judicial branch to protect the most vulnerable, it is now up to Congress to make up the slack. And the failed impeachment shows that their inability to handle a job that requires strategy, unity, statesmanship, and leadership.
It may be the DNC is too big and too diverse to form any cohesive partisan force. It seems the whips on the GOP side are much better at turning key issues into a bloc vote.
Who are the top five legislators who forge coalitions today?
Please be reminded we MUST flip the senate also. Moscow Mitch and friends have got to go.
Bi-partisan coalitions? Hardly anyone. Intra-party coalitions? Pelosi has done a pretty masterful job, I’ve got to give her credit, and the Senate Democrats, being filled with mostly moderates, gives Schumer a pretty easy job to corral them. Durkin does a good job, and I think Warren does an excellent job of maintaining a moral touchstone on a lot of issues without being so inflexible as to be disregarded.
Why?
You said Sanders couldn’t forge coalitions. I don’t think anyone there can forge coalitions.
COVID-19 can, sure, but beyond that, good luck folks.
In fact, what I said was “God bless him for the great ideas, but he’s never been known as a legislator who can forge coalitions or horse trade to actually pass the legislation he wants to pass.” Which is more than a bit different than “Sanders can’t forge coalitions.”
I am under no illusion that the GOP is going to be a good-faith negotiating partner with anyone, but I do have reservations about Sanders’ ability to compromise and trade with anyone, including his own party* to advance an agenda. Being right about policy is way less than half the battle when you’re actually trying to implement that policy.
*well, you know what I mean
What is the value of someone who can forge intra-party coalitions if you don’t own all levels of government?
Because it’s the bare minimum first step in trying to advance any kind of policy. If the President can’t get his own party behind him in a more or less unified block, then nothing advances.
Sanders wants to do some pretty bold things, and not all Democrats are on board with all of his ideas. If he can’t convince his own party of what he’s doing, he has no chance convincing anyone else.
Well, the way I see it, the class struggle is a political struggle that requires a certain amount of unity. You can’t win it by allowing to divide people along gender lines; but you can’t win it either with post modern whateverism that claims that all of these forms of oppression have the same impact on society. I’m happy with the progress in equality that has been made in the West, but if I see a right wing feminist, I don’t consider them an ally.
tankies
I’m not sure what that ephitet contains, but it doesn’t sound like something that is particuarly friendly to the idea of socialism
The revolutions that we have had show this doesn’t happen
Not automatically, no, but to claim that neither the French Revolution, nor the October Revolution, just to mention the most obvious ones, didn’t have a positive impact on women’s rights, seems rather ahistorical to me.
Ironically class reductionism is identity politics too
Ridiculous. Class is what unifies people regardless of their gender, race or sexual identity. It is what unifies people who are kept out of control over their own lives. To put it in a postmodern, arbitrary fashion besides several other forms of identity, and claim that those can fundamentally improve their lives without taking into consideration the basic traits of capitalist society, is just self sabotage. It’s the kind of petty bourgeois, scatter brained nonsense that made me no longer consider myself an anarchist since I outgrew my early twenties.
Edit: I’m not a “reductionist”, I don’t deny that these dimensions of oppression exist, or that they should be fixed. But I believe that can not be done in a capitalist society, that puts most of its economic decisions out of the reach of democratic control.
edit: I seem to have conveyed the impression that I regard feminism as “invalid” (DukeTrout), redundant, unnecessary, or something similar. That is not, and never has been my position. I do believe that gender equality is an important goal; I do not believe that a socialist society would automatically bring about gender equality, or that it would make feminism obsolete. But “existence determines consciousness”, and a capitalist society is practically unable to achieve equality for women and/or any marginalized groups in a lasting manner. Such a society will put its most important decisions, (those which form everybody’s life in production and consumption of all goods) outside of political control, and subject them to only one metric - the maximization of return-on-investment. This might be easy to forget or even deny in times of economic stability. However, it becomes more apparent with each economic crisis, when marginalized groups are the first to be asked to “tighten their belts”, and have previous achievements taken away, in what is then called the “national interest”, but really is little more than an attempt to save the capital at any cost, with all other considerations becoming secondary.
The specific needs for justice for women, POC, LGBTQ, etc. people transcend class. Your example of the right wing feminist goes the other way, too. It’s naive and more than a little dismissive to assert that solving the problems of class will solve the problems of injustice.
In other words, any movement that fails to consider and advocate for the needs of the underserved and those who are discriminated against, doesn’t deserve their support. There are endless examples of socialist policies that discriminate against minorities, women, and LGBTQ. You don’t get credit for improving those people’s lives if you ignored their input.
Why does that not go both ways? why does that not mean white cisgendered men supporting the antiracist struggle, the struggle for women’s rights, the struggles of the LBGQT+ community? why are these struggles, which are very much part of class relations, meant to be put on the back burner for the people who already enjoy some amount of privilege in our society?
And BTW, if I can have my rights taken away as a woman, then every single man, working class or not, can also have their rights revoked.
Who is saying that they ARE allies… they most certainly are not allies of other feminists. TERFS are a great example of women who style themselves feminists but they most certainly are not, as they exclude one category of women who tend to be far more vulnerable in our society.
People of color, women, and LBGQT+ people are harder hit by class relations and often easier to exploit within the class system. You don’t work from the top down, you work from the most exploited up. The most exploited having greater rights and protections spiral up to help others. when women won the right to bodily autonomy under Roe V. Wade, it was decided as a privacy right, and that right to privacy is beneficial to all americans, not just women.
Oh come on. You think somebody offers him money and he’s going to turn it down? That’s not how greed works.
In Bloomberg’s world, it worked splendidly. He got exactly what he wanted - the next President will be someone Bloomberg knows will be a figurehead for the plutocrats. No matter who wins the Presidency, Trump or Biden, the next President can be counted on to cut taxes for corporations and corporate fatcats. He will also continue the destruction of American public schools, which will guarantee a huge pool of undereducated workers who are hungry for any job they can get, thus driving down wages even more. And he will continue to stuff the Federal courts at all levels with right-wing ideologues who will cheerfully aid in dismantling the rights that workers struggled for. And he will continue gutting the regulating and controlling agencies that are supposed to protect the American public and American land and air and water against the inhuman greed of the corporations.
Some people have crowded about Bloomberg dropping out as a positive thing, a proof that the ultrarich can’t just buy the Presidency. What tommyrot. That wasn’t what he was after. Bloomberg achieved his goal of neutralizing the leftists in the party in order to throw the nomination to an old-school corporate whore, thus guaranteeing that after this election, American corporations will have a paradise - an endless supply of cheap expendable labor, near-total freedom from regulations, and almost perfect freedom from any kind of judicial efforts to combat white-collar crime. Bloomberg invested $500,000,000 in an effort to make the world safe for billionaires, and he got a good deal.
Hey now, I explicitly said that I don’t believe that! But I do believe that a socioeconomic system that keeps most members of society completely out of control over economic issues will not allow anyone to effectively free themselves from oppression of any kind, because the economic interests of the few who own shit will always take precedence over the individual well being of anyone else.
Repeating from an earlier thread, as a general comment:
Gender and race blind class reductionism is a severe error, both ethically and tactically.
Class and gender blind race reductionism is a severe error, both ethically and tactically.
Race and class blind gender reductionism is a severe error, both ethically and tactically.
Class analysis which does not directly attack patriarchy and white supremacy sucks. Patriarchal Black capitalism which recreates class and gender oppression sucks. White imperial pseudofeminism sucks.
You can’t really fix any of it unless you fix all of it. Either we all get to live in a decent world, or none of us do.
