MoveOn tells Sanders to move on

boing
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Please go on. Why did the US unilaterally foment a war with Iraq?

The US isn’t currently involved in a war with Iraq. And the reason they did before was for regime change, because Saddam was a destabilizing murderous despot, not because they wanted to steal their oil, which is such a nonsensical claim it’s always amazed me when grown adults believe it.

It’s a matter of opinion whether nuclear power is actually better. I think that one could make a good argument that the worst case scenarios for global warming aren’t actually quite so bad as worst case scenarios for nuclear power. (If you can’t accept even the possibility of that statement, then I feel pretty comfortable dismissing you as an ideologue.) Under a risk assessment framework like that, it’s only clear that best case nuclear is better than worst case global warming.

The worst case scenarios for global warming are so significantly worse than those for nuclear power it’s hard for me to take you seriously here. Global Warming could lead to many millions of deaths and mass displacement of countless millions more. The worst case scenario for Nuclear Power is that a few hundred people (or maybe thousand if it’s really really bad) die of cancer, and a small area of land becomes uninhabitable for a while, so far only a hundred or so people have died as a result of nuclear power that we know of. Also, the worst disaster, Chernobyl, was a fault of a decaying communist system more than anything else, the only modern disaster has killed exactly nobody (so that’s probably closer to the real worst case scenario).

Isn’t Clinton’s state department one of the biggest contributors to the content of the TPP? But now she’s against it?

Yes, apparently so.

Here in reality, I think the most sensible conclusion is to assume Clinton will vocally oppose private prisons while doing fuck all to actually end the practice.

It’s possible, we’ll have to see, I was only commenting on their policy platforms. She can’t abandon all of her stated policies though, politicians tend to want to get re-elected.

This seems like a hugely important issue to me. Why should I consider this a minor difference considering Clinton’s close relationship with the biggest investment banks and Sanders’ much more adversarial attitude towards them?

I never said it was a minor difference, I disagree with her on this one as well btw. Their policies on education aren’t minor differences either, though I agree her positions there more than Sanders.

Also, interesting to me how consistently you’re presenting your opinions as fact.

It’s not my opinion, he has a record of voting against certain gun control laws. He differs from Clinton in having a more state based approach. I’m not arguing the pros and cons here, just pointing out where they have differed.

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A good lesson to learn, at least as applied to one’s campaign rhetoric. I have no faith at all though that she’d actually apply it in practice if elected president.

What in Bernie’s past demonstrates to you that he just recently learned that lesson (as opposed to having known it for decades)?

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Isn’t some of the question between two competing notions of what is the base here:

One that the core of the current ideology we all live under is racial, aimed at the maintenance of white supremacy, as @GideonTJones suggests and that everything can be understood from that perspective? In that case, a more neo-liberal economic agenda doesn’t preclude an anti-racist backbone (which I think is what he means when he says that the democrats have trended left in recent years, also probably in relation to things like gay marriage, too - but I’m confident that I’ll be corrected if I’m wrong here).

Second is the traditional leftist view of the modern world,that the core underlying ideology is capitalism, and that racism emenates from that, and works in the maintenance of a divisive class system to keep one class in power. If so, then neo-liberalism works against the working classes to the benefit of the elites regardless of race. Breaking down the capitalist system is the only way to end racism, because racism only exists within the capitalist mode of production (but what about the continued racism in Cuba, for example).

So…I think that’s maybe where we’re at cross purposes here?

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So the real morons in all of this then are the women and POC who have supported Sanders?

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What I don’t understand is - if we are going to invade a country souly for resources, why don’t we actually take charge and command of said resources, vs allow the Iraqis to sell us the oil, and the various multinational corporations pump and process it?

Resources play a part in it, but our allies in Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait etc, also play a part in why we have any interest in the MIddle East, and very little interest in Africa. As well as it is the hot bed for terrorists groups who end up making it over here or in Europe. (Though there are African Muslims in both places as well.)

In short, involvement in the middle east certainly influenced by resources, but not the only reason why we do what we do and done did there.

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And in the White House!

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Please do go on.

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I don’t think I’d call anyone a “real moron” based solely on who they voted for. Unless they voted for Trump.

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The US isn’t currently involved in a war with Iraq.

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You seem to be confused by what Clinton said on the campaign trail vs her actual history and what she said in those closed Goldman Sacks meetings where she got paid enormous piles of money.

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[quote=“milliefink, post:82, topic:79353”]
A good lesson to learn, at least as applied to one’s campaign rhetoric. I have no faith at all though that she’d actually apply it in practice if elected president.[/quote]
If she’s as much a craven, power-hungry, do-anything-to-be-elected politician as many think, then she’ll do what the Democratic voters want. And given where the voters stand, those are policies further to the left than a lot of you seem to think.

[quote=“milliefink, post:82, topic:79353”]What in Bernie’s past demonstrates to you that he just recently learned that lesson (as opposed to having known it for decades)?[/quote]A lot of Bernie’s supporters are unfamiliar with his statements on the white working class he made repeatedly the last few years. He’s basically been arguing that the Democratic party abandoned them, that they’re a bigger constituency than Blacks, Hispanics, gay people, etc. That we have to go get them back and reconstitute the FDR coalition. His whole campaign was based around the idea that he was going to do that.

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No, not at all (and neither of us know what she said in those meetings btw). It’s entirely possible for a politician to say and do one thing in the past, and then say and then do a completely different thing in the future, it really does happen all the time. It’s how they keep getting themselves elected.

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Well, here’s the email MoveOn.org sent me early yesterday morning:

moveon.jpg1420×736 167 KB

Looks to me like they were rooting for him.

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Hmm. I am familiar with his commentary to that effect. As I think @Mindysan33 was partially getting at above (and I hope she’ll correct me if I’m wrong), appealing to a block of white voters in terms of their class-based interests is not the same as appealing to their desire to vote for the buttressing of white supremacy. It’s an appeal instead to their interest in terms of class – rather than of race. If pressed on this point (and he probably has been), I’m quite sure he’d say that the white working class voters who’ve been lost to republicans have been encouraged to support divisive policies as a diversion from class issues. Which would be the opposite of a an argument for white supremacy.

As for this constituency being a bigger one than Blacks, Hispanics, gay people, etc., he wasn’t saying these other constituencies need to be thrown overboard in favor of white working-class voters. He’s obviously in favor of uniting all the voting constituencies that democrats can, in terms of their class-based interests. If there’s any fault in that that I can see, it’s been in sometimes overlooking or downplaying the particular, additional interests beyond social class that affect and afflict constituencies like those other ones.

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I was pretty sure this is relevant and I wasn’t imagining it. Thanks for the confirmation.

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Note that I didn’t use ridicule to dismiss your perspective on this – I asked you to support your perspective using an actual argument.

Instead, you “argue” by bald assertion and top it off with more ridicule.

You seem to be working very hard to prove your thesis that BB is where rational debate goes to die.

I’m not going to argue with an ideologue about this. If you can’t show that you can discuss like a grown up, then you’re not worth my time.

You’re analyzing the comparison so poorly that it’s hard for me to take you seriously here.

We’re not talking about the worst case scenario for the current scale of nuclear. We’re talking about enough nuclear to substantially replace the role of all fossil fuels in the economy (including the fossil fuels needed to build the nuclear plants in the first place) as well an deal with the annual increase in demand. You’re also restricting your analysis to reactor-based disasters when the much more pressing issues with nuclear are the waste created (which would, needless to say, scale up spectacularly if nuclear was used to substantially replace fossil fuels) and the maintenance of the infrastructure (e.g. tailing ponds).

You’re also not addressing the worst case scenarios – you’re only addressing the scenarios we’ve seen historically in the context of a highly technological society that is able to leverage considerable flows of resources to mitigate problems before they become disasters. We don’t know what the response would be if a series of nuclear disasters happened after a great depression – but we know that the disasters would be much worse with the depression than without it. With fossil fuels, the situation is reversed – a global depression would lead to a substantial decrease in the rate of increase of CO2 in the atmosphere.

If you applied the same reasoning to global warming, you would be forced to extrapolate the effects from the historical record – approximately 3 degrees C warming so far, no deaths directly attributable to global warming.

Finally, you’re not taking into account the very real possibility that mitigating global warming would necessarily require a hit to the economy – and a global depression of that kind could very easily lead to millions of deaths and displacements. Shouldn’t we count the lives caused by global warming mitigation against the lives saved by global warming mitigation?

That his record is “not good” is purely your opinion.

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I think though, he didn’t seek to include the white working class at the expense of other groups. I think it’s more accurate to say that he sought a coalition of groups under a larger umbrella, which is again, a socialist dream for quite a while now (however often hamfisted and oblivious to racial realities it’s been in the past and in some cases continues to be).

And there is something to be said for a intersectional reading of race and class, which is hard. But I think we need to acknowledge that class is not something restricted to categories of whites, but applies across races, even as race has real world consequences which the left has not always been attentive to.

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  1. Public relations: the war was sold as a war of principal, and nakedly seizing the oil fields would put the lie to that claim. The Bush administration had to maintain the facade they established to justify the war.
  2. The US government wouldn’t benefit by directly seizing the oil fields in the first place – that idea only makes sense under the theory of mercantilism. Opening up the previously nationalized Iraqi oil fields to the free market means:
    a) your cronies in the oil companies make more money
    b) oil production is heavily taxed, so the government directly benefits from private companies drilling the oil fields
    c) the real benefit is a lower cost of oil resulting from the oil being dumped on the global market

Really, the scenario where the US government seizes the oil fields is the one that makes no sense.

Totally agreed, and I don’t think I ever said the Iraq war was solely over resources.

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[quote=“Donald_Petersen, post:93, topic:79353”]
Looks to me like they were rooting for him.
[/quote]Back on topic… Bernie’s superdelegates are doing the same. Suspect the unions that supported him will eventually issue similar statements if he doesn’t make it official. It usually ends up being a person’s friends and supporters that lets em know it’s time.

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I agree with your assessment. All of the rabid Hillary fans who are up in arms about Sanders not capitulating on bended knee should realize that the negotiations going on now will help to move the Democratic party as an institution in a more progressive direction. There are millions who have voted for Sanders in the primaries who want that to happen, and it is continued pressure that will make it so.

Hillary will be just fine, and there is actually a higher percentage of Sanders voters who have said that they will vote for Hillary than there were Hillary voters in 2008 who said that they would vote for Obama after the primary outcome was clear. All of the infighting and name calling needs to stop. Sanders voted in accord with the Democratic party 93% of the time, and he is not going to kick it to the curb now. He fought a good fight, raised some important issues, and will support Clinton to win. As will I.

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