Quote:
Originally Posted by
LittleFuzzy
See, there's that obsession of yours with the rich as the Enemy of the People again.
You say that as if this is some kind of gotcha, rather than a position I'm more than happy to defend. Maybe we'll have that conversation one day, it's kinda tangential to this thread, but for now I will say that their interests are fundamentally opposed to ours.
Quote:
I don't care if the rich influence politics anymore than I care about labor unions influencing politics. I dislike the direction some try to influence politics (Koch brothers being an example). I can certainly see the argument that the only way to prevent the latter is to put a stop to it in general.
There's also the argument that it's fundamentally anti-democratic, but I agree that's not the main issue here.
Quote:
But since that's certainly not going to happen this election cycle, the only reason to raise the "big donors are bad for politics" argument against Bloomberg is if you think he's going to be using it to influence politics in a way you really don't like, either as a donor or as a candidate. What immoral rich person agenda is it you think he's pushing Steely?
De-regulation, tax breaks for his buddies, eternal war, no real progress towards proper health-care, no attempt to curb police violence towards minorities, half measures on climate change etc etc.
Quote:
Think that if he's elected he's going to use it to reimplement "stop and frisk" as a national policy with his new half-state/half-corporate goon force and establish "sexual harassment day" by Executive Order?
Think stop and fisk or his comments about women just came out nowhere and aren't indicative of his attitudes to women and minorities, and thus a factor in how he'll make policy about them? You want a guy who told a pregnant employee to "kill it" is the right person to be making life and death decisions about policy on reproductive health or on women's access to maternal leave, for example?
Quote:
How is it, Steely, that you think the only appropriate response to the recent successes the Right has seen is to try and prove true all the fearmongering they've been using to get it?
I think the appropriate response to Republican fearmongering is to push back against it, not go "why yes, high taxes for the rich and moderate social protections is just like communism, we certainly don't believe anything like that"
Quote:
What I would really like to see (I won't get it, but it's a dream of mine) is for these last eight years and the upcoming four to eight to bring about one of those periodic realignments we see in US politics. The fiscally conservative wing of the Republican Party has collapsed. It's dead right now, there's no sign of it anywhere. What I would love would be for a moderate Democratic Party to bring those people in, build a policy-dynamic wedding both the need in a modern society to provide adequate social support and responsible fiscal restraint.
The fiscally conservative wing of the Republican party has collapsed because it never existed in any real sense. In the same way their belief in "family values" was never real, just plausible cover story for homophobic policies, their professed belief in "fiscal conservativism" was simply a plausible cover for implementing policies benefit the rich (their true constituency) at their expense of everyone else. The modern Republican party of the Trump era isn't some perversion of the, say, pre-Clinton era Republican party, it's the same institution that no longer needs pretence. They dislike Trump because he's an embarrassment, but one they're prepared to put up with because he's giving them everything they've ever wanted.
