Tainari88 wrote:Yes, BJ, I think socialism is going to improve the living conditions of the working class. Giving them greater security and it will also improve the USA in general. If you have the majority of your population with decent living standards, more opportunities for being educated and with preventive medicine and health measures and unemployment insurance, and making sure babies, toddlers and children are taken care of?
Socialism in this case is an abstraction. Real problems need real solutions, and you have to fight real entrenched interests. Decent living standards aren't hard to achieve if you're willing to give up free trade agreements. That means a lower standard of living for the upper classes though, so you have to take them on. Education opportunities would also be easy to address, as schools are effectively already socialist. So you have to take on the entrenched bureaucracy--the labor unions, etc. Unemployment insurance has been part of the US since the 1930s, like 90 years now. WIC, etc. has been around for a long time too. Basically, there are two things that need to be addressed:
1) Neoconservative/neoliberal trade policies
2) Democratic party political machine
Crush those two factions, and things generally start to improve for people.
Tainari88 wrote:I don't give a shit about Trump being some victim. He is not a victim.
I'm not encouraging you to take pity on Trump. I'm trying to help you see beyond "capitalism=bad; socialism=good" so that you can understand the political system in the United States better than you do. Let's remove race from the equation for the moment. Watch this lecture when you have some time:
The establishment either breeds or educates who they want to be in power later in life. Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, John F. Kennedy, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush were of "breeding." People like Clinton, Obama and Biden were educated to the establishment's desires--moulded into politicians, having done nothing else with their lives. In the absence of grooming, the establishment sees people like Clinton and Obama as trash, but they are the Pygmalion product of the establishment. Trump is not. For all intents and purposes, to them Trump is white trash. He doesn't deserve to be president, because they didn't mold and shape him. Ironically, the more they attack him, the more they alienate themselves from the seat of power.
Tainari88 wrote:He is a power-hungry man with no scruples and a lot of bad choices that affect too many people. He needs to be gone.
A guy who decides against retaliating against Iran shooting down a drone, because it is not proportionate is someone with scruples. A guy who gets through all the lawfare attacks on him unscathed has scruples. Is he a paragon of moral virtue? No. However, your emotional attachment to people like Jose Mujica leaves you with a one-dimensional view of other politicians. If Trump loses, he will be replaced by the neoliberal cabal and we'll be back at war again. There is no Jose Mujica in the 2020 election with better than a snowball's chance in hell of winning the White House.
Tainari88 wrote:Do I care about old money or new money? No. I care about getting a representative of working-class value and people candidates elected in there.
That's not a viable choice in the 2020 presidential elections in the US.
Tainari88 wrote:Get a person who's parents were struggling and hardworking with decent values and the kid went to uni and is brilliant, had no money, and is extremely bright, accomplished, educated, and talented and is great at everything.
Bill Clinton? Barack Obama?
Tainari88 wrote:The BEST of humanity should be running nations. Not fools or greedy bastards.
That's a normative statement. It's not realpolitik.
Tainari88 wrote:You don't know who he is do you?
Personally, no.
Tainari88 wrote:The man was an activist that opposed the government. He was thrown in solitary confinement, starved, tortured and beaten and nearly died for 12 years in jail.
Maybe Michael Flynn should run for high office.
Tainari88 wrote:You can't buy him off because he ain't interested in money.
That's also true of John F. Kennedy, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and Donald Trump. They already have enough money.
Tainari88 wrote:You don't know Latin American political history at all. That is the reality.
Back in the 1990s, I was actually invited to the old presidential palace in Rio for a musical performance. We were staying in a penthouse in the Copacabana neighborhood of Rio, within walking distance of the Copacabana Palace hotel. The owner had a major domo in charge of the property who was gay and the son of the former secretary of Brazil's communist party. He gave us quite a bit of background of Brazilian politics, being a red diaper baby himself. He was the one who pointed out to me the differences in architecture in Rio, and the gaps in architectural styles that are present in liberal countries when the government in Brazil was totalitarian. I also visited the old palace up in Petropolis, where Pedro II lived.
If Augusto Pinochet were a family friend of mine, you'd say the same thing.
In 2006 when I was in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, I got a deeper reading of the kinds of things that Daniel Ortega's forces did there. We were looking at property, and I decided against investing in Nicaragua due to the cloudy title problems from the years of the Sandinista government. We went up to the caldera at Masaya, where it was said the Sandinistas used to throw their political opponents into the lava lake at the bottom of it. Daniel Ortega was a poor boy once too, and he's a fairly wealthy socialist now.
Tainari88 wrote:You are not me.
My values are different than yours.
Indeed. I don't believe in socialism, because human nature doesn't quite work that way.
"We have put together the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics."
-- Joe Biden