Tainari88 wrote:You keep voting for swamp people who claim to be anti establishment.
Trump is not a life long professional politician. I never said I was a communist or a socialist. I clearly am not. So you are making semantic distinctions that are irrelevant to me.
Tainari88 wrote:They are just selfish assholes who will make the establishment even worse.
I want to break the establishment, so making it appear worse to the electorate is an objective.
Tainari88 wrote:The lack of trusting the working class will do this nation in.
Well, if that's the case, then the US was done in a long time ago.
Rancid wrote:The system cannot be fixed.
We agree on this much.
Rancid wrote:They often successfully convince people in the professional classes to turn against the working classes. This is how you get lawyers, doctors, etc. etc. that vote against poor people.
For the most part, it is happening the other way around. The establishment is doing its level best to convince the working class that the middle class is racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. and therefore the enemy of the working class. This strategy works pretty reliably for black voters, but it is nowhere near as successful for Hispanic or women voters.
jimjam wrote:AOC is brilliant. She really knows how to point out the truth succinctly and with great energy.
Marx was a brilliant analyst as well. The problem is that the proposed remedy for the analyzed problem is far worse than the disease.
jimjam wrote:The fact that she garners so much ridicule from the plutocracy and their hoodwinked lemmings is a high compliment to her philosophy and methodology.
Her philosophy is to print money and give away the store. That's the fastest path to third world status. Every time it is tried it fails miserably. Her methodology is more or less the same as any other demagogue.
jimjam wrote:In case you haven't noticed kids, this is ISSUE #ONE. Even more important than THE WALL The issue that The Greedy Old Party and the plutocrats they enable try like hell to keep off of the national agenda. Better late than never.
The soak-the-rich plans — ones that were only recently considered ridiculously far-fetched or political poison — have received serious and sober treatment, even by critics, and remarkably broad encouragement from the electorate.
I have noticed. You'll noticed I haven't discouraged people like Elizabeth Warren signing on to a wealth tax, have you? My reason is different from yours. My reason is that it forces the ruling class to tack away from AOC, Warren, et. al. Personally, I think the situation in Virginia is an effort to maintain political correctness, while guaranteeing that the Democrats lose the presidency in 2020. That is why I scoff at political correctness and why I find it so amusing that you people who ran on endlessly about Judge Moore or Bret Kavanaugh are suddenly rendered mute.
At this juncture, if I were Northam, I would resign out of spite and throw my support behind Fairfax and urge him to fight against the charges. Again, my goal, in part, is defeating political correctness and restoring presumption of innocence, the right to confront an accuser, due process, etc. So I want to sow as much chaos for the establishment as possible.
jimjam wrote:Roughly three out of four registered voters surveyed in recent polls supported higher taxes on the wealthy.
I expect that to increase after upper middle class people realize--especially in blue states--that they will not get as much of a tax cut. However, as I have said before, it's not earned income taxes that are the issue. It is actual possession of wealth and capital gains.
JohnRawls wrote:Not all reasons are related to corruption actually.
Right. This is why I think that the anti-GOP types represented by jimjam are missing how the wealthy will ultimately have to address Warren, AOC, etc. They will have to throw the 2020 election to Trump to leave them bitterly disillusioned. I think people here are missing the "crisis" in Virginia as an establishment trick to maintain power.
Tainari88 wrote:Just dig hard on every single source of income and expenditure of theirs both personal and public and trace it to its source. I heard it is very challenging to do so because the law allows the corporations to hide everything with the full force of the unethical law behind it. It is amazing people are not outraged at all this crap!!
They are horrified by the opposite--the government being able to search your finances without probable cause, a warrant, etc. Congress can compel tax returns of corporations. That was how they figured out that Hillary Clinton was the mastermind behind the phony Russian collusion story with respect to Trump.
Sivad wrote:She barely scratched the surface. One thing she forgot to mention is the big back-end payoffs they get for their service to corporate capitalism after they leave electoral politics that come in the form of lucrative lobbying and consulting jobs, millions of dollars for paid speeches, multi-million dollar book and tv deals, highly paid sinecures in academia, crony nepotistic land deals and job offers for children and spouses, etc etc etc. The back-end is the big post-electoral cash out and it's all perfectly legal institutionalized corruption.
That's correct. The Clintons made hundreds of millions after Bill left office, and with Hillary as SecState they cleaned up with the Clinton Foundation too. In fact, my annual ethics training for Foreign Corrupt Practices indicated that I was to avoid precisely the type of thing the Clinton's set up at the Clinton Foundation.
Steve_American wrote:For example, to me looking back Pres. Obama was a Dem sell-out. Literally everything he did helped the top 10% or 1%.
I knew the moment he named his national security adviser in 2008 before he took office that the entire campaign was a sham. Obama bailed out the super rich at the expense of the middle class. Anyone who criticizes the Republicans as the party of the rich and doesn't criticize Obama is either profoundly stupid and should not be allowed to vote, or is exceptionally wicked.
Steve_American wrote:Even the ACA wasn't single-payer and will make the 1% richer. He bailed out the criminals who ran the big banks and left the little people swinging in the wind. They lost their houses, when he didn't spent even 10% of the money Congress appropriated for the purpose of helping homeowners, IIRC. Etc. Etc.
He certainly did. The establishment is not friendly to small business. So small business has very good reason to believe that the establishment is their enemy, because they are.
Godstud wrote:The ACA, however, was not there to help the top 10%.
It absolutely was to help the wealthy. That's why they routinely tried to sell it as a Heritage Foundation plan from the Republicans, and why they ran Romney in 2012 (i.e., RomneyCare in Massachussets was the harbinger). Coverage does not mean quality health care. It just means that providers get paid regardless of the quality of care they provide or don't provide.
Godstud wrote::eh: How? Please provide a source for this claim that providing more poor people with insurance coverage will make rich people richer.
Econ 101--Microeconomics. Providing more people with insurance coverage means that providers get paid when the poor use health services. In effect, it stimulates aggregate demand for health care services. That fattens profit margins for health care providers.
Godstud wrote:(a purely economic system that doesn't work to help people, only individuals).
People are individuals.
Steve_American wrote:Medicare for all ends all that.
No it doesn't. Medicare is why healthcare became expensive in the United States. By allowing providers to bill high for taking care of the elderly, industry effectively inoculated themselves from government take over of private insurance. We can barely afford Medicare for seniors. It is going bankrupt. Trying to apply it to everyone without severe rationing would bankrupt the country almost overnight.
Steve_American wrote:Also, while we are at it we should let the Medicare Admin. force big pharma to sell it drugs at a much lower price.
Trump is for this too. He wants to eliminate the US subsidizing healthcare for Europe by ensuring that they US consumer pays no more than Europeans for the same drugs. This will lower prices for Americans, but it will raise prices for everyone else.
Hindsite wrote: Big pharma is not going work hard to make new drugs if they are not going to get rewarded for their efforts. That is just common sense.
That's true, but the point is that the US consumer is making drugs cheap for Europeans by paying far more money for the same thing. By outlawing that possibility, it forces drug companies to charge more money to European health systems.
Godstud wrote:It's not socialist if you have a dictator.
Socialism isn't inherently democratic.
Godstud wrote:Since when do insurance company stocks go up when you get more insured at cheaper rates? That would cause insurance stocks to drop, which is why ACA is unpopular amongst the 1%ers. It's pretty "self-evident".
It is. That's why anybody who wants to pull up insurance company stocks since 2010 can see that they have been on a tear ever since ObamaCare was passed. For example, at the beginning of 2009, Cigna (CI) was about $12-13 per share. Today it is $180 per share. It's gone up more than 10x it's value in 2009.
Drlee wrote:A single payer system is far more effective and far more affordable.
It is only more affordable if you introduce cost controls. We can do that without going to single payer.
Drlee wrote:The argument that they will stop producing drugs if they cannot charge extortionate prices for them doe not explain why drugs that cost $X in the US cost less than half that amount in Canada and the UK.
The US does not allow collective bargaining on drugs, not even for Medicare. You have to address the cost problem in order for anything government run to be even remotely feasible.
Drlee wrote:And in the case of the Hep C drugs, in Africa they cost less than 1% of what they cost here.
Pharmas are allowed to give the drugs away cheap and charge more for other drugs and markets to make up the difference. Eliminate these practices, and you would have much lower costs of healthcare for Americans and higher costs in Europe. Costs would become prohibitive in the third world.
Drlee wrote:We have a law precluding the federal government from negotiating drug prices. That is criminal.
Right. That needs to change. Trump is for changing that. All hail Trump!
annatar1914 wrote:Look at Virginia, etc... And President Trump looks now like the sane and moderate one after the SOTU.
Exactly. I still think it's too early to say that Trump gets re-elected for sure, but it is looking that way now. The establishment has a wild fire on its hands, and it has to smother the AOC/Warren wing of the Democrats to save its own bacon now.
"We have put together the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics."
-- Joe Biden