Joe Biden pictures, quotes and youtubes - Official Thread

Duff... wrote:Perhaps I'm misremembering here but isn't Ocasio-Cortez more or less a guarantee?

What I'm mostly tired of is this lefter than thou nonsense that we keep playing here. Fighting trumpism is job number one, everything else we can figure out later.

WP64 wrote:On a personal level, I don't feel like fighting Trump is my primary political motivation. I am really committed to the positive political vision represented at the grassroots level by DSA. My primary political concern is making sure that access to housing, healthcare, and education are not dictated by the market. Any meaningful and progressive campaign for real racial justice, gender equity, or just basic human rights, needs to begin with a fundamental understanding of the limits of a capitalist market economy. That doesn't mean expanding the social safety net either.

But look from another angle, and the picture appears different—and perhaps more useful in thinking through our own political moment. The New Deal was not “socialist.” But to end the story there is to miss the role of socialists in crafting the intellectual world within which the New Deal unfolded. Look not at what socialism was, but at what socialists did, and one sees that the New Deal’s progressive achievements do bear a significant historical relationship to reform socialism...

To look at the Socialist Party’s platforms in the years leading up to American entry in the First World War is to see a blueprint for the New Deal: reduced working hours and higher wages; abolition of child labor; national programs of old-age and unemployment insurance; more city parks and playgrounds; public housing; free maternity clinics and hospitals; public theater, cultural offerings, and reading-rooms. If Progressive social reform sometimes carried an element of bourgeois paternalism, the upshot was decommodification, so that working people might enjoy not only more security and better working conditions, but also the pleasures of everyday life and leisure...

Yet the New Deal’s frank recognition of the interdependence of society, its acknowledgement that a good society rests on a sense of mutuality, reciprocity, and community spoke, if not fully to the socialists’ vision, at least to their understanding of what was wrong with a market society. Its more imaginative programs did owe a debt to the social-political borrowings American socialists had curated and advocated for. The resurgence of the left in the mid-1930s in the form of direct-action campaigns and labor organizing shaped the context in which it was necessary (and electorally worthwhile) for Roosevelt and the Democrats to enact programs like the Works Progress Administration and the Wagner Act.

Something similar may be happening today. As in the Progressive era, today’s socialists have no monopoly on policy ideas like Medicare for All. But they are on the ascent because their systematic critique of today’s market society allows them to frame visible, easy-to-understand policies that speak in a direct and powerful way to the lived experiences of contemporary American life, particularly for young people: stagnant wages, insecurity, exploitation, precarity, runaway inequality, indebtedness, the soaring cost of essentials like housing and health care.

Today’s liberals may find irksome the appropriation of their own historical legacy in the service of this project. They may worry, reasonably, about the consequences of branding liberal reform as “socialist.” A few might find themselves in Al Smith’s shoes—displaced from the heart of the party as new forces filter in. But the example of the New Deal might serve as a reminder of the value that liberalism can draw from schools of social and political thought that cast a more critical eye on American capitalism and the political practices bound up with it. The result may be a more tempestuous liberal-left coalition, but one with a broader capacity to imagine social problems and solutions. And if that is not enough, they can at least take comfort in another fact: FDR’s reforms won the Democrats a lot of votes.

Like so much else about the healthcare debate, it comes down to math. "I would say that in the Senate, there are at most 10 votes for a single-payer plan," Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., a self-described democratic socialist, who isn't shy about his own preference for that kind of solution, told Salon this week. "In the House, I have no idea but it's a small minority ... It's absurd to say, 'Mr. President, go forward and make your bill single-payer,' when you've got 10 percent of the Congress supporting you."

Perlstein wrote:That is the promise of privatization in a nutshell: that the profit motive can serve not just those making the profits, but society as a whole, by bypassing inefficient government bureaucracies that thrive whether they deliver services effectively or not, and empower grubby, corrupt politicians and their pals to dip their hands in the pie of guaranteed government money.

As one of the movement’s fans explained in 1997, his experience with nascent attempts to pay private real estate developers to replace public housing was an “example of smart policy.”

“The developers were thinking in market terms and operating under the rules of the marketplace,” he said. “But at the same time, we had government supporting and subsidizing those efforts.”

The fan was Barack Obama, then a young state senator. Four years later, he cosponsored a bipartisan bill to increase subsidies for private developers and financiers to build or revamp low-income housing.

reuben wrote:

undo wrote:He’s going to get metooed and it will destroy the Democratic party and he needs to understand why that can’t happen in the near future.