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AOC Responds to Lauren Boebert's 'Sexually Lewd' Theater 'Show'
(www.newsweek.com)
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this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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politics
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If the Dems are so economically liberal, where's nationalized healthcare? They wouldn't allow it.
Where's the wealth tax?
Why aren't they calling for blanket federal student loan forgiveness?
Why didn't we get a reinstatement of Glass-Steagall after any of the recent economic crises?
Why haven't they broken up the banks?
Why were the GOP the ones who upped the amount of the first covid check? It ended up being $1,200, the Dems only asked for $800 or $850 or something.
Why was the final covid check cut from $2,000 to $1,400, after promising that if we gave them the two Georgia Senate seats, we'd get $2,000 checks?
The Dems - at best - only serve to lightly depress the brake pedal on the disasterous changes that the GOP make when the GOP have the reins.
And, never forget: Biden rammed Clarence Thomas through his Supreme Court appointment, and treated Anita Hill terribly at the hearings in order to do so.
Because nearly all of that they've lacked the political power to do. Obama had 2 years with democrat control of congress and the White House, and that got us the ACA. Was it enough? No. Was it the best we're going to get given the makeup of the senate especially at that time? Yeah probably.
Similar with Biden's term so far. 2 years of very bare congressional control*, one of the most legislatively successful terms in modern history. Stimulus, for example, you woefully mischaracterize, and it's worth reading what actually happened.. Also of note from the same article:
Another juicy one:
They fucking did. Biden signed via executive order student loan forgiveness and it got struck down by a Trump appointed judge.
I wonder who repealed glass-steagall? Oh right, a bunch of fucking republicans. I wonder what dems had to say about that:
Good thing that never happened.
I'm not going to go any deeper on this, and while I agree that the dem party is nowhere near left enough for my tastes, they're not even comparable to republicans/conservatives and part of the reason that we're in the circumstance we are is that people who are obviously ignorant of the actual and political realities in this country and pretend that the parties are even close to equivalent. You're doing it right now - Republicans fuck everything up, but somehow it's Democrat's fault that they aren't fixing it fast enough, even though they're expected to do it with one hand tied behind their back.
But even that, that doesn't matter. The practical reality in this country which seems especially difficult for hard-left/progressives to swallow is that you will further nothing on your agenda by not voting, or not voting for dems. Third party will change nothing because of the decisions white slave owners made 200 years ago, and republicans are literally out to destroy any of the things that the left care about.
* Democrats controlled the house for 2 years pretty decisively. They only had the senate with a tie-breaker, and that's including Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema who have repeatedly fucked up a lot of the positives dems have attempted during this time. Manchin, I can almost understand because a dem getting elected in WV at all is remarkable, but Sinema is just a cunt.
Obama had a 60 vote supermajority in the Senate before Ted Kennedy died, and after his death, Harry Reid said they'd wait for the Republican guy to get seated before voting on the ACA. SUPER. MAJORITY. When is a Democratic supermajority going to happen in the Senate again?
Yeah, they passed the HEROES Act in 2020 when there was no chance of it defeating a guaranteed Trump veto. Why didn't they pass it again when they had a trifecta 2021-2022? They'll pass doomed-to-fail symbolic legislation all day long, but when there's a chance at doing some real good, they always delay too long, deliver a gutted husk of what they promised, or apparently just forget to get around to it.
On student loans, Biden didn't promise full student loan forgiveness. In fact, he campaigned promising not to do any substantial student loan forgiveness. When his staff and influential people on the Hill finally convinced him to do something on federal student loans, it was not blanket forgiveness. It wasn't even the $50k that they thought they could realistically justify in court. It was $10-20k, and means-tested at that (because Dems can't do anything without their precious means testing to prove that they're financially conservative).
Bill Clinton signed the repeal of Glass-Steagall, with a 55/45 GOP majority in the Senate, and something like a 20-vote GOP majority in the House. He could have vetoed it if he wanted to, if he thought it wouldn't get overridden. This means either:
I'm not sure which option is more damning, but frankly I think both are true. The Clinton Administration explicitly pushed to the right (which they called "triangulation") after they got whooped in the '94 midterms, and the party has continued pushing right ever since.
On your argument that not voting for the Dems won't do any good: The only way to make a party listen to you is to withhold your votes; until you do so, they'll take you for granted. In the 80s, the radical right demonstrated that they'd sit out elections if they didn't have sufficiently fascist and/or stupid candidates to vote for - now they're running the show.
The problem is that the Democratic party establishment does not care if they are the majority. In fact, they'd prefer it if they weren't. They are first and foremost a fundraising operation. If they win, then they actually have to do something good for us, which generally runs contrary to the interests of the party's largest donors. They could have made PR and DC states in the first half of Biden's term - that would have been a lay-up, guaranteeing them some hope of competitiveness in the Senate in the coming decades. So why didn't they?
The result of what you're arguing for is a continuing leisurely descent into fascism, at which point we'd hopefully get a major correction. I'm saying let's cut out the slow leisurely descent part and get a new left-wing party that is actually left-wing. Because with two right-wing parties in power, there's no hope of turning left until they're gone.