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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
And if Obama was the Wall Street Candidate? Holy crap, maybe Wall Street isn't the embodiment of all evil!
The thing to remember about Wall Street is that they like having a functioning economy and healthy international trade. Yeah, the isolationist "anti-globalist" people hate that, but to be honest, they're dumb. The modern US cannot function at all without international trade. Wall Street is extremely flawed and the banks have done some awful things...but they're also one of the foundations of the American economy. You kind of have to listen to them sometimes.
Also, keep in mind, banks like Goldman Sachs have been spending the past few years periodically issuing warnings about isolationism and anti-middle class practices because they employ smart people, even if they encourage some degree of sociopathy.
edited 19th Apr '17 7:57:23 PM by Zendervai
"You talking about Obama? Because Obama is no progressive.
He was Wall Street's candidate in 2008."
Whatever, pal. The 111th Congress, partnered with him, managed to get a higher concentration of useful and progressive legislation passed in two years than in the previous twenty. Those were fucking idyllic times compared to today's waking nightmare.
But he didn't seize the means of production and initiate the centralization of capital, so I guess he's just a Wall Street shill, /s.
edited 19th Apr '17 7:57:58 PM by CrimsonZephyr
"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."![]()
A lot of it probably stems from 2008, when all of the financial industry's shenanigans over the years (maybe even decades) finally caught up with them.
But yeah, while I'm not blind to Wall Street and US banking's many faults, I am also sick of the demonization. Partly because I have a beloved relative who works in the industry.
edited 19th Apr '17 7:59:43 PM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprisedNot really that difficult given who his predecessors were, but indeed idyllic compared to now.
Now the good news—The Police aren't as gung-ho for the Return of "Law & Order" as it may look: Officers rue the return of US 'war on drugs'
"We will enforce our laws and put bad men behind bars," he said in a recent speech in Richmond, Virginia.
"We will fight the scourge of drug abuse."
Mr Sessions sent out his own memo last month to prosecutors, instructing them to use "every tool we have", including targeting drug users, in a new crackdown on violent crime. But many of those who fought and studied the first war on drugs say it was a proven failure.
"The people we put away were low-level drug users, not violent criminals," said Tim Longo, who served with Baltimore police between 1981 and 2000.
Dealing long sentences to low-level users and distributors also damaged community relations and made life tough for frontline police, said Norm Stamper, who started as a beat cop in San Diego in 1966 and retired in 2000 as police chief of Seattle.
He recalled low-level drug users being "ripped out of their communities, away from their families, to join the ranks of our mass incarceration problem".
"We were told to hit the streets and make arrests, anything that counted was good," said Mr Stamper, who now works with Law Enforcement Action Partnership, a drug policy advocacy group.
"And we sent a lot of people from our community to San Quentin," he said. "We sent non-violent drug offenders away for 20 years to life under mandatory minimum sentences. Millions of them."
Reports that Jeff Sessions intended to revive these policies made Stamper "heartsick", he said. "We spent $1.5tr (£1.17tr) on this war and drugs are now more available, at higher potency, than when Nixon stood up and made his proclamation.
"Now we have Jeff Sessions quoting Nancy Reagan, saying we've all gone soft. It's all so retrograde it's frightening. We weren't going soft, we were just starting to get smart."
Mr Sessions... credits the war on drugs with a steep decline in violent crime that began in 1991 and continued nearly unabated until 2013.
In 2014 the violent crime rate ticked up 3% - the largest one-year increase since 1991. That increase was the result of a "retreat from the aggressive prosecution and incarceration of drug traffickers" the Department of Justice told the BBC.
"The Department has no intention of letting those trends continue to destroy communities," spokesman Ian Prior said.
Earlier this month, Mr Sessions appointed Steven Cook to a top justice department role. A former policeman and prosecutor, Mr Cook is fiercely against the legalisation of marijuana and in favour of maintaining mandatory minimum sentences.
"The federal criminal justice system simply is not broken. In fact, it's working exactly as designed," said Mr Cook last year at an event organised by the Washington Post.
A return to the old war-on-drugs style, in the midst of a opiate addiction crisis which has swept the country, would be "a public health disaster", said [Leo Beletsky, a public health and drug policy expert from Northeastern University].
Aggressive law enforcement interventions against drug crime had been shown to create economic incentives for more dangerous, more potent alternatives, Mr Beletsky said. A string of recent overdoses have been linked to carfentanil, an opiate 10,000 times stronger than morphine.
"We are at an incredibly vulnerable moment right now," he said, "and the tactics they're talking about would just fuel the crisis."
edited 19th Apr '17 9:11:06 PM by CenturyEye
Look with century eyes... With our backs to the arch And the wreck of our kind We will stare straight ahead For the rest of our livesEither Bernie didnt think much about what he said, he doesn't like Ossoff or he's only really willing to bat for candidates that he sees as progressive (unless it's do or die like with Hillary).
Or, as a final possibility, he's only prepared to endorse candidates who he himself has picked out so that he can claim credit for finding them. You yourself said it—he's attempting a takeover of the Democratic Party, and I think we have to consider the possibility that he's trying to parlay his endorsements into a loyal power base within the party.
As a sidenote, the Washington Post
reports that Sanders went further than saying he didn't know if Ossof was progressive. When asked at a rally he answered point blank: "He's not a progressive".
So maybe that Blue Dog has some lefty economic positions.
Even if they did, that would not change the fact that they are distinctly anti-abortion and have been responsible for the passing of anti-abortion legislation—and moreover, still identify with those positions. Endorsing him will do nothing for the perception that the Sanders campaign had a problem with women.
Moreover, while I have no issue with running Blue Dog Democrats in conservative districts, the problem here is that the diehard Sanders crowd is railing about the need to primary Blue Dogs everywhere else. Apparently its unacceptable for Joe Manchin to be a conservative Democrat in West Virginia, but an anti-choice candidate in Nebraska is a-okay? Even more obnoxiously, neither Sanders nor his hardcore supporters will even admit that Mello, the Nebraskan mayoral candidate, is a Blue Dog, instead describing him as a straight-up progressive.
We may not all agree on what defines progressive-ism but being anti-choice is pretty definitively not progressive, no matter who you ask.
I would like to note that I made this exact same statement a few pages back and was repeatedly attacked by a couple of posters for insulting kids or something. Nice to see someone on the other side of the debate acknowledge this point.
He was Wall Street's candidate in 2008.
And here is where we radically disagree again. Wall Street backed Obama because he was prepared to bail them out, which is a good thing. I get that you want bankers punished etc for that mess, but did you really want to send the national economy down with them. If Obama had not done that millions would have been left homeless or unemployed and we wouldn't be a single step closer to the progressive revolution you advocate for.
![]()
Isn't that why we had the War on Drugs to begin with? Because Nixon wanted African Americans and hippies in cells rather than voting against him?
edited 19th Apr '17 9:39:13 PM by TrashJack
"Cynic, n. — A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be." - The Devil's Dictionary"White House sidewalk to be closed to public permanently" - http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-whitehouse-security-idUSKBN17M05B
There's a book I read regarding this called From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incareration in America, by Elizabeth Hinton.
edited 19th Apr '17 9:49:29 PM by rmctagg09
Hugging a Vanillite will give you frostbite.As a sidenote, the Washington Post reports that Sanders went further than saying he didn't know if Ossof was progressive. When asked at a rally he answered point blank: "He's not a progressive".
I don't think he's looking for a powerbase loyal to him though. I think it's more about his ideology. As I've said before, Sanders is a Marxist using a Social Democrat platform. And he seems welded to his vision that requires getting the working class onboard.
I don't think he wants a socialist revolution but I think his endgoal is for the party to get the poor and the working class on the same side and eject corporate influence and the rich from the Democratic Party. If he was decades younger, I could see him trying to turn them into a proto-Socialist party.
And you know, he's been at this for a while now, I don't know if people ever talk about this but Bernie Sanders created the Congressional Progressive Caucus to advance his agenda. And it's now the biggest Democratic Caucus in the House.
Moreover, while I have no issue with running Blue Dog Democrats in conservative districts, the problem here is that the diehard Sanders crowd is railing about the need to primary Blue Dogs everywhere else. Apparently its unacceptable for Joe Manchin to be a conservative Democrat in West Virginia, but an anti-choice candidate in Nebraska is a-okay? Even more obnoxiously, neither Sanders nor his hardcore supporters will even admit that Mello, the Nebraskan mayoral candidate, is a Blue Dog, instead describing him as a straight-up progressive.
We may not all agree on what defines progressive-ism but being anti-choice is pretty definitively not progressive, no matter who you ask.
I think Sanders has said something like you can be a Democrat and be pro-life.
There are a lot of circles that view progressivism as more about economic issues than social issues. And again, I think Sanders has a very Marxist lens on life.
Eugene Debs, 5 time Socialist candidate for the American presidency, is Sanders' hero.
He had a baseball people called the People's Republic of Burlington.
He honeymooned in the USSR.
I agree that bailing them out was a good thing but....and here's the big caveat, he should've nationalized the banks permanently. Or at least do something similar to what he did to Chrysler and GM.
(also yes punishing the bankers)
In order to avoid a collapse of the entire system, too big to fail banks are going to require bail outs every time. The banks know this. That is a license for big banks to take as many risks as possible, make money and get saved by us. In other words, we have a nanny state for banks.
Ah, yes. You can deviate from Sanders on allowing women bodily autonomy.
But don't you dare deviate on destroying big banks and single payer health care. What ridiculous hypocrisy. It's really just saying that one's pet issues are more important, and civil rights can go to the back of the line.
And oh, yeah, nationalize the banks. Yeah, Obama could totally have done that. There was total political will for it. I'm sure Joe Lieberman would've signed RIGHT on. and Tester. And McCaskill. And Manchin. And Byrd. And Landrieu. And Nelson.
edited 19th Apr '17 10:50:07 PM by Lightysnake
If this is the case then he's either very bad at getting people who agree with his ideology on board, or his ideology is pretty ugly, given some of those he's backing or backed, and those he's refused to do so.
In decrying Ossof as not being progressive he's ensured his fanbase will not go to Georgia for the runoff, and that means one more Republican in the House. If Sanders is putting ideology over stopping the Republicans than he is no good to the party, or anybody else for that matter.
Seriously, the possibility that he's trying to install loyalists for a coup would make him a better person than the alternative.
Sanders does not get to determine what you can be while being a Democrat, because he is not a Democrat. I cannot repeat this often enough. That being said, can you be a Democrat and antiabortion? Yes. It's called being a Conservative Democrat, or a Blue Dog Democrat. If Sanders is supporting the election of additional Blue Dogs in what are otherwise traditionally conservative states, then that's great—except he needs to come out and say that's what he's doing, not dress up his Blue Dogs as progressives while letting his fanbase target the likes of Manchin (and denouncing Ossof, who isn't a Blue Dog at all, as not progressive).
I would also add that while you can be a Democrat and be anti-choice, you cannot be a progressive and be anti-choice. That's a fundamentally anti-women stance, and at that point you are not in favour of social justice for anybody.
And this is the problem that numerous people in the thread have with him, namely they feel he is advocating the abandonment of social issues to focus on white male workers. His support of an anti-choice candidate is not helping my opinion in this regard. Neither is his refusal to endorse Ossof (whose strongest supporters are women
), or all the other tone deaf things he's said over the course of the campaign and since.
A rising tide may lift all boats, but you still have to have a boat. And many minorities do not have boats.
He honeymooned in the USSR.
Which is completely revolting.
edited 19th Apr '17 10:53:40 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar

Relying on Trump to do or be anything is a foolish gamble. He's an inherently unreliable person.
edited 19th Apr '17 7:52:12 PM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprised