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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Haaland has been pretty involved on issues related to the Department of the Interior for years, so she her qualifications speak for themselves though sometimes I think there is an over emphasis on qualifications in a lot of these pick evaluations.
@Silasaw: I admit that I often forget the he was very much for the $15.00 minimum wage, but outside of the and his "Green New Deal" what else in his platform makes it the most progressive really? Especially when much of it was forced on him.
And again, he ran to the right of most of the Presidential candidates in the primary (and I would argue even to the right of Hillary Clinton) and hasn't really come down from that rhetorically speaking particularly recently.
I like this idea:
The Defense Medical Act will pass before Medicare for All
Honestly, both healthcare and education should be framed as national security issues.
Edited by megaeliz on Dec 18th 2020 at 9:52:05 AM
Judge skewers GOP over suit targeting newly registered voters in Georgia
However, following a hearing that stretched to more than two hours Friday afternoon, U.S. District Judge Lisa Godbey Wood denied the Republicans' request for an emergency order setting aside all ballots cast by tens of thousands of voters registered since the Nov. 3 election.
Georgia sets new voting record for runoffs
Since then, the numbers have only continued to rise. As of Friday morning, more than 1.1 million people had voted in the Jan. 5 Georgia runoff elections, according to numbers collated by Georgia Votes, a website that tracks early voting data.
That lags only slightly behind the roughly 1.2 million that had voted at this point in the 2020 general election.
As a non-American I’ll admit that I didn’t actually read Biden’s platform, I can’t vote in your elections so I didn’t feel compelled to spend the time.
However the platform was celebrated across the Democratic Party as being the most progressive Democratic platform ever, so I’m willing to make a leap of faith on that unless someone wants to read it and argue otherwise.
As for Biden having things forced on him, that’s both incorrect (he gave Bernie extra votes for determining the platform when he didn’t have to) and feels like a preemptive statement before goalposts move. It feels like the argument is basically “The platform isn’t that progressive, and even if you prove it is that progressive it’s not because of Biden”. Biden is either responsible for the platform or he’s not, he can’t be responsible for the bad bits but not the good bits when he controlled the platform’s creation.
Biden didn’t take a lot of ideological stances in the primary, he’s opposed to instant Medicare for All, he’s opposed to defunding the police, he’s for reducing student debt, he’s for decriminalising weed, he’s for a higher minimum wage, he’s for criminal justice reform.
I wouldn’t say Biden ran to the right on anything but healthcare, by and large he ran to the white more than the right.
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You can do it super easily with green energy. Something like the “American Energy Independence Act” requiring a certain percentage of electricity to be generated from non-imported fuel and cars to run on non-imported fuel.
Edited by Silasw on Dec 18th 2020 at 3:04:50 PM
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran![]()
I sincerely hope most of these early votes are for Ossof and Warnock. Something worries me that a large proportion of them will be for Perdue and Meat Loeff.
Not to be a party pooper, Imca, but the graph you presented on the previous page is about supporting democracy not about the left-right axis - notice how all Swiss parties including the right-wing SVP are in the lower left quadrant despite SVP being nowhere close to the Greens politically speaking.
Also the absence of the GOP on that list makes me wonder if they just fall off the upper right quadrants. Which would imply that the US median is in the right half of the graph ... and thus more authoritarian than the mean of Europe (1/2 of all European parties are in the lower left quadrant)
Mind you, I have argued previously that the idea that Democrats are right wing by European standards is a tall tale. That graph however is not the correct kind of data to support this argument.
Edited by SeptimusHeap on Dec 19th 2020 at 10:56:49 AM
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
I think this
contains the graph of where political parties fall on a left-right scale for economic and social views, by the same place that did the graph on the last page.
Yeah, I'm with Silas, I'm a little confused that people are denying Biden ran on a super-progressive platform, after telling me in this very thread that he is, in fact, the most progressive candidate in history.
So which is it, people? Did he have a progressive platform or not?
Hope shines brightest in the darkest times
It's two people, one of them a newcomer to the thread, saying that.
And the other one has also admitted to not actually knowing Biden's platform.
He's also against the death penalty, and has been for a long time.
Edited by M84 on Dec 19th 2020 at 7:27:30 PM
Disgusted, but not surprisedA 15$ federal minimum wage is not even REMOTELY close to "empowering the working class".
What about empowering unions? Heavier taxes on corporations? A more progressive tax system? A public healthcare system that doesn't rely on insurance? Debt clearing for universities and colleges?
I'm not even American but all American leftists and progressives I know and have seen all want these things, and the closest thing I saw that Biden wants to do is reversing the tax cut that Trump did, which is good but...isn't exactly moving forward, and this 'bidencare' plan that just feels like Obamacare 2.0 that I'm not even sure they're going to actually push for.
Well, I saw no one refuting it the last two times they said so, so thanks for clearing it up.
From what I understand, Biden ran with a progressive platform, but he himself does not seem that progressive. Like stated above, he seems to oppose or be ambivalent about a lot of things progressives care about.
Edited by Redmess on Dec 19th 2020 at 12:29:19 PM
Hope shines brightest in the darkest timesWell here’s his Union position[1]
. Well make to wait and see what gets implemented, but he’s certainly talking about what you’re asking for.
- Check the abuse of corporate power over labor and hold corporate executives personally accountable for violations of labor laws;
- Encourage and incentivize unionization and collective bargaining;
- Ensure that workers are treated with dignity and receive the pay, benefits, and workplace protections they deserve.
He’d pledged to get rid of Trump’s regressive tax cuts, yes he’s not made other announcements, because in case you hadn’t noticed tax rises are unpopular, even when they’re only on the 1%. With healthcare he’s pledged to provide a public option, which is if nothing else the only thing he’s got any chance of actually passing. He has pledged to do student debt forgiveness, I believe there’s currently haggling over how much debt to forgive, but the basic plan is there.
Here’s the thing, your list, it’s a list in a vaccine. You’re not asking for Joe Biden to pass the most progressive and leftist policies that he can and thus enhance the lives of the working class, you asking for Joe Biden to stake out specific leftist political positions regardless of the political reality he exists in.
You’re not asking for a plan to generally enhance the lives of the working-class, you’re asking for a plan that will hit specific checkpoints that you (probably correctly) have identified as markers of a better system.
As a non-ideologue Biden doesn’t seem to be thinking in those terms, for him it’s about if we get a Public Option, Medicare for All or Nationalised Healthcare, it’s about if we get a system that is better and cares for more people and results in less pain.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran
Assuming Biden is none ideological is probably my biggest staking point with this analysis. Biden does have an ideological position, and it is firmly on the right-wing of the party and in opposition to figures and positions on the parties left-wing and even now he has set himself up in opposition to the party's left.
That's why I and others are skeptical about whether his "progressive" platform will hold, especially in the face of bipartisanship.
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Just because Joe Manchin is even further to the right does not mean that Joe Biden does not lie in the party's relative right-wing, particularly with his opposition to some of the party's left-wing.
By the way I don't mean right-wing as in "he is basically a Republican" (though I might say that for Joe Manchin) sense, I'm only speaking relatively within the Democratic Party itself.
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I honestly have no idea where Gabbard falls relative to everyone else. Her idiosyncratic views honestly read kind of fashy (in the right-wing but populist sense) to me.
Edited by Mio on Dec 19th 2020 at 9:07:07 AM
This doesn't actually diminish my point, as I never specified Republican. You're still essentially calling him a Conservative Democrat seemingly solely on the basis that he's not on the party's left. Which is still wrong.
i'm tired, my friend![]()
That is self-evidently untrue. If Biden did not represent the majority viewpoint of the Democratic Party, then he would not have been nominated for President. The hard-left faction of the Democrats is louder, but don't mistake that for commanding more support.

On the importance of picking Haaland for Interior, from Business Insider:
If confirmed, Haaland would the first-ever Native American to serve at the Cabinet level in a presidential administration. In addition to the historic and symbolic nature of her selection, Haaland would directly oversee the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Bureau of Indian Education, and the bureau charged with managing financial assets Native Americans hold with the federal government.
That role would give her the power to play a key role in restoring trust and repairing the historically fraught and painful relationship between the federal government and the 574 federally-recognized Native American tribes, Native activists told Insider.
"The Department of the Interior is the agency really charged with holding that federal trust responsibility that the US government has with tribal nations here in the United States. And it's been a horrible relationship. It's been an abusive relationship. It's one that has been wrought with fraud and corruption...with mismanagement of tribal funds and just very paternalistic, very unhealthy," Crystal Echo Hawk, the executive director of nonprofit IllumiNative and a citizen of the Pawnee Nation, told Insider in early December.
Haaland recently told Insider's Kayla Epstein that one of her top priorities as Interior Secretary would to be to improve the tribal consultation process, the procedure by which the federal governments seeks input from Native tribes on a wide array of environmental and other issues that directly impact them.
Haaland said the Trump administration has tossed that process "out the window" in pursuing development and resource extraction on public lands.
"We all get very excited just thinking about the opportunity to really finally start to reset that relationship that the federal government has with tribes, and having a Native person and a Native woman at the helm of that," Echo Hawk said. "And it's not going to happen overnight, but I think that, as a marker to reset that relationship, it's fundamentally important."
Haaland has won praise from Native advocacy organizations and environmental groups alike for her focus in Congress on maintaining public lands and protecting the environment that Native tribes rely on. Haaland is a member of the National Resources Committee and chairs the National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands subcommittee.
"Representative Haaland is a public lands champion with experience protecting and managing America's most majestic landmarks," Phil Francis, Chair of the Coalition to Protect America's National Parks, said in a Thursday statement. "She has been at the forefront crafting thoughtful solutions to combating the climate crisis that continues to impact our national parks."
As Interior Secretary, she would manage the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, and US Fish and Wild Service. Those three departments are crucial to protecting the US' natural resources from climate change and what Haaland and many other groups view as harmful oil drilling and fracking activities on public lands.
"To me, it just makes sense that that role as Secretary of the Interior, overseeing our public lands, will belong to a Native person given how we honor Mother Earth," Allie Young, a Dine activist, Navajo Nation citizen, and co-founder of Protect the Sacred, told Insider. "I know we would be in good hands with her, especially as a Native woman, because of that special relationship in our matrilineal societies and seeing our Earth as Mother."
Edited by nova92 on Dec 18th 2020 at 6:35:21 AM