iemanja
iemanja's JournalActually it was Bernie Sanders who said single payer never had a chance
On March 10, 2010, Sanders insisted single payer was never a possibility. That was during a period when Democrats had a majority in both the House and Senate.
"It would have had 8 or 10 votes and that's it," he said, addressing a topic central in the minds of many who the bloggers and left wing talk show hosts gathered for the 4th annual Senate Democratic Progressive Media Summit in Washington reach everyday. . .
Sanders said it was still possible for single-payer to come to the U.S. eventually -- but he said the road will not begin in Washington. If a state like California or Vermont ever instituted a single-payer system on its own, Sanders said, it would eventually lead to national adoption of universal coverage.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/sanders-single-payer-never-had-a-chance
Now, when we have a Republican majority in both houses, we're supposed to believe that he can deliver something he insisted was not viable a few years ago. Do you actually think the GOP is more amenable to single payer? Or is he making promises he thinks will help his presidential campaign? Do you think the failure of single payer in VT actually makes it more possible nationally? I seriously doubt it. You can blame Clinton supporters for Sanders' double talk, but it doesn't change what he said. There is no logical basis to conclude it is more possible under a GOP majority than a Democratic one.
Nothing is.easier than promising the moon. Delivering on those promises is another story. What is sad is that some actually want to hear promises, even knowing the candidate making those promises said the opposite just a few years ago. All a candidate has to do is tell you what you want to hear, and he's golden.
We are told we are "conservative" for critically examining such promises. Actually it means we aren't gullible. We care about what can get done, not empty rhetoric. Blaming Clinton supporters for what your own candidate said about single payer is just sad.
Your post says a great deal about this election
And is emblematic of the fault lines running across gender, race, and class that are at the heart of this primary contest.
As offensive as I find your post, at least you've put it all on the table. It's not enough for you to say I support another candidate because of x, y, and z. You have to attack her very womanliness, make clear that you see her and other women who don't behave as you think acceptable as trangressing the gender norms that uphold your fragile sense of masculinity. You've demonstrated just how much your opposition to Clinton is based in no small degree on her gender. The irony is in that announcing what you think is acceptable womanliness, you've showed precisely what kind of a man you are.
Vote for whomever you want, Sanders, Trump, whoever meets your standards of acceptable gender norms. It doesn't really matter. No one expects you, or those who think like you, to support Clinton, least of all the candidate herself. She had doubtless encountered men like you her entire life, and she has risen in spite of their efforts to demean her for transgressing gender norms they think their right to impose on women. Make no mistake about it. That is a form social control, but it is an increasingly tenuous one. Your day has passed. The US is starting to catch up to the rest of the world in terms of women in political office, and you are not going to be able to stop it.
The Democratic party is majority women and people of color. White men are not only a minority within the party but in the nation as well. Their privilege, their uncontested grip on power, is slipping away, and it's about goddamn time.
I secretly hope (I guess it's not a secret anymore) that Fiorina wins the GOP nomination because then guys like you will be faced with two women who don't behave like you feel women are supposed to.
I'm so looking forward to election day 2016. It will be a thing of beauty.
He was for them before he was against them
Like when he voted for them in this bill:
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?&congress=113&session=1&vote=00168
http://www.h1base.com/visa/work/h1bvisaincrease2013/ref/1771/
Somehow I'm guessing you'll omit the disparity between rhetoric and voting record. When another candidate does it, you all call it flip flopping, or something to do with weather vanes.
Visas, whether H-IB or any other kind, are not outsourcing. They involve bringing workers to the US, not shipping jobs out of the US.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Out -------->
. . . . . . . . . . . . In <---------------
Hillary Clinton is one of the strongest women on the planet
And YOU are in no position to question her strength.
Whether or not you agree with Clinton's take on the shouting business, her raising it does not make her a victim and it DOES NOT set women back. You are speaking about a woman who has done more in her life than most of us do in ten lifetimes, a woman who will quite likely be President of the United States. She is remarkably strong, much stronger than I am and certainly much stronger than you are. She does NOT play the victim. She has been Senator, Secretary of State. She stood up to 11 hours of interrogation by the GOP house, chewed them up and spit them out. Bernie Sanders balked with interrupted on stage by two women, and his supporters rushed to his defense. That you would pretend there is anything weak about Clinton is ludicrous.
You do not speak for all women or even most women, the majority of whom will be voting for Hillary Clinton and do not share your view that women are expected to remain silent when they feel they have been disrespected or their rights violated. You belong to another era, an ethos that thinks its acceptable to invoke right-wing tropes of gender card and race card. Such tropes are part of the apparatus of white patriarchal power, a kind of power far more enduring and intractable than any temporal political power.
The people most focused on Clinton's gender are those who despise her, and there is a very good reason for that. While I rarely discuss it, I have not failed to observe the fact that gender underlies the extraordinary animosity toward Clinton, disproportionate to anything in her record. I observe it but I rarely discuss it because I know there is no point; those who do it simply do not care. Feminist academics and writers can take on that analysis, and this election has already given them plenty to work with.
Your post shows desperation. You have no policy or issue to discuss because you have point blank refused to read Clinton's policy positions. That level of contempt toward Clinton depends on disinformation, and her actual policies and voting record get in the way of the contrived narrative. Your post shows the desperation of someone searching for whatever they can to try to take down a very strong woman who is on the rise. Go right ahead. Preach away to your echo chamber. Your protestations amount to nothing. Hillary Clinton will carry on being successful and strong, and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.
I am so looking forward to election day 2016.
Not your OP
your responses to posts like the OP about someone on his campaign ejecting pro-Palestinian protestors, or bringing up his policies toward Israel. That is what I am talking about.
Given your great concern for anti-semitism, I would have thought I would have seen you denouncing the spate of posts we had about a year ago when Gaza was being bombed. I don't recall seeing you raise concern about one thread after another comparing Israelis to Nazis, or a poster who invoked the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In fact, I remember being one of a very small handful of posters speaking out about that, as I do against Islamophobia, racism, sexism, anti-Catholicism, etc...
Yet suddenly it's a major concern for you because of Sanders? I have trouble when general principles are not in fact principles but apply to a few great men rather than all people. That is what I find disingenuous.
The other thing I observed about your responses is that you don't do what many do when they are concerned about bigotry: explain how and why something is bigoted (except for your OP, which you didn't write but merely reposted). You used it as a club. Like here, for example. http://www.democraticunderground.com/1251650448#post5
Whereas when a Sanders supporter posted it a day earlier, you did not wield the club similarly. http://www.democraticunderground.com/1251650448#post5(People will have to look at the first, unedited version to see what you responded to) Exact same story, exact same event, yet your responses were entirely different.
In order to criticize a policy, one has to know what it is
and the fact is most are not even slightly interested in her policy positions and refuse, even when provided links, to look at them. Thus, how can their criticism be of policy when they don't care what she has proposed?
Hillary Clinton is NOT a victim by any means, and her supporters don't treat her as one. She is a remarkably strong person, and her supporters know that. It is not we who have devised one conspiracy theory after another to smear black activists and to pretend the GOP held 8 Benghazi hearings in order to promote Clinton and harm Sanders. We do not take to social media to attack black activists for having the nerve to interrupt our candidate, or try to cover up for her voting record by waging personal insults in stead of discussing issues.
Every time I post about a policy position, like a tax position or guns, I am told I am "smearing a good man." I had someone compare me to a Nazi and post a series of threads demanding I take down a story from the Washington Post, a story that he nor anyone else was able to refute any of, and you yourself referred to my posting the story as "disgusting." You'll have to excuse me if I see a massive double standard at work here.
I haven't referred to you or anyone else as "disgusting" for posting anything, let alone a reputable news source. What I do--once in a while--is provide Clinton's policy positions and voting record in response. They do not read them. They announce they will not read them, and they are not interested in them. And then you want to pretend this is disagreement about policy?
It is clear what you object to is that 10 percent of the site holds an opinion that you do not approve of, and now you insist we not express it in public. Rather than working so hard to keep us from expressing our views, use ignore. You need not subject yourself of the horror of dissenting thought.
This site has for years been inundated with one thread after another, invoking every RW source and meme under the sun to attack Clinton. We all know that is the way it is. But you are clearly put out that some 10-15 percent of this site dares to disagree. Rather than telling us we have no right to express our opinions, don't read them. No one forces you to.
It's incredible to me someone can post something like this with a straight face given the content of 90 percent of the posts about the primary on this site. I am tired of people who insist on stifling all dissent, who insist that anyone who dares to think in ways they don't approve of have no right to speak. I am tried of the absolute deference for Sanders and the refusal to discuss any policies, whether Sanders or Clinton. I am tired of reading posts after posts that say nothing of substance about any policy position but instead target other voters. If you care about policy, discuss it. This doesn't come close to that. .
MIC includes Lockheed-Martin
and Sanders continues to support the $800 million boondoggle that is the F-35. http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/24583-bernie-sanders-doubles-down-on-f-35-support-days-after-runway-explosion
"Anyone taking corporate money." It is in fact illegal for candidates to take money from corporations. Citizens United ruled that corporations are allowed to spend their own money on candidates. It didn't authorize candidates to take "corporate money."
It is factually false that Clinton is the candidate of Wall Street. As Paul Krugman noted, that money is going almost exclusively to the GOP.
Well, if Wall Street’s attitude and its political giving are any indication, financiers themselves believe that any Democrat, Mrs. Clinton very much included, would be serious about policing their industry’s excesses. And that’s why they’re doing all they can to elect a Republican.
To understand the politics of financial reform and regulation, we have to start by acknowledging that there was a time when Wall Street and Democrats got on just fine. Robert Rubin of Goldman Sachs became Bill Clinton’s most influential economic official; big banks had plenty of political access; and the industry by and large got what it wanted, including repeal of Glass-Steagall.
This cozy relationship was reflected in campaign contributions, with the securities industry splitting its donations more or less evenly between the parties, and hedge funds actually leaning Democratic.
But then came the financial crisis of 2008, and everything changed. . .
While this is good news for taxpayers and the economy, financiers bitterly resent any constraints on their ability to gamble with other people’s money, and they are voting with their checkbooks. Financial tycoons loom large among the tiny group of wealthy families that is dominating campaign finance this election cycle — a group that overwhelmingly supports Republicans. Hedge funds used to give the majority of their contributions to Democrats, but since 2010 they have flipped almost totally to the G.O.P.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/16/opinion/democrats-republicans-and-wall-street-tycoons.html?_r=1
Clinton has a far more detailed and thorough plan for reforming Wall Street than Sanders does. In fact, he has yet to develop a policy statement on it other than reinstating a law from 1933, which Elizabeth Warren has said is more a goal and rhetorical device for talking to the public than an essential part of Wall Street reform, which is in fact complicated because the fuckers manage to wiggle their way around any and every regulation. This is Clinton's plan, very much opposed by Wall Street, as Krugman notes above. It also deals with the shadow banks that caused the 2008 collapse, entities that would not be effected by Glass-Steagal.
http://www.vox.com/2015/10/8/9482521/hillary-clinton-financial-reform
Now I understand you prefer to keep things in the realm of slogans rather than a discussion of actual policy, but the information is here for those who do care.
Paul Krugman on Wall Street reform: Hillary vs. Bernie
For what it’s worth, Mrs. Clinton had the better case. Mr. Sanders has been focused on restoring Glass-Steagall, the rule that separated deposit-taking banks from riskier wheeling and dealing. And repealing Glass-Steagall was indeed a mistake. But it’s not what caused the financial crisis, which arose instead from “shadow banks” like Lehman Brothers, which don’t take deposits but can nonetheless wreak havoc when they fail. Mrs. Clinton has laid out a plan to rein in shadow banks; so far, Mr. Sanders hasn’t. . . .
Well, if Wall Street’s attitude and its political giving are any indication, financiers themselves believe that any Democrat, Mrs. Clinton very much included, would be serious about policing their industry’s excesses. And that’s why they’re doing all they can to elect a Republican.
To understand the politics of financial reform and regulation, we have to start by acknowledging that there was a time when Wall Street and Democrats got on just fine. Robert Rubin of Goldman Sachs became Bill Clinton’s most influential economic official; big banks had plenty of political access; and the industry by and large got what it wanted, including repeal of Glass-Steagall.
This cozy relationship was reflected in campaign contributions, with the securities industry splitting its donations more or less evenly between the parties, and hedge funds actually leaning Democratic.
But then came the financial crisis of 2008, and everything changed. . .
While this is good news for taxpayers and the economy, financiers bitterly resent any constraints on their ability to gamble with other people’s money, and they are voting with their checkbooks. Financial tycoons loom large among the tiny group of wealthy families that is dominating campaign finance this election cycle — a group that overwhelmingly supports Republicans. Hedge funds used to give the majority of their contributions to Democrats, but since 2010 they have flipped almost totally to the G.O.P.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/16/opinion/democrats-republicans-and-wall-street-tycoons.html?_r=1
There are factual errors in your OP
This is the actual title of the article: "Hillary Clinton Interrupted By Immigration Protester Over Private Prison Donations."
Additionally, it makes the following point:
I understand facts are annoying, but the actual contributions in question come from five people who work at the lobbying firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, a firm that among its clients includes a single private prison corporation.
https://theintercept.com/2015/07/23/private-prison-lobbyists-raising-cash-hillary-clinton/
Now, one may find that problematic, but it is not at all the same as claiming she takes money from private prison corporations. In addition to being factually false, that statement shows a woeful misunderstanding of campaign finance law, which in fact prohibits politicians from accepting money from corporations of any kind. That point has already been posted on this site a number of times, but of course I realize facts complicate the narrative and truth is the least of concerns.
Now, I presume the glee with which you post the story indicates you think Bernie will be the beneficiary of the anger expressed by Ramos at the event. I don't know why that should be the case, and polls show no evidence of it. Bernie in fact voted for two of the crime bills that began the era of incarceration many here have decided was entirely the responsibility of a woman who was First Lady at the time, whereas a congressman who twice voted for those crime bills is somehow the only person that can save us from a situation he voted to implement. Voting records matter, as much as some may insist any effort to examine them amounts to character assassination. https://votesmart.org/candidate/key-votes/27110/bernie-sanders/20/crime
Additionally, a couple of months ago Sanders publicly stated that he sees immigration as responsible for unemployment in the US. That was in keeping with his previous statements on the subject:
That kind of statement is certain to attract the Republican voters some "progressives" are so excited to be allied with, but it alienates immigrants, Hispanic immigrants in particular. It is also at odds with the Democratic Party's position on immigration.
Now, notice that rather than simply shouting "It's been debunked. Take it down!" over and over again, I showed which aspects of the story were false and provided evidence to support my point. Imagine that.
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