Voting in elections is like breathing. The next one is always the most important one of your lifetime.
The last important one was in 1980. The people celebrated their own destruction as they counted the days when they would be the millionaires inflicting themselves on society.
Fucking suckers.
Big capital owns both parties now, the literal 5ish spoilers between both chambers that the neoliberals hate more than their opposition party canāt do a thing in a sea of hundreds of well bribed, oh Iām sorry ādonated,ā sycophants. Thereās no escape under the current framework.
Worse, weāve used our massive hard and soft geopolitical power since then to make the rest of the world as exploitative, sociopathic, and greedy as us, and weāve been wildly successful at it.
Look up Jerry Falwell and his āMoral Majority.ā
Falwell was a TV preacher who decided he wanted to get into politics. He had a simple formula to take over the GOP. The Party depends on small local clubs to do all the little things like getting petitions signed and driving folks to the polls on election day. Those clubs pick local office holders like sheriffs and county clerks.
Falwell told his people to show up at those clubs whenever there was a decision to be voted on. If thereād been twenty folks there for the last vote, Falwellās āMoral Majorityā would show up with fifty. Pretty soon Jerry had a lot of local folks in his pocket. Those soon became Congressmembers and Governors.
AOC did it in one Congressional district.
If they owned the elections they wouldnāt be trying so hard to stop people from voting.
The last important one was in 1980.
I think millions of people are about to find that the last important one was a month ago now. Especially all the ones that are about to be put in concentration camps and the ones who care about those that are about to be put in concentration camps.
By āimportantā I meant our overall trajectory and our ability to change it.
Every election has consequences for many, what I meant was that, imho the conversion of the former opposition to neoliberals, and the codification of legal political bribery that started with the creation of the Federalist society in the 80s that culminated in Citizens United means fight over social rights all you want, beat yourself bloody poories, the economy is no longer something the people have a say in under the current government.
The economy is the core rot that breeds desparation, which leads to hatred, which leads to scapegoating. The conditions are right for Trump, and if not Trump, someone like him, because of the effective economic dictatorship of our oligarchs.
As you said IF weāre permitted a vote again, weāll keep electing āstrongmanā archetypes like trump out of ignorant desparation(no different than Germany post ww1 because of sanctions), and weāre desperate because weāre largely not benefitting from the value weāre generating by design.
Without making the economy work for society, weāll keep circling back to fascism until it destroys us, and we no longer have the means to change the economy because almost anyone and everyone can be bought by those with effectively infinite sums in the light of day now to keep their exploitation in place.
Iām sorry, who allowed Trump to pack the court? The Debt Collective?
Every single non-voter in the country willingly allowed the Republicans to fuck everyone over.
Edit: Going back decades, obviously. The latest election has nothing to do with the current SCOTUS. And sure, itās not the American non-votersā fault theyāre brain dead consumers with no will of their own. Itās all very sad, blah blah blah.
Implying non voters would vote for Biden XD
Also he just gave the biggest middle finger to his own supporters by pardoning his son. After the elections, youāre all just worthless trash to him.
If you think the results would be different if all people voted, youāre just coping. Vote of half of the society is extremely representative
One way or another, any government which remains in power is a representative government. If your city government is a crooked machine, then it is because you and your neighbors prefer it that way - prefer it to the effort of running your own affairs.
Hitlerās government was a popular government; the vast majority of Germans preferred the rule of gangsters to the effort of thinking and doing for themselves. They abdicated their franchise.
āRobert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government
Voters allowed trump to stack it?!
Obama didnāt fight for his pick because the party wanted to use it to motivate voters to vote for Hillary, which didnāt work.
McTurtle refused to vote to confirm, and legally all that needs to happen is the Senate has an opportunity to vote to confirm. Obama had a year to say:
āI take no vote to mean no objections, Merrick Garland is on the SCā
Except Garland probably wouldnāt be that much different than Trumpās picks.
Stop blaming the voters for stupid shit the only option we have to vote for keeps doing.
The party refused to pressure Breyer & RBG to step down. Obama refused to play hardball with Garland.
Biden negotiated with himself and cut debt forgiveness to 10K. Then the SC strikes it down , and he throws his hands up and walks away. Iām old enough to remember when Trumpās obviously unconstitutional muslim ban got banned and he rewrote it and tried again until it stuck. It didnāt fully take until the third try. Then he expanded it twice.
[Edit: I looked it up and he did give it another go, my b]
Yep
Itās because the same billionaires/corporations donate to both parties.
If a moderate wins, the most theyāll do is ātryā they were paid too much money to actually succeed, so they do the bare minimum till people stop complaining they didnāt do anything.
And the donors know that means a republican will likely win the next election, which is their preference anyways.
The moderate wing of the party only exists to make sure the wealthy never lose and we never really win.
and legally all that needs to happen is the Senate has an opportunity to vote to confirm. Obama had a year to say:
āI take no vote to mean no objections, Merrick Garland is on the SCā
From what I know (not much) this is a creative take on it. The Senate needs to confirm. If they donāt confirm then the judge is not placed. I welcome expert legal scholars to weigh in but afaik what you said is wrong.
Obama could have temporarily placed the judge but that would have only lasted until the end of his term.
democracy is when you let a bunch of unelected elders in robes dictate how society operates
They donāt entirely, though. In fact, much of what the SCOTUS has struck down has been them saying Congress needs to do their job and write laws to do what they want the laws to do, versus having the SCOTUS legislate from the bench. Donāt get me wrong, this SCOTUS is fucking awful, but thereās some slight truth to some of what theyāve said on some of their rulings. For example, Roe v Wade couldāve easily become a national law, but Congress wonāt do it.
Itās bad when even RBG was saying roe shouldnāt have been used as law. The dems have had a ton of times to solidify it into law via the proper channels but wonāt because it gets votes.
Have they, though?
It wasnāt because it gets votes, but because it loses votes. People will strongly object to one thing a hell of a lot faster than theyāll give you credit for doing anything. Look at Bidenās entire administration. We handled post-covid inflation* better than any other developed nation, but he didnāt get credit for the 90% he fixed. He got shit on for the 10% left to go.
* And Iād argue a good chunk of that inflation was the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), the bipartisan bill Trump signed into law while rejecting the oversight the Dems wanted. That was the biggest corporate giveaway in our nationās history. Literally just giving public money to private corporations. A step far beyond āprivatize profits, socialize lossesā.
Dems believed, reasonably, that Roe was settled and wasnāt in imminent danger. Holding a vote on that just pushes people away. Of course, in hindsight, they should have done it anyway. But as you can tell from this past election, and all the states that went red while passing womenās rights legislation, having the issue out there is not getting them votes.
This only sounds reasonable until you think about it for 2 seconds. Do you really want the Senate and Congress to have to learn about and try to legislate the details of chemistry, medicine, finance, engineering, etc, rather than delegating figuring out the details of tasks like āmake the food safeā or āmake the water cleanā to scientists and other experts at agencies?
The Supreme Court only has the power it does because the legislature has been dysfunctional. Most of their terrible decisions are not based on the constitution, but rather their interpretation of laws written by Congress. Congress can easily override them by passing a law saying āNo, that Is not what we meantā.
āSeparation of powersā is an incredibly nonsensical concept. If we live in a democracy then the democratically elected legislature should have total power. The idea that unelected judicial branch can dictate policy is indeed anti-democratic, the judicial branch should be wholly subervient to the legislature. The same is true of the executive branch, the executive branch also should be wholly subservient to the legislature. Giving a single guy control over the whole freaking military and making the branch roughly independent is also entirely nonsensical. It has happened historically in the past in several countries that the executive just tells the military to attack the legislature and the country collapses into a dictatorship. This literally almost happened in South Korea literally today, although the president backed down at last moment. Any country with separation of powers is already borderline a totalitarian dictatorship, since it just takes a single crazy executive to decide to pack the courts and disband the legislature solely for their own personal gain and the whole thing falls apart.
Because indebted students run the Democratic Party, gotcha
