The Democrats already, generally, are in favor of those things. They talk about fighting corruption, fighting corporate money, and creating good jobs all the time.
And your last point is mostly GOP (and a few dead-ender leftist) propaganda. Universal health care isn’t supported by “corporate interests”. Neither is a higher minimum wage. Neither is stronger union protection. And much more. The Democratic party is highly flawed, but so far your criticism appears to be highly dubious, factually speaking.
I spoke to this in a previous post, but with journalism in particular, how does that matter? The truth is the truth, regardless of who is presenting it. Facts don’t change just because it’s Anderson Cooper or Don Lemon making the report and not Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson.
If I’m reading an article in a medical journal, for example, I don’t care that it was published in The Lancet or JAMA rather than the New England Journal of Medicine. I don’t care if the study was done in India or Africa or Europe rather than the US. What’s important is what the data shows.
Draining the swamp is not a thing. It’s a lie no matter who makes the claim because a government of any size is a bureaucratic “swamp”. Trump was never going to change that. That his supporters believed it only serves to show their lack of understanding of government.
I’m going to assume we can skip the “president beholden” bit for reasons too obvious to mention again.
Renewable energy jobs are good jobs. Fossil fuel jobs are jobs without a future. Investing in infrastructure is a good jobs plan. Twisting arms of HVAC manufacturer do delay the move of a few hundred jobs for the optics, is not a good jobs plan. I don’t know how that can be explained to people, or even why that should need explaining. But the latter is certainly a dumb thing that hurts America and the people who buy into it.
Democrats are already viewed by Republicans as being against corporations. It’s been drilled into conservative minds that progressives are against corporate interests. If that is true then it cannot also be true that Democrats will not go against corporate interests. If, as conservatives believe, being aligned with corporate interests is goof for American voters because it creates jobs, then American voters should not object to whatever alignment may exists between Democrats and corporate interests. What is this argument even about at the end of the day; why is it okay for republicans to be in alignment with corporate interests but not for democrats?
I’ve tried to understand this. Prior to the 2016 election I spent an hour on the phone with a pro-Trump farmer, and I mostly listened. Trump helped him a little by relaxing environmental standards, but mostly screwed him by making it harder for him to hire the legal work-permit aliens he hires to harvest his crops.
(He had been pissed that some of his competition used undocumented aliens, and he was paying to do it legally, and he wanted tighter borders so the cheaters didn’t have an advantage over him.)
So… I drink that water. I don’t want to relax environmental standards even if it does make life easier for the farmers. And my “fix” to the unfair advantage problem would be to greatly increase the quota for legal workers, and make it administratively easier, so everyone could hire legal aliens to pick their crops.
(No, I don’t think those jobs would go to Americans if we removed the alien workers. I think the fields would move to Mexico.)
There are plenty of Democrats who are pro-job and pro-industry.
So, what, realistically, should Democrats be doing to appeal to rural Americans?
You know who else drinks that water? The farmer, his wife, his kids, his grandchildren… The farmer has as much interest in clean water and clean air as anyone. Even if he doesn’t want to see it.
That’s true, and he probably drinks from his local well, which has a higher concentration is his run-off than my municipal water supply has. Nonetheless, the cost/benefit ratio is different for him, and might nudge him to want laxer regulation.
Also, this seems like a good time to point out that a lot of “the swamp” is lobbyists. But lobbyists are the people who understand the pain points of the farmer who has to abide by those environmental regulations, and can work with legislators to craft effective regulation that is less onerous than naive regulation would be. I realize that the world doesn’t work the way one might like the ideal world to work. But in an ideal world, we would have paid industry lobbyists negotiating the details of most regulation, bringing the expert knowledge of the people most affected to the table, to craft the most efficient possible regulations.
Journalism isn’t a dry recital of facts, it’s also a narrative, intended to influence people. Are events treated as good or bad? Whose perspective are they shown from?Even the choice of what to cover and not cover makes a big difference, and all without saying an untrue word. And this doesn’t have to be conscious propaganda, either. The journalist’s beliefs and value system inherently influence their work.
The rich and elite own our government through unbridled “donations” to their campaigns. THEY tell us what to do through our government, which explains how the fabulously rich were able to get over a one trillion dollar tax break among many other things.
By the way, I hope you don’t consider yourself a Christian because Jesus was a Socialist through and through. That could be awkward.
Oh dear. I can see I should have included my sarcasm tags.
Of course, you are 100% correct.
Socialism would solve so many of our country’s problems. And yes, taxes need to go up, because how do people think stuff gets paid for, FFS? To promise all kinds of infrastructure improvement/enhancement and then say “but there will be no more taxes” is blatant lying. ThelmaLou hyperventilates.
Hehe. I consider myself a Jew, but once again I completely agree.
I still don’t understand why “socialism” is such a dirty word in the USA.
Maybe Democrats aren’t viewed as aligned with corporate interests, but that doesn’t mean that’s the reality. I believe both parties are. But Trump at least claimed to be moving away from that, and several of his key policies were different to standard Republican ones. Weren’t they big supporters of free trade before Trump, for example? I think this was part of Trump’s appeal and something Democrats could look at emulating. The idea, if not specific policies.
This excerpt GreenWyvern posted in another thread is along the lines of what I am thinking, although I haven’t had chance to read the whole article yet:
The big problem with this is that the legislation that would be best for eg Microsoft may be very different from the legislation that would be best for Microsoft’s customers. But the former has all the money and lobbyists dedicated to getting it’s way, so the latter lose out. I don’t know how it is in the USA, but in the UK it often happens that a minister will make some decision that benefits a certain company, then when he retires from politics, he gets a very well paid position on the board of that company. Ordinary taxpayers are the ones who lose out.
This is something I’ve wondered. Despite all the flaws of rural America (or rural anywhere,) it seems that the ruralites often have an advantage in the charm/PR department. Footage of amber-golden wheat fields, rustic small towns in the snow of Christmas or whatnot seem to be contrasted with the stereotypical crime and jammed hustle of the big city which has a harder time winning in PR.
I realize that “honest politician” is a bit of an oxymoron, but what an honest politician ought to do is decide on the goals, then talk to the lobbyists to determine how to implement those goals at minimal cost to industry, and then write the regulations.
Yeah, I’m a pollyanna. Still, without the “swamp” we get clunky regulations that are overly hard to implement and enforce.
It’s a shame PR firms don’t wax poetic about small towns ruined by the closing of the only large employer in the county, leaving behind a poverty stricken population addicted to drugs. Do you ever wonder about that?
I think we both agree here. It just comes down to what one or the other side wants to believe.
At most Trump made that claim. Once again, we come down to what one side chooses to believe over actual reality.
They were for RomneyCare, before they were against ObamaCare. They were pro trade until Democrats proposes the TransPacific Trade Agreement which would have put a hell of a check on China. Then they were against that but continue to decry China’s unfair trade policies.
Consistency, FFS. Is that too much to ask of them?
It was a very high turnout election and people were engaged in the process. Sure, some people switched sides, others got citizenship or turned 18 since 2016, but my guess is that the vast majority of “new” voters for each side are just people who would have voted for that side in 2016 but couldn’t be bothered.
He did start a few trade wars, he renegotiated NAFTA, and I don’t think he started any actual wars, which is a pleasant change for a US president. He didn’t do any of this stuff well, but I think he’s shown there were more options available than was previously believed.
Consistency is only good if what you are doing is working. And I don’t think it is. Trump had a very positive, optimistic narrative whereas the people trying to counter him were all doom and gloom. It played out the same as the Brexit campaign, which is why I wasn’t surprised when he won in 2016. Obama had an optimistic campaign, too.
Too often I think the lobbyists block the goals from being achieved at all, or even create goals to benefit themselves instead.
For example, Obama managed to pass the ACA, but that didn’t reduce the amount of money spent on healthcare, it just changed the way it was paid for. I don’t think it was a coincidence that he avoided all measures that would reduce costs, but IMO that is by far the most pressing issue. It would help people directly and make every funding option much more feasible. But I fear reducing the cost is exactly what lobbyists and big business would never allow, because it would cut into their profits, and it’s not an accident this hasn’t happened under any government. That’s an example of the problem of business having too much influence and blocking policy that 90% of voters would agree with.
Yes, it is. But it’s also a really really hard issue to address. We pay more for health care mostly in three places:
Doctors have higher salaries here than elsewhere
Drugs cost more (often MUCH more) here than elsewhere
Our health-payment system is hideously inefficient, and we pay far more overhead than anyone else.
The problem with reducing (1) is obvious. The problem with reducing (2) is mostly that the drug industry has invested very heavily in buying politicians. Yes, that’s the bad side of the swamp. There’s really no reason why the entire profit of the pharmaceutical industry should be paid by US consumers, but it is. (3) seems like one you would want to address, but if we actually did that, it would put an enormous number of people out of work. All that wasted paperwork, verifying this and proving that and filling out the paperwork… that’s jobs. I’m not saying we shouldn’t try to improve this, but if it’s done suddenly it would be immensely disruptive.
Can you expand on this? Where did you find optimism in Trump’s 2016 campaign message?
I heard him say that immigrants threaten American safety, that America is a sucker, that America is being taken advantage of by allies, that there is carnage on city streets, that America needs to become more insular and build walls (physical and geopolitical). To my ears, none of that sounds optimistic. All of it is doom and gloom.
Contrast that, as you say, with Obama’s campaign and even with HRC’s campaign. Certainly the Biden campaign has been to unite the country and to put aside divisions.
It’s at once puzzling and disturbing to me that people can see the same events unfold but hear very different things.
Well, he made a great deal of “renegotiating NAFTA”. Truth is, whatever modifications were needed could have been accomplished easily and competently between the two countries without Trump’s strutting and preening as if he brought Canada to it’s knees. The new NAFTA is virtually indistinguishable from the old NAFTA. I’ll give Trump credit for withdrawing troops from pointless wars and not starting new ones. But he did throw the Kurds, key American allies in the region, under the bus. So all did not end well.
@DemonTree, where are you getting your information about Trump? AFAICT, most of how you describe his campaign and his presidency is contrary to the facts.