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Ocasio-Cortez endorses Biden's reelection campaign, sending a strong signal of Democratic unity
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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It would be nice to have a strong challenger, but the DNC protects its elders. I can't imagine any Dem not endorsing Biden as it's the only choice, and not endorsing him is a strange waste of political capital.
It amazes me how much and how quick people are to blame Biden or AOC when the political landscape isn't this richly progressive utopia in a rank choice voting system. We have real problems in this country and the ONLY way we get closer to solving them is by not electing fascists
The ONLY way we get closer to solving them was by educating our populace about the dangers of authoritarianism in the wake of the world wars. And coming to terms as a nation how much the Nazi regime learned from America and our concentration camps that we don't teach nearly enough about.
But that ship kind of sailed and we now live in a country where some obscenely high percent of Americans don't even believe the holocaust happened at all.
In my opinion we are way past the solution being democrats, they hardly even stop the bleeding anymore. They are just there to show the masses that there are two parties and they didn't really want to pass all of this pro business, anti people legislation, but we had to because of the debt ceiling that we didn't even stop for long and the Republicans can beat us with it again in a few years.
The system is designed to be fucked.
we can whine about how we didn't do the right thing before now all we want, but we live in the world of today, and the solution, or at least part of it, must be to keep the actual fascists from doing actual fascism. we have to do more, electoral politics isn't gonna save us, but genuinely it makes me really mad when people get all doomer about this shit. most people used to be serfs. a hundred years ago children were working in coal mines. progress can be made. progress against capitalists can be made. and if voting didn't matter businesses wouldn't be pouring money into politics, republicans wouldn't be trying their best to stop people from turning up.
While I agree that "being all doomer" isn't exactly helpful, I want to point out that voting democrats in hasn't been exactly helpful either. Child labor has been happening in America this ENTIRE time, it has just only been legal in the agricultural space. But I had a job before it was legal using a family members social security number, and we were almost middle class.
There are a LOT of problems with our current system. I just feel like continuing to elect the only two parties that got us here is a bad plan.
as always, if you want this to be different in a way that isn't going to throw everything to the hardest right politicians (who incidentally are making a full-court press to make child labor legal again) you'll need to start with voting reform. i would encourage you to formally get involved with an organization like Fairvote to this end.
While I do agree that my doomer additude isn't helpful, I don't think anything can change. And I also don't want to sacrifice my life to the cause. People who go against this system end up dead if they are lucky. I'm fine to just complain online.
I think a third political party that simply ran on always voting no to anything other than clean budgets and debt ceiling hikes would 100% win in the minds of the people. But it wouldn't take much for tge system to distort and twist even that incredibly basic platform.
I don't believe a third party will ever be allowed to become viable in this country. I hate it, but that won't change it because there is too much "capital" in this for human lives to outweigh it. That is our countries values. Who am I to say that isn't what the majority want?
The reason third parties don’t succeed is because they are often vanity projects with little work done in the “off-season.” For example, the Green Party: sucks thousands of votes away during presidential elections, but is yet to have elected a single person to the House of Representatives.
If you’re squeamish about supporting an individual candidate, at least get involved in voter protection efforts.
Under Biden, we've seen no meaningful action as the right to abortion was lost, housing scarcity has become a crisis for most Americans, another 100 billion unbudgeted was sent to another country's war, and there was zero meaningful progression on education, health care, militarizing police, or stopping the resurgence of fascism.
Voting for Biden is voting for team color and little else. The man is a shitty president more concerned with stringing together a coherent sentence and running cover for his son than doing anything for the people who got him elected. And the extent to which he is a shitty president is going to usher in an overt fascist when he tries to sell himself on his record in a year.
I mean I really don't like Biden but fwiw he reversed policies from Trump in areas such as inmigration and transgender people (such as excluding HRT from Medicare), and did some work with food stamps, not to mention the damage control his administration had to do for COVID-19. If Trump have been re-elected, things would've been very very different, and if the Senate midterms hadn't turned out the way they did we might have had fascist federal laws by now.
Currently one party is the Fascist party and the other is the "literally anyone left from that" party. As sad as it is, Biden is probably what the DNC thinks is the best shot at having the entire party voting for him, from the social democrats to the conservatives, since he's not LGBTphobic nor racist, and supports the current status quo. And yes, the bar is pretty fucking low but if the Republican wins it will be even worse.
Biden was my last choice out of the field of Democrats heading into 2020, and yet I don't know what any other candidate would have done differently to achieve better results.
I'm voting for the record and the strategy more than the man himself. I wish things were different but it's hard to argue with the results considering the state of Congress and the courts.
Passed under Biden:
Not a complete failure, but I mean if the alternative is another geriatric, but one who is twice impeached, twice indicted and scummy, it's a shitty choice, but it's the only choice.
It's the only choice because he was shoved down Dem throats though. Great, he accomplished some things. Quite frankly any empty suit could have done that with the clout of the rest of the party. A non-geriatric progressive could have potentially done much more, but the establishment won't run anyone like that. Eventually the fragmentation will grow too great and start working against itself (we may already be there).
When Biden supported the rail corporations and waffled on student loans (pre-SC scumbaggery), it was apparent that he's just a shill. The latter went against a campaign promise, but memories are short.
Edit: also "helping defeat Russia" is arguably not a thing. They are not the threat to the US that they used to be. Sure, it's great to support Ukraine. But China is the only real military threat to the US, and Biden has been status quo there. I get that the US is world police, but let's not treat the Military Industrial Complex as a plus.
just a heads up, you should look into that rail thing again. the unions ended up getting alot of what they wanted because Biden's admin did actually follow through with negotiations. definitely not cool, but also not the unambiguous support of corporations you seem to have interpreted it as. IBEW statement. there are people who are still unhappy, because capitalism sucks and they should be unhappy, but lots of railworkers got significantly improved working conditions out of it.
It is good that the outcome came out better than it initially looked. But I have a really hard time understanding why a Democratic president couldn't overtly and publicly support a union in the first place. Full stop.
Biden didn't even need a bill to forgive student debt.
He did it unilaterally in the case of people who were defrauded. The whole song and dance with his 'plan' was to give him plausible deniability so his corporate backers wouldn't lose their golden goose.
100% agree. And it's something that should be apparent to voters. If it isn't (and I think it isn't)... damn, we are in a bad spot.
A good thing, but also a reminder that 100 billion sent for another country's war is 100 billion that isn't being spent to keep our veterans in good care. (Among other things)
Biden himself made excuses for how lackluster this was, despite it's super-cool name, and even more fun, his administration withheld $600 of the promised $2000 in aid that he'd assured voters they'd get before they delivered Georgia.
Sounds pretty awesome until you realize everyone's working 2-3 jobs to survive. See my point above about housing scarcity. I think we'd all be way more impressed if he'd passed a living wage back when he had the majority.
Another bill Biden made excuses for, which is funny, because he had the majority when it was passed. As much as he, and his partisan ideologues want to let him cosplay as a cut-rate FDR, we deserve way better than a corporate shill.
This isn't our war. We should not be sending a hundred billion of our dollars in order to fund it, especially when we have wildfires, hurricanes, failing power grids, and other crises being ignored here at home. (In addition to, what, wars in eight countries we're already involved in.)
_
While I agree he's not a complete failure, that's kind of like the 600 points a person gets just for signing their name correctly on an SAT testing form. It was a particular kick in the balls when Dems got Georgia and his messaging switched from "2000 checks" to "finish the job" and they sent $1400 instead, considering that was our money he was withholding from us in a time of crisis.
And in a nation of 330,000,000 people, "better than Trump" isn't good enough. That we gave Biden a Democratic majority and he did nothing meaningful with it is why we'll likely have an outspoken and overt fascist elected as our president in a year.
I think you're overestimating the power of a "Democratic Majority" anchored by Manchin and Sinema.
If only people could eat excuses, every table in this country would be full.
What progressive legislation that Congress passed has Biden vetoed?
Unemployment is one of the most cooked statistics by the federal government; they have several so they can choose the most ideal to report. The real issue is that unemployment also accounts for people who left the market, aka disabled, left-behind, or those with long term disability due to COVID. So unemployment looks great when you remove all the people deemed not fit for capital to exploit further.
Its difficult to find a good measurement for a country's success. See Campbell's Law. But yeah, unemployment has been a bad metric from the start. They just keep using it because people don't know it's a bad metric.
stop with the prophecy, and stop with the doomer shit. sure, lets say voting biden is "voting for team color". tell me, would the other team be better? fuck no, we'd be getting even more fucked than we already are. there would be a federal abortion ban. the federal government would be pursuing an actively genocidal agenda towards queer people across the country. millions of real human lives would be negatively affected. there would be less than no action on climate change, instead of the "meager" biggest investment in renewables in US history.
it just makes me so mad. if the red team wins, MORE PEOPLE WILL DIE. is that not meaningful? it is to me. it should be to you. vote blue. it isn't enough, but not everybody has the privilege of ideological purity. we have to survive in order to thrive.
I agree.
This thread is the first time I've been embarrassed to be a part of the fediverse. This thread shows a lot of nihilistic people who don't actually follow politics well enough to have views based in reality. People reference the railroad situation without understanding the resolution and reference student debt and other areas as if Biden had full control of the house/senate.
It really is the left's version of Trump supporters in that they revel in their ignorance, wear it as a badge and then encourage others to follow the same path. At least Trump supporters have the decency to encourage their contemporaries to vote in elections smh.
sometimes I wonder if the "both sides" leftists are privileged accelerationists
i don't think its necessarily intentional. apocalyptic narratives play well online, the cold war made a generation paranoid about nuclear annihilation, and the US is steeped in evangelical culture. if you listen to right wing media, there's so much stuff talking about the end times its crazy. the reason the right likes Israel? they think it fulfills end times prophecy. everybody they don't like is the anti-christ. so many people in this country have been primed to accept the apocalypse as an inevitability, it isn't that surprising that the sentiment has spread to other parts of our culture, and into our political discourse. at least, that's my pet theory on why it pops up so often. could just be a human thing, honestly.
The issue of abortion isn't solely attributable to Biden. It's the result of 50 years of GOP-aligned think tanks and policymakers strategizing for this outcome. One could argue that the Democrats missed an opportunity during their supermajority periods to enshrine abortion rights in the constitution, instead relying on legal arguments, which, to be fair, were upheld by the courts. This issue wasn't perceived as a political threat, and it was unexpected that the GOP would follow through on this. It's akin to a dog chasing a car and actually catching it.
As for education and healthcare, these are primarily legislative matters. The executive branch doesn't wield as much power as some might think, and any power it does have typically doesn't extend beyond the current president's term. Biden should be seen more as a check on the GOP rather than an initiator of change.
Criticizing Biden's speaking abilities is somewhat unfair. He has a stutter that he constantly battles when speaking, and age has inevitably dulled some of his skills. Regarding his son, yes, he has made mistakes.
The Ukraine war involves complex geopolitics. There's a genuine moral argument at play here. Germany and the EU are willing to take a significant hit by excluding Russian energy from the market, which speaks volumes.
The $100 billion deal is advantageous for the US. It effectively sidelines Russia from the geopolitical table. Russia has shown signs of wanting to reclaim most of the USSR borders, primarily for logistical reasons. The Russian military struggles to hold territory within its own borders due to the lack of natural chokepoints until you reach the old USSR borders. Ukraine was never the end goal, but a stepping stone. Russia, like the rest of the developed world, is experiencing a population decline, which means they won't have the manpower or technical expertise in a few decades.
Stalling Russia's plans in Ukraine now is a proactive measure to prevent future issues. This also serves to deter China and make them reconsider any plans with Taiwan.
But really, whose fault is that really? The people actually trying to make meaningful changes (even begrudgingly) or the people that stand in the way of literally all progress and are actual responsible for all of those problems to begin with?
So you don't think the west should be supporting Ukriane then?
Not until we have a fully-funded universal health care system, no. Absolutely not.
You know those are exclusive things right. Plenty of countries with healthcare systems are helping Ukriane too right now.
It's not the same thing.
Those countries aren't neglecting their people's basic needs in order to spend a trillion-plus dollars per year on war.