The Dems put up a good fight. Biden needed to leave earlier. Harris could’ve had an actual answer to what she would’ve done differently. The reality is they were fighting a huge uphill battle. We’ve got an extremely ignorant and uninformed citizenry with little understanding of the functioning of government. I’m talking about Americans a proud and reactionary group of people. There was zero chance after picking Kamala that the Democratic party was going to pivot from their neo-liberal views and what movement they did was towards the center.

Now that they’ve lost so decisively maybe we’ll see a window to move the party in a progressive direction. Personally I think the Dems need to get back to supporting labor unions. If we are going to “reindustrialize” this country because we are doing war with China then we should want strong labor organization. Get some progressives to run on policies that put people first instead of property and capital.

That would probably require getting money out of politics. In the meantime focus on continuing to improve the quality of life in blue states and blue cities. As far as the voters they didn’t fail the party they failed the country. We are going to see a bunch of our fellow citizens lose more of their rights.

If it were me I’d barricade the office and declare myself a constitutional special counsel. But what do I know I just love my country.

The Majority Report with Sam Seder just had a guest on today for an interview about this very topic. The guy’s name was Daniel Hunter and I found it solid.

The gist of the interview was that you can block boats that are carrying arms shipments with smaller boats and that might work for a while but the coast guard will probably fuck with you. So your best course of action is to get the dockworkers on your side and get them to not load the weapons onto the boats. I don’t know how much shipping is done in Utah as I’ve only been once.

You are just describing the Federalist Society.

Tolerated… We got a major party ready to dismantle what little democracy we got. The GOP collectively lost their shit cause their orange gibbon lost 2020 and could handle it. So in 2024 they’ve doubled down on the geriatric man child.

If we get this wrong we should apologize to the King of England and rejoin the commonwealth.

Why complicate the onion by adding more layers? Why do we want a sovereign fund? Your solution just seems like another way to funnel more money to US corporations. We already let them switch to defined contribution 401k retirement funds. More money to companies public or private is just more money empowering little corporate fiefdoms.

We should simply tax these corporations and their owner class at a much higher rate. Take that money and fund social programs. For example, it is completely idiotic to have healthcare tied to employment and subsidizing it through the gov’t.

If we removed corporate welfare from our system it would be really bad until something else took its place. We subsidize our entire food production system, removing that would drive up the cost of food. The Jones Act subsidizes our shipping industry. The price of drugs would also probably sky rocket the second you remove the public funding that goes into the early stage research.

And what happens to our military industrial complex when you remove corporate welfare?

The problem is we have Bezos playing rocket man and newspaper baron to the tune of three billion dollars a year. We have Musk fucking with our elections to the tune of some hundred million dollars a month. They have this money because we don’t tax them. Tax that money away and they won’t be fucking with shit.

Bill Gates the Microsoft guy? The one that just demolished competition? The same company that ran afoul of US antitrust law? Bill Gates the guy that had a non zero number of African nations ask him to stop helping, that guy?

It’d be funny if it was just about grilling and craft beers with nothing spicier than a Full House (the original) joke, but I somehow doubt it.

I mean, I guess, but why complicate this stuff. We already have the systems and administration to do taxes. We could break up monopolies and enforce the laws we already have.

I’d keep it real real simple for folks. We should stop letting corporations and their owner class privatize the gains and stick the rest of society with the losses. Take the 2008 fiasco, if we are bailing out a bunch of companies we should be bailing out a bunch of home owners.

Very simply. Raise their taxes.

Less simply. Remove the cap on social security tax. Tax long term capital gains beyond a certain amount as regular income. Put the top rate income tax closer to 90%. Fix the god damn estate tax situation. Why on god’s green earth do the children of Sam Walton occupy so much space on the Forbes 400.

I could see your scenario being scary if the “reasonable” GOP members and funders split off and started sucking all the “conservative” liberal groups that normally vote Democratic but could be swayed to embrace even more neo-liberal policies.

As long as there is a large concentration of a anti-education, anti-intellectual, and nationalistic brained people in easily gerrymandered areas there will probably always be a conservative party. The GOP has been playing their hateful scared brains like a fiddle for a good four plus decades, and they won’t go quietly into the night.

Maybe if we didn’t have a poorly planned two party system they’d have far less actual power.

Seeding the land for the next generation of American pickers?

Also makes you wonder what else he’s lied about. Are we not getting super affordable butler robots that are also best friends?

They had the same message back in the AOL days. Even with the warning people still had no problem handing over all sorts of passwords and stuff.

I always try and take advantage of double sided printing when it is available. And my partner and I both drive reasonable vehicles and not oversized gas guzzlers.

As far as addressing the boomer problem, I’ve been just waiting for them to age out as the ones I know don’t respond well to logical or rational arguments. The boomers I know that are supporting Trump lack critical thinking skills and struggle with abstract thinking. This has made them easy prey for conservative media that for one seeks to short circuit any higher order thinking by triggering fear responses in their viewers.

If I had three wishes, I’d use one to try and fix this problem by massively expanding our education system. We are saddled with an antiquated system designed for a time when factory workers were needed and scheduling had to be done around farm labor availability. So I live in a progressive city and our state is finally doing free school meals. How insane that in 2024 there’s a need for free meals in a rather rich country and also a good chunk of our population are opposed to giving out free food.

I guess that is one way to present a nice picture for the people at the top. Here’s the way I see it. This neo-liberal experiment has been a massive disaster. We’ve allowed the elites to dismantle so much of our social safety net, and all for what… cheap smart phones with facebook? The very same phones that help power the culture war. A war so devastating it has captured and rotted the brains of large segments of our population.

Meanwhile, we the general citizens have been getting fleeced in one of the greatest transfers of wealth from the public to the private. And what are these elites doing with all their new wealth? Buying up every available asset that can produce a dollar and writing the rules to benefit those with excessive wealth.

I’ll leave with an example from the housing market, because it has been so popular lately and because it is a perfect example of this wealth transfer. This is broad and general. People and institutions over extended themselves and got drunk on paper asset inflation during the housing bubble. The gov’t bailed out the big institutions and stuck the common people with the bill. This resulted in tighter lending for the regular home buyer and cheap available funds for institutions such as hedge funds. So tons of available housing stock sitting on bank’s balance sheets were easy pickings for funds.

This reminded me of the hit 90s movie Super Mario Bros with John Leguizamo when the lead characters got the goomba guys dancing in the elevator.

Absolutely. It is also never a bad idea to have at least 6 months in expenses saved up in cash for emergencies. And another 10 thousand to keep an attorney on retainer.