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The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must...The question becomes: who has the power to redirect that flow?
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The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must...The question becomes: who has the power to redirect that flow?
Can we add Roberts taking a torch to protecting minorities' voting rights in Shelby ?1. Criticizing the abundance agenda, and then citing the problems the abundance agenda tries to challenge as the basis for your own argument, is a take I suppose. Why is rent eating half their paycheck? Why is it way more expensive to build in California than in Texas? That's a fact. Texas' way is not necessarily better for many, many reasons, but if housing is a major problem, build more housing!
2. Why does the political and economic system keep those efforts small or underfunded? Is it because of neoliberalism? Or because every time a Dem president expands labor rights, the subsequent GOP administration undoes that progress or more.
3. You want to know why I'm frustrated by Nader and the Naderites? Well, here's an anecdote. A while back, the Supreme Court issued one of the most anti-union decisions since the 1890s when the Sherman Act was interpreted to be a union-busting tool. It was authored by Alito. Alito was the driving force behind it -- having complained about unions endlessly until he finally got a majority to take them down.
If Ralph Nader had not run for president in 2000; if he hadn't been out there talking about a uniparty and blurring the distinctions between the two parties, Samuel Alito would not have been a Supreme Court justice. In all likelihood, Justice Tatel would have been writing opinions upholding union rights. Oh, and campaign finance reform -- another issue where Roberts and Alito did so much damage even before Citizens United.
The reason that unions are underfunded is not Bill Clinton or Barack Obama or Joe Biden. It's GWB and Trump and Ralph Nader. It isn't neoliberalism. As applied to labor rights, that term is even more bullshit than usual. If you knew anything about labor law, you'd know that there are more volumes of NLRB adjudications than all federal court cases. Well, I don't know if that's technically accurate, but the density is much higher. That's because the NLRB is always changing its stripes. Dems come in and expand union rights through adjudications. Then the GOPers come in and retract those rights in subsequent adjudications.
For those of you, who like me, were poorly educated in the classics, not because of the schools I attended, but because of internal shotcomings, this quote is from Herman Melville's "Billy Budd." TGF Google. In college, getting me interested in the Classics, was like trying to paint plastic."What was the matter with the master-at-arms?"
Several of the problems I see is that you are likely your (pl) view of soft "experts" like politicians, economists, media pundits and such reject statisticians, scientists, researchers and the sort of hard expert people who could have saved us from some of this ignorant voting patterns. There really are some things that can be nailed down as the best possible explanation possible with our knowledge. Those things aren't really a matter of public opinion and when you reject those because these other so called experts let us down, everybody loses.I somehow missed this reply in real time, but it deserves a response.
I don’t reject expertise in the way some populists on the right do. I agree that professional standards, peer review, and institutional knowledge are crucial to a functioning society. But I think you’re misunderstanding where my skepticism is coming from.
I’m not talking about throwing out expertise. I’m talking about the fact that in recent decades, many of the people and institutions who claimed the mantle of expertise, particularly in politics, finance, foreign policy, and media, failed in massive, visible ways. The Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis, the opioid epidemic, the Covid response, the collapse of local journalism, and the bipartisan economic consensus that hollowed out working-class communities were not engineered by the MAGA right. They were often driven, rationalized, or rubber-stamped by credentialed experts in high places.
That doesn’t mean we abandon all expertise. Rather, it means we need to reckon honestly with why public trust has eroded and why institutions that should be defending democracy and the common good have so often been captured by elite interests.
People aren’t stupid. They’ve watched “the experts” bail out Wall Street while their towns die, tell them globalization will be a net positive while their jobs are offshored, and treat their skepticism as ignorance rather than a rational response to betrayal.
This is why I focus more on the failures of Democrats and liberal institutions. It’s not because I think they’re as bad as Republicans. It’s because in communities like this, everyone already knows the GOP is a wrecking ball. My concern is how liberal leadership has often failed to meet the moment, and how that failure has opened the door to reactionary politics.
As for pragmatism and electability: I want to win too. But I think our chances improve when we offer people something clear, material, and rooted in dignity, not when we keep chasing the political center or trying to guilt people into voting for a status quo they feel has failed them. The reason figures like Bernie resonated was because they spoke directly to people’s material needs without talking down to them. That’s the path forward, not “perfect versus good,” but credible versus hollow.
You’ve lived through real change. That matters. But I think the risk now is that without a reckoning and a bolder vision, we’ll keep losing ground to a right-wing movement that has no such hesitation.
To extend the analogy, though, gravity is non-negotiable. You can't make water flow up. You can't redirect capital flow just where you want.That’s a fair analogy in some ways.
Capital does flow like water toward the path of least resistance, but the key is that the “terrain” it flows through isn’t natural; it’s shaped by political choices.
Governments build the channels. They cut away labor protections, weaken environmental standards, and offer tax incentives not because of gravity, but because of pressure from international institutions, corporate lobbying, and a prevailing economic orthodoxy.
So yes, capital follows the path of least resistance, but it’s a path engineered to serve its interests. The question becomes: who has the power to redirect that flow?
If you're talking about my silence, what it means is that I haven't looked at the board for 15 hours.I’m noticing that my last point here about the limits of personality-based explanations for political behavior hasn’t been responded to. I think that silence is meaningful. When we frame political divisions primarily as fixed psychological traits, it leads to a dead end in terms of building inclusive, hopeful movements.
It’s worth reflecting on what that means for anyone interested in lasting social and political change. If a large share of people are seen as inherently authoritarian or “bad,” then organizing becomes less about solidarity and more about exclusion or defeatism. That kind of framing risks alienating the very people whose support we need to create real progress.
This isn’t just a theoretical debate; it shapes how we build coalitions, craft messages, and imagine the future. I believe in a politics rooted in human potential, material conditions, and shared struggle. If we lose that, we lose everything.
I welcome others who want to think through how we can maintain that hopeful, grounded approach to change.
You don't have to be poorly educated not to recognize that quote. In fact, it's quite obscure as far as I know. Your lack of recognition isn't a comment on you; it's a comment on our resident literary genius who is able to pull quotes from classical literature the way I pull quotes from Tarantino.For those of you, who like me, were poorly educated in the classics, not because of the schools I attended, but because of internal shotcomings, this quote is from Herman Melville's "Billy Budd." TGF Google. In college, getting me interested in the Classics, was like trying to paint plastic.
In fairness to Paine, this is how he understands what he's doing. He's telling people like me to talk to people across the fence as if they were not racist authoritarians -- or, perhaps more accurately, talk about them in that way. He wants to pull some of those folks to the better side of the fence.Bo-siding is one thing, but you must sit astride the fence so you can see both sides, engage both sides, deal with both sides of the aisle.
I’m almost positive he is scrambling to find ways to bring some sanity to this insane position in which America finds itself. I really wish his suggested form(s) of messaging can find footing and actually work. I’m sure the Centerists of the world would appreciate it.In fairness to Paine, this is how he understands what he's doing. He's telling people like me to talk to people across the fence as if they were not racist authoritarians -- or, perhaps more accurately, talk about them in that way. He wants to pull some of those folks to the better side of the fence.
Paine has said multiple times that he recognizes that, but he wants to speak to the maybe 5% who aren't so far. On that point, he's correct that if successful, that could make a big difference when our elections are so close. I'm skeptical that it's easy to distinguish the true believers from the non-cultists but all of us really are speculating.But as most know, there is no communicating with those who’ve strayed so far to the right of the fence. “The fence” for them is that great big beautiful wall that Mexico will pay for. Either that, or it’s the fence with razor wire in which to contain and “own” the libs.
This may be true, but if it is, isn't it just as true of Maga and the vision of what they think could be as it is of the other movements you mentioned?I’d counter that history has always involved people organizing around visions of what could be.
What are your ideas on the limits of personal wealth accumulation and what would the attempt to achieve them look like? I haven't given it much thought but I suspect you have, or at least have looked into much more closely than I. Just wondering if you've come across anything you perceive as remotely workable. It's very difficult for me to imagine and frankly I'm not sure if it's even desirable, but again, I really haven't give it much thought, although I did participate in an Occupy Wall Street gathering (only b/c I happened to be in town and I went to check it out and somebody handed me a flag)...A billionaire cap is one policy idea among many.
thisWe do not need to hate the rich. But we do need to stop designing our entire political and economic system to serve them.
Sounds like the Supreme Court...A small group ends up making decisions for everyone else, with no real accountability.
I hope you don't think I'm badgering you about this (not my intent) but do you have any specific ideas (or even concepts of plans, LOL) in regard to these? Maybe you don't, I'm just curious...I support steeply progressive taxation, serious inheritance taxes
Is that so? You're talking to a finance professor right now, but sure -- go ahead and explain finance to me. In fact, impress everyone with your finance knowledge. Walk us through the process of financing a factory, and explain how it is all a constructed system. Go on, step by step. Show us the constructs.Yes, gravity is non-negotiable. But in politics, the forces shaping capital flows aren’t natural laws, they’re human-made. Tax codes, labor rules, public investments, trade agreements. These shape the “gravity.”
Saying “you can’t make water flow up” masks a political choice as a natural limit. That’s the ideological trick of neoliberalism: it treats constructed systems as immutable facts.
1. Go fuck yourself. I'm not proving any point of yours.You’re proving my point better than I ever could.
All of it is designed. And all of it can be redesigned.
What I’m pushing back against is the idea that this entire setup (how capital flows, who benefits, who doesn’t) is somehow inevitable. That’s not finance, that’s ideology.
I respect technical expertise. But I reject the idea that expertise gives someone the final word on what’s politically possible. That kind of thinking turns democratic debate into something closer to a professional monopoly. Finance, like every other part of our economy, is shaped by laws and institutions. Those laws didn’t fall from the sky. They were written by people, and they can be rewritten.