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.

I don’t know about you but some of us chose to get born. I remember rolling my round ass down through a warm long tube as I waited for my other half to meet up. And, I also remember waiting patiently for the right blast off, one that wasn’t going to end up in or on a tummy, and swimming so hard and fast past all the other guys.

I’d still probably do it again, but it would’ve been nice to know more about the outside world. But back then it was all just about swimming and trying to hook up.

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.

Women’s Suffrage was fairly significant and the Civil Rights movement also used protests. Then in the 2000s people rose up against the canceling of Firefly and demanded a movie as compensation. Serenity was that movie and it was awesome and it remains amazing.

Finally, internationally one man named Gandhi used nonviolence to defeat the British empire.

I think it has to do with our ability to manage large societies. People evolved in small groups and now we are trying to manage hundreds of millions of people under the same systems. Humans are not inherently good at abstract thinking and critical thinking skills are taught not hard wired.

So we have hundreds of millions of people all living in the same capitalist neo-liberal economic system, but that might not work for all of them. Well we just let those people wander around forming tent cities. All because our culture says if you are poor or homeless then you failed, not that the system failed the individual.

I’m not an expert on small human societies, but from my understanding homeless starving people wouldn’t be tolerated in a community of like 150 or so.

It means they aren’t serious people. The Trump administration wrecked up the country with their shitty dangerous response to covid and their conservative base spent the entire time complaining and attacking healthcare workers.

Serious people propose ways to address problems and work based off of facts. Conservatives are off on witch hunts and high on identity politics.

This election was a referendum on the neo-liberal order and it lost. Trump represents populist nationalism, if the transactional nature of his first term is any indicator he’s gonna sell off as much as he can to the highest bidders.

TLDR: A bunch of angry working class folks just handed the country to the billionaire oligarchs, possibly under some delusion the wealthy won’t keep robbing them blind.

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?

It is already hard enough knowing a non zero percent of adults in our society voted for Trump. I’m not sure I could handle watching them vote for JD.

I think when SCOTUS and Florida gave the presidency to Bush Jr. was the major attack on the system of democracy that we practice. Gore v Bush Jr. taught the conservatives how to harness the dark side of the law. Now they engaged in their lawfare stage of fascism.