Welp, there goes my mom’s safety net.
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Did your mom vote for Trump?
My parents did, and they talk shit about the social safety net while fucking taking from it.
They both apparently think Obama is still president, because they still blame him for everything.
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Does it matter? It doesn’t to me. If she loses that income and her health care, her care falls on my family and my sister’s family. She’ll have to move in with one of us, and we’ll have to help subsidize her expensive health care. So it’s not just impacting her, but my family, my sister’s family, the future of her grandchildren.
Especially if they end up pushing for greater “reforms” on SS and medicare dispersments for people drawing on that now, this will likely kill her. So honestly, I’m not really worried about who she voted for right now. I’m worried about what the elected officials have and will continue to do to all of us.
[ETA] Don’t take this comment as hostility aimed at you or to be all yelly at you. I do get what you’re saying, but this for me is besides the point on these issues right now. This tax bill means that any chance of a career that I wanted has just been scuttled, and the care for my mother is looking like it’s going to be my responsibility going forward. it was foolish of me to imagine that I could do anything worth while in this world, other than being a glorified house wife. I wasted half my life thinking that I could be an academic, but clearly, at my age that’s no longer in the cards.
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I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say. Sorry for being so insensitive.
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Like I said, I’m not trying to yell at you or be hostile, but this is going to be a disaster for, not just my family, but so many others.
I’m really in the pits of despair over this as the icing on the shit cake of the Trump years.
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I don’t know if this is encouraging or discouraging, but…
I don’t see the Trumpist tax/healthcare regime as a long-term thing. Either the fascists are taken down within a year or two, or we’re all dead. War is not far off, and once it begins it is likely to snowball rapidly.
OTOH, if the Trumpists are overthrown, it will be via revolution rather than reform. If that happens, all bets are off; scrub the tax code and begin again with a blank slate. Many impossible things become possible.
I don’t use this song normally, due to its deliberately heavy-handed rose-coloured aspect, but it might be appropriate today:
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that last part is a serious misreading of the history and trajectory of the democratic party. dinesh dsouza keeps trying to misattribute the terrorism of the democrats of the reconstruction era with the modern democratic party. the failures of civil rights in the 1870s are at least as much the responsibility the republican party of the time as it is of the democrats. after the passage of the civil rights act of 1964 and the voting rights act of 1965 the southern racists spent the next 20 years or so abandoning the democratic party in favor of the racism invigorated republican party. again, that last bit is part and parcel of the kind of crap republican pseudointellectuals have been trying to sell for the past 15-20 years. don’t fall for it.
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Both US parties are white supremacist, and always have been.
They don’t swap positions between “racist” and “anti-racist”, they swap between “loud racist” and “quiet racist”.
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtid=3&psid=3619
See also:
(should be cued to 5:01)
The Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s was merely recovering the rights that had been in place because of Reconstruction. The 1964 Civil Rights Act was practically the same as what had happened during Reconstruction a century prior.
Cypher is an academic historian and mainstream Democrat, not any sort of radical of the left or right.
To be clear: I am not saying that the GOP are innocent in the betrayal of Reconstruction. White supremacy is a bipartisan project.
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Related to this, and related to my comments upthread about Goebbel’s propaganda:
I don’t need to manufacture misleading propaganda to attack the right. The reality is vile enough already.
But if I were to manufacture propaganda, I wouldn’t base it in bullshit. Instead, I would find something negative about my opponents that was true, and then use framing and selection to amplify and distort it.
This is what the GOP have been doing for decades. Because of this, many of their arguments do contain a grain of truth. Which is why many left critiques of the Democrats bear a superficial resemblance to attacks from the right.
The difference is that the GOP are saying “Dems are bad”, while the left are saying “capitalists are bad”.
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but what you are also doing is ignoring the very real social and demographic shifts within the democratic and republican parties from 1965-1990. i’ve lived through most of this period as an informed and rational individual. the parts i am not old enough to have witnessed intelligently i have studied closely. i don’t care whether your critique is left, right, or center: any critique premised on the notion that the democratic party of 2017 is equivalent to the democratic party of 1876 has rendered itself irrelevant from the start.
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Pre-sixties, the Democrats based their appeal on white animus, while the GOP based their appeal upon anti-immigrant xenophobia and class privilege. White supremacy vs merciless capitalism (with a side of white supremacy).
In the sixties, the GOP overtly moved into the white animus territory. The Dems, in response, shifted to a mix of faux-populism and exploiting the fear of white animus.
The Black community didn’t shift to the Dems because the Dems became non-racist. They shifted because the GOP betrayed them (again). White supremacy remained an overt part of the Democratic party long past the 1960’s.
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the end result of the process, though, is a party which is close to 50% non-white and will become majority non-white over the course of the next decade. in most of the south the democratic party has been majority non-white for a decade or more. in my county i am one of only a dozen or so white democrats out of 600+/- party members. it is impossible to remain a party of white racism when the majority of the members and leaders of the local and state party groups are black and hispanic.
again, if you insist that nothing has changed or that nothing relevant has changed within the democratic party over the past 50 years it is impossible to take anything else you have to say about the parties in the united states seriously because your argument begins flawed past redemption.
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Which is why I never said that. I usually choose my words carefully.
Many important things have changed. Most notably, the Klan switched allegiance from the Dems to the GOP. However, white supremacy is a fundamental feature of both US major parties, and remains so to this day.
The GOP are two parts racist and one part classist. The Dems are one part racist and two parts classist. The parties are not equivalent, as they are roughly matched on classism while the GOP racism is off the charts.
Nevertheless, both parties still suck.
Neither party represents the working class, and the working class are disproportionately PoC. Both parties support imperialism, militarism, and capitalism. The GOP want to suppress the working class because they are PoC, the Dems just accept that as a side-effect of deregulated capitalism.
The Dem leadership are plutocratic liberals and conservatives, devoted to the maintenance of their privilege and the expansion of neoliberal exploitation. They are more than happy to accept plutocrats of colour, so long as those plutocrats are wealthy first and “of colour” second.
They are not willing to do anything meaningful to address structural inequality, as that might limit their ability to extract the maximum profit from the peasantry.
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As random trivia, and because I was trying to recollect the sequence for something else, Wanderfound’s adult career trajectory:
- Supreme Court filing clerk
- Social Work student
- Telemarketer
- Corporate spy (much less exciting than it sounds)
- Apprentice wood machinist
- Accounts clerk for a university IT department
- Rehabilitation Counselling student
- Psychology/Philosophy/History student
- Neuroscientist
- Bush Regenerator
- Crazy person
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Yep. I’m committed to being the guy who brings up politics at the table in the lunch room.
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