barnie prefers the alternative where no one works. he promised to return $2k to everyone and instead returned $1400 (at most) to some of us and pocketed the rest

You're talking to a person who is attempting to pass off a state bailout and child tax credit extension bill as a stimulus. Wooo! 20% of the funds of a bill are going to the people! So the people who paid for the entire bill are getting 20% of their investment back. Wooo!

You know better. Just call him the Nazi he is and move on.

The overwhelming majority of ordinary people dont know all the stuff that's in the bill, they only know about the topline $1400 checks. Had the Dems put forth a clean bill titled "1400 dollar checks and nothing else", there would have been meaningful Republican support. But not for the absurd amounts of pork barrel spending the pushed through.

Also a nice way for Bernie to distract from his failure to get a $15 minimum wage. He gave in to the corporate Dems on one of his core demands yet again, and without even putting up a fight... yet again. Just for the record: Bernie had the power to unilaterally halt the bill until it includes the $15 minimum wage provision, but he chose not to use it, while Manchin, his counterpart on the opposite end of the Democrats' ideological spectrum, had no such qualms and consequently got his way.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Mar 10 2021 07:42pm

Wait. I thought Democrats were far left and unwilling to compromise. It seems that the right side of their party still holds the reigns.

FUNNY HOW THAT WORKS

You think Bernie wants a $15 minimum wage? He's served as a rep then senator in Vermont for 30 years. Vermont has a $10.78 minimum wage. You don't see him fighting with his governor or campaigning in his state supporting a Vermont $15 minimum. FFS, his state pays a lower minimum wage than surrounding states. He doesn't give a shit about the minimum wage. It's just face time.

The corporate Dems reign with an iron fist when it comes to economic and fiscal issues, although that's the area in which the party should move to the left quite a bit.
They are, however, getting pulled quite substantially to the left by progressives when it comes to social/cultural issues, an area where they imho are going way too far. This is obviously a deliberate tactic, steering leftist energy toward non-economic issues where they can give the progressive wing of their party some victories without actually hurting the bottom line of their corporate overlords.

All in all, the Democratic party is offering poor and working-class Americans only breadcrumbs in terms of economic or fiscal policy while, at the same time, promoting cultural policies which undermine the pillars of society, erode social cohesion and make the economic standing of lower-class citizens even more precarious. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley, Wall Street and the federal bureaucracy are getting fatter and fatter.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Mar 10 2021 08:02pm

What specific social/cultural issues shouldn't they be pulling left on? Trans rights remains a fringe topic, even if Fox News would say otherwise. Cancel culture is a giant red herring, it's the new "Obama socialist".

Dems win when they go left economically. That's why Florida passed a $15 minimum wage and voted Trump, and why every congressperson who ran on Medicare for all, even in Republican districts, won their elections.



Hell, the last Dem president ran on civil unions and only came out in support of gay rights basically after the supreme court legalized it for him.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Mar 10 2021 08:07pm

keep lying. trump's stimulus package was full of unrelated pork, this one is full of actual aid to covid related causes that directly benefit small businesses, families, workers, low income earners, schools, unemployed... the reason republicans reject it is because their donors don't want it, and because they don't really care about the average american. that's why you have people like ted cruz lying about the stimulus checks, claiming they go to undocumented immigrants, even though that's not true, since you need a social security number to collect them.

you pretending like republicans had valid reasons to not support this one, but push through the trump stimulus that was significantly worse in terms of supporting the average american, is absurd and dishonest.

This post was edited by fender on Mar 10 2021 08:15pm

Some groups of themes:

- immigration, integration, national indentity, race-baiting
- globalism vs nationalism
- undermining the core familiy as the nucleus of society
- undermining free speech and intellectual freedom via promoting a culture of denunciation, outrage and cancellation
- fueling divisive indentity politics as a form of "divide and conquer" strategy on behalf of the rich and powerful
- strangling the country's entrepreneurial culture of risk-taking and self-responsibility to death with exuberant red tape and taxes (this issue is maybe 70% economic and 30% cultural)

There's probably some more that I forgot. Generally speaking, the social/cultural policies of Democrats foster an atomized society with low cohesion, neighborhoods with low social capital, everyone being a lonely, isolated worker drone scared of stepping out of line, unable to organize or critically challenge the status quo.

The corporate-/Biden-wing of the party wants to preserve the status quo of corporate rule while expanding the scope and power of the state. The Bernie/AOC wing of the party wants to take power away from corporations and give it to the state, on which large swaths of the population are supposed to depend. What neither faction of the Democrats offers is an ideology or policies to give power back to ordinary, middle-class citizens.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Mar 10 2021 08:28pm