This whole impeachment thing.

I voted for Obama both times because he had a populist message that I agreed with. I was laid off from my job and I struggled during the recession.

I could not bring myself to vote for Hillary Clinton because she only seemed to be concerned with "identity politics".

Most liberals are ultimately interested only in affirmative action. We keep hearing them preach about how everything is rigged against so-and-so so there must be hiring quotas and preferential treatment for certain designated groups. It will never end. Liberalism in America only exists today to keep the affirmative action gravy train on its tracks.

I've worked for two different state agencies and I have a lot of friends who work for the federal govt in DC and I can tell you that there is no incentive to do well and succeed in the liberal vision for business and society. It's all about justifying pandering and handouts.

pigfarmer said:

Not insipid at all to say that you can benefit from your own labor, however you like to put it.

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Somehow you missed my point. Nobody's saying that working doesn't pay wages.

My point is that wages have been flat for decades, while the real-world cost of living has skyrocketed, so the baseline quality of life has plummeted all over the country. Now half the country is either poor or in poverty, and that's not because Americans suddenly got lazy - people are working more hours, and more productively, than anywhere else in the developed world.

So obviously the macroeconomics of our society have shifted dramatically. Maybe you noticed that when the banks crashed the global stock markets, and our totally corrupted government bailed out the crooked banks while millions of hard-working Americans like my sister lost their homes.

And we see this trend in the data all across the board because economic inequality is right back to the levels of the Gilded Age, which was such a dark and unfair economic and policy climate for the labor class that millions of people took to the streets and raised hell until they forced the system to represent the people and not just the corporate interests.

The only real differences now are that today the corporate news media has us completely brainwashed and complacent - happy to point the finger at the other half of the country that's getting screwed over by the same billionaires and corporation and politicians, and what's even worse - production has gone global while labor remains local so we can't get out of this mess through national unionization; the only way to fight back now would be to establish global labor unions, which presents virtually insurmountable obstacles.

pigfarmer said:

The opposite side of that coin is reserved to those who feel they are owed something by life in general and the government specifically. Some people are legitimate victims. Most who feel that way aren't.

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You have it completely backwards - the rules have been corrupted so everyone in the working class is fighting a losing uphill game now. And nobody is more screwed than the millennials - they're lucky if they can find an unpaid internship these days, and then they have to figure out how to pay back tens of thousands of dollars in higher education costs. When we were that age it was a radically different story - we had ample opportunities because America was still making stuff. Only a tiny sliver of industry is left now and that's trickling away slowly but surely.

Sheltie said:

Most liberals are ultimately interested only in affirmative action.

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Lol...WHAT?? About half of my friend identify as Democrats or Democrat-aligned, and I can't remember the last time that subject came up. It's not in the news either. So idk where you're coming up with that.

Sheltie said:

We keep hearing them preach about how everything is rigged against so-and-so so there must be hiring quotas and preferential treatment for certain designated groups. It will never end. Liberalism in America only exists today to keep the affirmative action gravy train on its tracks.

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You must be hearing this through the Faux News filter. The leftists I know are concerned with the labor class as a whole. Only idiots focus on the microstructure of the massive problems that the entire labor class is facing these days. Like having nearly all of the middle-class labor jobs exported to China, for example.

Sheltie said:

I've worked for two different state agencies and I have a lot of friends who work for the federal govt in DC and I can tell you that there is no incentive to do well and succeed in the liberal vision for business and society. It's all about justifying pandering and handouts.

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Preposterous. Sure, there are the "Gene Steinberg neoliberals" who are allergic to an honest day's work and think the world owes them a living. But that's a small demographic.

All of the leftists that I know are focused on a fair and thriving economy so the middle class can be restored in this country, and they want to see an end to the interminable mass murder operations abroad. None of them want "hand outs," unless by that you mean "healthcare, and education for all citizens" which all of our closest allies already provide for their citizens.

In any case, the pitiful devolution of this debate only proves my original point: the corporations/billionaires that control our entire society have us arguing the fake right-left divide, instead of recognizing the real problem and uniting against it. The crisis in America is the same crisis as the Gilded Age - it's a top-bottom problem, not a left-right problem. And we'll never be able to fix it as long as the right-wing and the left-wing are seeing each other through parody-like lenses, and blaming each other for the problems created by a horrific and rapidly escalating level of economic inequality between the plutocrats and the labor class.

Well, that clears things up for those of us counting on our fingers and toes.

Not every conversation has to be a debate. Pitiful devolution of this debate.

Oh my hairy ball bag.

They refuse his right to defense but impeach him for obstruction, they abuse their own power to impeach him for abuse of power, they are ignoring one of our highest and most sacred element of our judicial system, "innocent until proven guilty"...If the Senate has a trial they should follow through in the same way our courts do, hearsay is not admissible in any trial...They will find there is nothing to justify this sham of an impeachment...Rightfully though, the Senate should dissolve this illegitimate impeachment and clear the President immediately...

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Like I said, I've worked for two different state agencies in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Each one had an HR person whose sole duty was to handle affirmative action and diversity issues. They had to periodically pass tests and be certified and they had to attend seminars.

The agencies were required to use SWaM (Small business, Woman owned, Minority owned) certified vendors/contractors. There is even an agency called the Virginia Department of Small Business and Supplier Diversity dedicated to this: Virginia Department of Small Business and Supplier Diversity – Virginia Department of Small Business and Supplier Diversity .

There is an entire bureaucratic labyrinth of groups and people involved in the minority recruitment process.

There are probably hundreds of people in the Richmond area alone who work directly for the state or as contractors who literally do nothing but handle minority issues. I'm not exaggerating.

As for the revolution so many people say we need in this country, give me just one example where a left wing/Marxist style of government has improved the lives of people. Seriously, please make your case... I'm listening.

Sheltie said:

Like I said, I've worked for two different state agencies in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Each one had an HR person whose sole duty was to handle affirmative action and diversity issues. They had to periodically pass tests and be certified and they had to attend seminars.

The agencies were required to use SWaM (Small business, Woman owned, Minority owned) certified vendors/contractors. There is even an agency called the Virginia Department of Small Business and Supplier Diversity dedicated to this: Virginia Department of Small Business and Supplier Diversity – Virginia Department of Small Business and Supplier Diversity .

There is an entire bureaucratic labyrinth of groups and people involved in the minority recruitment process.

There are probably hundreds of people in the Richmond area alone who work directly for the state or as contractors who literally do nothing but handle minority issues. I'm not exaggerating.

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Of all the gigantic systemic problems with our civilization....this is what you're worried about? Holy moly.

Sheltie said:

As for the revolution so many people say we need in this country, give me just one example where a left wing/Marxist style of government has improved the lives of people. Seriously, please make your case... I'm listening.

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The false equivalence embedded within your question is absurd: "a left wing/Marxist style of government." Those are two radically different concepts. I know tons of leftists and none of them are Marxists. Our structural societal problems are similar to pre-revolutionary France and pre-revolutionary America: a sliver of the population at the top of the economic food chain have seized control of our entire government and they're re-writing the laws to make themselves more rich and more powerful...at the expense of roughly 99% of the population. That's the problem - we don't have a representative government anymore; we have an oligarchy masquerading as a republic.

I don't see any way that the people can restore the representational form of government that the founding fathers intended, without a major uprising of at least the scale of the unionization movement.

nivek said:

They refuse his right to defense but impeach him for obstruction, they abuse their own power to impeach him for abuse of power, they are ignoring one of our highest and most sacred element of our judicial system, "innocent until proven guilty"...If the Senate has a trial they should follow through in the same way our courts do, hearsay is not admissible in any trial...They will find there is nothing to justify this sham of an impeachment...Rightfully though, the Senate should dissolve this illegitimate impeachment and clear the President immediately...
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It's a ludicrous farce; the Democrat equivalent of the birther movement. Apparently that's how the control system works - when the "Red team" wins, they throw the "Blue team" a stupid conspiracy theory to get them all ginned up and distracted, and vice versa. But in reality both teams work for the same ruling class, so the labor class loses more ground with every administration, until now our economy has a feudal-era wealth distribution and the working class is fighting each other tooth-and-claw over the scraps.

oal

Thomas R. Morrison said:

How can anyone who has seen the disintegration of America for the last 40-50 years delude themself into thinking that anything is getting better in this country under any of our totally corrupt presidents or Congresses?

This is why things are only going to keep getting worse, while half of our population is now either poor or in poverty: people allied to either the Republicans or the Democrats still think that we the people have allies in Washington. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The corporations and the billionaires have seized complete control of all levers of power in this country, and the people now have no significant influence over policy making. This has actually been empirically proven by this 2014 Princeton study on US policy making:

https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites...testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf


You've been just as brainwashed by the right-wing media, as the Democrats who think that Trump is some kind of Russian asset.

Both parties have been corrupting and eroding all of our rights, the meaning of the Constitution, our national security, and financial regulations, for decades. Our elections are little more than auctions, so regardless of which "side" wins any given election, the rich and powerful have only acquired more riches and more power. Where do they get those riches and powers from? Us.

So at this point our own government is spying on all of us all the time, our military budget is bloated beyond imagination while we wage endless mass murder operations abroad that only create more enemies all over the world, the Supreme Court has created unlimited corruption in our electoral process by opening the floodgates to bribes in the form of political "contributions," legitimate whistleblowers face jail and torture, both sides of the corporate news media are merely control systems pushing two brands of propaganda to keep us misinformed and emotionally overwrought over constant distractions, our entire manufacturing infrastructure and most of our jobs market have been exported overseas by corporate profiteers, the land, water and air are all horribly polluted with carcinogens, people have to risk bankruptcy to get a higher education or a major medical procedure, and the only things America is #1 in, is in imprisonment and defense spending.

I don't know what kind of blinders somebody needs in order to miss all of these very troubling and escalating problems, but I'm glad I don't own a pair.


Yeah the only people who don't seem to see through this farce are the soulless husks who run the Democratic party, like Pelosi and Schumer and Schiff etc. - the kind of people who had no problem with rigging the 2016 primary and plan on doing it again, because both parties now represent billionaire sociopaths like Jeff Bezos, which is why you probably paid more in taxes last year than Amazon (who paid nothing to the IRS on $11.2 billion in profits last year).

If thinking people can't see how totally screwed the people of America are right now, then nothing can be done about it. And that's the biggest problem of all - most people on both "sides" of the political spectrum still think that there are politicians in Washington looking out for them. I'd laugh if it weren't so disturbing.

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You speak as a paranoid one.
It is the rich that invest money that leads to manufacturing which need jobs as such the rich help create jobs. Without the rich we would not have much.
Also, many of the rich are self made rich and started with little or nothing.

There are many rich corporations that did not have to pay in federal tax, but did pay state and local taxes as well as taxes elsewhere.

We need term limits in politics and on judges where there are none now.
Defense spending is needed. The budget is NOT bloated out of control. Not even close!!
It has been on a serious decline until Trump turned it around.
Maybe you see no need for our military...dunno.
Pollution is drastically better than it was.
Jobs are coming back from over seas and the economy is at an almost all time high.
Locally we have many job openings and businesses are expanding.

The propaganda is on the liberal left and Democrats and it sounds like you are believing some of that propaganda.
What endless mass murder are you referring to abroad? Really!?

SOUL-DRIFTER said:

What endless mass murder are you referring to abroad? Really!?

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Pretty much agree except to say that we have blown up a hell of a lot of people all over the world in the last twenty years, some more deserving than others. Some who just got in the way, some went to the wrong wedding. Collateral damage. The news cycle doesn't give much air time to those who have developed a well deserved hatred for the West and US in particular, and all that tech hasn't really sanitized war.

Osama bin Laden was pissed for good own good reasons. If only he'd kept his activities under the umbrella we like to keep over all that oil and the money to buy all the weapons we make - excuse me, Saudi sensibilities - we wouldn't have ever heard his name. This isn't an anti-military rant, it's a rant about the rank amateurs who have been driving our foreign policy into the crapper for 20+ years. Money and big business driving nation states into taking sometimes precipitous action ain't new. This is usually when the Ike quote gets trotted out, and there's truth in it but it isn't the whole picture.

So now the media begins to go after the Senate, their hypocrisy knows no bounds...

American democracy’s Senate problem, explained
A huge — and growing — source of bias in the political system.

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The real impact of this clown show by the Democrats will be at the polls in November.

SOUL-DRIFTER said:

The real impact of this clown show by the Democrats will be at the polls in November.

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The impact the Dems and left in general have felt here in the UK has scattered them to the four corners. Dem leader lost her seat, leadership and job. Labour has a cult like faction called momentum on the inside, they are now seen as the problem and reason why they got smashed. The Labour leader is gone along with the shadow chancellor.

The way our systems are set to make the wealthy more wealthy has always been the case, probably stems from the strongest getting first dibs on the carcass and such like. Always an order.

Start it all over again and working with what we have we would arrive back here with both science and politics. Religion is a sketchy one though, theme would remain but the identities have been changed to protect the innocent.

Little do they know.

I graduated from college in the 1980's. At times I feel envious of my father's generation because it was so much easier to find a good paying job with security back in the 1950's and the 1960's during America's economic golden age. That said, my father's childhood was during the depression and he served in the Merchant Marines during WWII and in the Army during the Korean War.

If I could trade places with my Dad's generation, would I do it? Hell no!

Every generation in US history has had issues that have made life more difficult and issues that have made life easier. It's all in what we choose to focus on.

pigfarmer said:

Pretty much agree except to say that we have blown up a hell of a lot of people all over the world in the last twenty years, some more deserving than others.

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The impeachment is unjust, because Trump has committed no crime.

But it is equally asinine because Trump will be up for reelection in less than a year. Since the Dems hate him so much, they should have just focused on voting him out of office. Instead, they may have boosted his chance of winning a second term!

wwkirk said:

The impeachment is unjust, because Trump has committed no crime.

But it is equally asinine because Trump will be up for reelection in less than a year. Since the Dems hate him so much, they should have just focused on voting him out of office. Instead, they may have boosted his chance of winning a second term!

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Yeah I think they were hoping to tarnish his image and make him seem like the bad guy who will wreck our country but instead they have been very successful at solidifying his position and they made him look like the one being unjustly attacked...Now many democrats and independents will be voting for Trump along with his base which hasn't diminished at all and because of all of this it seems he is sure to be reflected to a second term...

I used to think that unfortunately someone may try to shoot him but now I doubt that will ever happen, he would quickly be made into a martyr by his base and gain more support throughout the country and sympathy by our traditional allies...

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Nancy Pelosi lost the impeachment standoff

After nearly a month of dithering, Nancy Pelosi is finally accepting defeat in her standoff with Mitch McConnell over impeachment. Despite insisting as recently as Thursday that she would wait to transmit the articles of impeachment against Donald Trump to the Senate until she was confident that the trial in the upper chamber would proceed on terms favorable to her party, she quietly backed down on Friday morning. Her letter to Democratic colleagues in the House announced that the articles would be sent next week even though McConnell has made it clear that none of her demands — testimony from additional witnesses, for example — would be honored or even considered.

Is anyone actually surprised by this outcome? How likely was it that Pelosi was ever going to change McConnell's mind? All of the leverage has been on his side from the beginning. He would be the one to decide how the trial would proceed, when it would begin, and how long it would last. Having to surrender the fate of judicial proceedings to the opposing party was how this was always fated to end.

Was a delay actually in her party's interest? It could be argued that she hoped to persuade a handful of Republican senators to insist upon subpoenas for witnesses and documents. This did not happen, nor was it ever very likely. By the time Pelosi acknowledged that McConnell had the upper hand, Senate Democrats had been publicly begging her to surrender for days. "I think the speaker should send the articles regardless," Senator Chris Coons (Del.) said on Tuesday. "I think the time has passed."

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https://nypost.com/2020/01/18/charl...-him/?utm_campaign=iosapp&utm_source=mail_app

If they had anything concrete the House would have presented it, three years of Presidency and they came up empty...If there were something, anything substantial and concrete showing a serious enough crime to remove the President all of these impeachment proceedings would have been bipartisan from the beginning...President Trump isn't the only President elect that has done shady things, Congress doesn't have clean hands either, none of them I bet, doesn't mean its right but it does show they are no better than him by the way this whole impeachment has carried on...

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