2020 Presidential Election

[dark_crystal]

Originally Posted by kittygrrl

we should banish plastic from food products..the invasion of plastic into our air, water, and soil will eventually kill us all..the candidates who are sincere about climate change must include all the substances that are slowly poisoning us and our world.

I remember being like ten years old and starting to see the shift from glass to plastic food packaging-- starting with soda and then moving on to mustard and ketchup, then milk.

They advertised the packaging as "shatterproof and disposable," and even as a kid i was confused: since when was plastic disposable? And i have to wonder, now, how it was that all of the adults went "yes, good" and never hesitated at all to drop those giant two-liters into the garbage?

I mean, my grandparents lived on a farm, and had no utility service-- which means they were on well and septic for water and sewage, and disposed of all trash by burning it in a barrel.

That burn pile was always visible to us, and every time you walked past it you could see the stuff that did not fall to ash. When plastic packaging hit the shelves, that burn barrel was what i thought of.

Anyway here is some history
The Guardian: Opinion-- Plastic bottles are a recycling disaster. Coca-Cola should have known better

[...]In the past several decades, Coca-Cola has fought hard to prevent communities around the world implementing deposit systems that would require drinks firms to add a charge to the price of their products, to be refunded when customers returned the packaging to the distributor or retailer.

Deposit systems began to spread in the US in the 1970s, as throwaway steel and aluminium cans replaced the returnable glass bottles that once dominated the beer and soft drink industries.
This switch to throwaways, which started with brewers in the 1930s and matured in the soft drinks industry in the 1960s, was in part driven by a consumer culture that craved convenience. It was also driven by economics, as big beverage companies sought to achieve economies of scale by consolidating their bottling networks, and realised they could save money if they didn’t have to truck returnable bottles back to factories.

But those companies did not like deposit systems because they believed government-imposed price hikes could hit sales. Coke, Pepsi and others organised to counter deposit laws. Their campaign was successful, largely because of a promise they brought to debates: kerbside recycling. In federal and state government hearings, Coca-Cola and others argued that municipal recycling systems, if funded and supported by government agencies, would eliminate the need for deposits. By the mid-80s, this argument had won the day.

How did this system stack up against the alternatives, considering the full ecological impact of reclaiming returnable glass bottles, including washing them? In 1969 Coca-Cola attempted to answer that question by asking the Midwest Research Institute to conduct a life-cycle analysis of packaging. The firm looked at various types of throwaway containers, and compared them with returnable glass bottles on almost every measure: energy expenditure, waste generation, water pollution, air emissions and more

This study, which the investigators reproduced for the US Environmental Protection Agency in 1974, concluded that no throwaway “container will be improved to match or surpass that of [the 10-trip returnable glass bottle] in the near future”.

Coca-Cola nevertheless placed its future in the plastic bottle. Paul Austin, then company president, explained this was because Coca-Cola believed recycling systems would allow the company to reclaim much of the plastic it used.

The beauty of history is that we can look back and see if Austin’s bet paid off. Using the US as a case study, the message is clear: failure to offer financial incentives has resulted in a wasteful recycling system. Over 25 years since kerbside recycling began, 70% of plastic containers are never reclaimed. Just 30% end up being recycled.

Basically, we trashed our oceans to preserve one company's profit margins.

So, who failed? Was it the company who shifted half its responsibility to "municipal recycling systems, if funded and supported by government agencies"?

Capitalist rhetoric says we have to blame the consumer. Governments would have better-funded and more successful recycling programs if consumers demanded them, or even used them, but they didn't and they don't.

That is a tactic for maintaining the status quo. Anytime the rhetoric can shift the blame to a million end-users of a product instead of tracing a problem back to its root and holding the original decision-makers responsible, change becomes less possible.

I mean, the lag time for my family between all products shifting to plastic and the arrival of our first curbside bin was at least a decade. Shouldn't someone have required Coke to shift their packaging gradually, market area by market area, as recycling became available in each area? We should not have had plastic on our supermarket shelves until we had bins on our curbs.

[kittygrrl]

Not sure who will end up being the Democratic nominee but if it's Biden I hope he can persuade Harris to take the Vice Presidency or if not her then Klobuchar ....i hate to say this...............................but it's our turn

[cathexis]

Let's not let our guard down. We still have to Get dt out of the White House. Not referring to the election, necessarily. Who's to say that he will give up the power without a fight. Would not be surprised if he pulls an advance Executive Order, carefully worded, to give the President additional power or he even ignores the election.

He might require force to get ejected. The US has never encountered a President who behaves this way, stomping all over the Constitution. We need to remain vigilant.

Remember, Hitler was initially elected to office.

[kittygrrl]

Beto did fairly well and seemed coherent last night but anyone can seem to be for a few minutes at a time...i'm hesitate to believe power will not eventually corrupt even those who seem the most ethical choice in our minds..gosh, i think, i still have GOT dust on my thoughts

[Martina]

Hate to be guilty of schadenfreude, but this strikes me as funny as hell.

Not 'born to be in it': Beto O’Rourke strikes more humble tone as buzz fades

Https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...eboot-campaign

He's apologizing. He hasn't done anything wrong really. People just aren't responding to him or his middle of the road message. Apologies won't help. I can see why he's embarrassed though.

[BullDog]

I don't know why people like Beto and Pete Buttigieg think they have the right to run for President of the United States. I don't have anything against either one of them but I don't see how either one of them has enough experience. I sure wish we had actual job requirements for the position - that would have ruled out the orange monstrosity who is obviously in no way shape or form qualified. There are stricter job requirements to be a manager at a fast food restaurant than to be president of the United States.

[A. Spectre]

Joe Bidens' mishandling of the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings is enough for me to disregard his candidacy. Allow me to recap for some here who do not recall or needs a jog of the memory.

What did Biden do during the hearings?

He did little to almost nothing from stopping the committee members from attacking Professor Hill. The Republicans were the most relentless. Arlen Specter asked her why she didn’t report the behavior to HR and said that discussing “large breasts” at work was common. Howell Heflin asked if she was a “scorned woman” and if she had “militant attitude relative to the area of civil rights” or a “martyr complex.” Charles Grassley accused her of lifting the pubic hair story from The Exorcist.

Second, Biden failed to call additional witnesses who could have corroborated Hill’s testimony. One of those women, Angela Wright Shannon, told Roll Call in 2016 that it was probably a good thing that she didn’t testify. “I don’t think I could have maintained the grace and dignity of Anita Hill,” she said. Hill, in 2014, said Biden declining to put the other witnesses in front of the committee was “a disservice to me” and “a disservice more importantly, to the public,” as allowing those women to testify would have “helped the public to understand sexual harassment. He failed to do that.”

You want to talk about hubris when it relates to IQ 45, I personally see similar hubris in Sanders and Biden albeit much less detrimental to society. It is time for the old white men to sit down.

[dark_crystal]

Originally Posted by BullDog

I don't know why people like Beto and Pete Buttigieg think they have the right to run for President of the United States. I don't have anything against either one of them but I don't see how either one of them has enough experience. I sure wish we had actual job requirements for the position - that would have ruled out the orange monstrosity who is obviously in no way shape or form qualified. There are stricter job requirements to be a manager at a fast food restaurant than to be president of the United States.

Obama wasn't all that qualified, either. Or Reagan.

[dark_crystal]

Originally Posted by dark_crystal

Basically, we trashed our oceans to preserve one company's profit margins.

So, who failed? Was it the company who shifted half its responsibility to "municipal recycling systems, if funded and supported by government agencies"?

Capitalist rhetoric says we have to blame the consumer. Governments would have better-funded and more successful recycling programs if consumers demanded them, or even used them, but they didn't and they don't.

That is a tactic for maintaining the status quo. Anytime the rhetoric can shift the blame to a million end-users of a product instead of tracing a problem back to its root and holding the original decision-makers responsible, change becomes less possible.

I mean, the lag time for my family between all products shifting to plastic and the arrival of our first curbside bin was at least a decade. Shouldn't someone have required Coke to shift their packaging gradually, market area by market area, as recycling became available in each area? We should not have had plastic on our supermarket shelves until we had bins on our curbs.

The Guardian: Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals. By Martin Lukacs

Would you advise someone to flap towels in a burning house? To bring a flyswatter to a gunfight? Yet the counsel we hear on climate change could scarcely be more out of sync with the nature of the crisis.

The email in my inbox last week offered thirty suggestions to green my office space: use reusable pens, redecorate with light colours, stop using the elevator.

Back at home, done huffing stairs, I could get on with other options: change my lightbulbs, buy local veggies, purchase eco-appliances, put a solar panel on my roof.

And a study released on Thursday claimed it had figured out the single best way to fight climate change: I could swear off ever having a child.

These pervasive exhortations to individual action — in corporate ads, school textbooks, and the campaigns of mainstream environmental groups, especially in the west — seem as natural as the air we breathe. But we could hardly be worse-served.

While we busy ourselves greening our personal lives, fossil fuel corporations are rendering these efforts irrelevant. The breakdown of carbon emissions since 1988? A hundred companies alone are responsible for an astonishing 71%. You tinker with those pens or that panel; they go on torching the planet.

The freedom of these corporations to pollute – and the fixation on a feeble lifestyle response – is no accident. It is the result of an ideological war, waged over the last 40 years, against the possibility of collective action. Devastatingly successful, it is not too late to reverse it.

The political project of neoliberalism, brought to ascendence by Thatcher and Reagan, has pursued two principal objectives. The first has been to dismantle any barriers to the exercise of unaccountable private power. The second had been to erect them to the exercise of any democratic public will.

Its trademark policies of privatization, deregulation, tax cuts and free trade deals: these have liberated corporations to accumulate enormous profits and treat the atmosphere like a sewage dump, and hamstrung our ability, through the instrument of the state, to plan for our collective welfare.

Anything resembling a collective check on corporate power has become a target of the elite: lobbying and corporate donations, hollowing out democracies, have obstructed green policies and kept fossil fuel subsidies flowing; and the rights of associations like unions, the most effective means for workers to wield power together, have been undercut whenever possible.

At the very moment when climate change demands an unprecedented collective public response, neoliberal ideology stands in the way. Which is why, if we want to bring down emissions fast, we will need to overcome all of its free-market mantras: take railways and utilities and energy grids back into public control; regulate corporations to phase out fossil fuels; and raise taxes to pay for massive investment in climate-ready infrastructure and renewable energy — so that solar panels can go on everyone’s rooftop, not just on those who can afford it.

Neoliberalism has not merely ensured this agenda is politically unrealistic: it has also tried to make it culturally unthinkable. Its celebration of competitive self-interest and hyper-individualism, its stigmatization of compassion and solidarity, has frayed our collective bonds. It has spread, like an insidious anti-social toxin, what Margaret Thatcher preached: “there is no such thing as society.”

Studies show that people who have grown up under this era have indeed become more individualistic and consumerist. Steeped in a culture telling us to think of ourselves as consumers instead of citizens, as self-reliant instead of interdependent, is it any wonder we deal with a systemic issue by turning in droves to ineffectual, individual efforts?

[Martina]

And in the US, it's mainstream Dems who've lead the way on this. It was all meritocracy instead of workers organize.

There's an interesting critique of yoga now as a sort of a personal empowerment while ignoring not just poor people (duh), but a dying planet. Given how many of us are suffering from lifestyle related illnesses, it's hard to fault people for trying to live and be well. Also yoga can be anti-consumerist. But if you think of the resources that were poured into it by the well educated elite while so little energy was directed at climate change at a time when it would have mattered. . . .

I think what appalls people is their belief that yoga or meditation would lead to a better world. It definitely leads to a better life, but does it turn people away from politics and social activism?

Perhaps. Certainly there is something solipsistic in these and other practices. But I don't think the ideology is the explanation. It's that in the US, it is a movement formed around the interests of the professional classes. People do not betray their class interests easily. People of all races put class interest first. People born into poverty who have entered the professional class, their political behavior is almost indistinguishable from those whose parents were from the professional classes.

Neoliberalism is the ideology of the professional class within the construct of Capitalism. It does nothing to stop the inevitable self destructive arc that is the heart of Capitalism and that will eventually take most of them down too, but for the last fifty years it has made their lives more flush and given them power. The Cheney's of the world don't die with 100 million in the bank. But they got to drive the machine that is making the wealthy wealthier. Why that feels so good I can't say.

We endlessly criticize poor white people for voting against their best interests, but the professional classes have too by supporting Clinton and others, including Republicans, who tell them they have won the meritocracy sweepstakes while the biggest transfer of wealth has been from the professional classes to the extremely wealthy.

If the working class is desperate, the professionals are showing their pathetic asses. The college cheating scandal tells you all you need to know about what they will do to keep their edge.

[ksrainbow]

I may find your efforts on your local/state/national level more appealing for the House and Senate races.

Why I ask is this...Your voting record is public for all local/state/national issues from your past to present.

IF your record can not be sustained/maintained in the current legislation: then maybe going back to your initial impact on positive policy change can/may/will impact the next. Your vote will secure your base there.

One step at a time-

Ks-

[dark_crystal]

Originally Posted by Martina

Neoliberalism is the ideology of the professional class within the construct of Capitalism. It does nothing to stop the inevitable self destructive arc that is the heart of Capitalism and that will eventually take most of them down too, but for the last fifty years it has made their lives more flush and given them power. The Cheney's of the world don't die with 100 million in the bank. But they got to drive the machine that is making the wealthy wealthier. Why that feels so good I can't say.

First, a caveat:

It Takes A Village To Determine The Origins Of An African Proverb

"If you want to go fast, go alone; but if you want to go far, go together."

That was one piece of advice passed along at the just-concluded Democratic National Convention. The words were spoken by New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, who said he was quoting "an African saying."

The proverb got a lot of retweets. And some criticism. One Twitter user, Christiana A. Mbakwe, said, "If someone starts an aphorism with 'there's an African saying' it's probably a mythical quote misattributed to a whole continent."

That wasn't the only purportedly African proverb uttered at the DNC. Hillary Clinton referred to her 1996 book It Takes a Village, whose title is said to be part of another saying from Africa: "It takes a village to raise a child."

Second: despite that caveat, that "African Proverb" has been on my mind a lot

"If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together."

We’re here, at the end times, because we did not go together.

The patriarchs wanted to go fast, instead, and now they’re stuck. They can’t escape their fate unless they go back to the first people-- women-- they left behind and pick them up. Then the next, the next, and the next until everyone has their shoes tied and their backpack on, now we all step off in unison, one, two.

The thing is, they knew what they were doing. They knew going fast would ruin everything-- that’s why every tradition has an apocalypse narrative.

This consumption, this population-- even before the pollution, the extinctions-- they knew: this can’t go on forever. Infinite growth on a finite planet always had to end in catastrophe. The math was there before the problems manifested.

They distracted us from the math by teaching women to think beyond the planet. They told us not to be worldly, your reward is in heaven. Be fruitful and multiply!

And the patriarchs most emphatically are not going to go back and correct the mistake of choosing fast over far...
They would rather die. They have decided. They would rather all of us die than consider sharing anything at all.

Social media is prime example of going fast when you should have gone together. The men that invented social media were coders. They did not bother to ask any social scientists what the pitfalls could be or how best to proceed. Now we have bad actors poisoning our brains.

[dark_crystal]

Originally Posted by dark_crystal

"If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together."

We’re here, at the end times, because we did not go together.

The patriarchs wanted to go fast, instead, and now they’re stuck. They can’t escape their fate unless they go back to the first people-- women-- they left behind and pick them up. Then the next, the next, and the next until everyone has their shoes tied and their backpack on, now we all step off in unison, one, two.

This is why it pisses me off when people act like social justice is a distraction from more important issues, that we are wasting time on it.

Clearly i am on twitter TOO MUCH, but i think about this tweet a lot:

"Conservatives: Lets round up Muslims and put them in camps. Liberals: HIRE MORE WOMEN GUARDS."

(@historyinflicks)

The implication here is that liberals can't see the forest for the trees. We are so focused on equality that we can't see that the system we're trying to make equal is already fucked up.

i get it, but "hire more female guards" is not as ridiculous as implied. The point is not that we need to hire more female anything NOW, but that EVERY job should have been half women from the beginning.

There were decisions made centuries ago that are part of what will destroy us, and those decisions were made and implemented by a very narrow slice of humanity. And now, when we are in a place where we have to try to undo those decisions, the progressive wing of that very narrow slice is insisting that worrying about gender inequality is something that should wait until the planet is not on fire.

The planet is on fire because we let it go on as long as it did. It is clear from the actions of the GOP that THEY are willing to leverage racism and misogyny to distract THEIR base long enough to finish the job of burning the planet. Whether progressive men like it or not, we're completely gridlocked by bigotry.

If we have to spend another decade fixing bigotry, we're going to be a lot closer to the abyss before we start clawing our way back from it, but when bigotry is how they did it and how they keep doing it, bigotry is what you have to fix. People are only in denial of this because it is so monumental. How do you even start?

By electing a woman President, duh.

SERIOUSLY: DUH! They're criminalizing our bodies, the GOP used our bodies and Obama's birth certificate to buy the entire South, and white male Democrats still think they might be the answer?

I felt different a week ago, but post-Alabama/Georgia? Biden, Bernie, Beto, De Blasio, Hickenlooper, Insley, Ryan, etc. ALL need to just sit their asses down.

There is no qualification they can have that we need more than we a female face in that office. It is (and it WAS, in 2016) worth nominating a woman just because she's a woman-- we have reached a point (especially post-Trump, who couldn't be less qualified) where the symbolism really does matter more than the individual's qualifications. "No more old white dudes" really is the most powerful message we can send.

Just looking at the rage that came out when we had a black President, and how that rage has led the ragers into following the shittiest person alive into global suicide, should be enough to destroy the argument that it shouldn't matter whether the Democratic candidate is a white man.

It does suck that we have to fix racism and sexism before we can fix the planet, but that is not liberals being distracted, that is us fighting the battle on the ground where our enemies pitched it. They are (very, very successfully) using racism and sexism to destroy the planet.

Thinking we can skip fixing that and fix the planet first is the exact same old "going fast instead of far" mindset that invented social media without wondering whether you could rig an election with it.

Warren 2020

[C0LLETTE]

Branding.

Love the "The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act".
Hate "Obamacare".

Love "Social Democracy".
Hate "Socialism".

Just a thought:
I think many would support "social democracy" if they really understood what it meant and it didn't have the word "social" in it to raise the spectre of "socialism". Branding seems to work in America so maybe it's time to rebrand and move ahead.

Or, just wait it out:
"The big story here is the growing enthusiasm for socialism among younger Americans. Whereas only 27 per cent of over-65s have a positive view of socialism, according to an Axios poll conducted in January, 61 per cent of those aged 18-24 do."
Which doesn't mean everyone understands the term ( some thought it meant being "sociable") but at least it's in the right direction.

Globe and Mail May 17, 2019