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You Can't Eat Civility: A Messge to Joe Biden and the Democrats

The devil, as they say, is in the details. Biden is who he is, not evil, not a firebrand, a career politician who thrives on compromise and civility.Perhaps the very worst thing one might conjecture is that time has passed him by. Nevertheless, as we all know, he is going to be our president for the next four years, so the question is yet unanswered; how do we move this man , and his party, leftward?

The unthinking response would be immediately, we cannot. Unlike many, my crystal ball is unavailable so, prior to the attempt I refuse to say never. Certainly there are democrats, and a slowly increasing number, like AOC and her “posse”, there is Senator Sanders , who may very well wind up in this administration, voices all primed to push for progressive policies and solutions.

But, if we do nothing, we will be a self fulfilling prophesy, and have no one to blame but ourselves. (though of course, most complainers never seem to get that insight).

Some here , myself included, think working towards multiple party representation may provide the ultimate solution to what ails democracy. Others, more I am certain, than admit it, remain democrats and they must shoulder a large burden indeed. As Ernesto Guevara once said ( a simile); I envy the people of the United States, as they live in the belly of the beast, they have he hardest , and most important job of all…
So envy the democratic loyalists and do not denigrate. I have never understood why some think an endless stream of negativity and hopelessness is of any benefit to the struggle.

We can make progress, we cannot make it as fast as some would have us do, but we can achieve goals, all that is required is participation, is voting intelligently, in building third parties, in demanding more of our legislators. Trump is ousted, that, I might remind everyone, is progress.

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Or, pass the hat around and collect a few millions that could help the lives of many in any city USA.

Lord knows the fat cats in the Democratic Congress could well afford it.

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Good ideas, Cos.

i hope you support work to implement a better voting system, like Ranked Choice Voting, or Approval Voting, or Score Voting, or STAR Voting, which make the electoral system more open to multiple parties.

These systems allow voters to weigh in on every candidate on the ballot instead of having to give their single precious vote to only one candidate; greatly reduce the pull toward strategic voting and lesser-evil voting; and are far less likely to resolve into a fixed duopoly than the Plurality Voting, first-past-the-post, winner-take-all voting system that predominates in the USA.

RCV is now in use for Maine elections, and AV is now in use in Fargo ND and St Louis MO.

There are organizations and activists working to promote each of these systems:

Ranked Choice Voting: ~https://www.fairvote.org/
Approval Voting: ~https://electionscience.org/
Score Voting: ~https://www.rangevoting.org/
STAR Voting: ~https://www.starvoting.us/

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What is more likely to happen…Biden will listen to Bernie and the Squad and then say “No Thanks”.

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maybe the 1980’s…?

alas, it appears we will still have about 70 million dumbf–ks voting against what is good for us & them…“Trumpchucks”

What makes Joe Sanberg think that Joe Biden is a decent man?

You know, it is not as though that were just a polite rhetorical gesture or a way to look magnanimus that we can all just dismiss on the basis of its providing a safe environment for discussion. The statement is right there, noun-verb-noun, as a declarative sentence.

I don’t imagine that the author really means to dismiss any of Biden’s high crimes and misdemeanors over this. You cannot eat civility, but you should not confuse it with decency either.

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After the price of oil quadrupled in 1973 and led to stagflation (high inflation + high unemployment), U.S. businesses discovered they could maintain both profits and productivity levels using fewer employees. Bad turned to worse for the working class once Reagan decided to crush the unions in the eighties.

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So, really? “Civility will not solve the problems facing the country?” What the fuck makes you think the Dems want to solve the problems facing the country? That’s the last thing they want to do. They work for the folks that live off those problems. I mean, get real.

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Democrats do not know how to be bold–only how to kowtow to the bribers calling the tunes

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Phred - You forgot the slap on the wrist.

The Green Party has already taken a position favoring ranked choice voting.

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raydelcamino, as I commented in the NYT just this weekend regarding Nicholas Kristof’s excellent column Sunday:

Alan MacDonald
Wells, MaineNov. 15

Nicholas, the ‘battle-ground states’ — which Chuck, George, Margaret, and all the Sunday media-talk ‘shows’ all talk about all the time, regarding both the parties’; positions, policies, and worst of all “Issues” — but there is, IMHO, only one battle-ground ‘state’:

We can be in the ‘state’ of being a democracy — or we can be in the ‘state’ of being an EMPIRE.

We have only one pair of closely related questions we need to answer regarding the ‘state’ of the world in which we will all be living-in very soon:

Global Empire or global democracy

and our 2nd related question is whether we want to:

Eliminate surplus people or institute ‘wealth reform’

With regard to the ‘state’ we all choose to live in, Supreme Court Justice, Louise Brandeis, famously advised well over half a century ago:

“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”

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Sorry I can’t link directly to this “Times” column, but CD seems not to allow what all other progressive web-sites allow and support.

He is at least a man with a real chance to rise to these extraordinarily dark times: he can listen, or at least hear the screams. For all her mistakes I wish Harris was President—Joe’s a swell guy but she’s the one with testicular fortitude.

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I might as well add-in another of my comments published Sunday regarding Nicholas Kristof’s same column in the “Times” addressing the need for an alternative and strategically focused “Anti-Empire Party”:

Alan MacDonald

Wells, MaineNov. 15

Nicholas, I’m almost at the point of blaming the entrenched and “dollar-drenched” Democratic Party (and particularly the DNC) in a similar manner as Lincoln spurred the overly-cautious General McClellan by telling him, “If you are not using the army, I would like to borrow it for a while.”

If the Democratic Party is so tentative, nay scared, to march as hard principled left as the opposing force is marching fascist hard right, then ‘we the American people’ should take Lincoln’s advice and simply relieve them of command and have the courage to go as far to the left as with Bernie and “Our Revolution” Against EMPIRE.

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So you’d prefer a more fascist neoliberal than Biden to be heading the Democratic party,…really?!

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That’s enough to make sure I don’t vote for them ever again,
almost makes me regret voting for them this last time.

Hell no…because we didn’t elect “Bernie & The Squad” as President.

And who might that have been? Because I’m absolutely CERTAIN that you couldn’t possibly be talking about SOCIALIST Bernie Sanders, who would not have stood a snowball’s chance in hell of winning ANY of the critical and essential battleground swing States that were so very crucial to President-Elect Biden’s Electoral College victory…like Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia.