The GOP tax bill—the amount of money that was given to corporations and the rich would have paid for Medicare for all and healthcare for every man, woman, and child in this country for the next five years. So it’s there. And additionally, we added several hundred billion dollars additionally to our military spending, when the military didn’t even ask for it. They didn’t even want that additional spending, but we lopped it on there—and that could have financed public college tuition for years as well. So we actually have the money for these things.
It’s all about who has the courage to change the status quo and realign our priorities
We actually have the money for these things.
The US spends more on healthcare than the UK for less coverage. This isn’t utopian socialism or my usual demands for world peace and a pony. This is a fact. Your public and compulsory schemes cost more than ours and you don’t even get universal healthcare free at the point of delivery. You pay more and get less. This is a bad deal. You could pay less and get more. People mocking the idea and calling it communism or a money sink just can’t count.
AOC is making a broader point though that spending doesn’t matter when your economy is as massive as the US’s economy is and the “household” metaphor for a country’s budget is inaccurate.
The GOP tax bill—the amount of money that was given to corporations and the rich would have paid for Medicare for all and healthcare for every man, woman, and child in this country for the next five years. So it’s there. And additionally, we added several hundred billion dollars additionally to our military spending, when the military didn’t even ask for it. They didn’t even want that additional spending, but we lopped it on there—and that could have financed public college tuition for years as well. So we actually have the money for these things.
Consider this: If the next EPA administrator is just focused on deregulation, rather than deregulation, self-aggrandizement, and use of government services and funds to address their own financial problems and vanities, then we can focus our fight on deregulation, instead of Scott Pruitt’s firehose of badness. His replacement will be awful, but his resignation is good regardless.
Take the wins when they come.
Also it means Trump can’t fire Sessions and make Pruitt attorney general, which removes one of the ways he could get out of the Mueller investigation.
Maybe I’ll get back to this later, but I have an issue with the framing in this I can’t even start to articulate rn.
It’s a very pragmatic and calculated framing, but familiar. I talked about this on my last podcast. On one hand it’s great to see all these white people showing up, when say eight years ago, I’d go to an immigration protest and there’d be hardly any. On the other hand, what is that going to translate to? To really help immigrants and refugees in the here and now, we need to translate all this energy into policy proposals and successful bills and so on. If you’re a refugee family and you’re trying to get your mom into the US from somewhere like Dadaab none of this protest stuff means jack shit to you unless it produces a positive change in your life. And for that to happen, Democrats need to get back some degree of power AND there needs to be a concerted effort to make them keep their immigration promises. The fact that there are so many Democratic politicians with deep ties to immigrant communities makes this project possible, but it still can’t be ignored or taken for granted.
I can’t read the article because it’s behind a paywall but what you said on the podcast reminded me of when I went to a meeting about helping out undocumented people in my local community. There were a lot of immigration activists and faith leaders there. One thing that was emphasized repeatedly by the people who had been going to the meetings for years was that they were happy everyone was there (we were in an Elementary school classroom and it was so crowded that about half the people there couldn’t find seats) but disappointed that only a handful of people had been putting in the work during Obama. They also reiterated that White English speaking citizens needed to stay active in the fight and not disappear when there is a Democratic administration again.
If Democrats take the House, their current ranking member of the Financial Services Committee becomes the chair of the committee, and has the power to subpoena Trump’s bank records. That member is Maxine Waters. Vote.
Your periodic (almost daily at this point, lbr) non-sims reminder to Americans to PLEASE VOTE, remind your friends and family to vote, all those good things.
If you were registered to vote a year ago or more, check and make sure you are still registered, especially if you are a naturalized citizen. Voter rolls are being purged like whoa.
Don’t assume you’re still registered. Please please please check, and do it soon, because some states have cut-offs.
On the pro-Trump Internet last weekend, the #WalkAway hashtag was the nexus of an exciting idea: that “millions of Americans are walking away from the Democrat party,” as one pro-Trump account put it. Breitbart said that the hashtag had gone viral; the Epoch Times said it represented a “growing movement” of Democrats — particularly minority Democrats — abandoning their party, and liberalism.
#WalkAway, the hashtag, went viral this weekend, as something of a delayed reaction to a popular video renouncing liberalism by Brandon Straka, who described himself to the Epoch Times as a New York hairdresser and aspiring actor. The video, posted in late May, now has more than 1 million views on Facebook. In it, Straka says he was once a liberal, but now he is not.
“If you are a person of color, an LGBT person, a woman or an American immigrant, the Democratic Party wants you to know you are a victim,” Straka says in the video. “This is perhaps the Democratic Party’s greatest, and most insidious, lie.”
“I am walking away. And I encourage all of you to do the same. Walk away,” Straka concludes. The video was meant to spark a movement; this weekend’s going viral of the hashtag has been cited as proof that Straka has succeeded.
As the Internet fragments, our understanding of what it means to go “viral” has become complicated, and increasingly meaningless. A hashtag claiming to capture a movement among liberals has gone viral, in this case, almost exclusively on the right-wing Internet, as a reinforcement of one of its binding ideas.
There’s little actual evidence to suggest that #WalkAway represents a mass conversion of millions — or even thousands — of Democrats to the Trump Train since Straka’s video. Instead, the #WalkAway hashtag is going Conservative Internet viral on the same hope driving recent pro-Trump support of Kanye West: that the country is on the verge of a mass conversion to conservative thought, a Great Awakening of sorts. And the thing about anticipating an awakening is that it never actually has to happen for the idea of it to go viral.
One of the most viral #WalkAway tweets, for example, read as the generational reverse of the “woke toddler” meme:
Image via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, captured July 1.
The tweet had more than 16,000 retweets by Sunday. However, as my colleague Dave Weigel noted, the account appears to be a bot, an impersonation or both: @sofialimited’s profile picture was stolen from a book cover by someone with a different name. The account has since been suspended from Twitter.
Other viral tweets on the hashtag came from real people who aren’t exactly recent converts. Another popular #WalkAway tweet comes from CJ Pearson, a teen who describes himself as “the left’s youngest nightmare” on his website. His #WalkAway tweet has more than 10,000 retweets.
The Democratic Party is the party of slavery. The party of Jim Crow. The party of segregation. The party of the KKK.
Democrats walked away from black folks long ago. Now, it’s our time to #WalkAway.
Pearson has been right-wing Internet famous for a while now: The teen helped to campaign for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) in 2015, and has gone serially viral for his videos and Twitter stunts targeting former president Barack Obama.
By Monday, the conversation about #WalkAway followed two familiar, diverging lines of thought: Conservatives were praising the hashtag as proof of a mass conversion in the works, one that they accused Twitter of artificially suppressing from its “trending” tab. Meanwhile, others were pointing to evidence that the hashtag itself was being amplified artificially by bots to seem bigger than it was.
#WalkAway went viral because anticipating a mass conversion of Democrats to its side is an idea that the pro-Trump Internet loves to share. Those who represent the possibility of this conversion become conservative celebrities.
When Kanye West tweeted praise of Candace Owens — a conservative commentator who believes that black people have been brainwashed by the media to vote for Democrats — the right-wing Internet saw an opportunity for a mainstream prophet, whose huge platform would bring around the End Times for liberalism.
When PewDiePie, a YouTuber with more than 50 million subscribers, followed Alex Jones’s Twitter account, the Infowars personality aggressively courted him for an interview on his show. If Jones could reach PewDiePie’s young audience, the movement could grow.
The pro-Trump Internet is really good at convincing its audience that going viral signals popular opinion, that its movement is and always will be #winning. In this case, #WalkAway is the answer to the possibility of a Blue Wave in the 2018 midterms. It doesn’t need to be true to be effective. After all, the hashtag has now become an article in The Washington Post.
Reminds me of #notyourshield (a fake hashtag started by white men pretending to be women and/or POC) from Gamergate and probably appeals to the same sort of people.
PORTLAND REPORTBACK! When DHS cleared the part of the camp that was blocking the ICE driveway here in Portland last Thursday, they hired a pressure washing company to come wash the chalk messages off the ground. The company showed up, realized they were, in a very tiny way, aiding ICE, and they walked off the job. And then they brought pizza back for the folks in the OccupyICE camp beside the building.
Did refusing to wash away those messages of “Abolish ICE” and “Families belong together” actually make a tangible difference for the currently separated families and the people currently facing deportation? No. But did it encourage and inspire us? Does seeing a company refuse service to ICE make it seem more possible for others to do the same? Yes, absolutely.So refuse to wash the ICE building. Refuse to sell tires to the transportation company that leases the buses to ICE. Refuse to operate the plane flying the children to the camps. Refuse to be part of the system. Don’t just “do your job,” follow your ethics and hang on to your humanity.
So a lot of American xenophobia is informed by the fact that our news over-reports crimes committed by immigrants in Europe to such an extent that if you watch a lot of cable news you’ll deadass get the impression that every major European city is full of gangs of immigrants who just run around killing people all day and the European cops just watch it happen like “Alas, because of political correctness I can do nothing, if we try and stop and bloodbath we’ll be executed for racism.”
Which is of course, like, not true even a little bit, but it’s such a strongly-held belief that I’m not sure how to combat it.
I got into it the other day with a dude who was all like, “Yeah, it’s horrible that ICE is putting babies in baby jail and selling them for money, but isn’t it a necessary step to prevent the streets running red with blood like what’s happening in Europe??”
And you can’t just be all simplistic high-school-debate-team about it and just tell the poor fool that, no, that isn’t happening, because real-world political work is more complicated than that, but I ain’t yet got the hang of it.
California too for non-Californians. News reports California like it’s an apocalyptic wasteland. California also is “minority-majority” and conservatives link the two even if they’re not explicitly linked in the reporting.
Trump is probably gonna say he’s draining the swamp because Pruitt is finally gone. After 17 months.
I almost wonder if he was done in because of the scandal where he didn’t pay the interns back. Those are children of upper and upper middle class parents that probably have a lot of influence.
Rush's tumblr archive 