“Claiming that immigrants are making things worse for U.S.-born workers is often used as an intentional distraction from dynamics that are actually hurting working people—such as weak labor standards and enforcement, anti-worker deregulation, weak labor law that fails to protect workers’ rights to unions and collective bargaining in the face of coordinated and well-funded attacks, and other dynamics that result in too much power in the hands of corporations and employers.”
I didn’t think Ezra Klein was such an idiot.
Obamacare was Bob Dole & Mitt Romney’s Health Care plan. It’s not a solution, it’s a huge payday for Health Insurers. It mandated that we buy their shitty product, at their outrageous pricing—but hey, that’s what allows those executive bonus, all while they’re all about denying claims, making dealing with them and their claims and denials and appeals as purposefully opaque as they can… and why not? They’ve got a whole phalanx of lawyers and layers of legalese to back them up. You’ve got just you. You call in and get someone who might seem nice and friendly but who has no actual power to do anything other than make sympathetic cooing noises. If you get past them, you get the guys who’s mission it is to deflect and deny. All this entire aparatus; it serves no purpose. Hundreds of thousands of people who spend their working lives—all that potential—harming their fellow human beings. Causing needless suffering, stress, soul crushing financial ruin, and death to so many. All of *that* work/time/intellect/industry does two things - make a rich person richer, and make the rest of us suffer.
at Union Square, San Francisco
https://www.instagram.com/p/Cg2_DklLxIA/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
(via emergentfutures)
“Economies in which people have to struggle their whole lives to afford the basics — housing, healthcare, education, retirement — are not going to make it. They are going to end up trapped, like America, in increasingly vicious spirals of fascism, and all the things which make it go, stupidity, hate, greed, resentment, violence, brutality. Nobody should have to live that way. It’s medieval. Just because you have a flat screen TV and a Playstation, doesn’t mean you’re still not a serf — and that you don’t feel like it. And people like that lash out at the world around them, in the ways they can, which usually means taking it out on those even more powerless than them.”— How the Economy is Designed to Keep You Poor and Powerless
Dinner: Photographs in Reverse (at Twin Peaks (San Francisco))
https://www.instagram.com/p/CL3XtDNp4rK/?igshid=15hkt6sis7mc
It should be no surprise why people follow these apeshit crazy conspiracy groups - it makes them feel special, it makes them feel like they belong to something bigger than their sad pathetic lives. Their “righteous” cause elicits a fervor and devotion and distances them from reality, as they cannot understand how anyone would not want to save the children or whatever bait they bit, hook line and sinker. They get to be part of an “elite” in-group all while bringing down those with actual real power.
It’s sad that she once had friends whom she has chased away—but I don’t blame them… there’s only so much rabid crazy you can take spewing from someone like this before you just have to shut them out.
I’m sure whoever “Q” is is likely laughing their ass off at how they trolled millions of people. Yeah, there are plenty of Americans who are stupid and gullible and perfectly primed to lap this kind of shit up; they get their weekly lies and hypocrisy from the pulpit and they get multiple daily doses from Fox News.
Murdoch and the Christian right and Q have mentally harmed at least tens of millions of Americans. They need to pay.
“This contest is not new, of course. In many ways, it has defined the American experience. It’s embedded in founding documents that could simultaneously proclaim all men equal and yet count a slave as three-fifths of a man. It finds expression in our earliest court opinions, as when the chief justice of the United States bluntly explains to Native Americans that their tribe’s rights to convey property aren’t enforceable, because the court of the conqueror has no capacity to recognize the just claims of the conquered. It’s a contest that’s been fought on the fields of Gettysburg and Appomattox but also in the halls of Congress; on a bridge in Selma, Alabama; across the vineyards of California; and down the streets of New York—a contest fought by soldiers but more often by union organizers, suffragists, Pullman porters, student leaders, waves of immigrants, and LGBTQ activists, armed with nothing more than picket signs, pamphlets, or a pair of marching shoes. At the heart of this long-running battle is a simple question: Do we care to match the reality of America to its ideals? If so, do we really believe that our notions of self-government and individual freedom, equality of opportunity and equality before the law, apply to everybody? Or are we instead committed, in practice if not in statute, to reserving those things for a privileged few?”
“The whole thing seems similar to the perpetual freakouts over Cancel Culture, which usually attempt to erase the notion that there are boundaries on what it’s acceptable to say in our society, and we’re all just fighting over where they are. In much the same way, there are boundaries to what kind of religious beliefs you can hold while occupying an office of the public trust. If someone were to believe that their Christian faith tells them only white people should enjoy the full rights of citizenship, they would be totally OK to serve as a senator or a Supreme Court justice in, say, 1857. If they were up for the job today, however, it would be perfectly reasonable—in fact, absolutely necessary—to interrogate them about how their religious beliefs inform their intent to enforce a racial hierarchy. It’s not imposing a “religious test,” which would be unconstitutional, to attempt to marshal public opinion against this person’s fitness for holding office based on their expressed beliefs. It’s democracy. The reason we haven’t had a Satanist president is not that they’re banned, but that most Americans do not find those kind of religious beliefs acceptable.”— Marco Rubio Attack on Raphael Warnock Exposes Religious Faith Hypocrisy
“Defenders of capitalism generally make three broad historical claims: first, that it has fostered rapid scientific and technological development; second, that however much it may throw enormous wealth to a small minority, it does so in such a way that increases overall prosperity for everyone; third, that in doing so, it creates a more secure and democratic world. It is quite clear that in the twenty-first century, capitalism is not doing any of these things. In fact, even its proponents are increasingly retreating from any claim that it is a particular good system, falling back instead on the claim that it is the only possible system—or at least, the only possible system for a complex, technologically sophisticated society such as our own.”
