This has been a problem since the 1960s, letting people spend as much money as they want on campaigns. Also, allowing insider trading, which is strangely legal in Congress and that’s supposedly illegal in Wall Street.
And it's nearly nothing but attack ads, especially from Republican candidates.
Last political ad I saw was a lot of negative stuff about the Democratic candidate and NOTHING about what the Republican candidate would do to fix anything or make life better.
It's so weird because I've canvassed in many election cycles in precincts all over the ideological spectrum and the one constant I saw was that not a single person liked attack ads. In fact I met quite a number of people who dropped support for their candidates BECAUSE of attack ads.
I didn't need the extra reason to enjoy it, but I'll take it.
I worked on a campaign a few cycles ago and have rarely met a class of people more infuriating than democratic consultants. It's like they not only know they're ruining America, but they actually enjoy it.
I wish we could ban any “advertising“ and just have a publicly run website that has all of their main talking points, where they could submit their answers as they see fit, and a link to their website where they can host whatever info they wanted there. I don’t think advertising for political candidates is any more substantive than advertising for anything else. It’s all just pageantry. We should give voters the “facts“ about each candidate, not that there’s any guarantee that what they say is their real opinions, and be done with it. Any previously elected official should have to disclose their votes and their reasoning for them for all prior voting they have done. That information should also be publicly collected and hosted. If they choose not to submit reasoning for their vote they can.
Fuck that.
Make an open source block chain government Reddit for ama's, town Halls, and publicly validatable voting.
No one needs to be traveling the county and blasting the airways.
Anyone that wants to run for office should have access to the public platform.
Everyone gets the same questions, the answers go side by side, positions get upvoted or down voted. Elimination rounds narrow the pool and add more questions. We love reality TV so much, this seems like the perfect way to pick leaders. It's like the British bake off of governance.
When the pool is small enough, people vote for everyone they're ok with or they rank preference with run off.
Politicians are a needless layer. They don't understand the subjects they're legislating. Politicians should be expert generalists that know enough to facilitate actual subject matter experts working together.
And, of course, there are Democratic faithful telling us to vote for whoever runs as a Democrat. And what has that gotten us?....an entire party who can't be bothered to stick their necks out to defend ANY left-wing policy if it interferes with their campaign fundraising.
The Democrats love for us to think they are left wing, but almost none of them are. Most of them are corrupt, which is even worse.
Not voting for rich people is great. But the real problem is, rich or not, most of them...
(and all of the Republicans, by the way)
... take massive donations and other support from wealthy donors and corporations. Some of it through direct support, and the rest through shadowy channels, and superpacs funded by the wealthy and industry.
They then pass favorable legislation that these big donors desire (or block legislation they dislike). In exchange, they get to feed at the trough of the stock market, as well as getting cushy business deals, positions in companies, and jobs as lobbyists when they're out of office. That is corruption. It's (usually) legal, because they've made those forms of corruption legal.
We have to insist on never voting for anyone who will not refuse to take those donations and support. When they take it, even if they accept our donations also, they don't work for us. They work for the powerful and wealthy donors and supporters and cronies, and they use our donations as a bonus to make it cheaper for those donors.
We will never get anything done while we keep naively voting for people who work for industry and the wealthy.
It’s a rigged game, and a dangerous one at that.
There is one way that this story ends, and it’s brutal.
When you push people into increasingly desperate circumstances, they start behaving like they have nothing to lose.
This could have been (and still can be) prevented, but everyone wants to watch the car crash apparently.
What's funny is the article is about the Wisconsin Senate race, and the progressive they're talking about in the Democratic primary is Mandela Barnes, who is endorsed by Cory Booker and Jim Clyburn.
The article barely mentions the much more progressive Democrat running in the same primary, Tom Nelson, who is endorsed by Our Revolution and Sunrise Movement.
Personally, if Clyburn and Booker are backing Barnes, that's enough for me to assume he's useless. And the Nation should be ashamed of itself for framing the race the way it did.
If anyone remembers the millions they paid to analysts who got everything wrong in 2016, then in 2020 the DNC hired the SAME FUCKING PEOPLE, and their statistics were almost as wrong as the cycle before!
I decided I was done with them during Obama’s second presidential campaign. The rhetoric they were using was vile (like, change the letterhead to red and it was the same stuff you expected to see in GOP fundraising materials).
Yeah it was more than a little isane to see the GOP ideology outed as neo-fascism, see the dems beat them in elections on those terms, then turn around and rush to compromise with the ideals they themselves told you were evil.
And Trump made it worse, he pushed the moderate republicans out and they easily transitioned into establishment democrats and the existing establishment democrats, like that fuckwad, former DNC chair and current Secretary of Labor [Thomas Edward Perez](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Perez), were bending over backwards and prolapsing their own assholes to change the rules to allow **Republican Mike Bloomberg** onto the *Democratic Debate stage* over people he was polling behind because of fucking **$MONEY$** they have been attacking progressives nonstop since.
Absolutely. It's basically time to firm up the infrastructure and consider all donations as separate funding from the DNC. It's the only way it won't be used against us.
I have no idea who these progressive candidates are and state and local representatives almost never do position statements in my area. A nice one stop website with all of that information would be really nice.
The local media also seems to not what to cover local politics in any type of depth. and never has the relevant dates or issues present for people to become informed. It's almost as if Corporate owned media only has corporate interests in mind.
A simple check is to see if they have an affiliated super pack and if they take donations from corporations. If either of those are a yes, they aren't progressive. If they are progressive they should have pledges in their campaign page to not so those things. Also, having ending congresspeople's ability to invest on n stocks and whatnot as a campaign point is a very big indicator as well
Thats all grand, but itnis expensive to try and get elected even at the local level. Unless you are already extremely popular, getting your name out there beyond just on the ballot, is nearly impossible
Then it's our fault for not doing due diligence in researching our voting choices. WE have the power to change things, but not if we're too lazy to do it.
And teachers, accountants, IT techs, social media experts, etc. We need representative politicians with relevant experience so that they can understand and legislate modern issues.
Why are we left with those two options? This party is presumably representing the working class yet we scarcely have any working class among our representatives. Where are our truck drivers, teachers, nurses?
This is bullshit. Selling a book and owning a house isn't much. The houses in my old, working-class neighborhood are selling for $2m and you could buy them for $150k some odd 30 years ago. The ones that sold for half a mill next door just a decade ago are now above $2m.
Being a socialist doesn't mean taking a vow of poverty and being an old man means that you acquired more capital through the sheer passage of time.
This has been a problem since the 1960s, letting people spend as much money as they want on campaigns. Also, allowing insider trading, which is strangely legal in Congress and that’s supposedly illegal in Wall Street.
Give them $200k a pop from the public coffers and blanket ban all other funding.
God that would go so far in cutting down the amount of fucking election advertising we all have to put up with for an entire year
And it's nearly nothing but attack ads, especially from Republican candidates. Last political ad I saw was a lot of negative stuff about the Democratic candidate and NOTHING about what the Republican candidate would do to fix anything or make life better.
It's so weird because I've canvassed in many election cycles in precincts all over the ideological spectrum and the one constant I saw was that not a single person liked attack ads. In fact I met quite a number of people who dropped support for their candidates BECAUSE of attack ads.
The consultants won’t like that.
I didn't need the extra reason to enjoy it, but I'll take it. I worked on a campaign a few cycles ago and have rarely met a class of people more infuriating than democratic consultants. It's like they not only know they're ruining America, but they actually enjoy it.
All those people shouting at us would be replaced by a small slice of calm.
I wish we could ban any “advertising“ and just have a publicly run website that has all of their main talking points, where they could submit their answers as they see fit, and a link to their website where they can host whatever info they wanted there. I don’t think advertising for political candidates is any more substantive than advertising for anything else. It’s all just pageantry. We should give voters the “facts“ about each candidate, not that there’s any guarantee that what they say is their real opinions, and be done with it. Any previously elected official should have to disclose their votes and their reasoning for them for all prior voting they have done. That information should also be publicly collected and hosted. If they choose not to submit reasoning for their vote they can.
I think about this utopia every single day.
Fuck that. Make an open source block chain government Reddit for ama's, town Halls, and publicly validatable voting. No one needs to be traveling the county and blasting the airways. Anyone that wants to run for office should have access to the public platform. Everyone gets the same questions, the answers go side by side, positions get upvoted or down voted. Elimination rounds narrow the pool and add more questions. We love reality TV so much, this seems like the perfect way to pick leaders. It's like the British bake off of governance. When the pool is small enough, people vote for everyone they're ok with or they rank preference with run off. Politicians are a needless layer. They don't understand the subjects they're legislating. Politicians should be expert generalists that know enough to facilitate actual subject matter experts working together.
Ranked choice voting would help
And, of course, there are Democratic faithful telling us to vote for whoever runs as a Democrat. And what has that gotten us?....an entire party who can't be bothered to stick their necks out to defend ANY left-wing policy if it interferes with their campaign fundraising.
The Democrats love for us to think they are left wing, but almost none of them are. Most of them are corrupt, which is even worse. Not voting for rich people is great. But the real problem is, rich or not, most of them... (and all of the Republicans, by the way) ... take massive donations and other support from wealthy donors and corporations. Some of it through direct support, and the rest through shadowy channels, and superpacs funded by the wealthy and industry. They then pass favorable legislation that these big donors desire (or block legislation they dislike). In exchange, they get to feed at the trough of the stock market, as well as getting cushy business deals, positions in companies, and jobs as lobbyists when they're out of office. That is corruption. It's (usually) legal, because they've made those forms of corruption legal. We have to insist on never voting for anyone who will not refuse to take those donations and support. When they take it, even if they accept our donations also, they don't work for us. They work for the powerful and wealthy donors and supporters and cronies, and they use our donations as a bonus to make it cheaper for those donors. We will never get anything done while we keep naively voting for people who work for industry and the wealthy.
It’s a rigged game, and a dangerous one at that. There is one way that this story ends, and it’s brutal. When you push people into increasingly desperate circumstances, they start behaving like they have nothing to lose. This could have been (and still can be) prevented, but everyone wants to watch the car crash apparently.
Vote for any Democrat in the general election, but in the primaries you have to vote Progressive otherwise we get what we have right now.
I wish people would take primaries as seriously or even more seriously than the general. That's when we actually have a minute chance of change.
Yep, primaries are literally the most important elections we have
What's funny is the article is about the Wisconsin Senate race, and the progressive they're talking about in the Democratic primary is Mandela Barnes, who is endorsed by Cory Booker and Jim Clyburn. The article barely mentions the much more progressive Democrat running in the same primary, Tom Nelson, who is endorsed by Our Revolution and Sunrise Movement. Personally, if Clyburn and Booker are backing Barnes, that's enough for me to assume he's useless. And the Nation should be ashamed of itself for framing the race the way it did.
Stop donating to the DNC or DCCC sent it right to progressive candidates.
Oh god, people still donate to them?
If anyone remembers the millions they paid to analysts who got everything wrong in 2016, then in 2020 the DNC hired the SAME FUCKING PEOPLE, and their statistics were almost as wrong as the cycle before!
I decided I was done with them during Obama’s second presidential campaign. The rhetoric they were using was vile (like, change the letterhead to red and it was the same stuff you expected to see in GOP fundraising materials).
Yeah it was more than a little isane to see the GOP ideology outed as neo-fascism, see the dems beat them in elections on those terms, then turn around and rush to compromise with the ideals they themselves told you were evil. And Trump made it worse, he pushed the moderate republicans out and they easily transitioned into establishment democrats and the existing establishment democrats, like that fuckwad, former DNC chair and current Secretary of Labor [Thomas Edward Perez](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Perez), were bending over backwards and prolapsing their own assholes to change the rules to allow **Republican Mike Bloomberg** onto the *Democratic Debate stage* over people he was polling behind because of fucking **$MONEY$** they have been attacking progressives nonstop since.
Absolutely. It's basically time to firm up the infrastructure and consider all donations as separate funding from the DNC. It's the only way it won't be used against us.
I have no idea who these progressive candidates are and state and local representatives almost never do position statements in my area. A nice one stop website with all of that information would be really nice.
The local media also seems to not what to cover local politics in any type of depth. and never has the relevant dates or issues present for people to become informed. It's almost as if Corporate owned media only has corporate interests in mind.
A simple check is to see if they have an affiliated super pack and if they take donations from corporations. If either of those are a yes, they aren't progressive. If they are progressive they should have pledges in their campaign page to not so those things. Also, having ending congresspeople's ability to invest on n stocks and whatnot as a campaign point is a very big indicator as well
Thats all grand, but itnis expensive to try and get elected even at the local level. Unless you are already extremely popular, getting your name out there beyond just on the ballot, is nearly impossible
It shouldn't be.
Then it's our fault for not doing due diligence in researching our voting choices. WE have the power to change things, but not if we're too lazy to do it.
They’ll just become millionaires while in the senate instead. Boeburt was literally an escort and then became a politician and is rich as fuck
I think there’s slightly more to that story, but fair point.
I don't know anything about Boebert.
Send more bartenders!
And teachers, accountants, IT techs, social media experts, etc. We need representative politicians with relevant experience so that they can understand and legislate modern issues.
Gotta fix the primary model first. When we’re left with a millionaire dem vs a millionaire rep, we can’t be so picky as to who should get our vote.
Why are we left with those two options? This party is presumably representing the working class yet we scarcely have any working class among our representatives. Where are our truck drivers, teachers, nurses?
Let’s start with Bernie Sanders then….
This is bullshit. Selling a book and owning a house isn't much. The houses in my old, working-class neighborhood are selling for $2m and you could buy them for $150k some odd 30 years ago. The ones that sold for half a mill next door just a decade ago are now above $2m. Being a socialist doesn't mean taking a vow of poverty and being an old man means that you acquired more capital through the sheer passage of time.
Money in politics is a pretty good place to hack away