A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
PAGE 505 of 725
The Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would ease paths to unionization and ban state right-to-work legislation, passed the U.S. House on a party-line vote Tuesday.
Since the twofold combination of the Citizens United decision and the decision by Charles Koch to dramatically ramp up his political activity, labor has been dealt a string of legislative defeats at the state level. Right-to-work laws, which eliminate the requirement that people represented by a union join and pay dues to the union in the private sector, passed in Indiana and Michigan in 2012, Wisconsin in 2015, West Virginia in 2016, and Kentucky in 2017.
Until now, there has not been a single state in which Republicans control the legislature and governorship where right-to-work legislation has made it out of committee and then failed to pass.
https://theintercept.com/2021/03/12/union-right-to-work-montana/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Texas Democrats will not try to make Trumptards take a bath, wash their clothes or even wear clothes, which is totally a personal choice, especially because Texas is too far away to see, hear or smell you. 6ix, your life is your own; waste it if it pleases you. Many Texas Trumptards before you have wasted their lives and gone to early deaths. What is so special and unique about Indiana Trumptards that you would live longer?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Try and make us take it.
See what happens.
If somebody doesn't want to take a bath, they're not going to have many friends. If somebody goes out of their house naked, they get to spend a night in the pokey... a lot longer than a night if they did it anywhere near any children.
You really need to stop deluding yourself about how great you are. You're not that great.
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" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher
Collection of links to Second's, Nilbog's and Marcos' death threats: https://cutt.ly/tkCvEX6
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Bolivia’s Fascist Coup Leader Jeanine Áñez Arrested; Found in Box
A little good news from down south.
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The problem with the way you throw that word around, she might just be some random chick.
You really ought to stick to using the bad words for people who really deserve them.
Since you can't read, Roomba, might I suggest the following link:
https://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Cried-Wolf-Sommer-Time/dp/B00H1OW6F0/re
f=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=the+boy+who+cried+wolf&qid=1615769388&s=audible&sr=1-1
It's even free if you have an Amazon Prime membership.
Good stuff.
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" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher
Collection of links to Second's, Nilbog's and Marcos' death threats: https://cutt.ly/tkCvEX6
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Dark Money Behind GOP Judges Is Now Behind Voter Suppression
Sen. Whitehouse is not thinking about headlines. He is thinking about getting dark money out of the courts and voting booths.
Sen. Whitehouse chairs a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee that deals with oversight of the federal courts, and now that the Democrats are in charge, he is taking full advantage of it. He held a hearing on Thursday aimed at pulling back the curtain on the role dark money has played in the placement of judges at all levels.
"Courtrooms ought to be open places where you know who is present, not a place where powerful players can come masked behind front groups hiding both their own identity and their interconnections," Whitehouse said at the hearing. "The Supreme Court should not be a place that has a special interest-controlled fast lane bringing certain special interest-chosen cases before the court at high-speed, without the trappings of a real case or controversy," he insisted.
O'Donnell reminded us just how hard Mitch McConnell worked to grease the wheels for the Federalist Society to slide their obscenely conservative lawyers into judgeships, totaling 231 in all during the former guy's reign. "Many of those judges were unqualified, and all were the result of a right-wing screening process funded by dark money, contributed by people in corporations who want the courts to serve them," he said, warning that since those judges are now in their positions for life, Biden has a lot to do to balance the scales. He asked Whitehouse to tell the story of "how they got there and who put them there."
Whitehouse didn't name names, but said the "same donors, the same entities, the same operatives, the same machinery that, in the Trump administration, was driving the court capture operation," is now behind the voter suppression effort we are seeing in so many Republican states. "If we don't show the American people what this dark money operation is, and try to dig at who's behind it, then we're doing a real disservice to the American people," he said.
O'Donnell pointed out that these special interest-appointed judges are now going to be deciding these voter suppression cases, brought by the very same people who put them into their positions of power — all the way up to the Supreme Court. (Looking at you, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett.)
My husband agreed. "With litigants in the courtroom with bogus names, like the 'Honest Elections Project,' which is run right now by the same person who led the project that put these judges on the bench. So they'll be in the courtroom when these voter suppression cases are litigated to remind the judges, 'Yes, I am the one who got you there. Now it's pay back time.'"
I'll save you the Google search, and just let you know that the Honest Elections Project is funded by the DeVos family and the Kochs. Sheldon's just being coy.
When O'Donnell asked him how much HR1 would help solve these problems of dark money in corrupt appointments of judges, Whitehouse was unequivocal.
"Enormously. Enormously," he insisted. "It would do two things. First of all it makes government money a thing of the past for contributions over $10,000. And second, it takes the money spent on judicial confirmations and treats them as what they are, which is a political advertising expense that has to be disclosed also. It would make an enormous difference."
Whitehouse even has confidence (more than I do, honestly) that the public, once informed, would actually care. "As soon as the American public, as citizens sees who the players are on the stage, they get the plot right away. And that's why these nasty big dark money players love to hide behind masks and try to fool the American public, and deny them the knowledge of who's on the political stage. And in this case who's in the courtroom," he said.
It certainly ex
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There is no voter suppression.
Done listening to you, TrumpTard.
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" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher
Collection of links to Second's, Nilbog's and Marcos' death threats: https://cutt.ly/tkCvEX6
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We Need to Start Talking About Where Wealth Comes From
People’s views aren’t formed in a vacuum: they are shaped by social and political forces that evolve over time. Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal revolution wasn’t just successful because it reorganised the economy – it was successful because it embedded a particular narrative about how wealth is created and distributed in society. This is a world where, so long as there is sufficient competition and free markets, every individual will receive their just rewards in relation to their true contribution to society. There is, in Milton Friedman’s famous terms, “no such thing as a free lunch”. It’s a world where businesses are the “wealth creators” who create jobs and drive innovation, and business owners are entitled to the financial rewards of success – regardless of how enormous they are.
Tony Blair’s ‘Third Way’ largely accepted this narrative of wealth creation, and until relatively recently nobody in the mainstream of British politics challenged it. Is it really any wonder that most people believe it?
The problem, of course, is that it bears little resemblance to how the economy actually works. While it is true that working hard will generally help you earn more money, this causality doesn’t hold in reverse: not all wealth has been attained through hard work. In practice, the distribution of wealth has little to do with contribution, and everything to do with politics and power.
Someone that is born in the UK will earn more than someone born in Sub-Saharan Africa, even if they perform exactly the same labour. Why? Because one was lucky enough to be born in a powerful country with a legacy of imperialism that has rigged the rules of the global economy in its favour. The economist Branko Milanovic has estimated that 60% of someone’s income is determined by where they were born, and an additional 20% is determined by the income level of their parents. This means that place of birth and parental background accounts for around 80% of someone’s earning power on average.
In the age of the ‘self-made’ millionaire, the lottery of birth is more important than ever. As George Monbiot once said:
“If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire.”
Within countries, extreme fortunes almost always derive from control over a scare resource – fossil fuels, minerals, land, monopoly networks, money etc. To the early classical economists, this kind of wealth – attained by simply being a gatekeeper to scarce resources – was deemed to be unearned, and referred to it as ‘economic rent’. But today the Sunday Times Rich List is dominated by rentiers – financiers, real estate tycoons, oil barons, monopolists and aristocrats – many of whom acquired their original fortune in somewhat questionable circumstances.
As Grace Blakeley puts it:
“You do not become a billionaire through labour. You become a billionaire through inheritance, corruption or economic rents – or, in most cases, some mixture of all three.”
But it’s not just billionaires that accumulate wealth without working. Over a third of all the income in Britain is paid out as capital income (dividends, rents and interest) rather than labour income (wages and salaries). Capital income is inherently passive: it doesn’t correspond to work or skill, but ownership. And while capital ownership is distributed extremely unequally, in recent decades changes to pensions and the housing market have enabled many middle class households to join the capital income gravy train and accumulate wealth without lifting a finger.
As I’ve written about before, since 1995 three quarters of all wealth accumulated in the UK – totalling £5 trillion – has come from rising house prices. The driving force behind rising house prices has been rising land prices. But land is not a source of wealth but of economic rent. The truth is that most wealth made through the housing market has been gained at the expense of others who are now seeing more o
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Trump’s Strategy for Returning to Power Is Already Clear
By Masha Gessen, March 2, 2021
Hands waving while Donald Trump speaks at CPAC 2021. Speaking at the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference last weekend, the former President positioned himself and his audience as the only true Americans.
Viktor Orbán became the Prime Minister of Hungary in 1998. Four years later, with a record number of Hungarians turning up to the polls, his party lost power. The next day, Orbán’s allies claimed voter fraud and demanded recounts, and although these demands were rejected, Orbán continued to claim that the election had been stolen. In 2010, after eight years leading the opposition, Orbán and his party, Fidesz, returned to power with a supermajority—enough to change the constitution and begin rapidly consolidating autocratic power. Orbán has not left office in the decade since.
The Law and Justice Party, led by the twin brothers Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, first held power in Poland between 2005 and 2007, as part of a coalition government. Eight years after being voted out, their party (led, after Lech’s death, by Jaroslaw) returned to power, receiving the largest share of the vote that any party had seen since the fall of Communism. They quickly got to work dismantling the institutions of liberal democracy and establishing autocratic rule.
Other European autocrats never had to leave office—Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenka, and, of course, Russia’s Vladimir Putin have not been in the opposition since first touching power—but the cases of Hungary and Poland provide examples of a particular path to autocracy. It involves an aspiring autocrat who is rebuked by voters and who then frames his loss of power as illegitimate, launching a campaign aimed at undermining not only the party that won the election but the very institutions of democratic government. To discuss this scenario, I called Bálint Magyar, the author of such books as “Post-Communist Mafia State” and “The Anatomy of Post-Communist Regimes”—and my intellectual guiding light on things autocratic.
After losing the 2002 election, Orbán declared that “the homeland cannot be in the opposition.” By “the homeland” he meant himself, envisioned as the only true representative of Hungary; if he wasn’t in government, then the government had been hijacked. Orbán and the opposition, therefore, criticized everything that the new government did—not because they disagreed with the policies but because, in their view, a government that wasn’t led by their party had no right to exist. Magyar used an example from his own work: he served as Hungary’s education minister from 2002 to 2006 and created private-public partnerships that, he said, Fidesz members privately praised but publicly criticized—because they opposed everything done by the new government.
Magyar might as well have been describing last weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference, in Orlando, where former President Donald Trump accused President Joe Biden of having “the most disastrous first month of any President in modern history.” Trump recited a litany of lies about his own record and Biden’s policies on immigration, and he ranted about the COVID-19 pandemic: it sounded like he was against masking and against not masking, against social distancing and against not social distancing—or, simply, against everything Biden. “In just one short month, we have gone from America first to America last,” Trump falsely claimed, positioning himself and his audience as the only true Americans, much as Orbán had claimed to be the sole representative of Hungary.
Throughout Orbán’s eight years in the opposition, the parties in power “were always trying to have a normal discussion of policy issues,” Magyar said. But Orbán’s party chose “a permanent regime-critic paradigm rather than a government-critic paradigm.” In other words, Fidesz opposed the institutions of government themselves, not just the people staffing t
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GOP Faces Biden’s Next Big Bill
After muscling his $1.9 trillion pandemic-relief bill through Congress without a single Republican vote, Biden is hoping to bring GOP members aboard an infrastructure package set to be a core part of his longer-term economic plan, estimated at trillions of dollars.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/gop-faces-biden-s-next-big-bil
l-weighing-if-it-should-ease-rules/ar-BB1eCXhC?ocid=msedgntp
T
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