A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Don't care about income.
Don't need to.
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Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
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On a December morning in 1947 when three fellows at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study set out for the Third Circuit Court in Trenton, it was decided that the job of making sure that the brilliant but naively innocent logician Kurt Gödel didn’t say something intemperate at his citizenship hearing would fall to Albert Einstein. Economist Oscar Morgenstern would drive, Einstein rode shotgun, and a nervous Gödel sat in the back.
Studying for his citizenship test, Gödel realized that there was no safeguard against Article V, the portion of the Constitution that details the process of amendment, itself being amended. Theoretically, a sufficiently powerful political movement with legislative and executive authority could rapidly amend the articles of amendment so that a potential demagogue would be able to rule by fiat, all while such tyranny was perfectly constitutional. A paradox at the heart of the Constitution—something that supposedly guaranteed democracy having coiled within it rank authoritarianism. All three men driving to Trenton had a keen awareness of tyranny; all were refugees from Nazi Germany; all had found safe-haven on the pristine streets of suburban Princeton. After the Anschluss, Gödel was a stateless man, and though raised Protestant he was suspect by the Nazis and forced to emigrate. Gödel, with his wife, departed Vienna by the Trans-Siberian railroad, crossed from Japan to San Francisco, and then took the remainder of his sojourn by train to Princeton. His path had been arduous and he’d earned America, so when Gödel found a paradox at the heart of the Constitution, his desire to rectify it was born from patriotic duty. At the hearing, the judge asked Gödel how it felt to become a citizen of a nation where it was impossible for the government to fall into anti-democratic tyranny. But it could, Gödel told him, and “I can prove it.” Apocryphally, Einstein kicked the logician’s chair and ended that syllogism.
More at https://themillions.com/2021/09/this-isnt-the-essays-title.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Debt ceiling fight pits corporate America against Republicans
The Business Roundtable, which represents the CEOs of some of the nation’s largest companies, separately sounded the alarm that a default would saddle the federal government and private companies with significantly higher borrowing costs.
“Failure to lift the U.S. federal debt limit to meet U.S. obligations would produce an otherwise avoidable crisis and pose unacceptable risk to the nation’s economic growth, job creation and financial markets,” Business Roundtable CEO Joshua Bolten and Walmart CEO Doug McMillon wrote in a letter to congressional leaders.
Republican opposition to raising the debt limit underscores the divide between GOP lawmakers and corporate America that has only grown in recent years. Company executives can still count on Republicans to deliver tax cuts, but their influence has waned on other hot-button issues like climate change, voting rights and immigration.
No House Republicans voted for the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act after more than 150 large corporations employing 4 million U.S. workers urged them to support the bill. Corporate America also failed to generate GOP support for the Equality Act, a bill that would codify discrimination protections for LGBTQ individuals, and measures to provide a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
“The Republican Party has become a populist party, thanks largely to Donald Trump but also because of the presence of what’s now the Republican base. And for that very reason, corporate America has much less influence than it used to have,” said Geoff Kabaservice, director of political studies at the Niskanen Center, a right-leaning think tank.
“I think they’re right to be nervous,” he added, referring to major corporations worried about the potential of a default.
While many Republicans, including McConnell, have said that nobody wants the U.S. to default on its debt, GOP lawmakers have also expressed confidence that Democrats will take the blame if it happens since they control Congress and the White House.
“If the Democrats don’t do their job, I guess it will be political blowback for them,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), head of Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, said last week.
Business groups haven’t called out Republicans in the debt limit battle, instead urging both sides to come to an agreement. Corporations are wary of angering congressional Republicans, who have vowed to take revenge on companies that denounced state-level GOP voting laws and Republican attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
Even the Chamber of Commerce, which spends millions of dollars on ads backing Republicans’ reelection campaigns, drew backlash from GOP lawmakers like Sen. Tom Cotton (Ark.) after it endorsed several House Democrats in the 2020 election.
“Corporate America talked a big game about not donating to the campaigns of Republican politicians who voted to overturn the Electoral College result, and yet most of them in the end came around because they believe Republicans will be in the majority after the 2022 elections,” Kabaservice said. “On some level they think Republicans will still support their interests, whether it be tax cuts or deregulation.”
More at https://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/business-a-lobbying/573318-deb
t-ceiling-fight-pits-corporate-america-against
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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"Corporate America" has been in the woke pocket of Democrats for the last 5 years.
Fuck Corporate America.
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Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
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No, the Richest One Percent Don’t Pay 40 Percent of the Taxes.
One of the sad constants of American political debate is that, anytime the tax rate on the rich is to be either raised or lowered, Republicans will repeat a certain statistic. To wit, “The Stat” is that the highest-earning one percent of taxpayers pay 40 percent of all income taxes. Conservatives consider this fact a dispositive justification either against any proposal to increase taxes on the rich, or in favor of any plan to reduce it.
The actual truth about the American tax system is that the richest one percent earn about 21 percent of the income and pay 24 percent of the taxes:
More at https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/fact-check-richest-1-dont-pay-
40-of-the-taxes.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Why are Republicans starting up yet another debt ceiling battle? If we breached the debt ceiling and had to cut back spending to match incoming revenue, it would mean literally shutting down every single function of government, both domestic and defense, and whacking a trillion dollars or so from Medicare and Social Security. But it never hurt the Republicans at the polls, so they're gonna do it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/09/22/republicans-usually
-lose-shutdown-fights-so-why-are-they-going-there-again/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:Maybe Republicans engage in fights they'll lose to show their constituents where they stand on the issues.
Republicans usually lose shutdown fights. So why are they going there again?
It would be nice if democrats did that from time to time ... you know, complain about manufacturing and job outsourcing, whine about how much Israel is costing the US, pretend to care about the people the US had killed in its many global military misadventures ...
US House approves $1 billion for Israel's Iron Dome defense system
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/09/23/politics/iron-dome-house-vote/index
.html
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Why are Republicans starting up yet another debt ceiling battle?
To make it clear that Biden* and Biden* alone owns the inflation.
Democrats suck all the balls.
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Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
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Quote:If government won't set prices, prices are set by industry, not by government. If prices are rising, blame the corporations. In the past, WWII for example, the government told corporations that prices will not be rising. The government told the corporations that if they don't like the prices then don't sell the product. That system worked fine, but industry hates it because it cuts into their profits. Recently, in Texas, electric prices went from 5 cents per kilowatt-hour to $9 per kilowatt-hour because that is upper limit the government of Texas set during a natural gas shortage. That $9 didn't encourage more generation of electricity. What was happening is that Texas let corporations gouge their customers for as long as there was a shortage of electricity. The corporations didn't have to gouge, but they could gouge, so they did gouge for as long as the governor and supplies allowed them. That's how prices really work, 6ix, which is not the way you think it works.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Why are Republicans starting up yet another debt ceiling battle?
To make it clear that Biden* and Biden* alone owns the inflation.
Democrats suck all the balls.
https://www.power-technology.com/news/texas-to-raise-energy-prices-and
-suspend-price-cap-amid-winter-storm/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Are Centrist Democrats in the Thrall of Right-Wing Economic Propaganda?
Surprising, at least to me, has been the self-destructive behavior of Democratic centrists — a term I prefer to “moderates,” because it’s hard to see what’s moderate about demanding that Biden abandon highly popular policies like taxing corporations and reducing drug prices. At this point it seems all too possible that a handful of recalcitrant Democrats will blow up the whole Biden agenda — and yes, it’s the centrists who are throwing a tantrum, while the party’s progressives are acting like adults.
So what’s motivating the sabotage squad? Part of the answer, I’d argue, is that they have internalized decades of right-wing economic propaganda, that their gut reaction to any proposal to improve Americans’ lives is that it must be unworkable and unaffordable.
Of course, this isn’t the whole story. We certainly shouldn’t underrate the influence of money: Both wealthy donors and Big Pharma have been nakedly throwing their weight around. Nor should we discount the importance of simple innumeracy: $3.5 trillion sounds like a lot of money, and you shouldn’t assume politicians understand (or think constituents understand) that this is proposed spending over the course of a decade, not a single year. It would amount to little more than 1 percent of gross domestic product over that period and would still leave overall government spending far below its level in other wealthy democracies. It also ignores the fact that the true cost, after net savings and new revenue, would be much less than $3.5 trillion.
And some politicians seem to suffer from the misguided notion that only spending on “hard” infrastructure, like roads and bridges, counts as investing in the nation’s future. That is, they haven’t caught up with the growing body of evidence for high economic returns to spending on people — especially spending that lifts children out of poverty.
Still, I often find myself surprised to hear politicians and pundits who don’t consider themselves part of movement conservatism peddling economic narratives that are nothing more than right-wing propaganda but have been repeated so many times that many people who should know better accept them as established fact.
I frequently hear, for example, that runaway spending and budget deficits caused the stagflation of the 1970s. In reality, federal debt shrank as a share of G.D.P. over the course of that decade (only to soar under President Ronald Reagan). To the extent that we understand ’70s stagflation, it seems to have been caused by a combination of oil shocks and feckless monetary policy. Big government had nothing to do with it.
I also sometimes hear even centrists giving Reagan’s tax cuts credit for turning the U.S. economy around. The truth is that most Americans did worse in the decades after the Reagan tax cuts than in the corresponding previous period; the post-Reagan boom, such as it was, was limited to a small number of wealthy people.
Finally, it’s amazing how many people believe that European economies with high social spending are severely damaged by reduced incentives to work. It’s true that during the 1980s and 1990s much of the Continent seemed to suffer from “Eurosclerosis” — persistent high unemployment, even during periods of economic expansion. But that was a long time ago. These days generous welfare states often have better labor market performance than the United States.
Take the example of Denmark, which Fox Business at one point compared to Venezuela. Indeed, if there were any truth to right-wing dogma, Denmark should be an economic hellhole. It has vastly higher social spending than we do; two-thirds of its workers are union members, and those unions are so powerful that they forced McDonald’s to pay its workers $22 an hour.
But the reality is that working-age Danes are more likely than their American counterparts to have jobs. It’s true that real G.D.P. per capita is slightly lower in Denmark, but that’s mainly because Denmark, unlike the U.S., isn’t a no-vac
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