This whole thing is so fucked, I know y'all Americans could get insulin for pennies on the dollar if it was made in a nationalized pharma company. You could get high speed rail built within a decade, we know it's possible because they did it in China. You could guarantee jobs for at least a generation just re-tooling infrastructure or re-building it. All of it is so easy to imagine how it could happen except for one fucking thing, your political system but especially your democrats. It's just too bad you can't reach people with a message like the Bolsheviks had, not "peace, land, bread" but maybe something like "medicine, trains, jobs, peace." But people just wouldn't believe you after being lied to by every other political force for 50 years. It's all possible if you get rid of your shitty political class.
My partner and I talk about this so much about how easy it would be for the political class to do well and uphold capitalism for the next few decades but instead they'd rather a few more billionaires exist.
I mean that's the problem with Keynesianism, it's a pitch to the wrong people. The actual capitalist ruling class doesn't have a truly ideological commitment to preserving capitalist society, they are only interested in immediate profit and extraction. Instead it appeals to ideological nerds with no real power like economics departments.
But people just wouldn’t believe you after being lied to by every other political force for 50 years.
And this is why any non-duopoly political movement in the US, even a socialist one, is doomed to fail. People in this country intrinsically know, even if they can't artciulate it, that government exists only to hurt them and politicians are all hucksters. Plus protests are scary, disruption is scary, communism is scary. People have absolutely no reason to trust a party promising radical change for the better when that's what every politician's been promising since 1972 with no results. Doubly so for the scary socialists who love mask mandates and antifa and hate everything else.
Mr. Bones' wild ride will not get better, it must crash.
I think you could launch a successful third party campaign based on exactly this point. but you'd need a lot of money and good execution.
It would be Bernie 3.0, with similar results. I think the electoral route's been thoroughly proven non-viable.
National Politics is a dead end without some kind of material labor activism at the state and local level. Otherwise, you're just sending up your AOCs to argue with their MTGs, while they control gerrymandered districts and voter-disenfranchised swing states that control the balance of power.
There's no harm in voting. And occasionally you get lucky with a Lina Hidalgo or John Fetterman or Bernie Sanders. But until local communities can do a little class warfare to underpin their political position - like the Mexican truckers shutting down traffick on the US/Mexico southbound lanes to protest Greg Abbott's shitty immigrant harassment - elections don't offer any real leverage.
But people just wouldn’t believe you after being lied to by every other political force for 50 years
I think this is what sunk Corbyn and to a lesser extent Bernie. But not only mistrust, but also the totally rational belief that neither would be able to accomplish what they want because the political machine would stop them.
It’s just too bad you can’t reach people with a message like the Bolsheviks had, not “peace, land, bread” but maybe something like “medicine, trains, jobs, peace.”
The problem isn't just that people wouldn't believe us, it's that americans don't even want these good things. Their brains are so warped by propaganda that they think crumbling infrastructure, traffic everywhere, dying of preventable diseases, and endless war are good things. The situation is beyond hopeless, these people are unsalvageable
GROW MORE CORN MORE CORN MUST BE GROWN RAZE THE FIELDS GROW CORN DEPLETE THE TOPSOIL GROW CORN
Am sure glad corn doesn't need imported and/or oil-origin fertilizers.
Oh wait
just last night there was a post here about how we will deplete all our top soil in the next 60 years, then this news is announced :joker-shopping:
People are saying we should just build more trains but I promise you most Americans would never use them. The people of this country would rather go bankrupt while cooking themselves alive than wait at a tram stop.
You'd need a big pro-train media push to go with it. Put luxury train travel in MCU slops. Actually run anti-car and anti-plane newspieces. Start train-based tiktok trends. Have people bragging about their commute going from 90min in grueling traffic to 30min that they can spend vibing and getting hammered.
You can ideology all you want, if it allows to sleep 20 more minutes in the morning people will use them :shrug-outta-hecks:
I promise you most Americans would never use them
Back in '06 when gas was hitting similar levels, the buses and trains were absolutely overflowing with new ridership and cities were scrambling to expand the systems to support the excess capacity.
Like, you can shit on Econ 101 tier arguments all you want, but at the end of the day $6/gal gas changes how people behave.
I think this as well. Car culture is too deeply ingrained. It has become part of our identity. Freedom, Liberty, etc etc
:fedposting: WE'VE GOT YOU SURROUNDED! FILL UP ON CORN FUEL
:troll: I HATE CARS I HATE CARS I HATE CARS
Everyone knows ethanol for fuel is terrible policy. Worse for carbon, and causes more engine wear over time meaning people will just have to be spending more on car repairs and more resources dedicated to replacement parts. We will do anything to protect the society-wide madness of the personal automobile.
Digging deeper this just reverses a ban the EPA had on the sale of E15 during the summer because it causes smog. yay
This is Biden literally re-issuing a Trump policy that you (as a lib) would be furious at :cheeto-man: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-biofuels-ethanol/trump-lifts-curbs-on-e15-gasoline-to-help-farmers-angering-big-oil-idUSKCN1T11BN
You're not going to notice any change, E15 is supposed to be dispensed from separate pumps
I get the feeling we’re gonna get a reactionary movement to the late 2010s environmentalist movement
I mean, did record gas prices in 2006 create an anti-environmentalist reactionary movement? I recall that being the thing that jump started the electric car industry and fueled an enthusiastic-but-ultimately-failed effort at revitalizing public mass transit.
I have no doubt that you're going to get a guy like McCain running on a "Drill Everywhere On Everything All At Once!" campaign, but we've been backpedaling from O&G exploration and development over the last decade precisely because we've glutted the market. This is just going to be the sector doing some much-desired profit taking after a few years in the doldrums. And "Exxon racks in record profits!!!" headlines aren't going to endear the company to a bunch of people paying $6/gal at the pump.
If they succeed we’re gonna get a new Reagan/Thatcher/whatever, like in the 80s.
We've been doing Reaganism for my entire life. The public sector already underwent extensive privatization. The Pentagon has already been bloated into a moribund behemoth. Finance Capital runs damned near every branch of government and we're just leaping from one asset bubble to another, with all the real domestic infrastructure outsourced a generation ago.
There's no more Soviet Union to topple or Pacific Rim to exploit, just an Eastern Europe that reflects all our worst impulses and a Chinese-dominated manufacturing sector that has all our receipts. We don't have unions to bust anymore. We don't have a wealthy white working class to fleece. All the California Republicans are Texas Democrats.
We can do Socialism or we can do Barbarism. But we don't have anything left to do Reaganism one more time.
Marxists theorize that Capitalism is ultimately destructive, while Communism is constructive.
It may take numerous iterations, but eventually the functional societies will outcompete the dysfunctional ones. We're already seeing this in East Asia, as China eclipses its neighbours. And we're beginning to see it in Latin America, as socialist states reemerge in the absence of a functional American espionage system. Watching countries like N.Korea and Cuba endure decades of sanction and embargo should illustrate their durability relative to Western economic models.
But it took centuries for colonization to run its course. I don't think Communism will assert itself on a truly global scale in my lifetime.
Everyone knows ethanol for fuel is terrible policy. Worse for carbon, and causes more engine wear over time meaning people will just have to be spending more on car repairs and more resources dedicated to replacement parts. We will do anything to protect the society-wide madness of the personal automobile.
