I wanted to believe this during the 2016 party primary like I needed to breathe. Hell, I STILL want to believe it. But the reality is that the American people robbed us of his presidency.
2016 was one of the first elections where Gen X, Gen Z, and Millennials collectively outvoted the boomers and the silent generation, by the slimmest of margins. It goes without saying how much the older generation drinks from of the neo-liberalism kool-aid. A self-professing socialist was always going to be a hard sell.
As far as the 2016 Democratic primary goes, Bernie got 1820 pledged (elected) and 45 unpledged (super/unelected) delegates. To win by one delegate, he would have needed to get 518 additional super delegates to overcome Hillary's pledged delegate lead over him. A win from him would have caused an outrage, since the unelected delegates would have overridden the elected (read: will) of the Democratic primary voters.
The most important thing American voters can do is to continue to demonstrably show how neo-liberal socio-economic politics is marching us to generational ruin to every voter you know, and then vote appropriately in every local, state, and federal election.
It was the Democratic establishment and the corporate media that stole it. The biggest thing they fear is a candidate that puts the American people over corporate interests.
See the pattern? Combined with all the "left" side of democrats support for US imperialism.
Bernie and people like him ain't gonna change shit, not any more in the future that they did in a past decades. It's time to radicalise way beyond him and the lukewarm electoral socialdemocracy, the only thing that can change something for the better, and did in the past, is the organised working class.
Where is the literature on why this all happened? It feels so much like a concerted effort by the elites, but where is the theory and leaked stuff on the plans and collusions, etc? Was this really just organic -- Are we just going through a bronze age style collapse and can't really see it being inside?
It's more cynicism than defeatism. People from the United States have pushed for these kinds of common sense reforms for our entire lives and we still have nothing to show for it.
I don’t really have a horse in this race since I am not from the US.
So, that's the thing: after you have lived here long enough and seen all this shit happen, it's much easier to have a cynical outlook on the whole situation.
If you live in an area of the world where you feel as if you can actually improve things, I can kind of understand why you might be surprised.
As someone who lives in a country where Bernie's political view would be considered far more right than left, yes. Reasonable.
Imagine a politician with a good grasp of reality and actually wanting to improve the conditions for the people. Being right about all contentious issues for the past 3-4 decades... Then imagine instead electing an absolute narcissist moron who I would entrust with a single thing.
This is very smart of him to use generational terminology to engage with young voters. He's looking at trends on social media. Maybe it will work for him. His main obstacle is that most democrats are moderate and don't have a problem voting republican if they think the democrat is too far to the left. Maybe engaging with young voters in this way can help him get over that obstacle.
Just use 2000 hours. It makes the math easier, plus anybody who doesn't get (at least!) two weeks of vacation with their full-time job is a chump who needs to unionize anyway.
Depends what you subsidize, if you subsidize the learning, the work, the tools, etc. You'll also have a lot of young people already committed, having bought their own tools or paid for much of their education etc already, who will feel that they've lost their advantage in the job market due to the subsidy, and others who need it who may not qualify, who will be in a major pickle. At this stage at least, there's no one size fits all policy
I never liked school. Authority, busy work, rote memorization. I always liked to learn ground up, with a purpose. And choosing what I wanted to be before i was even aware of myself felt limiting.
Perhaps I'll go someday, I could never afford to not work, but today, I think I'd be pretty decent at school..go figure.
tbh, I wouldn't trade my "education" for the world. If I could do it again, I'd do the same, i think.
Yes something needs to change and I feel you are seeing the real panic of the right as more and more younger people can now vote and are just pissed as everything they are doing.
People have been saying this since the 60s. Lots of young people are still conservative and many areas are still solidly red. I don't see a massive blue wave that garners a supermajority happening anytime soon.
Next is speculation on my part, but I imagine people are turning conservative more based on their wealth than their age. We saw a correlation between age and conservative sentiment because people tended to gather wealth as they got older.
But that link has been progressively eroded, so people are no longer switching.
Essentially the conservatives are killing the golden goose in their incessant pursuit of consolidating wealth.
Do you realize who tweeted that? Because I feel like asking Bernie Sanders to just "do it" is very unfair. He's been fucking trying for the past decade.
Workers have been getting nickel & dimed for ages now, but it just feels like since the pandemic that everyone everywhere across every industry has just gone into overdrive with trying to get as much as they can from workers/consumers ("greedflation"). I don't know if this is the last big hurrah before capitalism collapses or what, it's just insane. And there doesn't seem to be any official government response to do anything about it, to help average people out, or to try to even bring prices down, nor does it seem like it's going to end anytime soon. I just wonder month after month, how much longer can this go on for? Are we getting the pitchforks out yet?
Capitalism collapsed over a century ago, that's why we have guardrails. We'll just keep putting up new ones as greedy humans find novel ways to scam each other, and bring the rest of along for the ride.
Oh god. Microfiche. I haven’t seen one of those machines in decades. I remember going to the local library and looking stuff up on them as a kid/early teen.
I do, every so often, encounter digital versions of microfiche catalog pages (like from parts department) from certain car manufacturers. They are so blown out and blurry.
The Federal Reserve has more power to control inflation than the president ever did. Presidents can't control supply and demand, nor can they control how much Amazon, Uber or Walmart pay their workers. Why do so many people believe that the US president is able to raise or lower prices of commodities, homes or college on a whim?
The president appoints multiple people on the board of the fed. But that's about it. More to your point neither the fed or the president has any control left on the main causes of inflation. Principal of which is corporate greed. Every major market in the US is an unnatural monopoly due to the fact we stopped busting monopoly's. Corporate greed would not be an inflationary cause but since there is so little competition in markets they can conspire without communication. Neither the president or the fed have any levers in which to do anything about this realistically since half our legislation is wholly owned by those same companies that hold control over these markets.
Companies very literally trained judges through continued learning requirements to not fight monopolies. The only bar for a merger today is a single question "Will prices go down" companies lie saying "yes" then it gets approved and there is no recourse or follow up.
They further make fallacious claims like "Monopolies don't exist without government!" Which is a total farce perpetuated by the same groups. It's meant to have people vote against their interests. Monopolies are an inevitable consequence of capitalism. It must divide at a certain point or stagnate.
It's not minimum wage's fault, it's the government guaranteeing student loans. Tuition skyrocketed since then and has been out of control since.
Then with so many people being told "You have to go to college so you don't become a garbageman!" the requirements for most jobs increased as well. Manufacturing in pharma, for instance, I could take a kid out of middle school and teach him the job in an hour. Get fresh grads from college for a bachelor's degree and they still need an hour of teaching. But now the Bachelors is required for some reason.
Ironically, garbage man pays pretty decent for some minimal manual labor.
Except that's not the case. The GI bill alone (passed in 1944) put millions people through college who otherwise would not have had the opportunity to do so and did so for decades and the price didn't skyrocket. Once deregulation happened the prices began to skyrocket.
Sallie Mae wasn't even a thing until 1973. Literally not boomers LOL. Federal student loans were very uncommon back before the 90s even and applied to only a few different areas, not everything. It is incredibly clear that something happened in the early 2000s that caused the current fiasco, with both tuition and debt skyrocketing.
I guess my dads not A typical boomer, he openly emits that times were much easier for him. As this quote from Bernie implies, after taking to account inflation and everything around living your life, we work much harder and get much less than our parents or grandparents did.
Regarding getting off the gold standard, sure that might have some effect, and I'm not a finance major so I don't know all the details, but in the end, I think capitalists would have done whatever they needed to in order to suppress how much people make in compared to their productivity. Getting off of a standard was just the technique used at the time.
Except the government has been backing student loans since the GI bill passed in 1944. College tuition started growing in the 80s and really took off on the 90s and 2000s. So of the government backed loans didn't cause skyrocketing tuition for almost 2 generations, why did it start when millennials were just being born?
Sorry, Bernie's full of crap. He's deliberately twisting facts to misinform. He's using today's highest minimum wage to calculate paying tuition at levels of 50 years ago, and trying to imply that people only needed to work 306 hours THEN to pay for college tuition THEN. That's just not true.
When I was working during high school / college, minimum wage was $1.50 / hr. That works out to $459 for 4 years of college education. Tuition at public institutions in the mid '70's was $1210 / year nces.ed.gov That's $4840 for 4 years at a time when my comfortably middle-class father was earning ~ $25 K / year. It was cheaper, but not by as much as Bernie claims.
Also, public colleges have always been subsidized by the state. You'd also need to look at the level of subsidy between then and now and whether we're choosing to subsidize less.
Yeah... That's less than 8 weeks of work for all 4 years though, that's a good trade. You could work for one summer and pay for all of college, or work for each summer and pay for college, a car, some spending money and have stuff saved.
Vs now, where you can work full time all year and still be in the negative, by a lot. And of course if you do that then that's going to really hurt your studies.
Did… did you seriously type that out, read it, and then think to yourself “yeah, this is a good argument!” Before you sent it? Because if you did that’s the funniest thing I’ve read all month.
Except of course there were student loans. "Federal student loans were first offered in 1958 " - wiki. And before that the baby boom generation's parents had the GI Bill to get them through college.