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This is problematic to voting in the same way closing polling sites is, framed as cost cutting or inefficiency reduction with the intention of reducing access t

This is problematic to voting in the same way closing polling sites is, framed as cost cutting or inefficiency reduction with the intention of reducing access to a subset of the population. This is just frustration, but the fact that we could pass a massive defense bill (again, I know), but are unable to fund basic services shows the integrity of our government. Moreover, it shows the culpability of most of the elected officials, from both parties. We don’t need a labor movement, we need a people’s movement.

claudeganon 6y ago
> Moreover, it shows the culpability of most of the elected officials, from both parties. It shows that after the labor movement was destroyed, the only material base for the Democratic Party was to go looking for money from the same people who give it to Republicans. Saying we don’t need a labor movement is equivalent to saying “we don’t need a political party that relies on support from workers.”
- alextheparrot 6y ago
  If I may, I'll add a correction to your quoted statement to give my intended meaning: “we don’t need a political party that relies only on support from workers.” The subdivision and segregation of American political movements has been an incredibly useful tool in defusing them. The labor, civil rights, suffrage, identity movements, were powerful, but the lack of intersectionality made it so that once policy victories were achieved the tenor died down. My comment was focused on how this was a fundamental weakness. For example, is voting by mail a "labor" issue? I would say no, and even if this opinion is generally wrong it shows the subdivision that occurs. There is no modern suffrage movement in the same way as existed in the early part of the 1900s. The idea of a "people's movement" is to say we need a political party that relies on the people, not kleptocrats, not lawyers, not donors, and fights for issues that are relevant to those people. I didn't march in the recent protests because I am black, because I've felt fear from the police, because I've been systemically oppressed. Most of my peers didn't either, and the ones who were subject to those oppressions, among many others, are far braver than me, and for that I feel empathy. And for that we should march. These are issues of "people" because that's the most common denominator, not because we're excluding the factors. The underlying thread of what I said is that we need a movement that relies on the common empathy we have for each other. I want community. I want justice. I want to love my neighbor, as myself. I want you to pray to your god while I mine, even if mine is just a nice bike ride on a Sunday morning. And I know cynics, rightfully jaded by their lives, will probably say I'm being hopeful, youthful, naive. And I accept all of these, but I'd rather be those than have what we have today, what a simple cross to carry. I guess I just want to listen to John Lenin's Imagine and feel like he's talking about my world. And I'm not the only one.
  - claudeganon 6y ago
    I won’t say that you’re naive, but only that that is kind of diffuse liberalism has no history of effecting real political change while the labor movement has a long, international history of doing so. While it’s good to acknowledge the failings of prior forms of the labor movement in addressing issues of race and gender, this doesn’t reflect their current state or reality. Unions for groups like the teachers, nurses, or service workers across the country are already wildly diverse across every axis. The primary failing of solidarity in the US is among white collar professionals, who see the struggle of these workers as separate from their own concerns, even though these unions been fighting for the racial and economic justice for many years prior to the current unrest. To my mind, this is the result of an ingrained classism, where said white collar workers see themselves above unionization (and thus the working class union members), preferring acts of temporary, performative symbolism over durable structures that would unite them with others across class lines. The first step in fighting this would of course be to form their own unions in explicit solidarity with those of the working class.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  No. The Democrats need to be a political party that relies on support from regular people. Whether they are workers is beside the point. Now, the unions were a good way of funneling support to the Democrats. (Which, by the way, was a bit unfair if you were a Republican and a union member, but that's not the point.) What's missing now for the Democrats isn't the workers, it's the mechanism for mobilizing bulk support.
xhkkffbf 6y ago
Voting in person the old fashioned way for all but those with a good physical excuse seems to be the best way to maintain the integrity of our voting process. Yes, in-person voting has the potential for fraud, but mail-in voting has all of the same problems and more. It's hard to find a mechanism for fraud that applies to in-person but not mail in. Furthermore, the issues with COVID seem overblown. I've waited in line to vote, but the lines were never longer than the lines at my local supermarket on Saturday morning. If we can shop for food in person, we can vote. If you want to understand the fears over mail-in voting, just imagine what you could do if you control the mail sorting for a large apartment building or nursing home. It is just much harder to cheat when you require a physical body to be present at the polls. Not impossible but harder.
- srj 6y ago
  I voted by mail in Seattle for years and never had an issue or even heard of one. The ballot goes in a tamper-evident envelope, sealed within the mailing envelope. You also get online tracking to know your ballot was received and processed.
  - specialist 6y ago
    You're welcome. Me and my peeps did the yeoman work to both protect the secret ballot and ensure end-to-end auditability. If every jurisdiction nationwide adopted the rules, procedures, and operations used by King County Elections, we'd be in good shape. But they won't.
    - spenczar5 6y ago
      Why not? I am curious to know more - is it expensive or difficult to implement? Couldn’t other jurisdictions copy King County’s system?
      - specialist 6y ago
        Election administration is chronically underfunded. A lot of people have some very funny ideas about how to conduct elections. For examples: Should ballots be required to be received or postmarked by Election Day to be accepted? (Correct answer is postmarked.) If a voter makes a mistake, how does it get corrected? Some jurisdictions just toss any ballot with any mistake. What are the standards for signature verification? What happens if the admins identify a mismatch? Sadly, the minutia goes on and on.
staplers 6y ago
The federal government is deploying Border Patrol and DHS agents to democratic American cities to use less-lethal ammunition on people demanding the defunding of police to better fund community services. The people's movement is happening right now.
js2 6y ago
I don't like to leave political comments here, but this gets my goad: > it shows the culpability of most of the elected officials, from both parties. The "both parties" remark drives me crazy, as if they are equally culpable in how we got to today, or equally culpable in their current leadership of America, so let's just back up for a moment. No Democratic president has won a majority of the white vote since 1964. The Republican Southern Strategy cynically used racism to dismantle the New Deal. Mondale was the last New Deal democrat. His crushing defeat by Reagan is what led to the the current Democratic party. See the Democratic Leadership Council. The Democrats had lost the white vote to racists and they had to do something to start winning elections. So they adopted the so-called Third Way. Simultaneously, Republicans and "right-to-work" (hah) laws dismantled unions, the primary source of Democratic fund raising. The Democrats had to go somewhere for money and that somewhere was corporate donors. So we end up with both parties beholden to corporate influence and neither party truly representing working class voters. But let us not forget that the Democrats didn't have a whole lot of options. Republicans also loosened campaign finance restrictions making it even more expensive to win elections. Heads we win, tails you lose. So the Republicans hold on to white working class voters through racism, not because they represent their economic interests. The Democrats become the "everyone else" party but are too much in the pocket of corporations and wall street. (One of Obama's biggest mistakes was not locking up the crooks responsible for the sub-prime crisis.) Still, the Democrats are much more the party of the working class voter than Republicans. You don't see any Republican candidate arguing for sectoral collective bargaining for example. Republicans, not Democrats, are trying to kill the USPS, the largest provider of decent working-class jobs in the country. I hope that Trump is the end of the Southern Strategy and that we end up with a not-racist Republican party. The Democrats need an opposition party that's based on serious policy differences instead of a party based on racism and cynicism. For example, I don't think there's a free-market answer solution to health insurance, but if the Republicans believe that, let them at least make a serious proposal. Here's an example of where the Republican party might go: Five years ago, Oren Cass sat at the center of the Republican Party. Cass is a former management consultant who served as the domestic policy director for the Mitt Romney campaign and then as a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute. But then he launched an insurgency. Today, Cass is the founder and executive director of American Compass, a new think tank created to challenge the right-wing economic orthodoxy. Cass thinks conservatism has lost its way, becoming obsessed with low tax rates and a quasi-religious veneration of markets. What conservatives need, he thinks, are clear social goals that can structure a radically new economic agenda: a vision that puts families first, eschews economic growth as the be-all-end-all of policymaking, and recognizes the inescapability of government intervention in the economy. Trump is likely — though not certain — to lose in 2020. And then, Cass thinks, Republicans will face a choice: to return to a “pre-Trump” consensus, or to build a “post-Trump future” — one that, he hopes, will prevent more Trump-like politicians from rising. In this conversation, Cass and I discuss how current economic indicators fail, the relationship between economics and culture, why Cass believes production — not consumption — should be the central focus of public policy, the problems with how our society assigns status to different professions, the role that power plays in determining market outcomes, the conservative case against market fundamentalism, why Cass supports labor unions and industrial policy but not a job guarantee or publicly funded childcare, what the future of the Republican Party after Donald Trump looks like, whether Cass’s policies are big enough to solve the problems he identifies, and more. https://overcast.fm/+QLhWcHCkY https://overcast.fm/+QLhWcHCkY Now that's a serious policy difference we can discuss instead of the clown show that is the current Republican party. I have a lot of beefs with the Democratic party but it's not "both parties" by any stretch of the imagination.

claudeganon 6y ago

> Moreover, it shows the culpability of most of the elected officials, from both parties. It shows that after the labor movement was destroyed, the only material base for the Democratic Party was to go looking for money from the same people who give it to Republicans. Saying we don’t need a labor movement is equivalent to saying “we don’t need a political party that relies on support from workers.”

alextheparrot 6y ago
If I may, I'll add a correction to your quoted statement to give my intended meaning: “we don’t need a political party that relies only on support from workers.” The subdivision and segregation of American political movements has been an incredibly useful tool in defusing them. The labor, civil rights, suffrage, identity movements, were powerful, but the lack of intersectionality made it so that once policy victories were achieved the tenor died down. My comment was focused on how this was a fundamental weakness. For example, is voting by mail a "labor" issue? I would say no, and even if this opinion is generally wrong it shows the subdivision that occurs. There is no modern suffrage movement in the same way as existed in the early part of the 1900s. The idea of a "people's movement" is to say we need a political party that relies on the people, not kleptocrats, not lawyers, not donors, and fights for issues that are relevant to those people. I didn't march in the recent protests because I am black, because I've felt fear from the police, because I've been systemically oppressed. Most of my peers didn't either, and the ones who were subject to those oppressions, among many others, are far braver than me, and for that I feel empathy. And for that we should march. These are issues of "people" because that's the most common denominator, not because we're excluding the factors. The underlying thread of what I said is that we need a movement that relies on the common empathy we have for each other. I want community. I want justice. I want to love my neighbor, as myself. I want you to pray to your god while I mine, even if mine is just a nice bike ride on a Sunday morning. And I know cynics, rightfully jaded by their lives, will probably say I'm being hopeful, youthful, naive. And I accept all of these, but I'd rather be those than have what we have today, what a simple cross to carry. I guess I just want to listen to John Lenin's Imagine and feel like he's talking about my world. And I'm not the only one.
- claudeganon 6y ago
  I won’t say that you’re naive, but only that that is kind of diffuse liberalism has no history of effecting real political change while the labor movement has a long, international history of doing so. While it’s good to acknowledge the failings of prior forms of the labor movement in addressing issues of race and gender, this doesn’t reflect their current state or reality. Unions for groups like the teachers, nurses, or service workers across the country are already wildly diverse across every axis. The primary failing of solidarity in the US is among white collar professionals, who see the struggle of these workers as separate from their own concerns, even though these unions been fighting for the racial and economic justice for many years prior to the current unrest. To my mind, this is the result of an ingrained classism, where said white collar workers see themselves above unionization (and thus the working class union members), preferring acts of temporary, performative symbolism over durable structures that would unite them with others across class lines. The first step in fighting this would of course be to form their own unions in explicit solidarity with those of the working class.
AnimalMuppet 6y ago
No. The Democrats need to be a political party that relies on support from regular people. Whether they are workers is beside the point. Now, the unions were a good way of funneling support to the Democrats. (Which, by the way, was a bit unfair if you were a Republican and a union member, but that's not the point.) What's missing now for the Democrats isn't the workers, it's the mechanism for mobilizing bulk support.

xhkkffbf 6y ago

Voting in person the old fashioned way for all but those with a good physical excuse seems to be the best way to maintain the integrity of our voting process. Yes, in-person voting has the potential for fraud, but mail-in voting has all of the same problems and more. It's hard to find a mechanism for fraud that applies to in-person but not mail in. Furthermore, the issues with COVID seem overblown. I've waited in line to vote, but the lines were never longer than the lines at my local supermarket on Saturday morning. If we can shop for food in person, we can vote. If you want to understand the fears over mail-in voting, just imagine what you could do if you control the mail sorting for a large apartment building or nursing home. It is just much harder to cheat when you require a physical body to be present at the polls. Not impossible but harder.

srj 6y ago
I voted by mail in Seattle for years and never had an issue or even heard of one. The ballot goes in a tamper-evident envelope, sealed within the mailing envelope. You also get online tracking to know your ballot was received and processed.
- specialist 6y ago
  You're welcome. Me and my peeps did the yeoman work to both protect the secret ballot and ensure end-to-end auditability. If every jurisdiction nationwide adopted the rules, procedures, and operations used by King County Elections, we'd be in good shape. But they won't.
  - spenczar5 6y ago
    Why not? I am curious to know more - is it expensive or difficult to implement? Couldn’t other jurisdictions copy King County’s system?
    - specialist 6y ago
      Election administration is chronically underfunded. A lot of people have some very funny ideas about how to conduct elections. For examples: Should ballots be required to be received or postmarked by Election Day to be accepted? (Correct answer is postmarked.) If a voter makes a mistake, how does it get corrected? Some jurisdictions just toss any ballot with any mistake. What are the standards for signature verification? What happens if the admins identify a mismatch? Sadly, the minutia goes on and on.

staplers 6y ago

The federal government is deploying Border Patrol and DHS agents to democratic American cities to use less-lethal ammunition on people demanding the defunding of police to better fund community services. The people's movement is happening right now.

js2 6y ago

I don't like to leave political comments here, but this gets my goad: > it shows the culpability of most of the elected officials, from both parties. The "both parties" remark drives me crazy, as if they are equally culpable in how we got to today, or equally culpable in their current leadership of America, so let's just back up for a moment. No Democratic president has won a majority of the white vote since 1964. The Republican Southern Strategy cynically used racism to dismantle the New Deal. Mondale was the last New Deal democrat. His crushing defeat by Reagan is what led to the the current Democratic party. See the Democratic Leadership Council. The Democrats had lost the white vote to racists and they had to do something to start winning elections. So they adopted the so-called Third Way. Simultaneously, Republicans and "right-to-work" (hah) laws dismantled unions, the primary source of Democratic fund raising. The Democrats had to go somewhere for money and that somewhere was corporate donors. So we end up with both parties beholden to corporate influence and neither party truly representing working class voters. But let us not forget that the Democrats didn't have a whole lot of options. Republicans also loosened campaign finance restrictions making it even more expensive to win elections. Heads we win, tails you lose. So the Republicans hold on to white working class voters through racism, not because they represent their economic interests. The Democrats become the "everyone else" party but are too much in the pocket of corporations and wall street. (One of Obama's biggest mistakes was not locking up the crooks responsible for the sub-prime crisis.) Still, the Democrats are much more the party of the working class voter than Republicans. You don't see any Republican candidate arguing for sectoral collective bargaining for example. Republicans, not Democrats, are trying to kill the USPS, the largest provider of decent working-class jobs in the country. I hope that Trump is the end of the Southern Strategy and that we end up with a not-racist Republican party. The Democrats need an opposition party that's based on serious policy differences instead of a party based on racism and cynicism. For example, I don't think there's a free-market answer solution to health insurance, but if the Republicans believe that, let them at least make a serious proposal. Here's an example of where the Republican party might go: Five years ago, Oren Cass sat at the center of the Republican Party. Cass is a former management consultant who served as the domestic policy director for the Mitt Romney campaign and then as a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute. But then he launched an insurgency. Today, Cass is the founder and executive director of American Compass, a new think tank created to challenge the right-wing economic orthodoxy. Cass thinks conservatism has lost its way, becoming obsessed with low tax rates and a quasi-religious veneration of markets. What conservatives need, he thinks, are clear social goals that can structure a radically new economic agenda: a vision that puts families first, eschews economic growth as the be-all-end-all of policymaking, and recognizes the inescapability of government intervention in the economy. Trump is likely — though not certain — to lose in 2020. And then, Cass thinks, Republicans will face a choice: to return to a “pre-Trump” consensus, or to build a “post-Trump future” — one that, he hopes, will prevent more Trump-like politicians from rising. In this conversation, Cass and I discuss how current economic indicators fail, the relationship between economics and culture, why Cass believes production — not consumption — should be the central focus of public policy, the problems with how our society assigns status to different professions, the role that power plays in determining market outcomes, the conservative case against market fundamentalism, why Cass supports labor unions and industrial policy but not a job guarantee or publicly funded childcare, what the future of the Republican Party after Donald Trump looks like, whether Cass’s policies are big enough to solve the problems he identifies, and more. https://overcast.fm/+QLhWcHCkY https://overcast.fm/+QLhWcHCkY Now that's a serious policy difference we can discuss instead of the clown show that is the current Republican party. I have a lot of beefs with the Democratic party but it's not "both parties" by any stretch of the imagination.