The Green Party is sick, organizationally. I few months back they posted a questionnaire for young students who wanted leadership positions that asked a dozen questions about racism and ideological purity and *zero* questions about the environment, environmental policy, or environmental organizing. Their mission is to sew dissent and anger in the left. They don't actually promote environmentalism because if they did rational voters my cast ballots for Democrats to actually see environmental policy enacted.

Dan will never get over 2016.
The Buttsore will Never. End.

It is called "reminding folks what their ideological purity costs." If those folks could learn from their mistakes, then it wouldn't be necessary to keep reminding them. Not that they actually understand the lesson. This horrorshow of a presidency still isn't bad enough for the purists that I know to say - hey, maybe this is how a two party system works. The folks I know still think Clinton would be worse than Trump.

It defies the imagination, the depth of the denial.

Sen. Jon Tester seems like such a good moderate choice to represent Montanans that I don't understand why voters wouldn't be lining up to cast ballots for him. I get why the GOP wants to get rid of him - the man has way too much integrity for their liking - but why MT voters wouldn't support him is beyond me.

Honestly, the more we learn about the psychology of political affiliations, the more convinced I am that governing from the center is a moral obligation as well as a practical necessity. There's about a third of the country that is not persuadable. And they are not persuadable because it's not their opinions that are conservative it's their personalities. Like a company has to balance decisions for the needs of their introverted and extroverted employees, we're going to need to consider the psychological and emotional needs of America's conservatives to be successful. All our Utopian visions will add up to shit if they result in systems preordained to make 1/3 of the country miserable. One in three people living in alienation and misery is not what I'm fighting for.

@2

I'm sure it is lovely but please stop thinking so much about Dan's ass.

Obligatory:

https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/u…

And then there are the republicans sponsered by the dccc running as conservative democrats. War mongers, military intelligence people with the backing of hoyer and nancy pelosi.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/n…

I'd hazard that Jill Stein did not get seated ***at Putin's table*** just because he's likes meeting new and interesting people. He does not have a rep for appreciating spirited disagreement at the dinner table.

@8 Link no work :(

But as long as they vote with the party on legislation, who cares? I'd rather have a war mongering military intelligence person in congress with a (D) after her name than one with an (R). And those are the choices cruel fate has given us.

This article is an incomplete depiction of the situation in #Montana. I'd like to say I'm surprised by this but honestly, at this point, I'd be shocked at any complete and accurate understanding coming from the D's. Tim Adams, the Montana Senate Candidate to whom this article is referring, is not, as you put it, a "Republican operative." Yes, he did work as a data analyst for the MTRP for six months. This is hardly indicates and over whelming commitment to republican ideals. I question how many working class people any of you know who've never worked for an organization who holds ideals you don't share? In America today, sometimes turning down work is simply not an option. You're article fails to address the fact that Mr. Adams has also donated to various Democratic candidates, ran as a Libertarian, worked tirelessly with various non profits organizations to advance the right of the LGBTQ+ community, on the Medical Marijuana initiative, and multitudes of other progressive projects. He is a politically conscious person looking for an organization that is seeking to advance the right of individual citizens rather than corporate elite and military industrial complex that both the D's and R's seem so hellbent on protecting.

Furthermore, you fail to mention the #MTGP's other Senate candidate at all! Mr. Steve Kelly is a well know environmental activist and a long time #Green Party support. He is also very likely to win the Green Party primary here in Montana and will, therefore, be the candidate #BigBankJon will be facing. Given that you have chosen to consider only the facts that your Democratic handlers have given you, you are probably unaware that the Democratic powers that be have brought in the same high-powered legal henchmen they used to silence the outcry by Bernie supporters after the 2016 primary race, Perkins & Coie, to also silence the voice of the more than 10,000 Montanan's who signed the Green Party petition for ballot access. They have found 180 of the signatures certified by the SOS that they don't think are valid. Despite the fact we only needed 5000 out of 34 districts to qualify, and we 7,386 in 38 were certified, somehow 180 "questionable" signatures, identified by democratic party employees, should somehow disqualify the #MTGP. This is a blatant attack on the 1st amendment rights of Montanan's and it is certainly not democratic. So any dirty underhanded tricks the Republican are using in this "politics as usual" election season aside, don't fool yourselves into thinking the Democrats are any better.

Danielle Breck, MTGP Coordinator

#VoteGreen2018 #DemExit #GreenEnter #MTGP #GPUS #ItsInOurHands #NowWeRise #GreenSpring #DemsDirtyDeals

Dan Savage already knows what Democrats have to do to avoid being outflanked on their left by real or fake leftists: run on progressive policies like medicare for all, free college at public institutions, campaign reform, $15 minimum wage, etc . Right wing Democrats losing narrowly to far right neanderthals like they have done numerous times over the last couple of decades is not the fault of the left despite Dan Savage's best attempt at claiming otherwise.

For those of you who don't understand why Montanan's would want to vote for #BigBankJon let me clue you in. He voted to gut Glass-Steagall. He sided with the pharmaceutical industry, which he takes massive amount of money from, instead of low income Montanan's on the issue of affordable Canadian medicine. Finally, and in my opinion most importantly, he continues, along with ALL the Democrats in congress, to vote for the foreign wars which have killed millions of innocent people and serve only to expand the power and control of the elite power structure.

Look the GP sucks for sure for all sorts of reasons, but they are such a tiny group of people and mostly irrelevant to anything and not even the largest (or even second largest) emerging alternatives to centrist politics or the mainstream right/left. It's weird the way some people fixate on them. The only thing I can consider is that it's because the GP keeps running in big elections (do they do anything else?) and so people who maybe don't know too much about any other grassroots or political alternatives hear about them all the time?

I think it was pointless (maybe even damaging) to vote for Stein too, but it was also such a tiny percent of people that it's weird to fixate on votes lost there- there are always going to be people who do that- rather than the millions of people who didn't vote at all or the people who stayed home or the people who were disenfranchised, or the fact that over 5X as many voted for the other big third party. Also it's a bit wrongheaded to assume people who voted for Stein would've voted for Clinton otherwise- the political spectrum is not quite so linear as that and it's been changing rapidly over the last few years especially.

I mean, it seems we should focus more on the disaffected, the unregistered, people who think they can't vote, redistricting, and getting the Dems to respond to its natural base and actually offer them something, etc.

The other thing that bothers me about this conversation is that if you are a candidate who has a following and your political stance does not quite fit with either of the two main parties, then you have a choice: you run as a third party or you caucus with one of the main party and run on their ticket. In either case, you get criticized by the main party. If you run as a third, you get called a spoiler. If you caucus/run with the main party, you get criticized for not being really a Dem or a Rep. So this criticism leaves no room for any voices outside of the mainstream parties- which is alienating to half the country that does not vote at all b/c they are disaffected. Then you blame that half for either not voting or you blame the third/independent candidates themselves for interfering. This is a nasty cycle, and it leads directly to what we have now.

If you are serious about democracy, the first thing is to demand that all candidates stop accepting big business money- we build a fire wall between politics and business. The second step is to be more responsive to populist movement demands. Then the issues with third parties or independents or the stupidity of the Greens will work itself out. Focusing on the GP itself is treating a symptom instead of finding a cure.

Correction would NOT* want to vote for #BigBankJon

Also, liberals/Dems who are annoyed that people don't vote for them really do need to step up and address issues of US war abroad. They keep blowing this off as a minor issue, and I'm not sure why? My experience from talking to liberal is that they are not interested personally or else (more commonly) they think that the US has good intentions and things just go wrong sometimes and it's complicated and that's fine.

If you actually talk to people about how they vote (people who wouldn't vote for Clinton), then there are all sorts of stupid reasons, but there are also people with real grievances who feel the Dems won't respond (I think nationally we're having conversations about that finally) and there are also people who were concerned about what a hawk Hilary is and her own past foreign policy disasters. Liberals never respond to this except to say that the GOP would be worse. While that's true, it's still not a defense of the Dem policy. There is no defense- liberals just act like it shouldn't matter.

So let me get it out of the way- yes the Reps are worse on foreign policy and yes I voted for Hilary for this reason. But that doesn't change the fact that the Dems, particularly the Hilary side, is awful too (brutal and disastrous in fact) and that loads of people did not vote for her for this reason. You have to actually address this. You can't blow it off anymore.

There are loads of people on the right and in the center who voted for Trump because they really believed him when he said he was going to end some of the wars abroad. (I agree that is naive- that is not the point). There are also loads of people who voted for either Johnson or Stein for the same reason. And on the right, there is a whole segment of the alt-right who is pulling away from Trump because he has been just as interventionist as other Dems and Reps. On the left, you have loads of anti-imperialists who will not vote Dem (or who do so grudgingly) for this reason. Even Bernie has gotten loads of heat from the left because he's been fairly shitty on foreign policy (though better than most other Dems). Likewise, millions of immigrants and people with families abroad for whom this is the number one issue. Liberals have to stop ignoring it. People who defend Clinton and the Democrats must respond to this.

So it seems weird to me to focus on a tiny percentage of voters who voted GP and ignore some of the core reasons people couldn't bring themselves to vote Dem in the first place. Why not instead focus on pressuring the Dems to get money out of politics- including their own donor base, expand their outreach to their base, and end US intervention in the Middle East?

Instead, you get people like Pelosi saying they are just going to stop requiring candidates to be pro-choice. This is the way these people think. They just keep moving to the right. And that's the problem with centrist politics- it doesn't actually stand for anything other than compromise. The right doesn't play that game and so you just keep chasing the Reps.

And if you start thinking about this, you'll see that the Dem establishment actually doesn't care. They would like to win. But they want to keep themselves in their own positions of power even more. Winning would require a radical transformation of the party. Keeping their own positions just requires them to pick up a few Rep votes here and there and to stay relevant with the liberals. Then so long as they sometimes win elections, they can continue business as usual. While this is going on, I just can't see focusing on Jill Fucking Stein.

The percentage of the electorate who voted for stein may be low and it’s likely that many/most of those people would not necessarily have voted for clinton anyway, but when someone is on the trail saying the 2 major parties are indistinguishable or that clinton would be more likely than trump to lead us into war, this can discourage people from voting, and the impact is immeasurable. In the near term this is harmful to the kinds of environmental and social policies that a typical green party voter would support.

That said I don’t think it’s helpful to worry about what’s going on inside the green party. The dems’ focus should be on cleaning house and getting a coherent message together, so that fewer people are capable of believing democrats are indistinguishable from republicans or that the dem candidate is a war hawk. Being slightly better than the alternative is not a winning strategy when it’s clear republicans will line up and support literally anyone, regardless of their qualifications, ethics or grasp on reality.

Blip,

I agree that it's stupid to say the two parties are indistinguishable. I blame Nader for this bullshit, even though I believe he is an honest person who has done a lot of good work, and the GP needs to shut the fuck up. They don't do much grassroots organizing as far as I can tell- they are out and around in things but hardly in any large numbers and considering the amount of money they have, I do wonder about their intentions sometimes. So I'm not defending them, I'm just saying that it's not an effective use of time/energy for people with national platforms for focus on them- they are mostly irrelevant.

As for Clinton being more likely to lead us into war than Trump- OK pretend you don't know anything about the world for just a sec. If you just look at what Clinton said during the campaign vs what Trump said, this is a possible conclusion. They both said harsh things about the rest of the world, but Trump also talked about pulling out of conflicts in the ME, how US weapons/money often end up in the hands of terrorists (true), how he wanted to de-escalate tensions with Russia, and how he wanted to pull the US out of NATO.

Now I agree that it's super naive to believe that any Rep candidate, Trump especially, would actually do any of those things, and they have historically been much more hawkish. But Clinton said the opposite of all this, so if you were just to base it on their own individual words, you would not be insane to conclude that Trump is less likely to start a war. Moreover, Clinton actually has experience starting wars and voting for them and Trump does not. So even if you looked at the actual individual careers of the two candidates, this would not be an insane conclusions. It only becomes an insane conclusion if you start looking at the track record of the two parties as a whole (independent of the people in charge)- and once you start thinking that way, you will see that they do in fact serve the same interests. This is not the same thing as saying there are no differences between them, but it is true that they are on roughly the same track in terms of serving the military industrial complex.

So I can understand someone thinking about all this and deciding not to vote or to go with the third party or go with the wild card. Especially when Hilary and liberals likewise sneer at people who raise these concerns. It was hard to vote for Hilary. I did it because I think Dems are always better than Reps, but it did make me feel complicit in expanding the US wars abroad. Hilary is a hawk. The GP did not make that up.

As for your second paragraph, we agree entirely.

WHY IS DAN SO NEGATIVE ABOUT SELF DEFEATING MORONS?? THINK ABOUT MY FEELINGS!!!

@13 Oh shut up. I love how the "left" (scare quotes intended) simultaneously paints everyone as an uneducated trog while assuring us that they have such a keen grasp of banking regulations that they'll come back to the fold is we run on Glass-Steagall! Seriously. This is why I am starting to ignore "cultural leftism" and vote for my economic self-interest, which is another way of saying "for Democrats."

Ever since the election, the DNC has done nothing but cast blame everywhere but themselves. The list of people Clinton has personally blamed for her loss is roughly 88% of the world population at this point.

I don't know if the eternal victimhood act is going to be very motivating to voters. It really just makes you seem weak and childish. Seems like a coherent message and likeable candidates would be more productive.

Unsure if a platform that consists solely of "Hate Trump!" and another neoliberal establishment Dem pushing 65 is going to do much to convince voters they are trying something new.

Luke, I'm not sure what your complaint is here. First off, @13 said lots of things, not just banking regulations. But if you are saying that people would start voting Dem again if they regulate the banks better, I agree it's a little naive to think that most people are running around thinking about specific legislation like Glass-Steagall. However, it's not naive to point out that Obama and the Dems lost a lot of support when they bailed out banks with taxpayer money- what we are seeing now is a backlash to the financial crisis, and Hilary and establishment Dems' connections to Wall Street did hurt them. I'm not claiming that the Reps are better- I think their core would vote for anyone and obviously Trump is all up in it, but it does partially account for people not voting for Hilary- all across the spectrum. Most people don't vote at all, and yes people did go to the polls and vote in local races but not the pres, and some people voted for Bernie in the primary or one of the third parties and then voted against Hilary later. So while I agree it's incorrect to assume that the majority of people would be motivated to vote based on specific legislation that they may not heard of, it is accurate that those same people care about the economy, and you don't have to be an economic/policy pedant to know that "bailing out bankers" is bad politics. But I took @13's argument more to mean that behind the scenes, it is true that many Dems (while no doubt working less against your economic interests than the Reps) are actively working on the side of the finance industry against people. And the repeal of Glass Steagal did play a role in causing the 08 crash, along with other bad economic policies many under the Clinton administration.

@14 -- "they are such a tiny group of people and mostly irrelevant to anything"

They were big enough to swing the election to Trump/Pence, which is big enough to install scores of rightwing tools in lifetime federal judgeships, which is enough to saddle progressive policy advocates with adverse legal precedents that will take more than a century to unwind.

Anyone who understands how any of this works will be buttsore for a long, long time.

this can discourage people from voting, and the impact is immeasurable.

The impact is certainly minor compared to whether the candidate runs on a credible platform of change. It's probable that Clinton would have won if she had actually ran as a progressive even though her oversized luggage told a very different story.

danijeane, I have a real hard time being persuaded by arguments that are bereft of citations but absolutely chock-full of spelling and grammatical errors.

@23 They were one of DOZENS of things that swung the election. You can pick and choose any of them to focus on and say "if X hadn't happened, the election results would be different". The weird thing is why someone would pick this particular thing.

For example, you could just as easily focus on the people who think they can't vote because they've had a felony in the past. In almost all states, they can. Or you could focus on the Congressional redistricting that the GOP has done in many states that has contributed to massive voter disaffection. Or you could focus on specific Dem policies that have alienated people and turned them against the Dems. Or you could focus on Hilary's own corporate backing and support for foreign intervention / Iraq war vote or her refusal to come out for M4A. Or you could focus on the Dem policy of bank bailout. Or on election reform itself- the fact that we could have stacked voting or we could get money out of campaigns. Etc forever. Any one of these things had a greater impact on voters than the Green Party.

Yet for some reason, the things that Dems are mostly focusing on are: 1)Russian social media / PR, 2)Existence of GP candidate, 3)ProChoice policies.

It must strike anyone who considers it that these are the three things that the Dems could focus on without requiring them to change the financial establishment / structure of the party or change the actual people involved in that structure. All of the others would require these changes.

What @25 said.

@10 The problem is that they don’t vote with the party. Look at the voting records of Joe Manchin, Doug Jones, Claire McCaskill, Heidi Heitkamp, and Joe Connelly. They have consistently and repeatedly broke ranks from their fellow Democrats to support Trumpian values. They voted in Mike Pompeo, destroyed Glass Steagall and even broke a bipartisan filibuster to extend warrantless spying. They’ll destroy gun control legislation in a heartbeat.

Dan, bless his heart, wants to rack up the Democratic numbers by any means necessary. If an anti-abortion anti-gun-control anti-LGBT pro-bank pro-War pro-corporate anti-single-payer anti-environmentalist candidate ran on the Democratic Ticket, he’d support them while sporting a hardon for how moral and righteous he is being. Dan will shout “Vote Blue no matter who” from the mountaintops and has done so from both of his podcasts. He’s immoral, unreasonable and quite frankly a moron of the type who championed us marching into the Iraq War.

Oh wait.

He did champion is into the Iraq War. If that doesn’t tell you that he’s voluntarily a Democratic mouthpiece without actually thinking about anything he types, then you really should get your head examined.

@23 Why aren’t you sore at the DNC for running a shitty candidate? Why aren’t you upset at Hillary for telling the media to tout Trump as the Ur-Republican Pied Piper candidate (and then LOST ago him!)?

That would require a modicum of self reflection, something that centrists sorely lack.

@Misanthrope

I don't know what's in Dan's heart of hearts and I don't listen to his podcasts (he has two?) but I think he's been consistently good on domestic cultural policies / civil rights. He's terrible on most domestic economic policies and also terrible on all foreign policy. So I think if there were an anti choice, anti LGBT candidate, even blue, Dan would not support them. But I don't know- it might depend on how bad the red candidate is? Maybe you are right?

What I think is that he's just the sort of liberal who only understands US politics in terms of cultural issues- that the Cons make up the party of creationism, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc, and the Libs make up the party that supports civil rights and logic. It's hard to break people out of this dichotomy and get them to see a political spectrum that is bigger than that- partially because it's not simple but mostly because there is a media empire (all the coastal talking heads) that have careers in perpetuating this incomplete and simplistic view of politics. And to a certain extent, Dan owes his bread and butter to maintaining it as well- his sex advice column and civil rights advocacy could exist outside of that framework, but it would be more difficult and more alienating to wealthy urban liberals, and he wouldn't get spots on Bill Maher or Colbert etc. In the end, I think he's done more good than harm, and his support of the Iraq war and other hawkish foreign policy views are more a stain on his reputation than actual consequential stances as he really has very little (if any) influence on US foreign policy, don't you think?

Basically I find it fascinating because I think the country in general is struggling with learning that politics is larger than this spectrum that has divided people over the last two decades. It's like it's slowly dawning on folks that politics is actually about the control and distribution of resources, all the way from your local school board up to what countries we invade. And we're feeling the growing pains of people having to readjust their political frameworks and identities as they start to realize this.

I support Ranked Choice Voting, which we have in San Francisco. It would neutralize these Trojan horse candidates and give people more choices. It would be challenging to do it at the presidential level without a Cinstitutional Amendment (would likely throw the race to the House every time), but would work for every other race.

This is a good thread. I do not think dan necessarily wants hilcrats in.
99% of the rich 20 or 30%, that are mainly the repugs and hillcrats of murica do not want democracy. They simply see, the rest of us as expendible and war fodder

I’ll add that Jill Stein is culpable here in ways that other Green candidates generally are not in that she actively championed Trump to win. She didn’t campaign in Green-rich states like California where she could have helped the Greens get to the coveted 5% threshold. Instead, she sacrificed that long term goal to campaign in swing states where a small blip up could flip the state. She dismissed criticism of Trump and only attacked Clinton, even saying she was worse than Trump. (Any Greens check out what Pruitt is up to at the EPA?) Her platform was a complete sop to Putin, one more reason he ran FB ads supporting her.

Any genuine Green Party member should be very suspicious of Jill Stein.

@Kevin,

Why do you think that ranked voting wouldn't work on the presidential level? Assuming it was coupled with campaign finance reform & an end to the electoral college? To me, it seems that these are the three things that could fix a broken system but I admit to not having read too much about how ranked voting could be implemented nationally.

I figure these reforms would cause the existence of coalition governments and all that- so maybe I'm pushing for a more parliamentary style here? I dunno. What's your rationale for thinking it wouldn't work for the president?

BTW, I'm leaning towards thinking we eliminate the presidency altogether. The executive branch and admin is important, but I don't see why the president should have any more power than just the figure head representation of that branch. It might be better if we start voting for parties/platforms instead.

EmmaLiz --

How do you find the time for these screeds? OMG. One would think you actually knew something until that last paragraph in #34.

Lindie, what's far stranger is how you find the time to comment on things you claim are screeds? I mean, either we all admit we are here wasting time for our various personal motivations (which I have written about before but don't feel compelled to do right now) - including yourself- or we have some pretension otherwise which is a tad hypocritical. It's far stranger that you keep commenting on my posts just to tell me how much you don't like them or find them too long OMG. I mean, move on then? You are not a captive audience and there are plenty of other posts here to engage with and I don't give a shit at all what you think about my posts, so it's a bit weird. Only explanation is that you, like me, are enjoying the waste of your time in this way.

@35 Lindie- as for your criticism of elimination of the election of the president himself but instead voting for a party that has a leader within the possibility of coalition governments, I'm not to knowledgeable about parliamentary politics, but I believe this is the way it works in those kinds of democracies- including India and the UK so this isn't some weirdo far fetched nutjob suggestion though I don't really know the details of how it works. Maybe someone here could help explain and could tell us if it does avoid the sorts of fixations on individual politicians instead of platforms/policies?

@23: "They were big enough to swing the election to Trump/Pence, which is big enough to install scores of rightwing tools in lifetime federal judgeships, which is enough to saddle progressive policy advocates with adverse legal precedents that will take more than a century to unwind."

No, they weren't. They didn't swing the election becasue they didn't vote for Trump, they voted for Stein. That's only a swing if you assume that Democrats are entitled to all votes that aren't for Republicans or something similar. What's far more likely than people who vote Green voting for the Democrat instead if there was no Green is that they simply wouldn't vote for the Republican OR the Democrat. Not voting is the plurality position in pretty much every election in this country, and it's the null hypothesis. What happened was that the Democrats failed to motivate more people to vote for their candidate in the necessary states that they lost by slim margins, whether those people voted Republican, Green, Socialist, Libertarian, or (the plurality, and nearly all who didn't pick the Republican) for nobody at all.

Maybe this becomes more clear if we consider the hypothetical case where the Green Party dissolves. So, now we no longer have 2% of the vote going to the Greens; who gets blamed for Democratic losses in that case? I suspect that, being unwilling to blame the party or candidate for failing to motivate voters, it's then the non-voters whom people like you or Dan would blame. What's confusing to me is that they're not already your focus, since there are SO MANY MORE of them than Green voters, which means that any strategy that will convince X% of people to alter their behavior to what you want - voting Democrat - will bring in far more votes if applied to non-voters than Green voters.

And I'm cheering for EmmaLiz @16!

@3: Why is it always the Left's ideological purity that's a problem, and never the ideological purity of capitalists or imperialists? Why didn't more people vote for Sanders in the primary when the polling and rally turnout both showed he was a much more popular candidate generally? (Yes, he did indeed lose the primary. He was not more popular among people who were able to vote in the Democratic primary, but since general elections are decided by the general population and not only by voters who are registered as Democrats - most states do not have open primaries and a plurality of US voters are neither Dems or Rebs but independents - that is not an indication that he was a weaker general election candidate than Clinton.)

That kind of posturing simply doesn't work, because whomever you're criticizing can flip it around to question why YOUR ideological purity stopped YOU from supporting ZIR candidate. Nobody is entitled to votes; do better at convincing people (you can start by dropping the "ideological purity" hypocrisy, which won't convince a single person).

when a republican runs as a green, they are fake (because greens are real); when a republican runs as a democrat, they are a blue dog, true and loyal democrat buds. kaine wants to expand trump's war powers, ds in georgia and philadelphia are in the news for helping rs gerrymander. greens have better policy ideas than d leadership, and d mouthpieces like shareblue and thinkprogress know this, and push green fracas so they can pistil cons in the name of progress. jayapal is now saying we should call progressive policies centrist because that's what they are; my guess is ds won't to defend their truth the blue dogs.

@22, Emma, I reject the assertion that weakening GS (it was never repealed) caused the 08 financial crisis and not other factors, like bad loan underwritting. While GS paved the way for a lot of M&A, no one who makes that argument as a sensible bright line for what “too big to fail is”! So while the deregulation might have been key to the JPM-Chase merger, both of those banks would have already been too big to let fail on their own. To the degree that the financial industry is “working against people” (fact check: most poor countries suffer from too few banks not at the hands of bankers) through practices like loan discrimination and unfair fees, I don’t think the Dems are working with them at all. Global banking will continue to be a thing people need and therefore they will need large banks.

It ain't easy being Green...
-Kermit

Luke, I didnt' say it caused it. I said it played a role in it, along with plenty of other bad policies.

Most poor countries don't have the ability to run massive deficits since they are not the world's default currency so it's really irrelevant to compare them. And while global banks will indeed continue to be a thing, I disagree that the financialization and commodification of every aspect of the economy is a good thing, and there is no reason why things that most people need a bank for (home mortgages, student/personal loans) should be connected to global banks or bundled in other debts and traded in the global financial market.

But that's really beside the point- you were criticizing the other poster for harping on about something like Glass Steagall, saying that most voters don't care about individual pieces of legislation like that, and I agree with you if we are being that absolutely specific. But most voters do in fact care about the economy and "bailing out banks" that are "too big to fail" and people losing their homes while banks remain unregulated and almost no one went to jail- these are all bad policies that people do in fact care about, and it's one of the reason that Obama became less popular and that Clinton alienated large segments of the working class.

"I disagree that the financialization and commodification of every aspect of the economy is a good thing."

Ha ha ha, well who wouldn't? We're done now. But here's some recommended reading: https://faculty.washington.edu/rsoder/EDLPS579/HonorsOrwellPoliticsEnglishLanguage.pdf

For you, highly recommended.

Everyone with an undergraduate degree has (should have) read that extremely famous essay Luke. If I were publishing instead of chatting online, I might reflect on what you are implying, but as it is, you don't respond to the meat of the conversation. The US has a unique position as the world's default currency that allows it to run huge surpluses. So you can't talk about the need for big banks (too big to fail) in a globalized financial economy and then refer to poor countries' financial problems as if they play by the same rules. Likewise, you can't talk about bail outs without acknowledging that QE couldn't exist at the same level anywhere else. Finally, the need for all of this to continue for globalization to exist has nothing to do with why retail, personal, consumer banking (housing, student loans and the like) should be bundled up and traded globally with other forms of debt or that the regulations were written before the tech existed to allow some of these transactions and financial packages to take place. I'm not sure what your point is here - as I said I can't tell what you were disputing in the first place. That average folks don't understand these things or know the terms for different legislation- all true. In fact almost no one, myself included certainly, actually understand the details of all of the complex ways debts were repackage and traded. But people do understand that back down here in the real world, folks lost jobs and houses, that the economy didn't recover for many people, that taxpayers bailed the banks out, and that no regulations or deterrents were put in place to prevent it from happening again. If that gets tossed around by some people (like the poster above) as something pedantically untrue and simplified like blaming it on politicians the voted to repeal glass-steagall, then you are missing the forest for the trees by criticizing. Voters are in fact bitter about it, whether or not they (or any of us outside of a tiny few) understand all the details. And it is a contributing factor (a bigger one than Jill Fucking Stein) to why Clinton lost.

ha, meant huge deficits of course. That was a long long time ago...

Voter the Green Party, where personal feelings are more important than truth or country.

And that's why we should all vote for the CIA-Democrats.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/03/13/pers-m13.html

Wow. So Jill is with holding info about her involvement with Russia. Why would she do that unless...

@2- THE ENTIRE COUNTRY is going to be goddamned lucky to get over 2016. And that traitorous b** Jill Stein should have to answer for her part in it. The Greens have become nothing more than tools of the right wing. Nader was bad enough but at least there's no reason to think he colluded with a foreign enemy.

Yes, the Dems fucked up in a bunch of ways but Trump would never have won without outside help. And I find Jill Stein dining in Moscow more than a little suspicious. Maybe we should "LOCK HER UP" as they used to say.

Bush made the marcos of the philipines, the stalin purges, the murderous ex-dictator of romania, idi amin all look good.

He, and his cabal, are the most brutal, evil, blood-thirsty genocidal, bunch in history.

6000 years of antiquities destroyed in iraq, while i listened to the radio, during the iraq invasion. That evil fuk was bragging about it. Fallujah, ruined forever, by radioactive poison.
10 generations, or more with hideous birth defects.
1 million murdered. The rest in iraq butchered, tortured, terrorized.

Most people in murica, were totally fucked over emotionally, financially, physically, when the bush monsters were in office. Lied to, ripped off, spied on, emotionally and physically ruined!

Fuko the clown is working on a close second. The degenrate bastard bush, and his minions threw america to a bunch of greedy, blood crazed dogs and sharks. Now fuko is doing the same thing, as if obamy,the cia spook, was not bad enough

Many of the same devils are back w fuko. The abomination: scooter libby pardoned. The degenerate devil netanyahu, never goes away, or gives up. The evil fuk trump, is rubbing our noses in the demon bush's abominations. He is doing it a million times worse, than the cia fuker, obama, and hillcrats were. It is like a never ending, ever worsening-nightmare.

Fuko the clown is a continuation of bush.. Be careful of being sucked into cults, cults of personalities, wats not on tv, mind- warping mind fuks, wats on tv, Human monkeys are pack animals, like dogs. Most pay too much attention, to what they percieve, as the alpha monkeys. The talking head monkeys on tv, who spit out the same shit in different ways and are considered ideological opposites. The preacher who tells ya the way it is, cause the bible says so. The nucular physics monkey who says radioactive shit is ok, and u believe him cause he passed calculus

@13 "He voted to gut Glass-Steagall."

Tester was not even in the Senate when Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act was passed and replace the Glass Steagall Act of 1934.

Glass Steagall has been gutted and made a hollow shell for over the 65 years after it passed, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, when Financial Giants demanded more and more leeway about consolidation of financial services, like Investment Banking and Insurance..

I will say this to any Montanan Green, do you want to be right with your #bigbankjon hashtag, or do you want to elect a candidate like Jon Tester, who may not agree 100% of the time, at least to be a vote for either good legislation or an opponent of truly horrific legislation like the recent Tax Reform?!? If you help defeat Tester, you are basically putting a far right Republican loon in office, who will try to gut environmental legislation, be an enemy of Women's reproductive health, cut health care, don't care about the Montana Greens until election time, and kowtow you to be active to help the Republican loon have an easier time for their election..

Do the right thing, vote for Tester, learn that politics is about being pragmatic, not about some pure ideological movement. Politics can only be implements if the candidates wins, not about being a platform when the votes count. Third or fourth place won't help you get any closer to getting your ideas enacted or heard..

@11 Your seamless insertion of hashtags made me laugh. That said ... Libertarians ( aka #Libertarians) are generally opposed to government regulation and certainly have never been strong supporters of the EPA or any other attempt to use the government's power to protect natural resources from corporate interests. How does his having run as a libertarian make your case at all? 'Everyone gets to do whatever they want' (reductionist, yes, but also pretty accurate) is hardly an environmentally conscious position.