General Politics Discussion [ARCHIVED] • Page 176

actually a lot of people stopped posting here because we banned birdman. i remember the drama quite vividly.

 

Yeah that too. Heh.

 

I see no future in which Clinton doesn't expand Obama's already awful drone program.

 

Oh god, Trump/Gingrich is a real nightmare ticket.

 

Looks like I'll be jumping in the Jill Stein boat and by boat I mean dinghy. I fully realize it's a lost cause when going up against 2 war ships.

 

This is a very confused post. Yes, I am a communist. Yes, that colors my perspective on things. I don't think that the policy is rotten because it doesn't lead to communism, I think it is bad on the basis of what it actually does. This is why I didn't bother with the rest of your post, I felt it necessary to clear up your misconceptions about how I'm approaching the situation. I've actually been refraining from posting in this thread as of late precisely because the debates devolve into a quagmire of ignorance and accusations. I think it is because there's no effort to understand epistemological differences. You say," argue within these parameters", and that actually misses the point of any given perspective that isn't tied to the center.

 

Apparently Labour are now freezing voting on their leadership elections for 6 months on people who joined under the lower fees they offer. Only two days for people who pay £25 (in one chunk) per year. Pretty fucked.

 

Yeah, but you provided no reasons for "why it's bad on the basis of what it actually does". You just said what you think it does in terms that sound more sympathetic to your viewpoint (nice spin, BTW), with the passive aggressive insinuation that these things are definitely bad...annnd end post. That was it. No actual analysis, not even some communist talking points that completely miss the point of the policy and how it's supposed to operate in a non-communist society.

I'm not saying "argue within these parameters", I'm saying some people want to talk about what the policy does, how, and who it helps/who it hurts, possible improvements to it, etc. It gets a little old when it's always "there are no ways to improve it because we don't live in a communist society and it's a neoliberal policy that will not do as much good as I think it should, and none of that will change until we overthrow society."

 

wow remember when bernie started running and i bet a bunch of people on the internet like a billion dollars each that he would drop out and endorse hillary

someone owes me like several billion dollars

 

For that money you could almost join the Labour party and support Corbyn

 

actually i think one of them was "a bajillion dollars" will that get me in?

 

Given the substance of your initial comment, I honestly didn't think you expected anything more. It was sort of like •insert political common sense• and that's why Hillary is not the Hillary of 1993. To put it more simply, I think it is bad to provide universities any more free labor, given how they treat TA's and the focus on cost reduction, while ostensibly being directed towards administrations, is easily directed at the adjuncts that are unionized/unionizing being used as scapegoats for costs. To the point of public-private partnerships, it accepts a premise that we cannot tax at higher rates, and given the common sense that pervades the establishment, allows these things to be sculpted on the terms of private capital. To my mind, the struggle is between whether you want to reduce the spaces that can be subject to finance capital and private companies, or do we want to cede ground to them. Yes, they may slightly help people, but these are actually concessions that solidify, rather than erode, the power of capital over the vast expanses of our life. This is, in effect, a social democratic argument, one which I could support as part of broader reforms to strengthen the welfare state. This doesn't do that.

 

The amount of people that are saying Bernie is a sell out and betrayed his supporters is really annoying me. I posted a long thing on facebook explaining why I think those people are wrong. To save you some time i'll shorten it up a little.

But anyway, when asked if he would drop out and endorse her he made sure people knew what his two goals were. 1. Make sure the the democratic party has the most progressive platform in history. 2. Do everything possible to make sure Donald Trump is defeated.

He accomplished number one a few days ago. The Democratic Party finished the draft of the party platform and Bernie Sanders had major contribution to shaping it. Things in this platform include a $15 minimum wage, expanding social security, breaking up the big banks, abolishing the death penalty, legalizing marijuana, enacting a carbon tax, comprehensive immigration reform, and so much more. These things would not have been included in the platform if Bernie Sanders had not run for president and gotten millions of people to support his campaign for these very issues.

Hillary also made strides further left not only in the past week, but throughout the primaries, including releasing a plan for tuition-free college as well as expanding her healthcare plan to ensure we achieve universal healthcare. If Bernie didn't run, Hillary would not have moved left on a great number of issues.

Bernie did not just run for president because he wanted to be the leader of the country, he ran because he wanted to start a movement, a political revolution, where millions of people come together to fight for these issues and get involved.

So why is it okay for Bernie to endorse Hillary? Because Bernie, as well as I, know that this movement will not make much progress if Trump is president. Today starts the day that Bernie begins his attempt to accomplish his second goal. Trump represents everything Bernie is against, and it would be a disaster for him to be president. Bernie ran for president to transform America, and Trump would transform it in all the wrong ways.

 

Maybe you could set up some kind of hedge fund that makes sure people can definitely vote for him if they want

 

Really disappointed in you that "pragmatism" isn't in quotation marks.

 

I don't see anything about providing universities with free labor. The plan calls for:

Don't see anywhere in there saying that those 10 hours a week will be at the college for free with no pay. Aside from that, outside of TA's, which you certainly can't hope to build this program on TA's, a lot of people work at college campuses, get paid, and get financial credit towards their tuition. It's usually one or the other, but it's not unheard of to get both. And even if the worst scenario comes true and every student who gets these grants has to work 10 hours for the college a week--so what? This is not an inherently bad thing. So they have to put in two shifts at the campus bookstore in return for free tuition. Good. Especially considering the income levels for which this proposal is going to. Spoiled suburanite white kids getting their free college might have to work 10 hours a week?? Poor Blaine. I feel so bad for him.

There's nothing in either the website announcement or the more detailed part that talks about adjunct professor. Maybe one way to improve the idea is to add incentive to schools to hire more full time professors. You say it's "easily directed" and that unionizing adjuncts are being scapegoated, but their unionization is a very new development in a problem that has been going on for decades, and I see no evidence of these claims you're making.

As for public/private partnerships, the only thing I see about that in there is this:

These aren't "private companies" here, they're non-profit colleges.

 

Just be thankful the ticket isn't Cruz/Huckabee. Seriously, we really dodged a bullet.

 

"Okay, so you've got the states, you've got the institutions and you've got the families, and then students who want to take advantage of debt-free tuition have to agree to work 10 hours a week. It's work-study at the college or university, because a couple of public institutions — Arizona State University being a prime example — have lowered their costs by using students for a lot of the work. Yes, it's free. It's in effect in exchange for lower tuition. So I want that to be part of the deal."

TRANSCRIPT: Hillary Clinton meets with News Editorial Board

For reference, this is Arizona's program:

NEWS RELEASE: ASU, Education At Work, PayPal Partner To Give Students Tuition Assistance And Work Experience - Education at Work


"Education at Work (EAW) begins expansion outside Cincinnati, where it was founded, at Arizona State University in an innovative three-way partnership with worldwide online payments system company PayPal. Students working at the non-profit contact center will have the opportunity to earn up to $6,000 a year in GPA-based tax-free tuition assistance in addition to an hourly wage. The students will work as part-time employees in a fast-paced, collaborative contact center environment responding to social media and email inquiries."

 

You think?

I don't think either is all that nightmarish given the field.

Actually, against the likes of Jindal, Walker, Cruz, etc., Gingrich seems pretty sensible. Imagine a ticket comprised of two of those three.

 

No, I said that the focus on reducing costs can be displaced onto things like salaries, unionization, etc. Either way, I never claimed these things were specifically in the plan, I was making a comparison and arguing that these are trends likely to develop or which are open to developing given the schematics of her plan. One doesn't expect to see the downside of legislation plastered across a candidate's website. Do you think welfare reform, for example, touted that it would increase poverty? As with anything, one has to look at the political center of gravity, historical tendencies, how institutions actually function, etc.

 

Yeah, I guess it's really a 'pick your poison' type scenario

 

Piping in here to say, unrelated to just this, but I hate public private partnerships. They undermine government activities and functions and often end up diverting tax dollars to companies that can't deliver.

 

Pence scares me more than Newt. Both in how I feel Newt is more toxic to Trumps campaign in that he is one of the most establishment republicans around (so would likely be a liability and do something dumb enough to derail the campaign where as Pence could say on the DL, pull in the religious vote and let Trump be Trump), and just purely on policy Pence appears to be even further right

 

And right now the political center of gravity is the huge backlash against the amount of admins at colleges, not the adjunct professors. No one even knows about their push for unionization. The rise of adjunct professors is also a pretty new phenomena without much of a history of legislative interaction, so there's no historical tendency to look at. What we do know is the proposal is calling for FedGov oversight, which would make it harder for institutions to just cut costs however they see fit, especially if the proposal is aimed at forcing colleges to provide "better educational services".

The thing is, this isn't legislation, it's an idea who's primary goal is to provide free college tuition to anyone coming from a family making under 125K per year. If you really want to look at historical tendencies, what's most likely to happen is the money for the free tuition gets spent but the "cost saving" measures meant to lower costs are never enacted or enacted half-heartedly.