Criticizing Is NOT Supporting

How would ruining a system be beneficial to the nation?

 

I'd rather not as I don't have the patience now.

Just give a gift of your premise in how you actually thought Trump would 'drain the swamp' in a pragmatic way and provide me evidence of how he had the ability to do it.

 

This study made the news more than three years ago, concluding that the US was an oligarchy.

Not Congress, not the president, not Republicans, not Democrats -- the country as a whole. There was one candidate, a little known senator from Vermont that made this issue the core point of his campaign for the presidency, but did not make it to the general election.

I am not of the opinion that electing an actual, proper oligarch instead to the presidency is an improvement unless it is to appreciate the efficiency of cutting out the middle man. It is a strawman to suggest that those that are primarily concerned about the pay-to-play nature of our decaying democracy are closet supporters of said oligarch.

 

Clinton is not president now. Nor is Sanders. And Perot isn't either. Trump is currently. Focus on the current problem.. and what is needed to fix it.

 

You basis of being in favor of Trump is your hate for the DEM. Trump burning down America is fine because of your hate.

You cannot be objective with hate. It color you blind. It's a mental disease. Get well.

 

I would counter that Trump is a symptom of the actual problem and not the cause. If the US is increasingly corrupt and oligarchical, it follows that a corrupt oligarch is what ends up in power. Kicking out one corrupt oligarch doesn't fix the problem, IMHO.

 

Improvements are improvements.. And getting rid of the result of a problem with the system still is an improvement. especially when most everything he does adds to the system's problem.

 

There is no one like me.

Anyway, I'm familiar with the shake-things-up approach that you've been advocating for quite some time now. I do read the posts. But, I think it is incredibly wrongheaded and literally counterproductive -- I think we have a significant increase in the disenfranchisement of the American people and in public corruption from what we had under Obama or would have had under Clinton. So, I see you advocating for reform or revolution, but actually working in the opposite direction.

 

I don't think you even know why or how you want this shake-up of the system to occur. The US has its flaws but it's been the most powerful and influential country in the world since WWII with a government and system that has been able to withstand the test of time while so many others have failed, so why on earth should we want to screw up and destroy the system? Tweaking it, fixing it, making it so our government functions better, sure, I think a lot of people are for that, but this Steve Bannon-style burn everything to the ground attitude that a lot of people have is just bizarre. This would be like the Golden State Warriors searching for a coach in order to tear down their roster and rebuild, it doesn't make any sense.

 

Of course. The problem isn't Trump. Its the powers behind Trump that allow him to operate above the law, and have created a system that has an open give and take from billionaires and corporations with our government officials who are bought to accomplish what they paid for when they funded their PACS.

Removing Trump won't remove the Kochs, Mercers, Steve Wynn, or the boogeyman that is George Soros (I'd argue the healthcare industry is more of an issue if you want to talk about Dem's and their donors).

However there has never been a president put into office that is so blatantly representing the oligarchy. He is a billionaire who is shamelessly profiting off of the presidency. He slapped us all in the face like the idiots he thinks we are when he stood there on stage with a stack of blank papers to show how he's divesting himself from his business interests and then did nothing.

The biggest thing the right keeps on coming back to with Clinton is how she's bought off by wall street or the health insurance company, but at the same time they support Trump likes he's the second coming of Christ. Its hard to have a serious discussion about "both sides" when there is a clear ideology of one side that sets completely different standards of ethical boundaries. If George Soros is such as problem, whey aren't the Koch brothers or the Mercers? You can't have it both ways.

First we have to ALL recognize the real problem. Second there has to be steps that are taken to affect this issue.... like creating organization around pulling our money from companies that ultimately fund government officials. Its hard to do with companies like Renaissance who aren't direct to consumer but we need people to do the research and create avenues of awareness about how our dollars ultimately fund political direction which they should NOT.

When the government is there merely to play winners and losers to corporations and billionaires we are no longer a Capitalist society. We are an Oligarchy at that point. Thats at the root of the problem of our government more than anything.

 

People don’t seem to grasp that the post war boom was a unique event that propelled the US. The system isn’t broken, it’s just the good times where we had weak competition is long over.

Lastly, the “Rust Belt” wasn’t a term coined post 2008 and the industrial NE wasn’t booming in the 21st century. The West Coast and the South has been where most of the growth has occurred in the last 50 years. The history of the US has been moving to where the jobs are and too many people made the choice to stay put in a declining region.

 

That’s the problem, he was a little known senator who didn’t play the game until the last moment. Ideals are great and all... but he didn’t play it right.

 

I was a supporter of Perot until I realized he didn't have the leadership qualities to be president but was a nut case. All that drama about quitting and then coming back. Then the whole meltdown.

Just aiming for someone who can shake things up isn't the answer. You need a leader who is mentally stable as well. A bull in the China shop will change things for sure - for the worse. Nothing good can come out of that kind of change.

Trump's change isn't radical change that you are arguing for. His change is to cave into business interests which isn't all that different from establishment Republicans. That's why many still support him because he isn't any different than any Republican who wants to cut taxes and services to people who don't vote for them. Trump's change is really for his base - which is a social change meant to play on people's emotions, fears, and prejudices to cover up that he is screwing them over financially.

You pick teams. Just like Republicans do. There's a great study that shows Republicans are very loyal to their team whereas Democrats are not nearly as loyal. You see it on here with many of us having criticized Obama and even more critical of Clinton. I couldn't stand Clinton. I voted for Bernie and held my nose to vote for Clinton because Trump was scary. If you think Clinton is establishment you have no idea what Trump is.

Fact is that a President can not implement positive change. NO PRESIDENT CAN. It is no longer the role of the president. Forces have played to our weaknesses to divide us and pit us against one another. Divide and conquer and oh they are conquering. Mega-rich and powerful people are conquering America and they rule her. Our democracy is dying, and Trump is just accelerating its death. Putin knows this. I know it as well.

 

Good lord. With all due respect, what a load of manure.

 

I agree with this completely. I would have much rather voted for Rand Paul, who is much more of a vote against the oligarchy (and unexamined American Exceptionalism) then anyone running in 2016 not named Bernie Sanders -- but it is precisely for this reason that a proper Libertarian would never get a GOP nod.

There's still Harding to catch up to, and if we expand the field to democratic leaders of other nations, there's always Silvio "Boonga Boonga" Berlusconi or Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump admittedly has his own impressive brand of anti-intellectual crudeness, but he's far from the undisputed worst of the worst at this point. Frankly, he's come up short in terms of the dire collapse we were promised from both the Clinton campaign and the news establishment as a whole if he were elected. We are still more or less here, there's job growth, and the Dow is above 23k, which for most Americans, is good enough for re-election, I'm afraid.

That cognitive dissonance is what permits the corruption to continue IMHO -- the tribalism that comes from the false construct of political identity creates false dichotomies. People should stop treating political parties like sports franchises. Clinton is and was a terrible candidate but people (including me) were persuaded to vote for her over fear of Donald Trump, who, despite not being beholden to corporate largesse, is still just as compliant to the demands of the oligarchy. He had one appeal to voters and that was his populism, which I think he has quickly and quietly abandoned. If Gary Johnson had an understanding of basic geography or world events or Jill Stein (and an MD no less) not been so anti-Vax and anti-GMO I might have been able to vote for either. I detest Clinton, but the alternatives in this election were even worse than usual.

Good luck with that. Especially in our era of consolidation and monopoly-friendliness, it's hard to avoid an outright embargo on corporations with their hand up Lady Liberty's proverbial skirt. It would require the political will of an unlikely coalition of voters who otherwise agree on little else to put the lid on the cookie jar and keep money out of elections. It's much easier to point the finger at someone else's sugar daddy than it is to give up your own.

I agree and I try not to be a hypocrite about it. That's why I don't obsess about Trump and his tweets and his gropings and his gaffes and the whole circus that surrounds him. I think that too much focus exclusively on him is to miss that point entirely, and if anything, distracts the eye from the people that benefit from him. Does anyone think that the country would be better off with President Ted Cruz? I don't and anyone other than the Mercers or Sheldon Adelson (and Evangelicals, I suppose) probably have no reason to disagree.

While everyone has their Two Minutes Hate over Trump, the DNC has purged all the pro-Ellison people out of leadership roles. If reducing the influence of the oligarchy on politics is really a concern, this would be talked about more than what Donald Trump did to make a Girl Scout cry or mocking the content of his incoherent tweets.

 

You didn't even read the rest of my post clearly.

Look, I've seen that video - I saw it live when he bought time on TV back in 1992. I loved what he said. But the guy isn't crazy for his policy or approach. He wasn't fit to lead because he wasn't stable as a leader. And he was a poor leader. Perot would have been a good cabinet member, but not President.

What you fail to understand that it's not just having the right answer, it's being able to sell that answer to the people you need to against all the winds against you. Perot failed at that miserably. The guy I voted for in the primary by the way was Paul Tsongas. When Clinton buried him unfairly, I switched to Perot. Ultimately when perot bombed out (that was all on him) I went with Clinton over Bush.

 

I don't begrudge you your right to your political opinion, but let us be fair here: you were for Trump long before it was fashionable, consistently, and with great enthusiasm. If you said anything critical of either Candidate Trump or President Trump, I certainly missed it.