Reading that the local fighters from Nusra, ISIS, Regime and Kurds are all putting up billboards imploring people to stay, the implication is if they go what are all these people fight for?

That war is going to be a real bummer if all the sex slaves leave town.

For Labor Day name the only President who headed a labor union.

George Washington.

Reagan duh

JFK?

Barack Hussein Obama.

I'd guess Reagan. He was involved in that stuff iirc.

Andrew Jackson.

Reagan was head of SAG

Gonna throw one out there for all my left wing homies: Al Gore.

President Gore? Did I sleep through something?

RANT TIME

I don't know if Lessig is like truly a dye in the wool leftist but this reeks of that odd bit of Process Liberalism that is completely detached from reality and believes what America is REALLY and TRULY needs right now is campaign finance reform and an end to gerrymandering.

So I always shake my head a little bit that academics, which are supposed to be some great fountain of political leftism, are often caught up in these inane political projects of no consequence to anyone. Oh, the BIG ELEPHANT in the room you say, Washington is broken and the political stalemate "isn't working." No one has thought this before, Larry Lessig is the first. Like does Larry Lessig really think that's the big elephant no one is talking about?

I'm not asking for academics to pick up the mantle of revolutionary spirit and goodness knows the whole notion academia is populated with exclusively activist leftists is just some right wing canard anyway. So whatever, I'm not insisting the Larry Lessigs of the world have to be for the same things that I'm for. I get that maybe he has different goals than I do.

But like then he says:

Well then what the **** are you talking about before bro? Presumably this guy does like more or less agree with me then, like we probably see close to eye to eye here on the big political questions of the day.

But then what's all that **** about campaign finance reform and multi-member districts with ranked choice voting for Congress? Those are the issues we really need to focus on?

Like I get it, I do, but on the one hand you have a political movement that's winning over large swaths of America advocating huge border walls and bombing Iran and seizing their oil and dismantling Obamacare because they have a "Make America Great" again hat. And to whatever extent they've already broken up the FDR collation and much of the social safety net and labor protections for the middle class and waged a far more aggressive foreign policy with the same kind of inanity for like 40 years. It's crazytown but we should never convince ourselves that it's the kind of politics that doesn't resonate and have meaning. It certainly does.

And then I guess on the other hand you have the Democrats at their best, like the Barack Obama campaign of 2008, sort of offering some form of a competing vision, or at worst, Democrats clutching at some kind of soft-right-wingerism that begs for just a little less cruelty to the poor and only slightly less war mongering.

And on the other hand here you have the Larry Lessigs of the world prattling on about the revolving door between government and lobbying and I get it, it's a problem, it really is, but no one but wonky losers give a **** about any of that.

Somewhere someone will stop by here and be like, well you know, the real root cause of all the things you dislike is the lack of citizen funded elections and gerrymandering or whatever the ****, but no, no it's really not. The real root cause of most of the things I dislike are people with abhorrent ideas convincing tons of people to share them and vote for those principles.

The great irony of the Process Liberal, like Larry Lessigs of the world, is that they are not seriously engaged in the political process at all. They're engaged in a fantasy world where 95% of the country gives two ****s about proportional congressional representation and that's a motivating political animator. It's not. Come join the rest of us arguing about whether Mexicans are really genetically predisposed to raping white women and whether or not cops should be brutalizing black people and whether NSA should be monitoring your Skype calls. I know it's icky and stupid and you have to listen to so much idiocy but that's what like is actually what and who gets power hinges on these days.

Nice rant, but your political process is still terrible and corrupt.

Not sure I agree, your rant makes plenty of sense when it comes to TRUMP, but the process used to play itself out like this:

1) GOP demonises Democrats and whips rednecks into a frenzy with racism, white victimhood, culture wars etc etc
2) Having thus made them petrified of the Dems getting in and turning America communist, billionaires spend a bajillion dollars ensuring that the candidate is actually someone reasonably electable who pays lip service to the concerns of the disgusting masses and implements policies desired by the elite.

Shutting 2) down would not improve the quality of Republican candidates - quite the opposite - but they'd get smashed in the general election. Over time, this would invalidate the whole strategy. TRUMP is currently engaged in trying to bypass 2), of course.

Shutting 1) down involves thinking that rational argument will prevail over the appeals to emotion used by the derposphere establishment. Not saying it isn't important to point out that Mexicans are not generally rapists, but I don't think that's getting it done on its own.

Well, I think the real issue is that like 45% of tax dollars go to welfare, and most of that is borrowed from the Chinese.

Incredible program on New Zealand tv featuring an interview with the former French agent responsible for (and coming clean to) bombing a Greenpeace boat in 1985 (killing a crew member on board). Aired on DN

Edit: hah the codename for that bombing was Operation Satanique.

ah my bad.

So what was the correct answer?

Reagan.

Ta.

You can never build the political will to do #2 precisely because of #1. Those billionaires existence and motivation to engage in the political process is precisely because they can easily distract tens of millions of Americans into voting billionaires more unchecked political power and tax cuts by simply whipping idiots into an angry frenzy about immigration and welfare queens.

But that's sort of not really the point either. The fact is you could actually like compete for the unwashed masses by offering a competing and meaningful vision of what improvements to their lives might look like, and gasp, how the government and policy might be leveraged to achieve those outcomes. And yeah like Step 99 of the 100 Step Plan might involve the kind of **** Lessig is talking about. But like Steps 1-98 are like, meaningful economic assistance and dignity for the poor and middle class, a vision of American foreign policy that isn't just threatening people with bombs and oil seizures, a restoration of the balance between labor and the ownership class that employs them for less and less year to year.

Some of this is obviously platitude-y, it's not like I have some clear vision for how to compete for these people. But I'm 100% confident that if you cede them to Trump and soft-right-wingerism Democratic alternatives and let them argue the case on the hoi polloi's terms, you will never ever get anyone to give a **** about multi-preference ballots and campaign finance reform. Those are not meaningful conversations to anyone except a small handful of elite academics. Lessig and other Procedure Liberals are going to have slum it with rest of us here talking about like the core retail political issues like immigration and foreign policy and labor protections and taxes and hats that say "Make America Great Again" and police brutality and rapey Mexicans if they want to engage in a discourse anyone gives a **** about.

Much like Naderites in 2000, I'd guess Lessig supporters are mostly quite comfortable and don't really need the government for anything. This gives them the luxury to not care too much about WHAT the government actually does so they can focus on HOW it does it.

Without campaign finance reform, WHAT the gov't does will always be **** that screws over the little guy and helps the elites. So yes, the HOW matters. If HOW = corporate oligarchy, then the WHAT won't be good for most people.

Lessig is "running" for his own vanity and not a real candidate.