“The latest Quinnipiac University poll of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters showed Biden with 22 percent support and Harris with 20 percent — a double-digit jump for her since the university’s previous poll last month.
Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont were in third and fourth place in the poll, with 14 percent and 13 percent, respectively. Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, was in fifth, with 4 percent support.
No other candidate got more than 3 percent in the poll.”
Thoughts:
- Barring some complete surprise, it now looks to be a four-horse race. As much as everyone is impressed by Mayor Pete, the gap between fourth and fifth is extremely wide.
- Bernie and Warren are splitting the leftward vote. One might have a chance at the nomination if the other dropped out and endorsed the one remaining. I don’t see Bernie being willing to drop out to campaign for Warren, although he probably should if he really believes in their ideas.
Fair enough, I don’t have an issue with that. You do you. I just hope everyone involved in their hypothesis of how the world works has a good answer when they meet their maker on what they believed and did with their life – if you believe in that sort of thing.
Have a good independence day.
Baby boomers are the failed generation…they squandered their “inheritance…”
I don’t even know what that statement means. Except the usual empty blind patriotic sentiments that have no intrinsic value.
For example, inventors could not exist if we has an equitable legal system where the mere threat of lawsuit can be hovered to exert power over regular citizens?
Hell, if anything, the way the patent system is today people like Henry Ford CANNOT exist. Henry Ford was a chief engineer in Thomas Edison’s company, and was encouraged to experiment by him, to which he eventually left and started his own company.
Could you imagine the way that would work in today’s age? Well, you can’t, because it wouldn’t. Edison’s company would immediately drop a gigantic patent lawsuit in East Texas on Ford for leaving and claim the invention was produced in their company, leaving it in legal limbo for years.
THEN if somehow an inventor like Ford could get past that, you have venture capitalist hawks out there trying to get him to sell his soul for a piece of the company, to which they would try to immediately exert power and run him off if he didn’t play the profit game. Go look at the history of Cisco, and Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner, to see a prime example of this.
Your sentiments are directed in the wrong location. If you took the story of Henry Ford and other inventors in their time, they simple would not exist in today’s playing field, because there isn’t an even playing field, because they would be crushed by the power exerted by monopolies over resources, the legal system, and patent system. Or they would exist, in a much more sanitized form, controlled by politics and greed.
This is the old “government shouldn’t pick winners and losers” trope. I’ve heard this from a couple different co-workers. (Ironically, they both got fired.) The Invisible Hand is magic. If we could just get government off business’s back, everything would sunshine and orgasms.
In fact government does and must pick winners and losers. Our taxes still subsidize oil, coal, and tobacco. If we didn’t they would have gone out of business long ago.
An underconstrained business ecosystem brought us slavery and child labor. More recently, it has gutted unions and frozen wages despite increased productivity.
The Ford and Hughes types will always get ahead whichever way the “playing field” tilts or doesn’t. The difference is between having them be rich as shit and having them be sofa king rich that they can run their competition out of business and keep them from innovating. The Waltons? Shit, what did they ever do but trash the main streets and tax bases of any place they move in? You want MORE of that?
You don’t even need the government to choose. The only thing that’s needed is to unstack the deck and base the system on the same benefits that say, the baby boomer generation had, for the current generation.
The ‘bootstrap’ lectures get old. Lets be real, the baby boomers took advantage of the highest minimum wage per inflation in history, the lowest college cost in history, and the lowest CEO to standard worker ratio in history. Then, once their careers took off, they used Reaganomics to create a gigantic deficit to pump themselves full of revenue on the governments dime (Reagan *real* ‘welfare queens’ on his watch were Wall Street), and then said fuck everyone else.
All that really needs to be done is to apply the same standard to everyone else. We can start with those three things: capping CEO wealth, minimum wage, and college costs – to what it was in the 60s. Then it can be moved to patents, the legal system, tax, and fake charity loopholes to break up the power of the monopolies and 0.1%.
The economy is stacked like a mob casino dealing the cards and deciding who lands pocket aces or who lands 7 2 offsuit. Yeah maybe the really dumb players will still still lose with pocket aces, and maybe the awesome player can find a way in with the 7 2 offsuit, but most aren’t.
The answer doesn’t *need* to be, well the guy with pocket aces needs to redistribute. The answer is making sure the deck isn’t stacked in the first place. Untangle the mess in the backrooms, and the people in the open will prosper.
You don’t have to play along. You can study and go on your own. You don’t have to conform. You don’t have to shop at Wal-Mart, Amazon, Microsoft, or Apple.
The choice isn’t conform or complain like you, say, there are many others besides conforming. You can go on your own, you can rail against in a legitimate manner, or even fight from within.
Believe whatever you want to believe. Personally, I believe that people who fight for good and the other 7 billion of us weren’t put on this earth so a few thousand can live like false gods. I don’t have to complain about it, I can take my own action to counter this and so can you if you decided to do so.
You’re really not getting the point. Evening the playing field is objectively looking at the work of others led to a few thousand individuals having god-like infinite wealth that benefits no one, but a few.
You say ‘the men in denim need the men in suits’ – but who do the men in suits need? They need the American consumer buying power to create their wealth. If the American public says ‘fuck you, you’re going to pay your share for the benefits we’ve given you, or go’ – then they can go to one of those wonderful totalitarian countries like China or Russia where they would be hedged out of their business and their rights take, or one of the EU countries where they would be paying *much* more of their fair share.
The ‘men in suits’ as you call them, have the American public and the public domain to thank for their wealth. If it weren’t for the Interstate Highway System paid for by the American people, then the commerce generated would not go their way.
If the TCP/IP protocol was not created by government backed funding under DARPA, then the internet would not exist.
THOSE are the things that should be paid for equally. Is my life slightly more convenient because of an Interstate Highway System? Sure. But I sure as hell don’t need it as much as billion dollar companies selling widgets with a CEO making 8 figures a year.
Is my life slightly more convenient for having access to cloud storage? Sure. But I sure as hell don’t need it compared to the amount Amazon or Microsoft make.
And as far as protecting the patents go by law? I don’t give the slightest fuck whatsoever. I use open source Linux and get along fine. But I’m supposed to shed crocodile tears over Apple clogging out court systems with frivolous lawsuits over what their fucking borders look like compared to Samsung?
That’s the point. Pay your fair share. That’s all that needs to be done. There are thousands, maybe even millions of protections the wealthy get an expect the American people to uphold that have much, MUCH less value to the average Joe.
Apple or Microsoft or Wal-Mart or whoever wants protection under OUR court system and infrastructure of the American populace to give THEM riches? To use public domain and other people’s hard work like the creation of the TCP/IP protocol and researched cryptographic protection of assets? Then they can fucking PAY what its worth to THEM.
Got it? That’s a fairly simple concept and doesn’t involve redistribution of wealth or this meritocracy bullshit of blue collar vs white collar. Its CEO’s, corporations, and the wealthy paying their dues to the protections of the US government paid for by the people, that they get EVERY day that has immense value to them.
I think Sanders and Warren have much stronger proposals than anyone else with regards to evening the playing field and giving the disenfranchised legitimate opportunities. I think that’s the irony about the polling. Biden is as conservative of an option as it gets, riding the coattails of Obama to his current standing.
Very similar to the 2016 situation. Hillary dominated the Southern and minority vote, and then lost. It’s bizarre to me that people never learn their lessons. I understand Bernie is pretty blunt, and looks like the crazy old man yelling at cloud, but it’s a little ridiculous so much rides on political affiliations and presentation.
Mayor Pete’s problem is that he has zero appeal among African Americans, who are an important part of the Democratic coalition. Obama’s success was due to an enthusiastic coalition of minorities and white liberal voters. Mayor Pete has the white liberals in his corner (the NPR listeners, the Jon Stewart fans, the NY Times readers), but that’s not enough to win the Presidency. I think Warren and Sanders have a similar problem, which leaves Harris as the strongest challenger to Biden.