2020 US Elections | Biden certified as President | Dems control Congress

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Cheimoon

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True. He was basically a pragmatic progressive who as all Presidents usually are, was forced into moderating in order to govern once in office.
And now his legacy is tainted by people who saw him as some kind of second coming and got disappointed. Can't do it right if you're being put on that kind of pedestal!
 

berbatrick

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And now his legacy is tainted by people who saw him as some kind of second coming and got disappointed. Can't do it right if you're being put on that kind of pedestal!
I like how there is only perception tht matters to you and not actual reality, like having Citibank vet his cabinet or the list of things I mentioned in the previous page.
 

berbatrick

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And now his legacy is tainted by people who saw him as some kind of second coming and got disappointed. Can't do it right if you're being put on that kind of pedestal!
The militarised DHS in Portland is the result of Trump's fascism!
Also this happened and nobody remembers.


And this was for a fecking oil pipeline, and people praise him for entering the absolutely toothless Paris accord. Really, as long as he says the right things and looks good, it doesn't matter if the president accelerates widepsread human death. He said this year the increase in domestic oil production was one of his proudest acheivements.


Citibank didn't vet his cabinet.

A month before the election, the key staffing for that future administration was almost entirely in place, revealing that some of the most crucial decisions an administration can make occur well before a vote has been cast.

Michael Froman, who is now U.S. trade representative but at the time was an executive at Citigroup, wrote an email to Podesta on October 6, 2008, with the subject “Lists.” Froman used a Citigroup email address. He attached three documents: a list of women for top administration jobs, a list of non-white candidates, and a sample outline of 31 cabinet-level positions and who would fill them. “The lists will continue to grow,” Froman wrote to Podesta, “but these are the names to date that seem to be coming up as recommended by various sources for senior level jobs.”

The cabinet list ended up being almost entirely on the money. It correctly identified Eric Holder for the Justice Department, Janet Napolitano for Homeland Security, Robert Gates for Defense, Rahm Emanuel for chief of staff, Peter Orszag for the Office of Management and Budget, Arne Duncan for Education, Eric Shinseki for Veterans Affairs, Kathleen Sebelius for Health and Human Services, Melody Barnes for the Domestic Policy Council, and more. For the Treasury, three possibilities were on the list: Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Timothy Geithner.

This was October 6. The election was November 4. And yet Froman, an executive at Citigroup, which would ultimately become the recipient of the largest bailout from the federal government during the financial crisis, had mapped out virtually the entire Obama cabinet, a month before votes were counted. And according to the Froman/Podesta emails, lists were floating around even before that.
For very obvious reasons we cannot expect them to come out and admit things like this, I thank Putin and his basment hackers for revealing the truth about how his campaign was run and who was in charge.
 

Cheimoon

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I like how there is only perception tht matters to you and not actual reality, like having Citibank vet his cabinet or the list of things I mentioned in the previous page.
You're reading that into my posts. I didn't actually say anything about how he did in absolute terms, I only compared expectations vs reality, and how that works out particularly poorly for Obama.

I do have my opinions about Obama's presidency, but that's not the topic of this thread and I don't know enough about past US presidents to assess Obama in that context, so I'll leave that to others in its own thread.
 

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The militarised DHS in Portland is the result of Trump's fascism!
Also this happened and nobody remembers.


And this was for a fecking oil pipeline, and people praise him for entering the absolutely toothless Paris accord. Really, as long as he says the right things and looks good, it doesn't matter if the president accelerates widepsread human death. He said this year the increase in domestic oil production was one of his proudest acheivements.







For very obvious reasons we cannot expect them to come out and admit things like this, I thank Putin and his basment hackers for revealing the truth about how his campaign was run and who was in charge.
To address this as well: I'm not at all saying Obama was awesome, just that it's unfair to judge him compared to expectations people projected on him. Except, of course, if you have examples of how his actions as president clearly contradicted his promises as a candidate (beyond the usual campaign rhetoric). In which case I would stand corrected.
 

berbatrick

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To address this as well: I'm not at all saying Obama was awesome, just that it's unfair to judge him compared to expectations people projected on him. Except, of course, if you have examples of how his actions as president clearly contradicted his promises as a candidate (beyond the usual campaign rhetoric). In which case I would stand corrected.
Uh sure. There seems to be a 2-month Obama cycle on here and I'm mostly guilty of being part of it, so I'll just repost: https://www.redcafe.net/threads/2020-us-elections.433222/page-604#post-25501606
 

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For very obvious reasons we cannot expect them to come out and admit things like this, I thank Putin and his basment hackers for revealing the truth about how his campaign was run and who was in charge.
The issue here is claiming that Michael Froman, a senior executive at Citibank at the time but still several degrees removed from the upper echelon of the firm, a man with 15 years of working for the US government before he worked at Citi, a college friend of Barack Obama, that by exchanging email about future cabinet picks with John Podesta it is the same as "Citibank vetted his cabinet".

Might as well start claiming that for every incoming government official from the private sector, it signifies a takeover by whatever company they work in of the office they're taking over.
 

Wibble

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The issue here is claiming that Michael Froman, a senior executive at Citibank at the time but still several degrees removed from the upper echelon of the firm, a man with 15 years of working for the US government before he worked at Citi, a college friend of Barack Obama, that by exchanging email about future cabinet picks with John Podesta it is the same as "Citibank vetted his cabinet".

Might as well start claiming that for every incoming government official from the private sector, it signifies a takeover by whatever company they work in of the office they're taking over.
More wildly inaccurate right wing bullshit propaganda.
 

berbatrick

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The issue here is claiming that Michael Froman, a senior executive at Citibank at the time but still several degrees removed from the upper echelon of the firm, a man with 15 years of working for the US government before he worked at Citi, a college friend of Barack Obama, that by exchanging email about future cabinet picks with John Podesta it is the same as "Citibank vetted his cabinet".

Might as well start claiming that for every incoming government official from the private sector, it signifies a takeover by whatever company they work in of the office they're taking over.
It is a coincidence that he was at Citi, that Citi did very well out of the administration's policies, and that the economics team proposed was Citigroup chariman Rubin, and Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, who worked under him and were both from Wall Street.
 

berbatrick

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More wildly inaccurate right wing bullshit propaganda.
Lies damned lies and statistics




Neil Barofsky, the bailout inspector general, later testified that protecting the banks was the actual goal. The administration’s aim was to “foam the runway” for the banks, as Barofsky witnessed Tim Geithner tell Elizabeth Warren. HAMP failed, in other words, because it was not designed to help homeowners.

As a result, in many cases HAMP actively enabled foreclosure. Its re-default rate — the fraction of people who got a modification and later defaulted out of the program — was 22 percent as of 2013. Only about $15 billion of the original $75 billion appropriation was spent by mid-2016.

Out of an initial promised 4 million mortgage modifications — itself a drastic underestimate — by the end of 2016 only 2.7 million had even been started. Out of that number, only 1.7 million made it to permanent modification, and of those, 558,000 eventually washed out of the program.


Mass foreclosures have severe ripple effects. People who lose their homes are at greater risk of job loss and falling into poverty, and are more likely to commit suicide. Nearby homes lose value, as foreclosed properties are often blighted. A 2013 Center for Responsible Lending study estimated that properties in proximity to a foreclosure shed $2.2 trillion in value — and that half that loss was in communities of color.

The decision to hang homeowners — especially black homeowners — out to dry was a catastrophe.

https://jacobinmag.com/2017/12/obama-foreclosure-crisis-wealth-inequality
 

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It is a coincidence that he was at Citi, that Citi did very well out of the administration's policies, and that the economics team proposed was Citigroup chariman Rubin, and Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, who worked under him and were both from Wall Street.
Citi and all the other banks were saved, but not just Citi. Geithner and Summers barely have private sector careers worth mentioning. Michael Froman was one of Rubin's top guys when Rubin was Treasury Secretary. Then Rubin went to Citi when the Clinton administration ended and that's where Froman went with him.

I know you disagree with all of them on policy, but they do not individually represent Citibank or any other bank. The highest claim in that sense would be the 2 years during which Rubin was Chairman at Citi. And even then it might bear mentioning for context that this is the former Treasury Secretary for the prior democratic party President, not just some random Citi executive.
 

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Kinda overkill there buddy, no need for the adjectives when they are implicit to the bold part. :D
True - it always amazes me that people have to make things up to criticise politicians for when there is some much they actually do worthy of criticism. With Trump his batshit crazy stuff covers for the complete incompetence of the rest of the things he does and doesn't do.
 

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Uh sure. There seems to be a 2-month Obama cycle on here and I'm mostly guilty of being part of it, so I'll just repost: https://www.redcafe.net/threads/2020-us-elections.433222/page-604#post-25501606
Thanks, that's interesting. (I have been lurking here for a while, but can't say I used to read all the threads in detail!)

That's still 'just' about things he did though. My post was about comparing his promises as a candidate against this actions. Would you have something on that as well?

To prevent misinterpretation: I actually don't know too much about Obama's campaign promises. What I remember is that message of 'hope'. That in itself doesn't mean much though; it served just to contrast him with the GOP candidate after the Bush years.

Same in Canada when Trudeau got elected: Trudeau talked a good progressive game, but didn't actually promise much; his entire aim was to make himself look as different as possible from Harper, with whom people had become completely fed up. People projected all kinds of ideas on the general feel-good message though, and so now there's disappointment to see that Trudeau isn't actually much of a leftist. (Not a rightist either; just a socially progressive centrist.)

So that's my interpretation for Obama: his vague message of hope got interpreted much further than it actually went, and so people were disappointed when Obama turned out to be a very traditional and centrist president (as I think your examples show).
 

berbatrick

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sorry but this doesnt feel like two old chums chatting
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/8190

John -- Attached are three documents: --

A list of African American, Latino and Asian American candidates, broken down by Cabinet/Deputy and Under/Assistant/Deputy Assistant level, plus a list of Native American, Arab/Muslim American and Disabled American candidates. We have much longer lists for most of the groups, and the lists will continue to grow as we reach out further and more openly, but these are the names to date that seem to be coming up as recommended by various sources for senior level jobs. (I have tried to include member of Barack's campaign and Senate policy staff, as well as participants in the Transition project, as appropriate.) --

While you did not ask for this, I prepared and attached a similar document on women. --

At the risk of being presumptuous, I also scoped out how the Cabinet-level appointments might be put together, probability-weighting the likelihood of appointing a diverse candidate for each position (given one view of the short list) and coming up with a straw man distribution. (Obviously, multiple permutations of this are possible. This was just one example to show how it might pan out.) Let me know when you'd like to discuss. I am around this morning until about 11:30.


Citi and all the other banks were saved, but not just Citi. Geithner and Summers barely have private sector careers worth mentioning. Michael Froman was one of Rubin's top guys when Rubin was Treasury Secretary. Then Rubin went to Citi when the Clinton administration ended and that's where Froman went with him.

I know you disagree with all of them on policy, but they do not individually represent Citibank or any other bank. The highest claim in that sense would be the 2 years during which Rubin was Chairman at Citi. And even then it might bear mentioning for context that this is the former Treasury Secretary for the prior democratic party President, not just some random Citi executive.
Sure I don't tink Citi did better than GS or Wells Fargo (both of which did excellently by avoiding severe prosecution in the first place) or the others. This was a bailout which worked to the benefit of a class/Wall St as a whole. There are times when the ruling class is divided - the ACA repeal failed partly because the hospitals' and doctors lobbies lined up against it and against the insurance lobby - but 2008 and what to do about Wall St wasn't one of those times. I think in regard to the prosecutions, which are a related issue to the Wall St bailout, the choice of Eric Holder (tied to Wall St via his prestigious firm) was revealing.
 

berbatrick

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Thanks, that's interesting. (I have been lurking here for a while, but can't say I used to read all the threads in detail!)

That's still 'just' about things he did though. My post was about comparing his promises as a candidate against this actions. Would you have something on that as well?

To prevent misinterpretation: I actually don't know too much about Obama's campaign promises. What I remember is that message of 'hope'. That in itself doesn't mean much though; it served just to contrast him with the GOP candidate after the Bush years.

Same in Canada when Trudeau got elected: Trudeau talked a good progressive game, but didn't actually promise much; his entire aim was to make himself look as different as possible from Harper, with whom people had become completely fed up. People projected all kinds of ideas on the general feel-good message though, and so now there's disappointment to see that Trudeau isn't actually much of a leftist. (Not a rightist either; just a socially progressive centrist.)

So that's my interpretation for Obama: his vague message of hope got interpreted much further than it actually went, and so people were disappointed when Obama turned out to be a very traditional and centrist president (as I think your examples show).
I think his broad and vague message is part of it, he praised Reagan during the campaign and barely anyone on the left seemed to notice, so it worked.
In terms of specific policies he backtracked on, off the top of my head there's the healthcare public option (3rd point in the old post, since people here will say it was politically impossible and that article shows the White House and party working together to stop it), and there's easier unionisation (card check), which he ran on and then forgot about afterwards.
There's also the promise to shut Guantanamo but there, afaik, it was due to the GOP blocking it. I could be wrong.
 

berbatrick

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either nobody has a memory or everbody pretends they dont

 

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I think his broad and vague message is part of it, he praised Reagan during the campaign and barely anyone on the left seemed to notice, so it worked.
In terms of specific policies he backtracked on, off the top of my head there's the healthcare public option (3rd point in the old post, since people here will say it was politically impossible and that article shows the White House and party working together to stop it), and there's easier unionisation (card check), which he ran on and then forgot about afterwards.
There's also the promise to shut Guantanamo but there, afaik, it was due to the GOP blocking it. I could be wrong.
Ok. So kinda what I thought. My recollection in general is that Obama was trying to keep bipartisanism alive too much when he had a chance early on to really forge ahead, and then later the GOP essentially blocked his every move.

In general, if you don't consider the campaign circumstances and his skin colour (which can't be a factor to assess Obama: you can't expect more or differently from him because he came after Bush or because he is black), Obama seems like a pretty run-of-the-mill DNP president to me. If accurate (given the debate in this thread), those banking links you have been talking about wouldn't surprise me in that context. (Yes, I am pretty cynical about US federal politics - individual outliers like AOC aside.)
 

WI_Red

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Not sure if I would put OH as a Trump lean given the recent polls there.

Nice to see my vote will actually mean something this year after spending a lifetime in CA and AL.

Mark my words, there is going to be some shady shit happening in my state in Nov. They tried it in the primaries and it backfired majorly (R's lost a supreme court seat), so I have a feeling they will be foaming at the mouth to "get revenge".
 

Raoul

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Nice to see my vote will actually mean something this year after spending a lifetime in CA and AL.

Mark my words, there is going to be some shady shit happening in my state in Nov. They tried it in the primaries and it backfired majorly (R's lost a supreme court seat), so I have a feeling they will be foaming at the mouth to "get revenge".
Its looking like Trump's strategy is to put one of his goons at the postal service, gradually erode its ability to handle the volume of mail in ballots, then claim they are illegitimate on election night.
 

WI_Red

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Its looking like Trump's strategy is to put one of his goons at the postal service, gradually erode its ability to handle the volume of mail in ballots, then claim they are illegitimate on election night.
For the primaries here my absentee ballot (and my wife's, and a large group of neighbors based on the Neighborhood App threads) was "misplaced" after being "sent". Of course we were told to wait and see, and when that period was over it was (surprise!) too late to guarantee the ballots arrival on time.

The end result was that we had to go out in the middle of a pandemic to vote. Most of my neighbors are retired and did not want to risk it. I am so very shocked that this happened exclusively in the most liberal areas of the state and, just like in Georgia, the election officials are able to say "90% of counties had no issues". Problem is that when that 10% of the counties has 40% of the states population, and is a heavy D lean, it kinda is a problem.
 

berbatrick

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But I thought she thought her grandparents had bravely eloped to escape racism.
 

Beachryan

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Man, you don't even like Warren now? Is there a politician on planet Earth that meets your standards?
 

GiddyUp

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Ok. So kinda what I thought. My recollection in general is that Obama was trying to keep bipartisanism alive too much when he had a chance early on to really forge ahead, and then later the GOP essentially blocked his every move.

In general, if you don't consider the campaign circumstances and his skin colour (which can't be a factor to assess Obama: you can't expect more or differently from him because he came after Bush or because he is black), Obama seems like a pretty run-of-the-mill DNP president to me. If accurate (given the debate in this thread), those banking links you have been talking about wouldn't surprise me in that context. (Yes, I am pretty cynical about US federal politics - individual outliers like AOC aside.)
Those banking links are hand in hand with every administration over the last 50 years, some on here think it's only a Dem problem.
 

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But I thought she thought her grandparents had bravely eloped to escape racism.
She was a student in Texas in the 60's. As the NYTimes states, " No Black woman had ever been offered acceptance into any of the sororities on campus.". This tweet, like most of the right-wing propaganda, is highly deceptive.
 

Beachryan

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She was a student in Texas in the 60's. As the NYTimes states, " No Black woman had ever been offered acceptance into any of the sororities on campus.". This tweet, like most of the right-wing propaganda, is highly deceptive.
Well then she's a racist....

...sigh.
 

entropy

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Those banking links are hand in hand with every administration over the last 50 years, some on here think it's only a Dem problem.
Democrats are so cultist. They feel obligated to defend someone who bailed out banks, didn’t prosecute any of the ceos, and did feck all for those losing their houses. Accordingly to folks like you it was all rosy and the reason for 2016 had very little to do with the previous administration. It’s almost as if you live in an alternate reality and if it didn’t happen to you, it probably isn’t true.
 

JakeC

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For the primaries here my absentee ballot (and my wife's, and a large group of neighbors based on the Neighborhood App threads) was "misplaced" after being "sent". Of course we were told to wait and see, and when that period was over it was (surprise!) too late to guarantee the ballots arrival on time.

The end result was that we had to go out in the middle of a pandemic to vote. Most of my neighbors are retired and did not want to risk it. I am so very shocked that this happened exclusively in the most liberal areas of the state and, just like in Georgia, the election officials are able to say "90% of counties had no issues". Problem is that when that 10% of the counties has 40% of the states population, and is a heavy D lean, it kinda is a problem.
I well believe this, but are there any sources?
 

WI_Red

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Democrats are so cultist. They feel obligated to defend someone who bailed out banks, didn’t prosecute any of the ceos, and did feck all for those losing their houses. Accordingly to folks like you it was all rosy and the reason for 2016 had very little to do with the previous administration. It’s almost as if you live in an alternate reality and if it didn’t happen to you, it probably isn’t true.
A thing can be 2 things. All of that can be true AND yet we can still see that one of the two choices is less evil than the other. 2020, and pretty much every presidential election, is a binary choice due to the 2 party nature of the US system. Until a viable 3rd party emerges or the progressive wing of the dems can break through the establishment this will be the reality.
 
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