After 2016, I asked a rhetorical question any time I engaged in just about any discussion about politics: “Why on earth would anyone in their right mind vote for Donald Trump, especially if they were female?!” I never expected anyone to answer, and I never paused to listen after I asked the question anyway.
Obama inherited a mess and almost immediately after he was sworn in, people were blaming him for not fixing the economic disaster left behind by a Republican President.
I guess the point is…when _hasn’t_ it been a mess, and is it even possible to fix within the current framework? More of the same on either “side” isn’t hopeful to me, though I really hope I’m wrong.
I look at it historically. Social security changed things for a lot of people. Medicare was a huge step forward and Obama managed to ram through the Affordable Care Act before the Republicans took back the House. You used to go to jail for homeschooling or marrying someone who was a different color shade. The ACA was was a first step. We could spend all day discussing what it didn't do, but it helped many families (including ours) deal with medical bills.
I’m very glad to hear that! I’ve only experienced it from the flip side (and I hate how the private insurers make so much freaking money off our illness): our health insurance costs skyrocketed directly after Obamacare went into effect, causing us to be unable to afford health insurance at all - and insult to injury, we had to pay fines for being uninsured - and once my husband got a more highly paying job, we didn’t (still don’t) qualify for subsidies, _only_ because he is able to purchase very expensive (4x the cost of the marketplace) insurance from work, which we still can’t afford).
The whole thing felt like way too little too late…and why can presidents push through enormous banking bailouts, but won’t push through populist programs for people, like single payer healthcare? The corporate-government collusion makes me angry, because as always, we little people lose. And even if Democrats have some secret ideas for making things better…they sure aren’t sharing those with Biden thus far! 😳
Not one Republican in the House or Senate voted for the Affordable Care Act and Obama didn't have enough Democratic votes for Single Payer (i.e. medicare for all). Afterwards the Republicans made it their mission, not to improve the ACA, but to tear it down. Marco Rubio got an amendment into a spending bill concerning "risk corridors" that forced insurance rates to go up. From the NYTimes 2015: "The risk corridors were intended to help some insurance companies if they ended up with too many new sick people on their rolls and too little cash from premiums to cover their medical bills in the first three years under the health law. But because of Mr. Rubio’s efforts, the administration says it will pay only 13 percent of what insurance companies were expecting to receive this year. The payments were supposed to help insurers cope with the risks they assumed when they decided to participate in the law’s new insurance marketplaces."
My main point is that we have two really crappy “choices,” and at a certain point there really isn’t a choice at all, when the majority of both sides’ platforms are Bought by Big Business. I’d bet that most republicans would rather have a better choice than Trump, just like most democrats want a better choice than Biden, and we are ALL losing because all of how easy it is for a two party system to be bought by the corporations. 😳
The few social programs that Democrats manage to eek out are some mostly crappy privatized health insurance and measures to introduce universal pre-K, and if that’s the only lipservice paid to social programs, while they’re all completely in bed with and making payouts to giant corporations on an ENORMOUS scale that defies understanding (more on the side of kings and dictators than mere management), then that pretty much equals Broken.
It might be a good idea to look at the history of the 20th and 21st centuries. Progress is a process. Social security was a huge step forward, guaranteeing some money to people who'd never had any kind of income when they stopped working. Ronald Reagan took a step backward when his administration legislated a tax on social security -- thus taxing the same money twice. But it was not a full step backward. Medicaid takes care of a lot of people who otherwise would have no way to see a doctor. It is the same with medicare.
And I know that Obamacare did not help your family, but it helped many other families and continues to do so. It's not what we wanted, but no other administration had been able to pass anything like it.
There is much I find frustrating about our society's dependence on pharmaceuticals and modern medicine in general, but if you look back a couple of hundred years to when sanitation was a joke and doctors didn't wash their hands in between seeing birthing mothers it is clear that we are evolving.
Ugh. Yes, it points toward my point #3 below. However, I have often wondered why presidents don’t do everything in their power to ram through populist endeavors - by executive order or otherwise - if it isn’t fear of corporate retribution (I.e. the end of their political career). Obama didn’t do anything to challenge the corporate oligarchy, as far as I can tell. It’s one thing to give lip service to valuing the working class, and it’s quite another to actually value (poor) people over (rich) corporations. I don’t imagine we could ever have a President principled enough to find out.
If Presidents ruled by executive order, they would be kings. So far the way things work, the next President can undo an executive order unless it was something like selling off public land, which Trump did. Can't undo that.
Rebekkah, I agree. Thanks for reminding me about that. And if you remember, anything he tried to do he was blocked and criticized. From supreme court nominees to any kind of progressive agenda. The Republicans were ruthless with their goal to make him a one term president.
I can only see that there were three possibilities during Obama’s tenure: 1. Obama didn’t have enough time to deal with the mess; 2. Obama wasn’t the man for the job (and when I look at the commensurate increase in military and corporate spending that occurred over eight years, combined with the day I lost faith in his actual humanity (when he visited Flint, MI and publicly laughed when observing the evils perpetuated by Governor Snyder, and did nothing…while thousands of children were poisoned with lead, and only General Motors received filtered supply lines because the newly horrendous water would corrode their car parts (!!!), I don’t see that he was a better man than any of the others)…and/or 3. The US government in a two-party stranglehold is a dangerous train on tracks toward a suicide mission and can’t be stopped by any one person or President, no matter how impeccable their character. For the record, I really hope I’m wrong!
When I read his book, "A Promised Land" I saw a different side of him. He goes to great lengths to describe the behind-the-scenes things that he had to deal with. Starting with the whole "he wasn't born here" where he had to show his birth certificate (how humiliating) scenario, clearly because he was a black man. He was a community organizer at one time, so he legitimately cares about people, and Michelle was trashed unfairly too. You raise legitimate points and I sound like a fangirl (woman??) and maybe I am and just want to cling to the fantasy.
Quick aside: My daughter Jess was a musician and we used to actually purchase sheet music (gasp) at our music store - The Freehold Music Center.
I hadn't been in in a while (this was years back) and when I went in to pick up some music, the place was half empty. Oh no! They must be going out of business I thought.
Turns out Donald Trump was building his hotels in Atlantic City (an hour away) and decided to order his pianos from The Freehold Music Center. The store is a relatively small, privately owned business, and I knew the owner from shopping there.
"What's going on?" I asked him.
"Donald Trump ordered pianos for his casinos. I was thrilled for the business, and we delivered the pianos to AC and set them up. When it came time to pay, he said he was only going to pay half of our agreed-upon price. That was less than what I paid wholesale." Trump then said, "Take it or leave it. If you don't like it sue me!" and laughed. It took this owner five years to recover from that loss.
Why didn't Trump use Steinway, not far from his NYC residence? Because he knew they had their own legal team, and he couldn't have pulled that off. So, he found a local small business he could rip off easily.
Of course, Trump the "businessman" bankrupted all of his NJ casinos (and didn't pay those employees either) but that's another story for another day.
Obama inherited a mess and almost immediately after he was sworn in, people were blaming him for not fixing the economic disaster left behind by a Republican President.
I guess the point is…when _hasn’t_ it been a mess, and is it even possible to fix within the current framework? More of the same on either “side” isn’t hopeful to me, though I really hope I’m wrong.
I look at it historically. Social security changed things for a lot of people. Medicare was a huge step forward and Obama managed to ram through the Affordable Care Act before the Republicans took back the House. You used to go to jail for homeschooling or marrying someone who was a different color shade. The ACA was was a first step. We could spend all day discussing what it didn't do, but it helped many families (including ours) deal with medical bills.
I’m very glad to hear that! I’ve only experienced it from the flip side (and I hate how the private insurers make so much freaking money off our illness): our health insurance costs skyrocketed directly after Obamacare went into effect, causing us to be unable to afford health insurance at all - and insult to injury, we had to pay fines for being uninsured - and once my husband got a more highly paying job, we didn’t (still don’t) qualify for subsidies, _only_ because he is able to purchase very expensive (4x the cost of the marketplace) insurance from work, which we still can’t afford).
The whole thing felt like way too little too late…and why can presidents push through enormous banking bailouts, but won’t push through populist programs for people, like single payer healthcare? The corporate-government collusion makes me angry, because as always, we little people lose. And even if Democrats have some secret ideas for making things better…they sure aren’t sharing those with Biden thus far! 😳
Not one Republican in the House or Senate voted for the Affordable Care Act and Obama didn't have enough Democratic votes for Single Payer (i.e. medicare for all). Afterwards the Republicans made it their mission, not to improve the ACA, but to tear it down. Marco Rubio got an amendment into a spending bill concerning "risk corridors" that forced insurance rates to go up. From the NYTimes 2015: "The risk corridors were intended to help some insurance companies if they ended up with too many new sick people on their rolls and too little cash from premiums to cover their medical bills in the first three years under the health law. But because of Mr. Rubio’s efforts, the administration says it will pay only 13 percent of what insurance companies were expecting to receive this year. The payments were supposed to help insurers cope with the risks they assumed when they decided to participate in the law’s new insurance marketplaces."
My main point is that we have two really crappy “choices,” and at a certain point there really isn’t a choice at all, when the majority of both sides’ platforms are Bought by Big Business. I’d bet that most republicans would rather have a better choice than Trump, just like most democrats want a better choice than Biden, and we are ALL losing because all of how easy it is for a two party system to be bought by the corporations. 😳
The few social programs that Democrats manage to eek out are some mostly crappy privatized health insurance and measures to introduce universal pre-K, and if that’s the only lipservice paid to social programs, while they’re all completely in bed with and making payouts to giant corporations on an ENORMOUS scale that defies understanding (more on the side of kings and dictators than mere management), then that pretty much equals Broken.
It might be a good idea to look at the history of the 20th and 21st centuries. Progress is a process. Social security was a huge step forward, guaranteeing some money to people who'd never had any kind of income when they stopped working. Ronald Reagan took a step backward when his administration legislated a tax on social security -- thus taxing the same money twice. But it was not a full step backward. Medicaid takes care of a lot of people who otherwise would have no way to see a doctor. It is the same with medicare.
And I know that Obamacare did not help your family, but it helped many other families and continues to do so. It's not what we wanted, but no other administration had been able to pass anything like it.
There is much I find frustrating about our society's dependence on pharmaceuticals and modern medicine in general, but if you look back a couple of hundred years to when sanitation was a joke and doctors didn't wash their hands in between seeing birthing mothers it is clear that we are evolving.
We are a blip in history.
Ugh. Yes, it points toward my point #3 below. However, I have often wondered why presidents don’t do everything in their power to ram through populist endeavors - by executive order or otherwise - if it isn’t fear of corporate retribution (I.e. the end of their political career). Obama didn’t do anything to challenge the corporate oligarchy, as far as I can tell. It’s one thing to give lip service to valuing the working class, and it’s quite another to actually value (poor) people over (rich) corporations. I don’t imagine we could ever have a President principled enough to find out.
If Presidents ruled by executive order, they would be kings. So far the way things work, the next President can undo an executive order unless it was something like selling off public land, which Trump did. Can't undo that.
Rebekkah, I agree. Thanks for reminding me about that. And if you remember, anything he tried to do he was blocked and criticized. From supreme court nominees to any kind of progressive agenda. The Republicans were ruthless with their goal to make him a one term president.
I can only see that there were three possibilities during Obama’s tenure: 1. Obama didn’t have enough time to deal with the mess; 2. Obama wasn’t the man for the job (and when I look at the commensurate increase in military and corporate spending that occurred over eight years, combined with the day I lost faith in his actual humanity (when he visited Flint, MI and publicly laughed when observing the evils perpetuated by Governor Snyder, and did nothing…while thousands of children were poisoned with lead, and only General Motors received filtered supply lines because the newly horrendous water would corrode their car parts (!!!), I don’t see that he was a better man than any of the others)…and/or 3. The US government in a two-party stranglehold is a dangerous train on tracks toward a suicide mission and can’t be stopped by any one person or President, no matter how impeccable their character. For the record, I really hope I’m wrong!
When I read his book, "A Promised Land" I saw a different side of him. He goes to great lengths to describe the behind-the-scenes things that he had to deal with. Starting with the whole "he wasn't born here" where he had to show his birth certificate (how humiliating) scenario, clearly because he was a black man. He was a community organizer at one time, so he legitimately cares about people, and Michelle was trashed unfairly too. You raise legitimate points and I sound like a fangirl (woman??) and maybe I am and just want to cling to the fantasy.
Quick aside: My daughter Jess was a musician and we used to actually purchase sheet music (gasp) at our music store - The Freehold Music Center.
I hadn't been in in a while (this was years back) and when I went in to pick up some music, the place was half empty. Oh no! They must be going out of business I thought.
Turns out Donald Trump was building his hotels in Atlantic City (an hour away) and decided to order his pianos from The Freehold Music Center. The store is a relatively small, privately owned business, and I knew the owner from shopping there.
"What's going on?" I asked him.
"Donald Trump ordered pianos for his casinos. I was thrilled for the business, and we delivered the pianos to AC and set them up. When it came time to pay, he said he was only going to pay half of our agreed-upon price. That was less than what I paid wholesale." Trump then said, "Take it or leave it. If you don't like it sue me!" and laughed. It took this owner five years to recover from that loss.
Why didn't Trump use Steinway, not far from his NYC residence? Because he knew they had their own legal team, and he couldn't have pulled that off. So, he found a local small business he could rip off easily.
Of course, Trump the "businessman" bankrupted all of his NJ casinos (and didn't pay those employees either) but that's another story for another day.