The 25th amendment was a mistake.
Game it out. Every president after Roosevelt resigned or lost re election until Reagan, who had severe altzheimers. Clinton would have been the first 3 term president, and probably 4 terms. No citizen united, no Bush v Gore. A dem Supreme Court. No war in Iraq.
Sure, a republican probably wins in 2008, but the country would have been on a much, much better footing. The 25th amendment was a mistake.
Good Trump bot
Personally, I think we will need to completely replace the economic system. Our norms are based on technical debt inherited from millennia of practice, with every great social hierarchy designed to make the ordinary person most useful to the wealthiest. Starting over, with a clean sheet design - new currency, new laws, new organizations, and new expectations, is the way forward.
For example, what if workers could vote on who their boss is, and be able to set the pay of said bosses every three months? What if there was a hard 40 hour cap on workhours per week, with fixed pay per hour? What if tipping was outlawed nationwide, and delivery drivers had their fuel costs covered by employers? What if there was an absolute cap on income, wealth, and assets, to prevent the existence of moguls?
We should just throw out our existing structures, because they are piles of bullshit.
You just described anticapitalism without using the words anticapitalism. A capitalist system is a system where the owners of the capital decide who is in charge, what their goals are, and how to distribute profits. You described an anticapitalist system where the employees decide that. That’s literally an entirely new economic system. If you believe your own words stop holding onto the idea that capitalism can be fixed and just admit you’re a socialist.It’s okay, I get the cognitive dissonance. You’re like me and you probably live in a capitalist economy. Which means that you need to participate in something you don’t like and have to do some light double think to avoid going crazy. I have it too. It’s a real thing and it takes maturity to really understand.Pretty sure they were making a joke, advocating for socialism without saying the word.
Wow that’s a really high flying joke.
FDR was a social democrat and the reason his social policy didn’t stick around is because he compromised with racists and allowed them to condition the passing of welfare policy on the exclusion of black and brown Americans from receiving any benefits, and he also did not sufficiently challenge the power of capitalist property owners. When the civil rights movement began to see success in forcing the universalization of social welfare the still-powerful capitalists were able to ride the wave of the racist backlash towards the near-total dismantling of the welfare state.
So sick of people glazing FDR. He seized the property of 100,000 innocent Americans and threw them in concentration camps. Fuck FDR.
That particular prez also beat the shit out of nazis. As opposed to, you know, hiring them.
Lmfao, no. FDR repeatedly positioned the US with the Nazis over the alliance. Even after Pearl Harbor FDR and his entire administration tried to keep us as friendly with Nazi Germany as possible, our declaration of war against Japan (as well as those famous speeches of FDR’s during those 2 days) specifically stated that we only had an interest in going after Japan, that the US would stay partnered with Nazi Germany and that business and politics would with them would continue unchanged. FDR as well as the vast majority of our population then loved Nazis, Nazi Germany was literally “Little America” after all.
Hell, take a look at what we did as soon as Nazi Germany was defeated. We still hadn’t even finished the war in the Pacific and yet we already were pushing the allies to complete the Nazis original plans…and we actually all fucking did it, literally beat the Nazis and then just did the earlier, more expensive version of the Nazis grand plan.
While FDR was popular, he was a social democrat. Welfare under capitalism is not socialism, it’s just welfare, and the welfare the US received was largely built from colonial holdings and imperialist plunder. Socialism isn’t just having decent welfare, it’s an entirely new economic system where the base of society is determined by social ownership of production and distribution. The only reason FDR was even allowed to pass these social reforms was because, at the time, economic unrest was high and workers could look to a largely unaffected and growing USSR for inspiration. The New Deal was a concession made to an organized working class, and the source was largely imperialist super-profits, ensuring both capitalists and workers could domestically be happy (assuming you were white). They exported the contradictions of society to the global south.
I think FDR - maybe better than any president since - really “understood the assignment” in regards to the POTUS being the manager of international capitalism in the post-war world. Part of that is understanding that the working class, in times of crisis, need to be pacified with carrots because sticks only heighten contradictions in the long run (even if he didn’t see or understand it that way nexessarily). FDR understood that capitalism is a global system and thus requires global coordination. He saw what happened between the wars where the bourgeoisie of each nation turned inward and disregarded this global nature of capitalism. Recently it seems the bourgeoisie are forgetting this lesson.
FDR genuinely was very competent at maintaining capitalism and facilitating the basis of imperialist expansion in a way no president before or since has managed to reach.
I think the joke is many American democratic socialists have policies comparable to just FDR
That’s one way to read it!
FDR wasn’t a democratic socialist and was only a social democrat by our current absolutely fucked standards but sure whatever everyone just lies about everything anyways why not.
Democratic Socialist is mostly a U.S. centric (post) Cold War era term, designed to work around red scare propaganda. Older references I have been able to find are mostly either French mistranslations of social democrat (the grammar has a different word order) or intended as adjectives (socialists who are democratic).
In 1944 it would have been considered a distinction without difference.
From my understanding, both Social democrat and Democratic socialist were interchangeable terms at one point, but eventiay came to mean 2 different ideologies.
Democratic socialist are socialist. they want to bring about socialism under a democratic system.
Social democrat want to apply socialist principals to the existing democratic, capitalist framework. Examples of this would be the Scandinavian countries.
“Democratic socialists” are just called “socialists” in places where they do not have to contend with red scare propaganda. Almost all European countries have or used to have socialist parties.
They’re not lying so much as they just don’t know what those terms mean. They don’t know what socialism is, or what the difference between social democracy and Democratic socialism is.
All they hear is “government does good things and must be socialism of some kind.”
To be fair to people in the US, this is because Bernie and all who followed have referred to themselves as DemSocs when they’re SocDems. As someone who studied PolSci this has annoyed me since the beginning, but at this point it’s too far gone to do anything about it.
That’s about where the political vocabulary in the US stands. 10 years ago, supposedly educated journalists were calling Bernie Sanders a democratic socialist. When asked about it I wish so hard that he said “no, I’m a social democrat, but for most people that distinction isn’t important right now”, but he leaned into it and here we are.
Yes clearly nomenclature is our biggest problem rn
Considering the brainless, knee-jerk demonization of words without comprehension, I think nomenclature is actually a really damn big problem these days:
- Woke
- Socialism/Socialist
- Welfare
- Obamacare
- DEI
- Critical Race Theory
- etc.
The minimum wage was supposed to be enough for one person to take care of a family of four and keep them out of poverty.
Now, the minimum wage is inadequate to support a person, let alone a pet or family.
Henry Ford, the first CEO of Ford Motor Co. made 50x more than his baseline employee.
Now, a starting employee for Ford makes about $18.00 an hour, $38,000 a year. Not enough to support any family (but more than minimum wage by far)
Now the CEO of Ford made $27,000,000 a year, or about $37,000.00 an hour. That’s over 700x more than a baseline employee.
(all approx. from duck duck go search)
and this is why minimums should be pegged to some cost of living measure so they constantly adjust
If this were done, I wouldn’t be surprised if every industry did everything in their power to manipulate the specific qualifying items used to generate the measure in order to keep wages as low as possible.
Like if the price of a gallon container of milk were to be the measure, the industry would start selling milk by the liter and limit galon containers to special sales where it cost $0.05, but each store only had a stock of 5 units on January 1st.
Some bullshit like that.
pegged
Giggitty
I met Americans telling me that these poor corporations can’t survive if they have to pay a minimum salary and how it was meant for teenagers … it was weird. I was like, you live in SF … what’s the minimum again? how much is rent again?
Years ago during an NFL strike the guy who owned the Carolina Panthers, cried this bullshit all the way to the bargaining table…years later only to discover the guy was literally making the most money
And worse if they have tl pay taxes as the rest of us! How can people be so cruel toward these poor corpos? /s
It’s just objectively false. The minimum wage was not “meant for teenagers”.
No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country… By living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level - I mean the wages of decent living.
-Franklin D. Roosevelt
You can hem and haw all day and what minimum wage should be, but what it was meant to be is unambiguously clear.
Back when you could still say “businesses don’t have rights”…
Ben and Jerry had it right. We need to take their policy and turn it into a federal law.
A static multiplier that is the most that they can receive based on the lowest salary level.
Let’s find a way to work in some math so that they make everybody part-time to avoid the trouble, like Walmart. They suffer harder.
What we need, desperately, is a restoration of the 91% top-tier tax rate, that nobody ever paid, and nobody ever will pay.
The purpose of such a tax rate isn’t revenue. The purpose is avoidance. What companies have to do to avoid that tax is exactly what the economy needs. The largest businesses need to reduce prices to lower revenue below the line. Alternatively, they need to Increase business spending, which reduces their taxable income by paying more to employees and outside workers for products and services.
Capital Gains need to be taxed progressively, and higher than labor.
The Social Security tax limit needs to be eliminated, and cap gains needs to be subject to this tax as well. Social security tax needs to be shifted from regressive to progressive. The social security benefit age needs to be incrementally decreased until Social Security is a UBI system instead of a retirement system.
100% seriously you should consider running for office
FDR’s signature policy for his fourth term was going to be riding his popularity from winning the war to pass a second, economic Bill of Rights, enshrining a constitutional right to housing, a fair wage, etc. Unfortunately, he didn’t survive to pursue it, and Truman had less than zero interest.
FDR’s former VP, Henry Wallace, would have gone even further, but he was replaced by Truman.
What’s really funny is that if you ask a MAGA about FDR they’ll swear that FDR’s policies kept the Depression going longer and it was only the massive government spending for WW2 that got the economy going again.
Dude the cognitive dissonance necessary to hold that point of view is insane. Like … FDR’s policies were squarely pegged to government spending to boost the economy - you can’t say that higher taxation for the ultra wealthy paired with government spending kept the depression going longer then turn around and say the exact same thing got the economy going again.
It’s maddening to me how folks can even think like that. What kind of brain must one possess to believe these sorts of lies?
Hilary Clinton was both a senile old woman who didn’t understand how to send an email AND a criminal mastermind who’d killed dozens without ever leaving a clue.
Obama was a lazy do-nothing AND tirelessly undermining the American way.
Immigrants are stealing our jobs AND getting welfare.
Dude for a second I was like what the fuck are you on about before I realized your point.
I literally believe that living through the Trump years has made me stupider, just because I’ve had to listen to so much nonsense.
Because that’s a Heritage foundation talking point. They think they’re lions and wolves, but really they’re parrots.
Well that’s just because they’re delusional idiots 🤷🏻
Not even MAGAts, my great grandmother allegedly hated FDR so much she refused to utter his name or refer to him as the President.
I once read a book about advertising and public relations.
One of the stories was that FDR personally destroyed the cigarette holder industry.
Cigarette holders were very popular with the rich and wannabes. But as FDR became more and more hated by the rich, stopped using the holders because the holders reminded the rich folks of ‘that man.’
My dad would sometimes loudly comment within earshot of my great-grandmother, “Well, this is a woman who voted for FDR four times” in a derisive fashion, and if she was feeling spicy, she’d yell “I’d have voted for him a fifth time too!”
That make you go “Hmm…” until you think about them for a few seconds. The fact FDR implemented progressive social policies isn’t why the 22nd Amendment was ratified. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Jackson established a convention of a maximum two terms by declining to run for a third.
Just like a lot of laws, the 22nd Amendment was written when someone finally violated a long-observed norm. Four terms in a row (without a definite end, even, as Roosevelt died early in his fourth term) was wildly outside the norm and forced politicians to confront formal term limits instead of unspoken, honors system ones.
The only states that voted to reject the 22nd were Oklahoma and Massachusetts.
Congress was more partisan, mainly being Republicans and southern Democrats voting in favor. This was pre-Southern Strategy, and the GOP was more complicated. With Truman (FDR’s former VP) on the backfoot when Congress was deciding on the 22nd, it’s pretty obvious why there’d be a partisan split—with the amendment existing because of FDR, whose popularity the Democratic Party were still riding off of.
Just like a lot of laws, the 22nd Amendment was written when someone finally violated a long-observed norm.
We’re going to need a lot more of those after the current administration.
They actually passed a law making twp terms because of FDR those are facts. And he was voted in 5 times but didn’t serve the 5th due to dying.
They actually passed a law making twp [sic] terms because of FDR those are facts.
- That’s a singular fact, for the record.
- Nobody was contesting that.
And he was voted in 5 times but didn’t serve the 5th due to dying.
No, he was elected in 1932, 1936, 1940, and 1944, and he died April 12, 1945.
Herbert Hoover ® won the 1928 election, and Harry Truman (D) won the 1948 election after having served the majority of FDR’s fourth and final term.
This is something you can look up in 10 seconds before you try to contradict somebody on it.
FDR was absolutely not a democratic socialist. He was a social democrat. He favored concessions to the working class to prevent them from revolting and overthrowing capitalism. The US was way behind Europe because the USSR showed workers everywhere what was possible and the US purged them all and sent them back to Europe, and the European bourgeoisie had to make concessions to the working class to prevent them from revolting and overthrowing capitalism. The US thought it had defended against this possibility with purges, but then the business cycle showed up and crashed the US economy, taking down the rest of the world with it. And they thought they could ride it out and let the working class suffer. But there was a real risk of class consciousness emerging and thus FDR presided over concessions to keep the people pacified
While there may be some truth here, I wouldn’t call The New Deal a “concession”. It was a complete paradigm shift about how government can work.
People also seem to forget that FDR was a compromise position and that even he tried a few times to sell people out.
Fuck you, now that song is going to be stuck in my head for six months.
Which song is that?
I am literally begging Republicans to set the precedent that you can run as many terms as you want
Why? They don’t equally apply precedent like that to both sides.
