Why hasn't Obama or the left passed any legislation for the working man?

All Obama and his law makers do is help the 1%.or the welfare parasites.

Why can't they do something to help the working man, such as allowing the hourly employee to write off his gas mileage?
Seems Obama just wants to tax the working man.

Meanwhile, Obama and Hillary are head cheer leaders for big Pharma, pushing for forced vaccinations.

Because the "working man" isn't enough of a threat to need concessions to pacify him. Politicians do the bare minimum for the working class, which, right now, is pretty close to zero.

Ewwwwwwww! Go awaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!!!

Welfare parasites? WTF? Why isn't this asshole banned?

Oh, I didn't even notice the "welfare parasites" bit.

Yeah, fuck off!

edit: "forced vaccines"? But how else will we stay safe from the fluoride chemtrails?

A dichotomy between "the 1%" and "welfare parasites", with the "working man" being squeezed between the two? Obama constructed as synonymous with 'the Left'? Reads like a low-octane variant of Buchananite producerism to me.

But don't ban him. I think you're too quick to ban, and even to restrict users here. Someone taking a populist tack, no matter how asinine, might be educable if they stick around long enough.

I didn't notice that. I thought I should put a serious post to mask my insult but now I guess something is getting edited!

What do you mean by "welfare parasites"?

Good.

Ultra masculine rhetoric. Blatant liberal classism. Quasi-conspiracy theorist rhetoric. Fuck off with that nonsense.

Obama is a bourgeois politician, so of course his politics benefit the ruling class.

But how can someone come on to a revolutionary leftist board and dismiss the poorer sections of the working class as "parasites" if they're on welfare? That's a reactionary viewpoint, and it dumps crap on some of the people here, like myself, who are that poor.

The only parasites in capitalist society are the capitalists themselves. Full stop. End of story.

I have no problem with mandatory vaccinations where public health is a legitimate concern.

Is there a better way we can phrase this? I am a tremendous picker of nits.

Jimmy Carter was the owner of a peanut farm; in this sense he was literally a bourgeois. Ronald Reagan was an actor, and despite being a mouthpiece for General Electric for a decade on television, he was not. George W. Bush was an executive at Arbusto and owner of the Texas Rangers - bourgeois. Barack Obama was a career politician and author - not really a capitalist.

I don't at all question that he serves the class interest of (one alignment of) capital. But calling elected officials bourgeois who are not in the strictest sense bourgeois kind of clouds in the class analysis.

Bourgeois in the ideological sense.

Again, not trying to be an asshole or unreasonable, and definitely not trying to pick some kind of sectarian fight (I'm not even certain I'm a Marxist), but this could make every pro-capital, conservative worker "bourgeois in an ideological sense". Which is true, but unhelpful.

One of the things I think we ought to do is figure out a way to communicate these ideas that's accurate without being overly jargonistic and natural without being superficial. Communicating an idea like " this politician serves the interest of capitalists - defined as that collective of individuals who live on profit (and rents!) and which controls the means of production - without himself actually being a capitalist" should be a lot easier. And then there's the problem of sounding like a member of a cultish Maoist sect from the 70s.

I wish our language had nuance.

Just a mental spasm. Pay me no mind.

Well, it's not like I'm a particularly orthodox Marxist. ;)

Agreed, especially when engaging with people outside of revolutionary circles. But that's a whole 'nother discussion that would merit its own thread.

Right, vaccines, which have saved more human lives in the past 3 centuries than any other single human invention are being denigrated by an imbecile conspiracy theorist.

Obama's less left leaning than Richard fucking Nixon as far as his economic policies go. American politics have undergone a massive rightward shift with Reagan's new paradigm (re; the resurgence of gilded age era social darwinism under a pretty dress) and it seems that the American right has done a most excellent job of fooling the electorate that they're all just temporarily disenfranchised millionares in waiting. As a result of this, by the standards of much of the world, the American Democrat party has essentially become a moderate right wing party that is only thought of as left by comparison because the Republican party is just that far to the right.

What you see in America is a bunch of ultraconservatives and reactionaries still fellating McCarthy and Reagan's corpses years after they've died. To the point that, to what other countries and the actual left wouldn't even measure up to Bismarck's welfare programs in the 19th century is considered an ultraleft marxist conspiracy by the American right. Yeah that's right, Obama's behind friggin' Bismarck in his economic policies. You see, Obama and the Democrat party are essentially paternalistic corporatists with some more progressive social viewpoints (though given that their opposition is the Republican party being socially progressive by comparison is about as hard as beating up Glass Joe in punch out) who are perhaps a little more wary of foreign adventures that involve ground force commitments (re; anything with a high chance of sending bodies back home in caskets).

That anyone considers this progressive is only possible because the U.S' body politic is just that heavily titled to the right and because their opposition is quite frankly terrifyingly batshit insane. Corporations only real fear Obama because of his rhetoric and because he doesn't fellate them quite as hard as the Republicans. If you get past his Rhetoric you'll see that his proposals are all actually very pro-business. And somehow this guy is the ultra-leftist Commie-Nazi-Hippie-Muslim-Atheist-Homosexual Anti-christ out to destroy America? Bro, the United States under Dwight D. Eisenhower had stiffer rich taxes and less income inequality.

Always remember that America's left-right spectrum is incredibly skewed thanks to decades of propaganda and literally rigging the electoral system to keep the actual leftists out of power. So why hasn't Obama really helped out the workers? Because he was never really pro-worker to begin with. He doesn't even really pass the Social-Liberal or Social-Democrat metric. He's just a more moderate form of conservative with less disgusting social policies. And honestly that kind of strikes me like saying that Fascist Italy was more progressive than Nazi Germany, it's damning with faint praise all the way.

The United Sates quite quickly transitioned from a progressivist ideal into a deeply conservative bastion, even at their most liberal and progressive the U.S has never been seriously more left-leaning than Social Liberalism in its body politic.

That's a bit of an oversimplification about Nixon (yeah, I'm going to be that guy here).

While his policies on the surface were certainly within the framework of the postwar Keynesian consensus, they were also applied in such a way as to practically guarantee their ineffectiveness.

The Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, which Nixon so often gets credit for signing into law, was actually devised as a way to reign in the conservation bureaucracies scattered throughout the Department of the Interior and consolidate them under White House control.

Another example: Nixon appointed a CIA spook named Frank Carlucci to head the Office of Economic Opportunity established by LBJ's Great Society. Carlucci was probably involved in the murder of Lamumba, and later became an acolyte of Donald Rumsfeld.

Then Nixon impounded funds approved by Congress, preventing their being spent on social programmes. The Supreme Court later found this unconstitutional.

And, of course, Nixon vetoed the Clean Air Act, which was subsequently overridden.

Nixon governed "to the Left" of Obama superficially, but in a way oriented towards subversion of the Keynesian consensus. I have zero doubt Obama is more personally to the left, within a bourgeois political framework, than Richard Nixon.

Don't let left-liberal revisionists trick you into believing in a bipartisan Keynesian Golden Age that can someday be restored if only you believe.

Too long, didn't read, not American version: if you're poor like me and you lived under Nixon, you might think you were experiencing a transitionary phase to socialism. In truth, the social safety net was being yanked out right from under your feet by the very man intended to administer it.

A large portion of Obama's income comes from book sales that he authored. I guess he can be classified as petite bourgeois, since he is an author and is living off of his profits from book deals.

I do understand your nit picking though; presidents and state officials are not all bourgeois and it is important to understand that. Obama earns a mere fraction of what capitalists in the states earn.

True, he's not a billionaire like the elite capitalists, but his income between the government and book royalties still puts him in the top 1%.

Even Tony Abbott is paid more than Obama.

www.paywizard.org/main/salary/vip-check/world-leaders-salaries


Unsurprisingly, politicians usually make their big bucks through their investment enterprises. Dick Cheney anyone?

lol gas mileage

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/03/10...html?referrer=

So that folks can get to work and work 50-60 hours a week, multiple jobs, to barely cover rent, or just not use public transit and be homeless with temp/part time work which doesn't pay enough to cover public transit + savings enough to rent. Nevermind travel time included, leaving not enough time for adequate amounts of sleep, free time, time to spend with family. This is what work is.

Same in UK, Labour party courts the middle class these days, because it's where the majority of votes are

Why? Because he is not a leftist.

Haha, you got banned. We don't take kindly to people attacking the disadvantaged.

This thread is old, but I want to address the welfare parasite comment. Although the language is highly offensive and indicative of someone that should be banned, I think what he is trying to say is that there is plenty of legislation designed to help the unemployed, the disabled etc, but virtually none designed to help low income workers. I am currently in a situation where I make too much money for government assistance but barely enough to get by. I believe this is what he means by not passing legislation for the working person, and I believe it is a genuine problem. Obviously yes, Barack Obama and the democrats are not a true workers party, but it's unfortunate that they do no seem to care at all about the working poor.