Trunks

Disillusioned leftish politics and alleged FFXIV fanbot. He/him.

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

The FTC is forcing H&R Block to stop their deceptive promises of ‘free’ filing and other unfair practices.

An @FTC action will now require the company to stop making it harder for people to downgrade to a cheaper service, and will also make H&R Block pay $7 million in fines.

[Adam Singer @AdamSinger]

"how could this have happened," we cried from our vacation home while our kids were barely affording groceries

[Jeremy Baiman @jeremybaiman]

Mexican left: Here is some money. We have taken it from the wealthy and are redistributing it to you. We also fixed your road.

U.S. liberals: We did a double negative reverse tax credit inversion scheme that in 15 years will create 6 jobs. Why doesn’t the working class love us?

[Trunks @trunksahoy]

@DanRShafer Food prices up 28% since 2019, rent & owner-equivalent up 22.5% since 2021. Meanwhile millions kicked off their health insurance and lost child credits.

Nobody cares about battery factories & highway grants. Civil wars have started over this kind of stuff.

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

What kills me is that it was not “the left” that wielded identity politics over economics that was explicitly the Hillary Clinton strategy to outflank Bernie. My book The Squad goes through it blow by blow

[John Frankensteiner @JFrankensteiner]

Smash cut to 4 months later

[Everything Price Sufferer (but especially eggs) @agraybee]

Did you guys expected to be greeted as liberators or something. Your whole thing is triggering the libs. Now the libs hate you. Seriously what was your expectation.

[Trunks @trunksahoy]

@RossBarkan Needs to be not just policy but packaging. Bernie did great with bite-sizing policy into easily understood phrases: “jobs and education, not jails and incarceration”, “Medicare for all”, “the billionaire class”, etc. Clear and concise, and just beat the drum.

[Trunks @trunksahoy]

Finally someone who said it. The Dem coalition doesn’t work. Eject the rich.

[Chris Murphy 🟧 @ChrisMurphyCT]

6/ We don't listen enough; we tell people what's good for them.

And when progressives like Bernie aggressively go after the elites that hold people down, they are shunned as dangerous populists. Why? Maybe because true economic populism is bad for our high-income base. 😬

[Andy Boenau @Boenau]

Minneapolis built 76 miles of bike lanes, and the biking increases looked like this:

⬆️ 69% on protected bike lanes
⬆️ 26% on on-street bike lanes
⬆️ 10% on streets without bike lanes

[Jeremy Slevin @jeremyslevin]

🙃🙃Dems need to move to the center🙃🙃

[Alycia Ramirez @AlyciaRamirez3]

It took the We 💚 Seattle founder only a few days to say the quiet part out loud.

Keep in mind that conservative-leaning Seattle Council members Nelson & Kettle publicly supported her campaign

[Jason Hickel @jasonhickel]

All the takes are correct and yet they also miss the point.

Yes, it was insane for the Democrats to think they could win by running a soulless candidate, without a shred of progressive policy vision, pursuing endorsements from neocon war-hawks everybody hates, while arming and funding a genocide, and belittling and crushing those who have enough morality to protest it.  It is enraging that the Democrats are so smug and blind to this.

But these are all just symptoms.  The deeper reality is that liberalism has failed, liberalism is dead, and people urgently need to wake up to this fact and respond accordingly. It is a defunct ideology that cannot offer any meaningful solutions to our social and ecological crises and it must be abandoned.

Democrats have proven over and over again that they cannot accept even *basic* steps like public healthcare, affordable housing, and a public job guarantee - things that would dramatically improve the material, social and political conditions of the working classes. And they cannot accept a public finance strategy that would steer production away from fossil fuels and toward green transition to give us a shot at a liveable future.

Why? Because these things run against the objectives of capital accumulation. And for liberals capital is sacrosanct. They will do whatever it takes to ensure elite accumulation, it is their only consistent commitment.  At home, they suppress and demonize progressive and socialist tendencies. Abroad, they engage in endless wars and violence to suppress input prices in the global South and prevent any possibility of sovereign economic development.

The Democrats have done all this purposefully and knowingly, for my whole life, not as some kind of "mistake" but in full consciousness that it is in the interests of capital.

And because liberalism cannot address our crises, and because it crushes socialist alternatives, it inevitably paves the way for right-wing populism.  They know this pattern, and yet they risk it every time - this election being only the most recent example. They did it in 2016, when they actively crushed the Sanders campaign and sent Trump to the White House. They do it because ultimately they (and I mean the liberal ruling class here) don't really mind if fascists take power, so long as the latter too ensure the conditions for capital accumulation. They 100% prefer this to the possibility of a socialist alternative.

So, progressives have to face reality. The dream of "converting" the Democratic party is dead. This is now a fact and it must be accepted. The only option is to build a mass-based movement that can reclaim the working classes and mobilize a political vehicle that can integrate disparate progressive struggles into a unified and formidable political force and achieve substantive transformation. This will take real work, actual organizing, but it must be done and that process must begin now.

[Bes D. Marx🔻 @BesDMarx]

slurs and slogans

[ça ira glass @PercyYaBysshe]

Lmao I missed this, they had BILL KRISTOL telling her to pivot to left populism and they kept handing Liz Cheney the mic!

[Wayne Farry @waynefarry]

feel like I'm losing my mind over this Maccabi-Amsterdam story

all the media literacy in the world means nothing when the biggest news orgs are reporting a version of events that simply didn't happen

[Yumna @yumna_patel]

So Israeli soccer fans went to Amsterdam, tore down Palestinian flags off Dutch buildings, chanted for the killing of Arabs, and then got attacked as a result.

But if you google ‘Amsterdam’ you’ll see a bunch of headlines about Israelis being targeted in unprovoked attacks.

[Jane Fox 🟥 @Foxsquire]

Student loans are the 2nd highest form of household debt in America. Harris never said a word about it.