zigdirty:
emptydragonseverywhere:
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transchaoswizard:
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“You can’t vote out Capitalism” yeah but you can vote for Elizabeth Warren and her Consumer Financial Protection Bureau you can vote for not abolishing food stamp. You can vote for Biden’s millions of dollars in federal loan forgiveness. You can vote for Medicaid expansion to help those at the bottom rungs. You can vote for racial, gender, and sexuality protections in the workplace. You can vote for a million things that improve our life under Capitalism and saying “voting doesn’t change anything” only shows how much privilege you must have that you wouldn’t notice the difference.
“You can vote for Biden’s millions of dollars in federal loan forgiveness” We did that though, and he proceeded to quite immediately and explicitly Not make it happen.
He forgave $188.8 Billion USD in federal student loans. I’m sorry you weren’t one of the borrowers who qualified, but he forgave billions with a B
5.3 million borrowers had their loans forgiven and while, yes, that’s only a drop in the bucket, that’s still a 5.3 million Americans who had a financial burden taken off their back and acting like that didn’t happen when these numbers are a Google search away can only be explained by ignorance or malice.
Also, acting like it was Biden and not the GOP who blocked further student loan forgiveness can also only be explained by ignorance or malice. Biden fought his entire presidency to expand loan forgiveness and Republicans in every branch and every level of government fought back at every opportunity. Biden was unable to expand loan forgiveness because Trump got to stack the Supreme Court in his first term (after the GOP’s senate majority took the unprecedented step to refuse to confirm Obama’s justice pick in his last year as president) and bc folks didn’t show up to vote blue in the midterms in 2022, giving Republicans the majority in the House and thus the ability to block Biden’s policies.
It wasn’t Biden’s fault that he had his student loan forgiveness plans blocked. It was the fault of every Republican and, truly, every American who could have voted blue down-ballot in every election they were eligible to vote in since 2012 and chose not to. If you aren’t voting for dems in congressional and gubanatorial elections then you can’t blame the dems when they don’t have the power to implement the leftist policies you want to see. That’s on you.
As someone who did benefit from the student loan forgiveness (on loans that my mother’s second husband fraudulently took out using my information, no less), it absolutely provided immense relief. And I ONLY had less than $5k left to be paid back (although I never even received a dime of the loans.)
Reagan put the US on a path to destruction and every time anyone that isn’t a far-right lunatic tries to course-correct, the conservative dark money made sure they never succeeded.
Every nationally beneficial piece of legislation in the last fifty years was from the left. Saying otherwise is sheer ignorance.
And as someone who would have qualified for 10K of forgiveness only for the GOP to launch a dozen legal challenges: I hold all of you “lol the dems are useless” people personally responsible.
I think we’ve turned incrementalism into some great evil that must be destroyed because passing imperfect solutions isn’t as sexy and fun as total reform. And I’m sick to my teeth about it.
Obamacare, the ACA, is an imperfect solution. It was not a universal option, and allowing the individual states to choose whether to take federal subsidies that were set aside for them regardless to expand Medicare created an enormous ironic hell. In red states, which refused the subsidies obvsly, you could be too poor for ACA coverage. I know because I lived in three such states. After Obamacare passed, I still was without insurance for years because I was too poor to be covered.
That, all of that? Is about as imperfect and fucked as a “solution” can be.
But then Obamacare literally saved my life. I would be dead without it. A few years ago, in Florida, I made barely enough money to qualify for ACA coverage. And then something went extremely wrong with my esophagus, and I had to get a magnetic ring surgically inserted around my throat or, y'all, I would have been dead in another month.
I’m sitting here alive because imperfect solutions. And when virtue-signaling cowards talk about how the Dems and GOP are the same, I want to scream, “The GOP would have let me fucking die! They have let so many others die! What the fuck is WRONG with you?”
You, all of you, are surrounded by people who are only here because imperfect Democratic solutions. And I think it’s hideously disrespectful to the people who aren’t here, who didn’t survive, who didn’t get the SNAP benefits they needed or didn’t get the insurance they needed or didn’t get the housing subsidy they needed, to pretend otherwise.
If that’s you, if you have ever sat there and gone “the dems do nothing, I’m not going to bother voting,” I want you to understand you were incorrect. And then I want you to do better.
“I didn’t get the perfect progressive Utopia I wanted with a single election so WHY BOTHER, the left is USELESS.”
