As a leftist, if you had a chance to switch out the Democrats with the Green Party...

Free college for everyone!
Guaranteed jobs for everyone!
Free health care for everyone!
Guaranteed low utility costs!
Guaranteed cheap housing!

Totally realistic - if you like 100% tax rates or believe communism somehow worked as a system.

 

So, corporations are not protected by the Constitution?

 

I don't think you can separate them out, though, if you're talking about the "Green Party Agenda". There are parts of every party's agenda that I like - but if you look at it as a whole, it's bat**** crazy.

I don't think it matters, to be honest. Medicare-for-all will bankrupt the country, just as the current system will. The biggest thing that matters in my opinion is innovation in how to make health care cheaper and pull the cost curve down - Medicare-for-all does nothing of the sort. It puts downward pressure on profits, which is a short-term solution to costs, but doesn't really address the problem in the long run. If anything, it discourages innovation by making one standard system that runs everything - that leaves no ability or incentive for anyone to try anything different. You can't just dictate prices down - at some point, someone has to come up with cheaper MRI machines, less invasive surgical processes, etc. And if there's no profit incentive, no one has a reason to do so. The current system is inefficient in other ways, but I don't remotely think single payer solves the problems with it.

I think this is a definite positive, though I'd argue Dems probably have the same general principles, though to a lesser extent. Dems are against Citizens United too.

 

Yes but would Dems be against Citizens United if it were supporting them? Unlikely.

 

absolutely

 

Sorry I should have been clearer. I wasn't implying that Dem voters would not be against it, rather I meant to say I believe the actual Dem politicians would not oppose it. Certainly I would be shocked if Obama said no to it.

 

Green party platform sounds good on paper, but not practical in real world, like communism.

 

Do you know anything about the history of campaign finance reform in the US? If you did, you wouldn't make silly statements like this.

 

...and capitalism.

 

Only vaguely, please enlighten me. I'm also interested in understanding why you believe Dems rejecting certain things in the past means they would reject it today?

 

Dems have a long and non-stop history of pushing for campaign finance reform and transparency. That's never stopped and started, despite the fact that certain years (2008), things like Citizens United would have benefited them. They pretty much universally have opposed things like that.

There is *zero* evidence of any sort to support your position. It's amusing how you would be "shocked" by Obama not supporting it despite "only vaguely" knowing about the historical Democratic position on the issue.

If your argument is that a different version of the Dems that appealed to a different demographic and had a different agenda might support Citizens United, that's probably true. They are called Republicans, though.

 

**** it... after living through 8 years of Bush, I wouldn't mind 8 years of the green party.

 

Or if we'd started working on it after WWII, while scaling back our defense budget and convincing different types of people to live, work and go to school together.

 

pure capitalism doesn't work well either. So far the best system is controlled capitalism. That's what US, European nations etc have, with varying degree of control.

 

China too.

 

Thanks. You are right. What I should have said was that Dems would not and do not oppose massive unlimited financing from questionable donors whereas Republicans go even further by concealing the identity of those donors. To me this is a neglible difference given that IMO the problem is politicians whoring themselves out for money while transparency is just the cherry on top. The presence of transparency on the other side has not yielded significantly better results IMO, though that is a subjective judgement.

For information, I read just recently that majority of independent, republican and democrat voters support a limit on campaign donations. This seems to reject the positions of both parties, although clearly rejecting republican standards more than democrat.

Perhaps more accurately, if the same people who back Citizens United wanted to back Obama, I'm fairly confident that he would accept their money under slightly different conditions. It is not as though Shelden Adelson, a major CU donor, is concealing his identity or his contribution. The transparency issue is just another problem in a whole bucket of problems which are sucesfully distracting Americans from the more fundamental problems which require reform. The main problem is that both these parties support corporates as persons more than humans as person, and corporate free speech over human free speech.

 

too many others to name, Japan, Korea, etc.