Don't blame me, I voted for the other guy. (Politics General)

@Lord Goku  
StAtIsT

@MxQuinn  

 
FTFY.

@Lord Goku  
Start to what exactly?

@Lord Goku
 
While also proposing slashing loan forgiveness programs and loosening regulations on private loan collections.
 
1 step forward, 6 steps back.

@Kazapsky  
I don’t think you understand how government works. Trump does not get to just ignore the rules.
 
Doesn’t matter how incompetent you are, doesn’t matter what you do or don’t understand. Rules are rules.
 
For example, just because Trump CAN declare a national emergency, doesn’t mean his decision will necessarily hold up in court. The emergency powers act or whatever it’s called is pretty clear on this, it’s only to be used when Congress doesn’t have time to decide on an issue (i’m simplifying massively here but that’s the gist of it), it’s explicitly NOT to be used to bypass Congress.
 
The results of the special council investigation during watergate are now public, what makes you think this time will be any different? Nixon tried to claim executive privilege and it was struck down; the same thing will happen if Trump does it.

@Sectioned  

Well he certainly seems to think he does. And judging by the actions (or more accurately, the lack thereof) of congressional Republicans in response to his idiotic stunts, a lot of them seem to think he does too.
 
 
@Sectioned  

But Nixon was facing a congress actually willing to use their power against him. Trump has violated norms and rules time and time again, and the response of (almost all) the Republicans, people who would have to work with the Democrats for any sort of significant rebuke or overturn of his actions, has been to shrug and let him. And let’s not forget, this is an investigation he has been maligning and trying to stop since week 1. He definitely wants it gone, and I’m not confident in the slightest that his party, who have been watching this since the beginning, would lift a finger to stop him if he tried.

@Sectioned  

 
You say that, and yet in the very example you’re using Trump is doing exactly that. “The rules” say the President doesn’t get the governmental ‘Power of the Purse’, Congress does, so Trump declared a flippant National Emergency to usurp that power. “The rules” say Congress then gets to vote whether to uphold the declaration, but after 58 out of 100 Senators said “No” Trump pounded on the table saying “Yes”.
 
“The rules” then say the courts have to determine whether this is constitutional, but during the very speech where he declared the “Emergency” he went out of his way to say ‘And then the courts will talk on it and probably strike it down, but I don’t care about their decisions. Then it’ll get appealed to a higher court who’ll probably strike it down, but I don’t care about their decision. Then it’ll get appealed to an even higher court who’ll probably strike it down, but I don’t care about their decision. But then it’ll get to the Supreme Court the same one that’s majority conservative and with 2 Justices that owe him a favor who’ll probably vote in my favor and therefore I’ll care about their decision.’

@igotnopicks  

 
Start to address our out of control student debt problem.
 
I would also make it easier to discharge student debt through bankruptcy. The current rules make it damn near impossible.

@MxQuinn  

 
>Not organizing with a million others to refuse to pay a dime until conditions improve.
 
The absolute state of bootlickers.

@Lord Goku  
These issues are systemic. Student loans are finance capital.
 
Reformists will insist that the state will pass laws to fix the issues, but they fail to employ a materialist analysis. The mode of production of society serves as the infrastructure upon which a legal and political superstructure is constructed. The state specifically exists because of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state carries out the long-term interests of the class that has power over it; it is an organ of class rule. The policies that Trump is pushing now make a lot more sense within this framework; he is putting restrictions on the short-term accumulation of financial capital in order to maintain capital in the long run. After the crisis of student debt has been averted, the policies will eventually be pushed back and we’ll begin this whole process anew.
 
The only permanent solution to this problem is to put an end to capital altogether.

@MxQuinn  
Byoutiful.
 
“We should do something about–”  
“COMMUNIST REVOLUTION!”  
“…the traffic accidents at 5th and Vine?”  
“…still communist revolution.”

@Background Human  
I hardly see how traffic accidents would go away if we got rid of capital; they’re more about the means of transportation than economic relations.
 
I hardly see how identifying student loans as finance capital, identifying the problem as capital itself is similar to saying that traffic accidents are caused by capital.

@Sectioned  

 
How dense do you have to be to think a Supreme Court that Trump personally stacked in his own favor will strike down anything he does?
 
Donald J. Trump has made a lifetime career and a personality cult out of doing whatever the hell he wants and getting away with it because nobody has the balls to enforce the rules on him. And now you expect a legislative body that’s roughly half made up of Trump rubber-stamps and a court that was already leaning right before he put two of his cronies on it to do what law enforcement couldn’t be arsed to for 50ish years?
 
And you accuse ME of not knowing how things work.

By the by about 1 in 6 judges across the nation has been appointed by Trump.

Let us imagine a world in which the supply of and demand for every commodity is exactly 1:1, the factories and farms still belong to a relative few, and owning human beings is illegal. Everything then sells for its equilibrium price i.e. its actual value and most people have to buy the commodities of others to live a decent life.
 
The factory and farm owners (capitalists) hire people who do not own the factories nor farms to work those factories and farms for a certain amount of time. In this sense, the capitalists own the worker’s ability to labor (labor power) for a certain amount of time by contract.
 
Because the worker has to buy the commodities of others to live a decent life and the only way e can do that is with money, e has to work to live a decent life. E thus is essentially coerced by circumstance to labor.
 
For a commodity to be traded for another commodity in this economy, they must be of equal value. This means that when you are paid for your labor power, you are paid a value equal to an amount of labor power you have provided.
 
How then does the capitalist profit?
 
Because you must labor to live a decent life, the capitalist can take advantage of this. E pays you 0.8 times the full value of your labor power for every hour you give to em. Because of this, essentially, the capitalist pays you the full value of your labor power for 80% of the working day and then pays you nothing for the remaining 20% of the day. 80% of the working day is for producing your wage and the other 20% of your working day is for producing profits. This is what we call exploitation, because a certain amount of labor power is essentially extorted from the worker through circumstance.
 
Because the price of any commodity in the real world fluctuates (due to supply and demand) around its actual value (equilibrium price), we can say that exploitation is how capitalists secure steady profits; fluctuations in supply and demand just temporarily lower or increase profits. If profits were solely made from price fluctuations due to the laws of supply and demand, as soon as the price of a commodity fell below its actual value, almost all the capitalists producing that one commodity would move out of that industry, causing the supply of the commodity to fall to basically nothing. A society whose profits are based solely on the laws of supply and demand would have very regular market crashes; one day the price would be reasonable and over the course of a month or two the price would rise to ridiculous amounts because 0% profit, if not negative profit, is a strong motivator for capitalists to move out of that industry.

@Kazapsky
 
Trump packed the courts in his favor. Because that’s something that’ll have lasting effects for decades.
 
What did you think the GOP were trying to accomplish in the two years they control of all three branches of government? Abortion? Nothing. Gun rights? Nothing. Shrink the government? Nothing. State rights? Nothing. Kill the ACA? Mostly nothing (hobbled it).
 
That’s because these are all of the fake issues Republican politicians use to sell themselves to gullible voters. If they get around to it, they’ll do something toward these goals, but it’s by no means a priority. When you look at what they’ve actually bothered to do, install conservatives on the Supreme Court and give massive tax breaks to all of their rich corporate banker buddies, you see what their real agenda is and always was.
 
Another thing they do to get votes from the gullible is to convince poor/working-class white voters that it’s a zero-sum game where it’s minorities and immigrants that are taking everything away from them, in order to keep them from thinking about what’s really taking away their resources: wealthy corporatists.
 
Look at Individual One: he’s a wealthy fuck who supports policies that benefit the wealthy at the expense of low-income groups, yet he successfully managed to convince gullible voters that it’s foreigners’ fault why they’re poor. Like another populist leader from several decades ago, he’s resorted to scapegoating…and desperate people believed him because they wanted to believe him.

@Dustcan  
most of the judges in the court have been his own party.
 
And most likely the republicans don’t care.

It’s weird that everyone mocks the UK for Brexit but no one ever makes fun of Greece and their government-debt crisis.

@Scrabbleman
 
Greece is old news. They’ve been in crisis since 2008.

@Scrabbleman  
How is it weird? Greece is a poor guy that went through the wringer after some really poor investment decisions and is trying hard to break even with the bank, while the UK was a rich guy that had it all and decided to start eating literal dog shit while yelling “I WANT TO DO THIS, DON’T TRY TO STOP ME, I CAN FEEL MY INSIDES BOILING BUT IT’S MY CHOICE, STAND BACK!” while their friends circle around telling them they can stop eating shit and embarrassing themselves any time.

The College Fix - Research finds trigger warnings have ‘little effect’ on emotional response – even for victims  

@Sectioned  
The only trigger warnings I believe in are for epilepsy and loud noises.

@Scrabbleman  

 
Sorry, couldn’t help myself

@Scrabbleman  
Those aren’t trigger warnings, those are seizure warnings.

@MethidMan  
not that the Democrats are any better. both parties aim to prosper at the expense of the common man.