Your job is to save the USA WITHOUT destroying capitalism. What would you do? What can you do? Basically—how can you make things like they were during Obama’s presidency?
As a lib my first thought would be: “implement universal health care.” But wouldn’t it be struck down immediately by the SCOTUS? Wouldn’t the health insurance companies just overthrow you? Won’t the corporate press immediately start treating you like Bernie (or even worse) in order to turn the populace against you?
Please discuss. Also I am not Biden looking for ideas. Nor do I work in the White House.
No powerful unions, no organized militant communist movement, and no united front with the USSR = no FDR.
Do an FDR. If the courts say shit go full Andrew Jackson and tell them to enforce their own fucking laws and ignore them. Legislature acting uppity? I'm gonna bet on red that the ABC agencies has plenty of dirt to gently persuade them to play ball.
ABC agencies getting a bit uppity thinking they wanna see if JFK 2 can be made happen then setting up inter-agency competitions and rivalries through allowing oversight over each other to make the ghouls devour each other should hold back the tide for a while.
Hogs going wild and want to try storming the capital? Let their stampeding thunder through the halls of power to shake up the bone-bags that run this country to remind them of their mortality and cement more power into the executive.
Business plot? Either use any dirt on them to get them fall in line or you read the unfortunate news the next day about how mcRichy Richfuck's solid gold boat unfortunately received faulty maintainence and sunk at sea with no survivors.
Etc until my term is up, anything after that is the next guys problem.
Seems kind of risky. You’ve turned most if not all of the power players in the country against you!
All they have to do is fund public work projects without subcontracting to a million leeches. Actually build infrastructure and build an agency of some sort to do it. Corporate interests and segments of the media would turn against you, but a popular president can weather that if they provide material improvement to people's lives. Our current structure is incapable of even basic Keynesian economics, but if you call infrastructure building "emergency defense spending to secure our supply chain and infrastructure from Chinese attacks" you could force it through with executive orders. A truly cynical take would be to manufacture consent that China or Russia are directly threatening us and escalating trade war. Maybe you do a false flag cyber attack on an electrical grid, then you can sell the public on anything.
This wouldn't save capitalism permanently since it's built on contradictions, but you could provide treats to keep it humming for a decade. Americans are so starved for any good, that a president who did what I outline would be immensely popular even if mainstream media was calling him an authoritarian communist.
Best answer I’ve seen so far. The only way you can convince enough Americans to support you is to dial up the xenophobia. And this is actually what many presidents already do. (Is Obama the only recent exception?) Except they just dial up the xenophobia for support; they don’t actually use that support to improve anything. One side effect is pogroms against anyone who looks even vaguely Asian.
I’ll pass this one up to Joe.
The other thing I'd add is some sort of direct cash payment to Americans a la covidbux. Not something that would be regular since again the rest of the government would stop it, but something close to W Bush's rhetoric on early tax returns after 9/11. People need money in their pocket for capitalism to run.
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well shit
how about making it much easier for immigrants to get in the country, would solve the so called job crisis at least.
That and start treating foreign medical degrees & licenses with the same legitimacy we treat US ones. Suddenly we no longer have a doctor / nurse shortage.
Strikes from nursing unions are virtually guaranteed if you adopt this approach though. They’ll see this move as a threat to job security.
we did this already. it was called "The New Deal." We only did it to prevent communist revolution, and we started reversing certain aspects of it right away. you cannot save the USA without destroying capitalism, and you cannot destroy capitalism without also destroying the USA as we know it.
I've thought about this scenario and the way I'd end capitalism would be to basically contrive a scenario to become more or less a dictator and destroy the other branches of government, only to use my newfound direct control of the armed forces to betray the rich. Basically like an Order 66 against people who own yachts, just get them all at once before they can react. I couldn't see any way to do it without fundamentally subverting the electoral system.
I'm really torn on this because part of me thinks it's entirely possible (even likely!) if the right person were to rise to the occasion, but another part of me says there is zero incentive to do it so why would they? If you become president, you, your descendants, and your friends are set for life. You would be taking this massive risk with coup like this for purely ideological reasons, some sort of new American nationalism.
The American president can't be like a new emperor who heroically leads their subjects to victory. It can't be Ceasar, Napoleon, or Wilhelm. It is one of those late-empire emperors that is subservient to the wills of some greater power, but as long as they behave they get to be the special boy in the Imperial Palace. If something were to truly rock this country that might change this calculus but I don't see the president ever seriously upsetting the order.
Of course. It's not a practical plan unless you are the person running because to get elected in the first place you'd have to pretend to be one of the ghouls until the very last moment. Before the turn this candidate would be indistinguishable from an ordinary fascist (or at best milquetoast liberal) to everyone except yourself. Especially towards the end where you're deliberately provoking a crisis to seize total authority, everyone with a brain cell will rightfully believe you're trying to be Mussolini 2: McDonalds Edition. On the other hand, if propaganda wins and leftism dies it's a not infeasible path to a better future.
unironically, withdraw from nato using some weird jingo arguments like trump used to use
Yeah pretty good step one tbh. I was gonna go with recognize Palestine and cut all funding to Israel.
I don't think there is a good way to bring standards of living up without doing some level of extreme spending/socialization/nationalization of industries and jubilee. Pot legalization and and expunging prisoners convicted of drug charges hurts the prison industrial complex and gives cops less to do, and creates more hungry people that you cant exploit for pennies because they're incarcerated. You can't nationalize the health insurance industry because it controls a lot of capital. Debt forgiveness would also be doing too much spending and would harm the financialization of the economy.
I think the most capital friendly option would be to create a lot of market schemes for public transit and other infrastructure. You dont even have to do it well, but currently a lot of young people lack the ability to own a car, so investing in local level bussing and maybe a better rail system to please industry would be good. Also from that just allowing the total monopolization of the economy.
The real problem here though is that America is doing :this-is-fine: , everything is still making money, the next recession is going to allow for a lot more capital mergers and the populace is disorganized and browbeaten and opiated at every turn to allow for a maximal exploitation.
Pack the courts, straight up some Huey Long level shenanigans too. My husband is going on the Supreme Court, as are my sisters but not my dad. Abolish the electoral college. Universal healthcare and universal basic income, pump trillions into infrastructure (But like, actually build it), Institute The Newer Deal for an Even Greater Society, and make being an employee of Goldman Sachs a federal offense.
It won't be as good as abolishing capitalism, but it's the best you can do while remai ing lib.
without destroying capitalism
Just do the new deal or some keynesian shit
Hear me out: pack the court, black bag everyone who bought into qanon, clean house on all appointable positions immediately, legalize marijuana, and create a massive arts funding program for meme creation, house music, and indie video games. This is how we return to 2012 without doing anything. Steep the culture in early 2010s stuff, and literally just disappear the unhinged chuds.
The issue is that you basically have to raise an army to do this since chuds control the military and all cops are bastards. Large numbers of cops and soldiers will refuse to follow these orders. So essentially you just plunged the USA into civil war.
Yeah that's 30-50 million people. And they hate being black bagged! They frequently say so
I would create capitalism 2.0, where employees decide on the direction of enterprise and community needs together in what I call Laborer's Meetups. There's still trade and money, so it's capitalism, yeah. Yep.
so it’s capitalism
It’s not the government doing stuff, so this checks out.
Basically Bonapartism.
Step 1: adopt the position that Marbury v Madison was decided incorrectly, and start enforcing laws and policies regardless of their alleged "constitutionality". When the Supreme Court complains, ask them what they plan to do about it.
Step 2: lots and lots of executive orders. A ton of hypothetical power has been given to the executive, especially since the War on Terror, use it to terrorize reactionaries with federal law enforcement without remorse.
Step 3: foreign policy is easy, because it has almost completely been given to the president. Every foreign base is closing, and every troop is coming home. The US is pulling all of its support out of NATO and locking the doors, "freedom of navigation" exercises are ending.
Step 4: if the Senate won't adjust the military budget, assume direct control of how the budget is spent and turn it towards building out renewable energy capacity across the US. Throw in infrastructure fixes too - declare a climate change state of emergency to justify it all.
Step 5: the leaders of the CIA, NSA and DHS should have all been shot in a basement under Washington DC during your first week. Purge literally every single person from those orgs until they cease to function by the end of your first term.
