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Comment by mhh__ | Hacker News Reader

These guys are all going to end up in prison at this rate. Dems are currently predicted to win next election no?

Maybe a mid-level scapegoat or two will go to prison. Definitely not the ones at the top. God bless America

Depends on who actually gets elected. A centrist candidate like Buttigeg/Ossoff/Harris/Newsom would almost certainly lead to no prosecutions. Someone with actual convictions like AOC or Ro Khanna might.

Ossoff does not really seem like a centrist on this point. He's pretty vicious about the whole Trump criminal organization.

Fair. Although he seems to mostly target Trump, rather than the conditions that gave rise to Trumpism. Unless someone addresses that we’re stuck in a vicious cycle…

He's even better than you thought, then. Here's a post from a week ago (and a common refrain in his writing and speaking):

"I get why people voted for him. Because even before he came on the scene, American politics was coin-operated.

Money goes in, favors come out. It’s been running on corporate money, secret money, billionaire money. Both sides.

And when members of Congress aren’t fundraising from lobbyists and corporate PACs, they’re trying to dodge getting bombed by these super PACs.

Spectacular wealth buys an ever greater share of power over our national affairs. And this corruption is why nothing works for ordinary people."

He at least seems to recognize the stakes, while the Schumer and Pelosi wing of the party (most of the party) simply do not. It's literally barbarism or democracy, and barbarism is currently winning, and if your opponent is a white supremacist fighting hard on the side of barbarism, you gotta say that plainly. Ossoff is one of the few democrats who will say it. He has the benefit of his opponent being particularly odious in his ties to literal Nazis, and the base he has to serve including a lot of black people who understand what a white supremacist looks like.

I will laugh and then cry if the left puts up a candidate that is (again) alienating of the working class.

Enough of the voter base will cut the nose to spite the face

Which candidate(s) would that be... and why?

Newsom because he is backed by oil wealth, has suspicious connections to PG&E, and has delivered (some of?) the highest electricity rates in the country.

There's only one Democrat I simply will not vote for, because they transparently serve the oligarch class, and it seems like the one the Democratic establishment wants to nominate for president in 2028 (that candidate is Newsom, if it weren't obvious). A man who grins while destroying everything a homeless person owns is a monster who should never be allowed into any position of power. I don't know if the working class, in general, understand who Newsom is, but he's clearly not for the working class, and at least some of them will figure that out in a general election. He's the kind of California Republican that runs as a Democrat so he can win statewide in California.

California voter here. If Newsom wins the primary I will campaign for the Republican.

But please note that he's pre-emptively declared he won't run if Kamala runs[0]. He even admits this is because they're both backed by the same groups and share the same donor network[1]. So there's at least one more Democrat you simply should not vote for.

[0]: https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/gavin-newsom-sa...

[1]: Quote from above article: "The governor said he would not want to force a contest against the former vice president, noting that the two share many political allies and supporters."

Yeah, I had to hold my nose to vote for Harris, and I don't look forward to the continued dominance of that wing of the party. The good thing about Harris running instead of Newsom is that she's less likely to win the nomination. I hope primary voters are as fed up with the corporate Democratic party as the country in general is.

> The good thing about Harris running instead of Newsom is that she's less likely to win the nomination.

That's a good point.

What scares me about Newsom is that, outside of California, Newsom's corruption, broken promises, and policy failures are totally unknown. He's just the handsome guy with all those great anti-Trump zingers. And as a relatively young white man, he might be seen as a demographically "safe" choice for primary voters burnt by their experience with Hillary and Kamala.

> I hope primary voters are as fed up with the corporate Democratic party as the country in general is.

I think a good chunk of them are. The question is really, who can win both the Democratic nomination and the general election?

AOC is the obvious choice for the DSA faction, but I'm deeply skeptical she can win in the general. The corporate faction seems dead set on Newsom or Kamala. If Kamala can somehow eke out a primary victory, she's gonna crash and burn badly in the general. And I don't see anyone else suddenly appearing as a viable candidate.

So from where I'm sitting, it looks like Democrats' most likely path to victory goes through Newsom. And I think his corruption and inevitably poor governance will discredit the Democratic party for a generation and catapult MAGA--perhaps another Trump--back into power. Then we'll be properly fucked.

Ossoff isn't my first choice, but I believe a charming, good looking, southern white man, who isn't afraid to call a Nazi a Nazi, might have a pretty good shot at both the nomination and the general (though I think AOC is also a strong contender, she's popular nationwide). It's early, yet, but if Democrats can't win a state or two in the south, they're going to have a hard time taking the White House. The northern "blue wall" simply aint (it started falling apart almost immediately after it was named, and Trump hammered the nail through its heart).

If so, the guy needs to get his name and message out there pronto. I don't hear jack shit about him, so he clearly sucks at gaining attention, and that's one thing both Trump and AOC excel at. These days, that seems to matter more than almost anything else.

> It's early, yet, but if Democrats can't win a state or two in the south, they're going to have a hard time taking the White House.

The Democrats are going to have a hard time taking the White House. Full stop. The electoral map isn't pretty. And if current trends continue, it's gonna become almost impossible for a Democrat to win the Presidency after the next reapportionment.

> The northern "blue wall" simply aint

Preach. It was always a delusion. Democrats have a long history of taking their voters for granted. Then, of course, they are shocked when they give them the finger. Unfortunately I don't see this changing any time soon. The DSA faction seems similarly aloof, in their own way.

> California voter here. If Newsom wins the primary I will campaign for the Republican.

It was thinking like this about Kamala that got us Trump.

I don't want Newsom either, but if it's a choice between Newsom and Trump 3.0 (if he swings it) or JD Vance, I'd still take Newsom any day.

If you don't want Democrats to lose, figure out how to keep someone like Newsom off the ballot. You've all got two years to settle on someone who isn't odious.

AOC

but I'm afraid that the dem party will work against her just like they did Bernie in 2016, which got us the mad king

Next election is midterms, not presidential.

I see what you did there - "only people with conviction might get convictions"

Oh absolutely not. They’re going to end up very rich!

Probably not, if the previous administration, when they had full control, is useful precedent.

I wondered about this so checked what happened to Joseph McCarthy. He was subject to a vote of censure in the senate, and became unpopular, but that was it. Of course he died shortly after of alcohol related conditions, so there's that..

Or, like, Nixon.

The relative lack of consequences there enabled this go around.

Nixon resigned, and was pardoned. Many of the conspirators were convicted and served prison time.

With Reagan and Iran-Contra, Reagan was never charged, most officials were pardoned, and only one person served any jail time.

With Bush (43) there were no consequences for any of it. Not he war under false pretenses, not the domestic spying, not the torture.

And with Donald Trump (45) a single judge recently appointed by Donald Trump held up legal proceedings until he was elected President, again.

> Nixon resigned, and was pardoned.

Yes. That's deeply bad precedent.

Roger Ailes founded Fox News, explicitly, to avoid a recurrence of even that minimal level of consequence.

Nixon was not aware of Watergate.

He was threatened with impeachment for lying about it after he found out it had happened.

We might get someone like Obama again who "looks forward and not backwards"... a logic that would result in all crimes being ignored if consistently applied.

A big part of why we are at where we are is that January 6 was our Beer Hall Putsch. Like the Germans, we failed to put a stop to it.

There have already been rumors of some administration-wide pardon scheme but that'll probably fall on its face when put to the test, like almost everything else they do.

It's baffling to watch people destroy their reputations, careers and possibly risk their freedom for a chance to get close to power and pad their (possibly offshore/crypto) savings accounts. For as evolved as we pretend to be, we're really not very far beyond our "lizard brains" and a few missed meals away from mania. I was actually just thinking about Todd Blanche and the stupid games he's playing, flirting with contempt in a number of lawsuits. He's almost certainly got less time in the AG seat than Trump has in the president's and reality is going to slam into his brown nose very hard, sooner than later.

There are enough state level charges to be laid against these people that federal pardons can be made in effective. The JDs among them can also lose their licenses.

Also, civil infractions can claw back ill begotten gains at a 3x multiple, and you can't pardon those

You might want to have a look at what happened to Iran-Contra. Or indeed, the current President's conviction in a New York court: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_trial_of_Donald_Trump...

They're simply in the oligarch level now. Everyone understands that they're above the law. Nowhere near enough Democrats are talking about the level of corruption clearout that would be required to bring accountability. Law enforcement are heavily compromised in the opposite direction. See the raid on Ilhan Omar, for example.

Techno-feudalism has many practical applications that benefit techno-royals.

Techo-nobles benefit as well. Just ask Eric Holder and centi-millionaire Obama. If you can reach the latter in his mansion on the exclusive island for the wealthy, that is.

What makes you think the Democrats are going to do anything? They had multiple slam-dunk cases against Trump during the previous administration and they either did nothing at all, or slow-rolled the investigations and then gave them up when election season rolled around again.

Nothing's going to change with the Democrats in. The authoritarianism will be done but behind the scenes much more.

Remember the whole system is filled with institutionalists who believe following in the program, no matter who sets the standards.

We need to focus on systemic change rather than populism.

So the election will be meaningless. Expect bad things in November.

The CFTC’s refusal to do anything useful serves both parties.

If prison was an option, it would have already happened. They will get away with it. Dems aren't going to be able to break this administration. They will just ignore congress. What will congress do?

Even worse they (the GOP) is just lighting everything on fire now and leaving it in a dysfunctional state on purpose. Because they know for the next two years voters will just start blaming the Dems for everything that goes wrong. Trump will say "I would fix it but the radical left Democrats are too busy persecuting me. High gas prices are their fault, and Zelensky's etc"

What's happening in Brazil right now should give people pause about thinking that an interregnum with someone left-ish in power trying to restore normality will reset things to a saner state.

These are people totally willing to burn the crops and salt the fields. Trump could die tomorrow and a thousand heads would pop up looking to benefit from the anger and resent.

Exactly. Almost be better if Dems lost. Now they will be a ignored, and a target for blame, an excuse.

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