I know there were a lot of quotable quotes in the discussion, but the one that blew my mind was when the moderator downplayed the importance of jobs and even tried to make it so to discuss jobs - you know the nuts and bolts of basic economics - was an act of racism. I mean come on ffs.
I'll tell ya straight up, I didn't watch a single minute of the debate. Despite it being in my back yard, I knew it was going to be so far detached from anything relevant to me, I couldn't even bring myself to care. It was a nice weekend, and I spent as much of it as I could out on the boat.
As for the content of that mess... Who knows how much of that talk was just playing up to Detroit. Politics in Detroit are such that you can't talk about jobs without talking about racism. Hell, politics in Detroit are such that I'm not sure you can talk about anything BUT racism. I mean, Detroit has one of the largest black populations in the US... And it is a city that never recovered from 1967. So many of the neighborhoods are still frozen there. It's almost a bizarre history museum in spots. Anything that creates jobs, the first question that is asked is "Are they black jobs?" "How many minorities are working for the contractors working there?" etc. Getting anything actually done in Detroit has to be fit into that type of landscape, or it won't happen.
And now that a few limited areas of Detroit are becoming somewhat functional again, all the talk is about gentrification. "How do we keep from displacing the people already living here?" Well, I got news for you. The only people still living there are the people who had no means to leave. Which means they have no money. How do you plan on running a city populated exclusively by people with no money? How do you plan on recovering an area without displacing them? These are the sorts of things that'll get you labelled as a racist, because no one wants an honest talk about them. Better to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.
They are completely detached from reality. It is honest to god frightening watching this.
The thing more frightening than watching this, is considering the thought that this is the new reality. Detroit is just ahead of the times. The rest of the country is heading down the path of Detroit. I've seen it travelling. So many southern manufacturing hubs are running like Detroit did back in 1998. They don't even realize that they are already completely fucked and just waiting for the crash.
We're probably going to end up with a version of Socialism, simply because no one is willing to make sane and rational efforts to save Capitalism. Instead of trying to fix Capitalism, the Democrats are falling over each other in their efforts to propose Socialism, because Capitalism is failing so many people. It plays popular with the people who have got nothing to lose. And that is a growing number of people. And the Republicans basically propose marching onward with giving everything to private corporations. Which will continue to fail at least as many people as it helps. And probably more as the corporations die off from their own stupidity. Any corporation that has too much power quickly becomes its own worst enemy.
And only a tiny fraction of the population will consider voting outside the two major parties. So that's our future.