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this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2026
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Work Reform
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A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
Our Philosophies:
- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
- Income inequality is the main cause of lower living standards.
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Our Goals
- Higher wages for underpaid workers.
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Rahm Emanuel was Obama's chief of staff. Hillary Clinton was his Secretary of State. His Vice President was Biden himself. His Secretary or the Treasury's resume is classic neoliberal.
Like, I can't even fathom how you would call this unhinged. Obama was firmly in the centrist/neoliberal wing of the party. He ran on hope and change, but he filled his cabinet with Clinton alums and Wall Street bankers. He ran under the banner of a progressive, but he governed under the same centrist banner as Clinton and Biden.
Did you forget how he wasted months of precious Congressional time by desperately trying to make the PPACA bipartisan? He let Republicans slow things down for months. He let them put all sorts of amendments into it. In the end, they all voted against it.
If Obama was famous for anything, it was surrendering in advance. This was a massive topic of discussion at the time. Obama was infamous for performative bipartisanship. He wouldn't propose a democratic version of a bill. He would start by magnanimously offering a compromise between the Republican and Democratic positions, hoping in vain to bring Republicans onboard. Republicans took his compromise-in-advance as weakness and never returned the favor.
Have you really forgotten history that quickly? Obama was a neoliberal to his core. It was his cabinet that negotiated the bailouts of the banks. Progressives at the time were arguing that any bailouts should be made contingent on keeping people in their homes, perhaps writing down the balances of underwater mortgages. Instead, the centrists in the Obama administration bailed out the banks and left working families to lose their homes.
Obama was firmly part of the neoliberal wing of the party, the same faction that's been ascendant since Clinton. So yes, it is literally the Obama wing of the party that progressives need to fight against. Remember, Obama wore the skin of a progressive, but he actually governed as a centrist.
And you're not even getting into his foriegn policy or his continuation of the, "War on Terror." Establishing the drone program as an unaccountable assassination tool of the Executive Branch? Collecting Americans metadata from tech companies without a warrent? Prosecuting leakers under the Espionage Act? You could credibly argue that he was further right than Bush on national security. Every time Trump subpoenas a journalist for their sources I think,."Damn, I wish Obama hadn't normalized this shit."
Don’t forget about keeping open the extrajudicial indefinite detention and torture prison.
Obama was such a fucking disappointment. After 8 years of Bush it looked like we were getting change and then he just kept things the same. He probably contributed more to my movement leftward than Bernie did.
Good point, he promised to close it when he was campaigning, but he just couldn't do it for some reason once he was in office.
Obama won overwhelmingly by campaigning as a progressive, then governed as a centrist, and 8 years later, voters abandoned the party. Somehow, the establishment's takeaway from that was, "we need to be less progressive."
"Democrat president worked with the most famous democrats"
What's unhinged is people downvoting and throwing insults at people who say drone strike civilians Obama was a centrist neo-liberal.
Stop worshipping politicians. Obama was not nearly as bad as any replication in living memory, but he is not a progressive or a leftist, he's a neo liberal capitalist who serves the same class interests.
On the ACA he didn't have the votes because Republicans were suing to keep Al Fraken from taking office, and by the time that bullshit ended Ted Kennedy had stopped showing up for work, but managed to cling to life for months, then the Tea Party filled Kennedy's seat, so the only time he had the 60 votes needed in the Senate was the few week's Kennedy's temporary appointment was seated, and that time included Christmas and New Year's.
It's important to put this into historical context... the world was different in 2008 - we still had McCain defending Obama against his most insane, racist supporters during the election. You could absolutely be forgiven at that time for taking most politicians at good faith that they had SOME kind of scruples or would do the right thing if push came to shove, and we know how absolutely naively batshit and wrong that was now, but it's easy to say that now with the benefit of another 18 years of data.
By your logic of association, Trump must be very religious.