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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

Especially when one party seemingly champions “civil rights” or “the little guy”, and the other party champions “small government”. And yet a government employee stealing someone’s cash with no justification does not fall under any of those categories.

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As mentioned in the tweets, the bipartisan FAIR act is supposed to reform civil asset forfeiture.

> @RepWalberg filed legislation in Congress (FAIR Act) that could end these seizures. The bill’s stuck in committee since April.

The broken system doesn't mean we don't have the right representation - we have to figure out how to amplify it and fix the system imho

There's a bill "in committee" for everything under the sun. It's meaningless.

And just look at the rogues gallery that makes up this committee. Very few of them would be willing to stand up for this.

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/about/members

Civil asset forfeiture has been a problem for 30+ years and multiple presidential administrations, of both parties.

>reform

I.e. screw slightly fewer people so public forgets about it but law enforcement gets to keep screwing people. They'll never get rid of it completely.

Reform isn't ban

One party champions unrestricted capitalism for billionaires, the other party is in the pocket of pharma, banks and other large corporations (and the management-class that work in those businesses). Everything else they say is trying to sell you on something to try to buy your vote. We have one party of the 1% and another party of the 0.0002%.

I think that is over-simplistic, at least since the emergence of a) a genuine progressive faction among the Democrats, small though it may be and b) an insane faction that's taken over the Republicans who seem to mostly represent outspoken racists.

No, b) is easy to understand because a party of the 0.0002% doesn't sell well at all and nobody would vote for that if they said it out loud. The billionaires also tend towards being insane racists, classists, think everyone below them are serfs and that they deserve their birthright, so those viewpoints are perfectly compatible.

If the progressive Democrats could take over the party and control it then I'd agree with you about a), but effectively what the Democrats can do is controlled by Krysten Sinema, not the progressive wing.

And both Trump and the progressive wing of the Democrats shows how untenable the current situation is, and how insufficient the Democratic party has been.

If you start to view the Democratic party (aside from the progressive insurgents) as being bought for by large corporations, and then understand that all the failings and excuses of the Democratic party are really just delivering to the customer what they want, it all makes a lot more sense.

And when it comes to the failings of the Democratic party -- like Krysten Sinema -- the trick is to stop going "oh if only she wasn't in the way we could have fixed everything, we have failed due to this externality" to realize that she's playing the role that the people who have bought the Democratic party want her to play and she's a feature, not a bug. And there's always been an excuse like that for the past 30 years.

Hopefully the progressives do eventually succeed or else we're likely to get some actually competent fascist on the right wing.

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