I said "hate" to mock Patrick's use of the term; my statement wasn't meant to be taken at face value. Though Republicans support policies that cause far more suffering than the 9/11 attacks, their beliefs stem from philosophical differences, not hatred.

By "ordinary" Americans, I was referring to the millions of people who face untreated medical conditions or bankruptcy as a result of Republican proposals to repeal the Affordable Care Act or make massive cuts in Medicare spending.

Dexter, my comments about Democrats and Republicans beliefs also apply to voters who aren't politicians, and those citizens aren't subject to pressure from special interests the way politicians are.

quick post before i forget the link...


http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/10/2 ... an-brother...

Interbane wrote:I spelled out what I think the problems are, and I gave a solution.

I don't see that you provided a solution. I think you gave an abridged compendium of complaint similar to what everyone else who chooses to say anything about it is saying. You highlighted some perceived problems and then gave an overall view of who it is you think should be held responsible. Well Gov Perry here in Texas, (and on those occasions when he gets out,) across the nation, will say the same thing! He will change the comically moronic villains to be democrats and change the too-obliging-folks-of-otherwise-good-sense to be republicans, but the symptom of the problem (such as it may be) of America performing an ongoing slide into irrelevancy is one for which he will match your every step with one of his own. Am I just making this up? Well, what I see is that the problem is not taxes or spending or illegals or the military or the shrinking middle class (these are symptoms) but rather it is, collectively, the democrats and republicans/teabaggers/libertarians. They both are walking us to the same place.

Turn your backs on the bunch!

I don't see that you provided a solution. I think you gave an abridged compendium of complaint similar to what everyone else who chooses to say anything about it is saying. You highlighted some perceived problems and then gave an overall view of who it is you think should be held responsible.

I also gave examples of the things we need to do to correct the problem, including a grassroots movement to offset the idiocy of the tea party. They are not grass roots. They are tree roots, feeding off the fertilizer of Fox news.

Well, what I see is that the problem is not taxes or spending or illegals or the military or the shrinking middle class (these are symptoms) but rather it is, collectively, the democrats and republicans/teabaggers/libertarians. They both are walking us to the same place.

The problem cannot ONLY be people. Those people may be terrible, but it is the policy they enact which has negative impact, not the people themselves. You also cannot disambiguate their motives to see whether the main influence of their actions are their personal beliefs, or external influence from lobbyists and corporate money. It's always the easiest thing to sever the chain of cause and effect at the mind of a human, and say the buck stops there. But that is often because the situation is so complex that the puppetteer stings cannot be clearly seen. If the players in this game are being manipulated, then blaming the players will not solve the problem. We must hold those players accountable, although the pressure we put on them to effect change must be greater than their current puppetteer strings. They must fear the American people more than they fear K street. But we are a long ways away from that.

Interbane wrote:I also gave examples of the things we need to do to correct the problem, including a grassroots movement to offset the idiocy of the tea party.

Exactly what the republicans would say except that instead of your idiots they'll choose their own set of idiots to combat.

They are not grass roots. They are tree roots, feeding off the fertilizer of Fox news.

It seems like it's the democrats who take FOX seriously.

The problem cannot ONLY be people.

Yes, it can. In the context of this discussion that's all there is.

Those people may be terrible, but it is the policy they enact which has negative impact, not the people themselves.

The democrats and republicans are the problem and the policies they enact are the symtoms of the problem.

You also cannot disambiguate their motives to see whether the main influence of their actions are their personal beliefs, or external influence from lobbyists and corporate money. It's always the easiest thing to sever the chain of cause and effect at the mind of a human, and say the buck stops there. But that is often because the situation is so complex that the puppetteer stings cannot be clearly seen. If the players in this game are being manipulated, then blaming the players will not solve the problem.

We must hold those players accountable, although the pressure we put on them to effect change must be greater than their current puppetteer strings.

[/quote]We are part of the problem. America is based upon domination, exploitation, and oppression. Given this viewpoint, it wouldn't surprise anyone for there to be policies enacted ~all the time~ that effectively serve to discriminate against a wide segment of the population. And a pre-emptivedisclaimer, I said 'America' only because that's the nation in discussion. There is no good example to give. That's the nature of humanity at play - and it's a problem!

Pres. Obama and the democrats still show indecision about whether to be very serious about reducing the federal debt. Some democrats listen to economists who say that now is the time for the government to pump up the economy through deficit spending, and who say that the ineffectiveness of previous rounds of stimulus is due to their not having gone far enough. Face it, deficit reduction isn't something the democrats are wired to do, just as healthcare reform isn't something we're going to get from the republicans.

Being convinced that deficit and debt reduction are vitally important, I've been looking for a succinct description of the choice we face. I found it in the current issue of "The Week." As you'll see if you read it, the issue of shafting the middle class fades somewhat, because everyone's going to have to pay more to significantly shrink the debt. There's an interesting sidebar on the make-up of the richest 1 percent. The full article is at http://theweek.com/article/index/220754 ... ontroversy.

Will taxing the rich fix the budget deficit?
It would help, but with the annual deficit now at $1.3 trillion, the rich alone won't provide a solution. The 5.6 percent millionaires' surtax that Obama recently proposed would generate about $45 billion a year. Ending the 2003 Bush tax cuts on households earning more than $250,000 a year would add about $87 billion a year. Put those two increases together, and the deficit would still exceed $1 trillion. Ending the Bush tax cuts for all tax brackets, however, would yield close to $400 billion per year — and make a real impact on the deficit. Clearly, if the country is serious about getting its fiscal house in order, it will require not only that the rich surrender tax cuts and loopholes, but that the middle class pay more too. It will also require major cuts in spending, primarily by reforming Medicare and Social Security — which inevitably would mean reducing benefits in some way. As former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson, the co-chairman of the White House fiscal commission, recently said, "You can't get this done without hits across the board."

Who makes up the 1 percent?
It takes an annual income of just above $516,000 to qualify as one of the richest 1 percent of Americans. The poster boys of that privileged set, heaped with the rancor of the Occupy Wall Street movement, are bailed-out bankers and securities traders, hedge-fund managers, and other plutocrats from the world of finance. But in fact, only about 14 percent of the richest taxpayers work in the finance sector. Many more of them — almost a third according to Internal Revenue Service data — are executives in nonfinancial firms. One out of six is in medicine, and one out of 12 is a lawyer. The select club of the top 1 percent includes more information-technology specialists and engineers than it does entrepreneurs, and more scientists and professors than celebrities from the arts, sports, and media. Not incidentally: More than half of U.S. senators and members of the House are part of the top 1 percent.

Forget the democrat/republican, conservative/liberal, hate/like, rich/poor, and all the other arguments; the problem with politics in this country can be summed up in one word: Money! Until there is serious campaign finance reform, nothing of any real consequence will happen to improve the lives of "average Americans," no matter how you define them.

Maybe I need more education on this, but the campaign finance issue wouldn't be at the top of my list as a barrier to doing what's needed to reduce our debt.

What else do you think should be done to reform campaign financing? We have McCain-Feingold, of course. I'm not up on the record of that 2002 legislation. You apparently don't think it's done very much.

DWill wrote:Maybe I need more education on this, but the campaign finance issue wouldn't be at the top of my list as a barrier to doing what's needed to reduce our debt.

What else do you think should be done to reform campaign financing? We have McCain-Feingold, of course. I'm not up on the record of that 2002 legislation. You apparently don't think it's done very much.

Sorry, but if you don't see the direct connection between the need to raise money in politics and the incredible advantage special interests have in crafting public opinion and legislation (which rules our lives, not to mention the country's deficits), for me to convince you of same would be like trying to convince a “true believer” that Christ was a myth, and I could not possibly do that. I’ll get to the deficit in a minute (even though that was not exactly the subject this particular thread had degenerated into), but as far as what I think can be done about the current situation concerning money in politics . . .

Of course there are things that could lead to drastic changes in our political system, but I don’t believe these things will ever happen. Fact is, money rules, and the influence of money will not go away so long as those who have it elect the politicians, who in turn make the laws and rules, while assuring that they and their cohorts are never held accountable for any of the self-serving foibles that negatively affect the "common" people. For evidence of this, all you have to do is look at the outrageous profits made by duping the public into believing in derivatives (mainly the fantasy known as “credit default swaps”), and the resultant near collapse of the world economy. It is not so much the duping that shows evidence of the influence money has on our political system, but the fact that the subsequent legislation to “guard against” the same thing happening again was so watered down that most economists agree it is a joke.

As for reducing the national debt, any competent economist will tell you that this is a red herring promoted by conservatives (who owe their political careers to the banking and financial-market industries) in order to obscure the real issues of income inequity, lack of health care for all, and other issues that continue to widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots. And, by the way, in order to find a competent economist, you would probably have to look to the international community, rather than the US, in which economists, like politicians, are owned by the banks and big business (note the fact that those derivatives were endorsed by the leading economic forecasters and credit rating agencies). Still, there are a few statistics issued by so-called “bipartisan” entities that, if averaged out, show what are probably some fairly accurate facts. For example:

At the beginning of the 20th century debt was equally divided between federal and state and local debt, totaling less than 20 percent of GDP. After World War I, the federal debt surged to 35% of GDP, but by the mid 1920s federal debt had declined to below 20 percent of GDP with state and local debt rising to 16 percent of GDP. Then came the Great Depression, and President Roosevelt decided we needed to spend our way out of trouble, boosting federal debt to 40 percent of GDP. So did the local governments, with state debt peaking at over 5 percent of GDP in 1933 and local debt peaking at over 28 percent in 1933. Soon, government debt, including federal and state and local debt, settled at around 70 percent of GDP, but it was World War II when the debt really entered new territory.

After the end of the war, in 1946, federal debt stood at almost 122 percent of GDP, with state and local debt adding another 7 percent. For the next 35 years, due largely to the results of Roosevelt’s actions, successive governments brought down the debt, but then came President Reagan. He increased the federal debt up over 50 percent of GDP to win the Cold War and enrich his wealthy supporters. President Bush increased the debt to fight a war on terror (and the ridiculous war in Iraq) and bail out his buddies in the banking and oil industries. President Obama increased the debt to fund a plan to revive the economy in the aftermath of the Crash (orchestrated by Bush) of 2008. Though Obama’s actions didn't "revive" the economy, almost all economists agree that without it, the world would have been plunged into a irreversible depression, or at the very least, an economic holocaust from which we might never have recovered.

Today, the highest estimates (and I state these only to give the argument a sense of fairness, because the numbers can, and always are, exaggerated to suit the party stating them) the federal debt as a percent of GDP is around 62%, a far cry from the 122% it was in 1946, and we not only survived that, but prospered to the point that we were ushered into an age of general prosperity (for the middle and lower-middle classes).

Today’s federal deficit seems dangerous and unprecedented only because of the rhetoric spouted by Republicans, echoed by their puppets in the Tea Party, and spread all over the national media by independent political groups whose spending is unregulated and who hire the absolute best advertising agencies in the world to craft subtle and slick commercials. The fact is, you really need a war to get a huge deficit in relation to GDP, as evidenced by those of 1946, of the Cold-War expenditures by Reagan, and Bush’s war in Iraq and on terrorism (which is what set the stage for our current economic problems and was subsequently amplified by the deregulation of the financial markets and banks). For comparison to the 62% figure (which may or may not be accurate), consider that, according to the CIA Factbook, nine countries had debt-to-GDP ratios over 100% in 2010, the largest of which was Japan at approximately 197.5%.

People need to understand that so-called "statistics" can be manipulated and influenced by those compiling and publishing them, and then further manipulated by those who wish to use them for political gain. If you simply believe what you hear on CNN or CNBC or (heaven help you) on Faux News, you are living in a dream world. Having been a journalist for over 25 years, I have first-hand experience with how easily a "slant" on a story can change the perception of the facts, and believe me, the spin doctors working for political parties and special interests are masters at influencing the media. The way things are structured today (which is unlikely to change -- efforts like McCain-Feingold are so watered down by the time they are passed that the loopholes far outweigh the regulations), the best of the spin doctors are hired by the richest businesses and politicians. And who do you think these are? The answer to that question is so obvious to anyone with a modicum of intelligence, it doesn’t even need to be stated.

Of course there are things that could lead to drastic changes in our political system, but I don’t believe these things will ever happen.

Just as in medicine, many supposed cures would only target the symptoms. What is unique about campaign finance is that it affects everything else. If we fired all politicians who have been influenced by private interests because of campaign donations, we would have no government and would still have the issue of lobbyist infrastructure to deal with. And they are as organized as a professional football team.

Just this year I remember a law being passed that allows larger(or was it obscure) donations. Talk about moving in the opposite direction. The largest underlying cause of most of this countries problems, and it went all but unnoticed! This deflated me a bit.

I still think we need to trumpet inequality, as that is the symptom that is most easily visible, and most easily traced back to underlying causes. Yet, we still see the other side being spun like crazy.