I’m with you, just as I said. Obama is trying to play politics by advocating only more taxes on the rich, which won’t cure our deficit. Cuts of the right kind are fine, but liberals like me think that it’s important to keep Medicare, not gut it as a solution to the debt as Republicans and Libertarians propose.
It is tough, but it helps a little to realize that most of the obstacles are political. As Al Gore said, political will is a renewable resource. If we are to renew our country, we will need more of it one of these days.
Debunking is harder than you think. Look at the 9/11 Truth Movement.
The Tea Party folks think exactly the same thing, interestingly enough.
Work within the existing channels then and push for change within the Democratic party…if you REALLY want any shot at all for change. Do the whole grass roots thingy…the only way progressive ideals are ever going to get out of the fringe is if there is a sea change in thinking among American voters. I wouldn’t hold my breath, but that’s the only realistic way to do it. Listen to BG…he knows what he speaks of wrt third party politics in the US, if you don’t want to attempt to work through existing political parties and channels.
As John Mace said…good luck (storming the castle boys).
Many things have happened. The republicans had the power to steal elections, for one thing. They have the power and ownership control to spend lots more money to persuade people, and they have the power to fire you if you don’t adopt their attitudes. Labor has declined for many reasons, and it’s hard to realize that we can demand fair wages. And one charismatic actor can do a lot, as happened in 1981.
Apples and oranges. There has to be something worth debunking and that can be debunked.
It’s certainly tough. And it’s tougher BECAUSE the obstacles are political…which is just another way of saying that large numbers of voters don’t see things the way you (or I for that matter) do. The trick is to change peoples perceptions and thinking at the grass roots, as this will cause change on the political scene.
If it was easy then someone would have solved it. That’s the real trouble…the American voter EXPECTS easy, quick and painless (to them as individuals…no worries if it’s someone else pain) solutions to difficult and complex problems.
I mean look what you wrote here. You are all for cuts…but not of Medicare, because you think that it’s important. I’m not saying whether it is or isn’t, or whether it should or shouldn’t be cut…but translate your attitude into 10’s of millions of voters in thousands of districts and towns, hundreds of cities, and the states and you start to see why it’s not going to be easy. Everyone has a different idea on what they think could be cut, should be cut…and absolutely can’t or shouldn’t be cut. Everyone has an idea on what they think their taxes should or shouldn’t be…while having a different opinion on what they think their neighbors or fellow citizens taxes should or shouldn’t be. I try and explain this to my dad all the time and he just doesn’t get it…but it is THE fundamental problem, IMHO in this country. Everyone wants something different, everyone prioritizes differently, is willing to have someone else sacrifice something while not wanting to sacrifice something else that they think is important…and politicians cater and pander to the various groups of folks with similar desires, assuming they constitute enough voters to entice them into pandering to them.
'luci is pulling your leg (that’s elucidator)…BG is Brain Glutton.
Lots of things are worth debunking, including the 9/11 Truther non-sense. Sadly, things can and have been debunked repeatedly yet they stay with us anyway, year after year, decade after decade. You’ll have better luck debunking the Magic Bullet, the Moon Landing Hoax or alien space ships crashing in Roswell than you will trickle down economics.
I am happy to pay for a government program if I think it will actually accomplish those goals.
Simply throwing more money at these problems is not an answer.
This is a very simple-minded attitude.
When speculators buy a good in the commodity market, they are most certainly not doing so “without any connection to the actual buyers and sellers”. Who do you think they are buying it from? There is someone on the market producing bushels of wheat, tons of copper, (or whatever) who is happy to have received a high price for it, and happy for the liquidity the speculators provide.
When the speculator eventually sells (or, when the other speculator the first speculator sells to eventually sells), he will only make a profit if there is actually enough demand in the market to justify the price he is asking for. Speculators or not, someone is going to pay for that wheat, copper, oil, whatever, and use it to produce a product.
“Free market policies” are only “causing” prices to rise in the sense that people are free to pay whatever price they want for whatever amount of commodities they need. If you limit every company in the US to XX tons of copper per year, sure, you will drive down the price of copper - and you’ll raise the price of whatever product the copper is being used to produce, because it will now be artificially scarce because of your manipulation of the market.
As another option, if you place a ceiling on the price of copper, all you’re doing is hurting the copper producers, and transferring profits that they would have made to the companies that are using copper to produce products. What’s the result of this? The supply of copper will go down because there will be no incentive to invest in new copper production, and the situation will be even worse. Tens of thousands of jobs will be lost as mines are shut down, smelters are shut down, etc.
Finally, if you ban speculators from trading in the market, you are simply taking money from the commodity producers and giving it to the commodity consumers. That might sound good to you, as I am assuming you are primarily a commodity consumer, but there are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of ordinary, lower and middle-class people in this country that work to produce commodities, and it makes little sense as public policy to take money from them and give it to you.
Regarding “colleges are unaffordable” - there are literally thousands of colleges in the US. The idea that they are all involved in some vast conspiracy to collude to keep prices high is ridiculous. If college is unaffordable, maybe the problem is that a good education is just very expensive to provide. Most colleges are non-profits! Government restrictions on the cost of college would do nothing but force colleges to lower staff salaries and cut spending.
A competitive free market is a very efficient system. Unlike what many libertarians will tell you, it is necessary to regulate the free market in order for it to remain competitive - prohibit monopolies from developing, punishing companies that gain an unfair advantage by breaking environmental laws, etc. And sometimes it is necessary to sacrifice a little efficiency in the market in order to achieve other goals - minimum wage laws, for instance.
But most of the problems that people blame on the “free market” are actually the result of a market that is not free at all, but distorted by a corrupt political and economic system influenced by large, powerful, monopolistic corporations - the total opposite of a free market.
There will always be a need for a new progressive party, as we evolve and/or mutate. Forty years ago, ideas I held were radical, now they are commonplace. Goody gumdrops and go team go. But whether progressive thinking is best represented by a separate political party is an issue of tactics, not convictions. Personally, and for now, I don’t’think so. At the moment, our best organized advocates are our enemies, compared to the people who hate us, how crazy can we be?
BUt there is a right answer to these problems and concerns, or several right answers. We should be smart enough to find them. It doesn’t matter if opinions are different. What matters is what is right. Cutting Medicare is not right; reducing medical costs and extending Medicare to all is right. Cutting defense is right. Cutting corporate subsidies is right. Ending the Bush tax cuts is right. These things alone would solve the deficit. The problem is not differing opinions. The problem is people are not informed enough and don’t care enough to inform themselves.
There are government programs that work. They are cut because Republicans don’t want to pay for them.
Why the middle men? Prices are being raised that have no connection to the product or its cost or the demand for it. Prices rise because people want to make more money, using excuses like a disturbance in the Middle East or North Africa that has nothing to do with the cost of the product. These commodity markets did not exist not long ago; there’s no reason for cynical conservatives to defend them and to claim that to say we don’t need them is simple-minded. It is not simple-minded to point out that just stumbling into doing things a certain way is costly and not needed.
Free market policies are claims that the “market” can’t be interfered with, so just let an unfair system just keep going.
Not supporting and requiring alternative energy is the main reason for high gas prices. That means is no competition from alternative energy (solar, wind, batteries, etc.) to the oil companies, who get all the breaks and are allowed to keep ruining and spoiling our planet. If consumers had a choice, gas prices would be forced down. We should have had electric cars long before now. Free market policies and delusions forced us to wait for the market to do it. That won’t happen. Watch PBS this Monday to see how electric cars are a solution and an expanding industry.
They are making obscene profits, whether they are non-profit or not. The costs are going up to obviously ridiculous levels, and at rates that have no relation whatever even to severe inflation. There is no conceivable rationale for this. College is unaffordable. It should be free, as it basically was before when our country was doing well. It is expensive because they are charging way too much, keeping administrators that aren’t needed and paying them too much, and taking tuition and using it to fund corporate research instead of teaching (that’s a big one). University of California has raised tuition sky high, cut teachers, and given huge raises to administrators; that’s a fact. It is surely not an isolated one either.
The point is that these corporate influences are JUSTIFIED by free market slogans. That is the problem; the ideology that is dominating our politics, and thus keeping all the regulations from being put into effect, or repealing them so that we have corruption and crashes. We need to return to a time when our country was doing well and moving forward, diverted off track by a charming actor who sold too many people on trickle-down theories.
He certainly has nothing to do with third party progressive politics. Know him well. I couldn’t imagine you would bring him up in this context, so certainly I didn’t know what the initials stood for.
It’s easy to say what’s right, but the actions you’ve listed above don’t just have simple consequences.
For example - cutting corporate subsidies - great idea - let’s not spend our taxes on keeping private businesses afloat, except cutting subsidies can create unemployment, higher costs to consumers, etc.
The question is not “what do you want to do?” - any idiot can answer that - it’s “how will you mitigate the potential negative outcomes of what you want to do?”.
It is certainly possible to determine which subsidies serve no purpose and which ones do. It’s not rocket science; it’s good politics, which is in short supply because money runs a lot of it. Sure, don’t cut subsidies to companies that help me get elected or that are popular in my district.
Couple of things - [ul][li]How do you propose reducing medical costs? and [*]Saying “I want to eliminate the deficit but not cut Medicare” is saying “I don’t want to eliminate the deficit”. [/ul][/li][quote]
The problem is not differing opinions. The problem is people are not informed enough and don’t care enough to inform themselves.
[/QUOTE]
No, the problem is differing opinions.
There’s your major problem - you are putting forth your opinions as if they were self-evidently true, and they’re not.
For instance -
Saying that threats to your supply line have nothing to do with the cost of a product shows a breath-taking ignorance of basic economic facts.
Why do we need another new movement? There are plenty of groups and parties already working towards these goals, usually with little success.
How would a new movement be formed? How would it be successful? Who would lead it? How would it spread? Why not just empower existing Green Parties and environmental groups instead of further fragmenting current socio-environmental movements?
The problems are easy to identify, but you’ve proposed no mechanism to enact their solutions. “If only people would vote…” or “if not for the damnable conservatives/republicans/whatever” or “if we had more money and less wars…”. How do we even begin to get there from the wasteland of greed and apathy we find ourselves in today?
Ugh. :rolleyes:
You know what we need? Fewer dreamers and more doers.
As usual, MaxTheVool has a correct intelligent outlook. I’ll subscribe to your newsletter, Max!
My own comments? Rather than Motherhood statements and wishful thinking, one needs to focus on specific problems and solutions. Recent trends in campaign finance law and the repeal of laws against concentrated media ownership are specific abuses that should have Americans “taking to the streets with pitchforks.”
I’m surprised that OP doesn’t mention, let alone endorse, the Occupy Wall Street Movement. Yes, they have a mess of contradictory ideas – that’s called popular democracy. If OP thinks he’ll get uniformity of thought in his new party, I think he’s [checks forum] … misinformed.
