Decent jobs and economic recovery will come only when the agents of greed, momopolization, and concentration of wealth in the hands of the few are brought to task. Just as was the mantra years ago about the need to split up “Ma Bell” spoke to the importance of competition and choice in the market place, so should this be repeated as relates to GE, and the other mega-corporations and various industry associations whose untold and unregulated fortunes have turned our “elected” government into a rubber stamp for the legalization of the outrages foisted on society by the oligarchy and their plutocratic patrons. The real shame is that there are so many people in this country so ignorant as to allow themselves to be manipulated to act consistently against common sense and their own interests!

Yes, you make some excellent points, prisnersdilema.  I will make
another one, the Tea Baggers need to be neutralized?  More boiling
water?

One more thing…unless progressives understand, they must break the power of religious
fundamentalism in right wing politics, just like we must break the Taliban in Afghanistan,
we will not succeed politically.

Yes..agree I also heard Rick Peary…say that sending for conservative republicans to
Washington was the answer…

This after conservatives have wrecked the country…

Conservatism is really a mass delusion..it’s a religion based on psychotic ideas, closely
aligned with religious fundamentalism. Very much like the Taliban..

In that sense Rick Pariy, is Just a watered down version of Warren Jeffs, praying for
rain, praying for God to fix the economy. Don’t expect them to respond to reason, or let
the facts get in the way.

The political discussion degenerates immediately into a conversation similar to an
Atheist trying to convince a polygamist that there is no god. It ain"t going to happen.

I do agree that if the fundamentalist Christians get into political power, one might as well
buy a gravesite and live in your coffin, because there won’t be anyone left to bury you
when they get through with the country.

The problem is, the Democrats seem to think on some level it’s just politics, it’s not. It’s a
struggle for the very survival of the world.

No, it is not Washington that is getting it all wrong.  It is the voting
public.  I just heard Rick Perry say that more and more Republicans
are moving to Washington D.C.  That should frighten the hell out of
the American people.  He said they would finish the job the Tea
Bagger’s started.  All right, then we should each go buy a shovel and
dig our own grave as the Republicans step up pressure on Democrats
to annihilate each and every liberal program that help stop the
exploitation of the American people, because we well know that is
exactly what the Republicans want to do to us.  Yup, the 1%ers would
slaughter us were they to get their way.  The Republicans are the Party
Against the People.

The Democrats in Wisconsin are not lying down prostrate before the
beast of Republicanism.  From Mother Jones, “Scot Ross, the executive
director of One Wisconsin Now, a left-leaning communications group,
described the future of Wisconsin’s young progressive movement with
a metaphor any Wisconsinite could love: football. Right now the
movement is at halftime, Ross says. The first quarter was gathering
more than 180,000 signatures to trigger Tuesday’s recalls. The second
was the recalls themselves, and Ross says those succeeded in their aim:
“holding the Walker Six accountable.” The third quarter is next week’s
recall of two Democratic state senators. And the fourth? “That’s when
we’re going to recall Governor Walker next year and restore decency,
fairness, and common sense to this state,” Ross says.”

August 13 Voters in such states as California, Wisconsin and Florida will
be getting messages starting today and throughout the month, courtesy
of the House Democrats’ campaign committee and its ongoing effort to
remind people of GOP budget proposals.

““Accountability August” is focused on 44 Republicans—all in House
districts where Democrats believe they could win in next year’s elections
—to show they’re “choosing millionaires over Medicare.” It’s another
part of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s ongoing
“Drive to 25,” focused on reclaiming power from the GOP. “– USA Today

You know, looking at the psychology of the recent performance on fixing the economy, one can’t help noticing (again) the element of punishment latent in the adopted recommendations.  In summary, the poorest people are to be punished by cuts in benefits and programs that benefit them. A cowardly retribution is to be used to rule over utter helplessness.

And on a still larger scale, the middle class above those who are utterly helpless is to be punished with unemployment, loss of homes, inability to buy needed and desired products, their children are not to get good educations, which will punish them regarding future possibilities.  In total result the entire society except for the richest few are to be punished one way or another, not only now but for years to come. Their health benefits are to be constricted; their retirement is to be threatened with insolvency.

Among the vast surveillance agencies which public taxation supports, anyone who tries to mount an unorthodox attack—even though non-violent—is to be threatened with denunciation and even imprisonment or forced to repress resistance and criticism by threat.  All the while, the military is poised to drain off the majority of public funding in foreign lands, killing and pillaging relatively helpless men, women and children who have done nothing to offend imperial power except to exist and take up space.

We need to understand, and get a handle on, this culture of punishment and why it is effective in overwhelming reason and destroying possibilities for peaceful solutions to urgent problems.  We need to find ways to stop reacting primarily to fear of the future and turn to creative possibilities for solving problems internatioinally and locally, together, in a spirit of compassioin, joy and intelligence.

The spirit of punishment is an ancient control mechanism in societies based primarily on belief in, and fear of, a vengeful, all-powerful god in a mythical world somewhere whose primary modus operandi is threat of punishment for proscribed sins, and secondarily, reward for obedience to laws derived not from popular choice but from super-natural edict. 

Science has only partially, and often ineffectively, relieved human societies of this elemental constricting fear—a fear which imprisons creativity and confines human reactions to a more or less unforgiving conformity and a sullen hidden resentment which now and then breaks out as irrational rage and a desire for revenge and a culminating holocaust.

This is the imprisonment of an ancient myth—not the kind of belief that fosters understanding, creative adventure, and joy.  Whatever we can do as individuals, even though only a little, to get rid of this imprisonment of repressive constriction, is all to the good. Joy is for the making, and life is, by nature, exhuberant, perennially bursting into renewal.

Yes….but Washington is living in cloud cuckoo land…So is it any wonder they have
totally blown it?

Does anyone there read Krugman? They’ve done the exact opposite of everything he’s
suggested since the beginning…...

Stop presenting Krugman.  Economists are a problem.  We need not hear what any conscious person already knows.  Lets get wider viewpoints, some new blood.  This guy is tedious and out of fresh ideas.  He’s a has been except for a small cadre of admirers.