anarcissie:

Well, it just may be that defense spending and our impending failure in AfPak will do for the progressives what Obamacare and the bailouts did for the Tea Party. We all know that the independents who deserted the Dems this go around will not put up with ANY backsliding from the new guys.

I agree. Defense will be a stone cold test of the new gang’s commitment to reining in spending. Having spent 21 years in the military, I can tell you for an absolute certainty that we could trim 5% from the Penatgon budget and not lose an ounce of security for it. That’s close to $30 billion a year or $100 per person in the US. I’ll be happy if they trim it 2%. But we’ll see.

Don’t get too conspiratorial about POTUS starting a war to divert attention from the next bust.

And BTW, don’t talk to mdgr- he’s been a real stick in the mud today.

rico, suave—it is true nothing is likely to get done by the government in the near future.  Normally, that might be a good thing, but presently there is a considerable crisis at hand due to the U.S. having lived on the tab for so long.  Initially, the crisis has been handled very badly (in my opinion) by simply doubling down.  That is the meaning of ‘QE2’—produce more and more hot credit in an attempt to reinflate the real estate and other markets.  The military thing is part of that, in that it is guaranteed that its expenditures will be off limits to any cuts; therefore, they will grow exponentially until some extrapolitical limit is reached, like national bankruptcy.

The other disquieting thing is that we have more or less given the presidency the power to start any old war any time one is wanted.  When the economy hits the next wall, that will be a major temptation.

mdgr:

Well aren’t we mister gloom and doom!

In my opinion, the Tea Party idea came as a response to the financial and housing/mortgage debacle. The events which caused it to cohere nationally were Obama’s and Congress’ response plus the sausage, I mean passage, of the health care bill. But, like I said, look it up. There will probably be a book out on the subject within a year.

What a rump progressive party will need is for the conservatives to do something concrete AND dumb and unpopular with a significant majority of the public.

I mentioned on a separate thread that I’m already gearing up to be pissed off by the failure of the new firebrands to do any of the things they promised. It’s how Washington works. I read a great line from some DC insider who said something like “all these Mr. Smiths think Washington is a swamp and when they get here they discover it’s a hot tub.”

So not to worry about the nuclear football. It will be safe. And the new conservative wave will probably only succeed in making sure nobody’s nekkid in the hot tub. That’s all.

Rico,

Thanks for pitching the ball so nicely.

Not to get too far-out for all the covert dialectical materialists on TD, my thesis wasn’t really that far-out.

Things seem to happen when the time is right, and the same endeavors are like pushing rope uphill when the time is wrong.

I agree with your comparison to the Tea Party. Here, the rage circulating within the American psyche—not to mention its increasing incoherency and tendency toward the twin internal defenses of both projection and denial—propelled this party of crazies.

Leadership even magically appeared (Palin and her publicists). It will only get worse over the next two years because the internal dynamics will only be exacerbated.

All I’ve been saying, though the meme isn’t exactly catching fire in this microcosmic community is that a antithesis to that of the “liberal and mealy-mouthed Vichy-based party of collaborators” will also arise on the left, and it too will be a natural event.

Whether it will be strong enough to induce a critical mass of the progressive caucus is Congress to abandon the Democratic Party is doubtful—Kucinich doesn’t REALLY walk his talk, but he sure does like to talk it—though who knows? If it did, a third party would be born almost overnight.

There are those on TD who will say that large-scale community action is needed to get this going, etc., and they indeed may be right. All I am saying is that if the progressive caucus did XYZ, then certain things would follow. And that temporal events (e.g., war with Iran, increasing joblessness and disillusionment with Obama, etc.) can be relied on to exacerbate the tensions.

But no, I do not think that ours is a time in which anything significant will happen along these lines. Progressives will continue to click their tongues, as they do on TD, and they will continue to vent through blog postings—while scratching their collective ass.

The nuclear football may or may not be handed to someone like Palin, but America will continue to devolve into a police state and into an increasingly fascist state. The entire planet will be affected by this and other events (climate change, etc.), and there will unavoidably also be a very big die-off.

I would not be surprised if it reduced the size of Homo Sapiens (sic) by an order of magnitude—far worse than the Black Death did (33-50%), BTW. But Sapiens has long since passed its expiration date. It’s long since bumped-up against its evolutionary glass-ceiling, Captain Kirk notwithstanding. Frankly, I think this latter event is not just necessary but much to be desired, though I’m less than thrilled at the collateral damage it will inflict in terms of pain and misery.

Still, on balance, it seems to be necessary—no less so than the Black Plague was in its time and how, in its wake, the paradigms of the Dark and Middle Ages were all but swept aside, laying the groundwork for the Renaissance.

But once again, it’s all a matter of timing. Cheers.

fearno:

Yes. This type of thing is a symptom of the problem, not the cause. Huge, unaccountable, out of control bureaucracies like the DoD dish out money like candy. It’s easy for some unethical contractor to do what he thinks is necessary to grab some of that free money. And don’t think for a minute that this sort of thing doesn’t happen at HHS or the DoEd.

What your anecdote is NOT, is a statement of a particular political philosophy. That Saudi contractor didn’t say to himself, “Oh boy! A Republican President. This is going to be easy.”

This is a bureaucracy problem not a political philosophy problem.

mdgr:

Just read an article about the Tea Party which got me to thinking about your split off idea. You need you read all you can about the history of the TP. It’s only about two years old and you can ignore deep history, like its philosophical roots, etc (which would probably make you gag anyway!). I’m talking about its organizational history. It started as a two word rallying cry and over two years assumed national cohesion. How did that happen? I don’t know or I’d tell you. If you find that out, you might have a better idea how to proceed with your project.

Just don’t be too successful with a progreesive TP. I don’t want to have to go whining on some conservative truthdig type site about how those yahoos over at the “PTP” are ruining my country.

RE: Drain the swamp!

Bravo, and thanks for the invite - how about we start here:

http://www.alternet.org/story/148019/military_subcontractors_bribing_u.s._personnel_with_
prostitutes_the_shady_world_of_war_contracting_in_afghanistan_and_iraq?page=entire

Military Subcontractors Bribing U.S. Personnel With Prostitutes?
 
The Shady World of War Contracting in Afghanistan and Iraq
Taxpayer cash is flowing to subcontractors in Iraq and Afghanistan,
who engage in shady, illegal practices with few repercussions.
August 30, 2010

Five years later, investigators are still largely in the dark. They suspect similar
activities by other subcontractors may have tainted contracts worth up to $300
million. But the investigators are unable to uncover even basic information,
such as how the manager of the Saudi company had come up with $133,000 in
bribe money.

RED:

“For me the problem isn’t that someone else might benefit from “my” tax dollars, it’s that the sane application and distribution of said funds is in the hands of corrupt thugs. It’s like two drunks fighting over a bottle. In the end it’s spilled and wasted and everybody loses. American access to moral leadership is THE ISSUE.”

EXACTLY RIGHT!!!

The difference between me and you (shorthand, please) is that I want to take the money away from the thugs and you think you can reform the thugs.

I have zero problem with taxes. The Tea Party has zero problem with taxes! It’s the moral corruption that tax dollars- billions in free money to politicians- creates. Drain the swamp!

The “let it burn” story was a tragedy. What can you say? That wasn’t philosophy,it was bureaucracy. Do you really think those firemen were Tea Partyers trying to make a point?

Christie?

Well, he just killed a major, necessary infrastructure project to relieve congestion getting into the city.  There has been nothing done to fix the horrible roads.  I certainly haven’t seen my prop taxes go down.  He fired Bret Schundler for messing up an application to get about 250 million from the feds for education—and it turned out it was HIS fault, not Schundler’s.  He’s anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage.  At best, he could have done a lot more harm to the state.  At worst, he’s not TOO much worse than Corzine or McSleezy before him.  While he claims to be a TP guy, reality may put him in a position where the Teaparty disowns him.

In short, while I’m not impressed, he could be a wacko raving lunatic like O’Donnell, but he’s not.

But I still haven’t made any final decisions about him.  I liked Christie Whitman a lot more, till I saw what a MESS she left the state’s finances in—she was the last Republican I voted for, and, the way things are going, the last I’ll EVER vote for.

RICO-

      Thanks for the comments.

      The word “collapse” doesn’t apply. We kept an open forum on T.V. for almost two years. Provided a platform to help others get their message out to the community. Focused on resource knowledge and support services for those in crisis and served as an interchange for action and ideas. We reached a point where we felt we’d said what we set out to say and agreed to end the effort. We effected change and a lift in consciousness. The dialogue itself was the catalyst that exposed the social exploitation and damage to healing.

      You are correct (and my point was) that more people will lend lip service than show up for action but even a small group can impact a problem and the effort to expose the American psyche to the truth around an issue vs. propaganda makes it worth the effort.(TRUTHDIG?)  A small light lights a lot of darkness. Looking out for “number one” is fine but a lost horseshoe nail in “number 376” can carry “number one” into the abyss.

      Your Firefighter analogy reminds me of a recent news report where Firefighters stood and let a families house burn because the family hadn’t paid $75.00 in dues. I can’t comprehend the attitude. For me the problem isn’t that someone else might benefit from “my” tax dollars, it’s that the sane application and distribution of said funds is in the hands of corrupt thugs. It’s like two drunks fighting over a bottle. In the end it’s spilled and wasted and everybody loses. American access to moral leadership is THE ISSUE. Hence Campaign Finance Reform is more important than the Presidency.

        Thanks.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah Shadaaaaaaaaaap ya Jew bastahd!

Tawk ta me wenn ya got some’m ta say…

rico, suave, November 8 at 11:52 pm Link to this comment

Wait a minute. I wanted to write that! Ya thief. Except for the last sentence. Let’s figure out how to change the game.
********************

PERSONAL ATTACK! PERSONAL ATTAAAACCCCKKKKK!!!  You vile Rite-Winger!

(J/K, of course! )

ITW:

I would sincerely like you to give me your sober, I repeat, sober opinion of Chris Christie. Have a martini or two before you answer if you have to (wait, I said sober didn’t I), but I really want to know what a liberal Garden Stater thinks about this guy. I needn’t tell you, he’s my hero. But then again, I’m not affected by his policies like you are.

Then I’ll try and get back to the thread, so mdgr can explain to me how he’s going to break a rump progressive party off from the Democrats without anybody getting seriously hurt.

ITW:

Wait a minute. I wanted to write that! Ya thief. Except for the last sentence. Let’s figure out how to change the game.

Anarcisie, Rico.

Damn right I’m pissed about it!  Our roads are collapsing in NJ. Our unemployment rate is high, many of our schools have serious troubles, and NOBODY is doing anything about a critical terrorist risk: The oil and chemical factories and storage depots along the eastern shore.  While they were worrying about terrorists in Wyoming, REAL threats here in the Garden State were being ignored.

But both of you are wrong about how it comes about.  It’s all about PORK. Not earmarks, but REAL pork.  And how is that decided? By what’s fair? You kidding? By what’s best for the nation? Are you kidding?  No.

You KNOW how it’s determined: By which congresscritters and which senators are most powerful and can garner the most pork for their states.  Up until 1994, Robert Byrd was the pork collector PAR EXCELLENCE.  But it was obvious it was coming in 1990, when the GOP controlled the majority of the statehouses.

Then in 1994, the GOP took over.  This meant that every committed head in both the Senate and the House was a Republican.  And they made DAMN sure over the next 12 years that pork flowed to THEIR states and not to Democratic ones.  GOP Congressmen made sure pork flowed to their districts as well.

But in this, you can’t cut out the other party.  You can’t get 60 votes in the Senate? Pork to the likeliest Senators across the aisle! Need extra house votes?  Pork to congresscritters across the aisle!

But to the victor belong the spoils, and so it did.  Building projects, army bases, ship-building, you name it ALL was centered more and more in GOP states, regardless of whether they were the strategically or economically the best. 

Who Cares?  I’m not going to get re-elected if that Army Base is 3 states over in a Democratic state when it could be in my fine Republican state!

(Don’t get me wrong: The Dems did EXACTLY the same things when they ran the show).

Now let’s get to the real shitty side:

When taxes are raised, everybody squeals, you, me, rich, poor, Dem, GOP, New Yorker, Kansan etc.

But when spending is cut, it’s by definition impossible to do it so we all suffer equally.

Because when you cut a base, that base is in SOMEBODY’S state and SOMEBODY’S district.  And they are gonna fight like a cornered rat to protect it, REGARDLESS OF WHETHER IT IS A BASE THAT SHOULD BE KEPT OR CUT!

So say I’m Congressman Foghorn, from Bumfuck, Iowa, and I’m the assistant chair of the Ways and Means Committee.  Now it don’t matter a tinker’s damn if any or all the projects in MY district and state are worthless pieces of shit that do nothing but WASTE YOUR MONEY!  They are in MY district and I’m going got fight for them with all the power of my chair.

Hard Example: Senator Stevens’ infamous “Bridge To Nowhere”, a quarter-billion dollar boon-doggle whose only purpose was…to spend another quarter billion dollars of lower 48 money in Alaska.  He fought like a demon to protect it.

Byrd exported WV recession to Va and Md by moving lots of federal agencies out of the DC area to WV, for no damn good reason than he could and ensured he’d NEVER be defeated.

That, in a nutshell, is the problem.  And neither the Democrats, nor the Republican, nor the Teaparty, nor even Chris Hedges “Socialist Revolution” is going to change that.  Only the players change, not the game.

Anarcissie:

Thank you.

ITW—Your question to rico raises the question of why the contributor states continue to favor a process which is so much to their disadvantage.  We ask ‘What’s the matter with Kansas?  Why are they voting against their interests?’  But similarly, why are New York and New Jersey voting against their interests?

ITW:

Found it. Go to youtube (Never thought I’d pitch a youtube video!). It’s “Barney Frank’s Acceptance Speech”, given Tuesday night. It’s 14 minutes long and about seven mintues in, he talks about how difficult it will be for him to go to mayors and selectmen in Mass and tell them they won’t be getting the support they’re used to for firemen and teachers, etc.

Also. I will readily concede the unbalanced nature of revenue sharing- a Nixon invention by the way. I hate it. Which is why I think it should be abolished. You are arguing from the position that it is here to stay and we should make it more fair.

I am arguing from the position that the whole damn thing should be abolished. Otherwise the fight will be only about which pig is strong enough to belly up closest to the trough- Republican or Democrat- it don’t matter. This isn’t about seeking parity of revenue sharing, it’s about keeping local use tax dollars home in the first place.

Every single statistic you cited further supports my claim that the program (and revenue sharing is quinessentially progressive) is grossly unfair. The money is irresistible to these bastards. From both parties! Take it away from them!

You are from New Jersey. I remember telling you once before that you of all people should be pissed about only getting 62 cents back of every dollar you send to DC. You could be giving your local teacher a local dollar, but she must settle for a watered down 62 cents, while YOU subsidize a teacher in North freakin’ Dakota! You MUST hate that.

You’re damn right the Republicans are ok with this arrangement, especially those from the net taker states. Which is PRECISELY why the Tea Party broke away from the Republican Party.

As I said to Anarcissie- you pay for your firemen, and I’ll pay for mine. We’ll both pitch in for clean air and national defense.

rico—skipping over the anarchism for a moment—there was an anti-war, anti-imperialism libertarian element of the Tea Party thing at first, but the libertarian candidates’ chains were very carefully pulled on that issue by Palin and some others, the gist of the word being that if they wanted the money and the support they had better toe the line on such matters.  I take it that also applies to the surveillance and security state, the prison-industrial complex, the Drug War, and so on.  So I don’t see the Tea Party as being particularly libertarian any more, unless people are seriously kidding themselves.

I’ll leave it to the proggies to defend big government, as is their hobby.  It has a considerable pedigree going back to Hamilton, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Wilson, and much can be said, but probably not by me.

rico, suave, November 8 at 5:33 pm Link to this comment

Still digging, but I remember that the context was extending the cuts to everyone. Frank wasn’t worried about taxes going up on firemen, he was worrying that without raising taxes on the rich it would affect his ability to bring home enough bacon to keep his local firemen happy. (HUGE paraphrase there!)

*********************

OK, let’s assume it was something like that.  If you look at the breakdown of how many dollars the citizens of a state sends to Washington, and how many dollars Washington spends in that state, you’ll see that most of the Eastern Seaboard states are at a deficit.  In New Jersey, for every dollar we send to DC, 62 cents gets spend here.  But in almost all of the “red” states, for every dollar they send Washington, MORE than a dollar is spent in their state (I believe Texas is the only exception, but only by a penny or two).  New York and Massachusetts get back .81 and .79 respectively. 

OTOH, N.Dakota gets back OVER $2 for every dollar the citizens send Washington. Mississippi gets back $1.84 (Haley Barbour Country).  Alabama gets $1.61.

So if Barney Frank is seeking to achieve a better parity for Massachusetts, so that the citizens of HIS state aren’t subsidizing Mississippi or Alabama, it only makes sense.  What state are you in, Rico?  Is it one that feeds at the trough (like most of the red states) or one that fills the trough (like most of the blue states).

Seriously.  This isn’t meant as an attack but since you challenge Barney Franks for doing this, you should know if YOUR state is already milking the citizens of other states.  And, as a New Jersey resident, we are getting ripped off in this deal more than any of the other 49.

Rand Paul’s Kentucky gets $1.51—a 50% return on taxes paid to DC.  Jim DeMint’s South Carolina gets $1.35. Coburn’s Oklahoma gets $1.36

But Nancy Pelosi’s California only gets back $.78, and Reid’s Nevada is second only to NJ—$.65 back. McCain’s Arizona gets $1.19.

Seems the GOPers have been doing far better at putting MY dollars and those of Barney Frank’s constituents into the pockets of THEIR constituents.

So how can you condemn Frank for doing the same thing?  In fact, Dems do far, FAR less of it than GOPers, according to the Tax Foundation.

Anarcissie:

Like I said, I don’t like long posts, so I see how you could find anarchy in the shorthand clip I sent to RED. NOT my preference at all- I don’t mind having to stop at red lights, or refrain from yelling fire in a theatre, or not cross the double yellow line, etc.

“the Right in the U.S. is not at all interested in less government,” Which is PRECISELY why the TP broke from the traditional right! It’s why they disliked McCain.

“By contrast the Tea Parties have mostly had a negative, leave-us-alone message, at least in the minds of their constituents.  They don’t have to work at consistency or cohesion.” EXACTLY!

I don’t know you. Why would you want me to be involved in controlling any part of your life? Isn’t it hard enough these days to take care of our immediate family and friends?

ITW:

Still digging, but I remember that the context was extending the cuts to everyone. Frank wasn’t worried about taxes going up on firemen, he was worrying that without raising taxes on the rich it would affect his ability to bring home enough bacon to keep his local firemen happy. (HUGE paraphrase there!)

rico, suave, November 8 at 4:00 pm:

Yes, but allowing people to be free agents requires less work than requiring them to conform to a set of artificial standards. ...

Allowing people to be free agents is anarchism.  I don’t see too much of that going on among either Tea Partiers or proggies.  As I pointed out previously, the Right in the U.S. is not at all interested in less government, they want to the government to pay attention to and spend money on different things.  For example, the proggie approach to certain recreational drugs is to treat them as a medical problem, the rightist as a moral or criminal problem.  Neither group seems to be able to conceive of drug use as a personal matter outside of the realm of government.  (Atypical individuals excepted, of course.)

My current guess about the inability of progs to organize and make a fuss Tea-Party style is that their concerns are too diffuse.  Plus, the Democratic Party has long labored to infiltrate and neutralize radical-Left groups and movements.  (More on that if you want to hear it.)  I agree, however, that there is also something to be said for your point that most of what progs seem to favor involves a lot of work, a lot of government activity, which is bound to be pretty depressing unless there is some urgent need felt by multitudes.  By contrast the Tea Parties have mostly had a negative, leave-us-alone message, at least in the minds of their constituents.  They don’t have to work at consistency or cohesion.

thx Rico.  It just doesn’t make sense that he would say that, when it would make more sense to say that the Obama extension of the Bush tax cuts would benefit firefighters and teachers in Boston.

Then again, Frank is a politician and any politician may say anything at any time….

ITW:

Let me check and I’ll get back to you. I heard the audio of his interview and I’ll try to find it. Thx

The day after the election, Barney Frank was asked what effect the Republican victories would have in his state. He went on to worry about how the local firefighters and police and school teachers were going to suffer if the Bush tax cuts remained.

I personally can’t understand why MY taxes should pay for a fire fighter in Boston. That to me is a very artificial arrangement. I happily pay for my own fire department, because I easily understand how it directly benfits me.
*****************

I cannot find any such quote by Frank and I’ve been googling and googling.  It sounds, however, like you have it garbled.

Remember: The Democratic position is to EXTEND the tax cuts, but only to the lower 95% of wage earners and to let it expire for the upper 5%.  The GOP position has been all or nothing.  That either the wealthiest 5% of the population gets their tax cuts extended or NOBODY does.  I daresay that firefighters and teachers don’t generally (if ever) fall into that upper 5%.

These two positions do not gibe with your statement about Barney Frank. It sounds like the quote was seriously garbled.  Why would Barney Frank be against firefighters or teachers in Boston getting the extension of the Bush tax cuts?

But I haven’t been able to find the quote.

Yes, but allowing people to be free agents requires less work than requiring them to conform to a set of artificial standards.

(This is NOT a judgment of the rightness or wrongness of those standards.)

Being a Catholic requires a lot more work than being an atheist.

Anything besides the status quo or entropic descent into chaos is going to require work.

REDHORSE:

In my brief exchanges with mdgr, I have tried to explain to him why I think trying to mount a sustained progressive third party effort would be more difficult than just expecting a “Tea Party of the Left” to emerge.

Your example of the meetings you had, which led nowhere because people didn’t want to commit, supports my view.

For me, it’s the nature of progressivism vs conservatism. (I am going to go out on a limb here and risk criticism for extremely oversimplifying the issue. But I hate long posts.)

To me, conservatism is more “natural” because it centers around an individual’s primary responsibility to take care himself first, which every rational person can readily understand. To me, progressivism requires submission first to the group, and continuous consensus, and lacking voluntary submission and consensus, it requires government coercion. (Your group fell apart because there was no authority which mandated that you stay together.) It’s a tautology that where there is socialism or progressivism, there is big government to keep all the balls in the air.

Let me give you a brief example relating to taxes.

The day after the election, Barney Frank was asked what effect the Republican victories would have in his state. He went on to worry about how the local firefighters and police and school teachers were going to suffer if the Bush tax cuts remained.

I personally can’t understand why MY taxes should pay for a fire fighter in Boston. That to me is a very artificial arrangement. I happily pay for my own fire department, because I easily understand how it directly benfits me. Let Boston residents figure out how to pay their own firemen. What if I were a Boston resident? Isn’t it a crazy for me to send tax dollars to DC so they can be send right back to Boston (after skimming by all the bureaucratic middlemen) to pay my local firemen? And, oh by the way, “thank you Barney for having the POWER to give to us (which implies the POWER to take away.)”

Nowhere am I implying that firemen in Boston don’t deserve to get paid a damn good wage. But my point is that the organizational structure needed to support a system where I send my taxes to DC so a congressman can pay for local projects to me is insane.

There is no question that efficiencies do obtain at the national level for many programs (clean air and water, defense, bank rules), but it is my humble opinion that progressivism burdens too many people with too many unnecessary obligations (taxes, regulations) in no rational way connected to their personal wellbeing (NEA, NPR, DEA, toilet tanks, light bulbs).

mdgr used the term “entropy” which is a thermodynamics term for a tendency toward chaos. I think it’s a perfect term. Chaos is natural. Order, or cosmos, requires energy. Water, after all runs downhill. Conservatives want to let gravity do its thing. Progressives want to push water uphill which requires a pumphouse which requires participation and coordination, voluntarily or coerced, to build and maintain.

I’ve gone on too long.

Wow! I don’t think I’ve seen this before at TD, or at least not in a very long time.
1) A BRILLIANT article by an analyst who supports his assertions and extrapolations with hard fact, not afraid to handle data that may counter it.
2) An intelligent discourse between 2, and then more, debaters who, while having a huge disparity between them, are keeping their discussion to facts and analysis.
3) MOST of the people jumping in have maintained the high standard Rico and MDGR have set for this discussion.
4) I gotta go to work so I didn’t get a chance to read all the latest posts nor do I have time to join in beyond this.
5) It’s a real but rare pleasure to see a thread like this.  THIS is what I come to TD everyday hoping to find.

rico—How do you know?

Anarcissie:

Gee, I just played golf with seven good buddies and there wasn’t a cop in sight. You’re obviously hanging around with the wrong crowd.

gerard, November 7 at 11:27 pm:

... 4. If the group is successful in achieving political goals, it will almost inevitably be visited by one or more “stooges” “informers” and self-appointed busy-bodies. Knowledge of where to go for legal help in matters of free speech is necessary. ...’

In my experience, wherever two or three are gathered together, there the cops will be also.  This shouldn’t discourage anyone; it’s just something to keep in mind.  And it is certainly helpful to have lawyering on tap if you can find any.

Some ironies of local organizing based on a variety of experiences during the 40s, 60s, 80s, and 90s.

1. Large numbers of people talk about organizing but don’t ever organize except in extreme crices for various reasons, some more “valid” than others. All reasons are valid to people claiming them.
2. There is likely to be a small core of committed individuals who do more than their share. (True everywhee.)
3. Internecine disputes, if not defused quickly, will cause a few to resign and “talk down” the group.
Not fatal if the group has solid positive experiences. (less damaging in groups drawn from wider social communities)
4. If the group is successful in achieving political goals, it will almost inevitably be visited by one or more “stooges” “informers” and self-appointed busy-bodies. Knowledge of where to go for legal help in matters of free speech is necessary.
5. The moment one objective is achieved, there will be a drop-out of the semi-committed. To minimize this, have a step by step plan.
6. Recruiting is a continuous job. It is wise to spend time only in areas where interest is high and need is great. 
7.  Crisis brings desire to “do something”—preferably something effective. You can’t   “demonstrate” all the time. Education is a never-ending constant.
8. Engage young people. Age is a kind of “curse” because of limitations—preconditioning, family obligatioins, determined ignorance, inability to accept creativity, etc.
9. When one goal is achieved, some or many drop out.
10. Some “socialzing” is essential.
11.  If an effort is to involve any public action, as much previous familiarity as possible with nonviolent philosophy and practice is essential.
12. Affiliation with a larger established group with similar goals and experience is helpful in many ways.
  It’s a serious undertaking, and a rewarding one.

A few years ago a friend and I put together a weekly T.V. program to provide a forum to voice a then prevalent social concern. We held it together for almost two years and provided a platform for groups and individuals on both sides of the topic. It was hard but rewarding work.

    During this time we met and worked with many individuals who held serious opinions about the issue and many who suffered as a direct consequence of it. My friend and I gladly footed much of the expense and spent much volunteer time keeping the effort alive. It became obvious that certain community efforts needed active support and volunteer labor and most in the forum agreed. But, almost none were willing to give up a Saturday, weekend or evening to do it. But, they were sure willing to TALK about it.

    Boehner and his thugs are willing to show up every day. Pelosi and Reed are willing to show up every day. The K Street boys show up every day. Many here complain if they’re ask’d to be involved in showing up to vote.

    Opinion isn’t action and 60’s Bullshit left the dead and walking wounded all over the political landscape. There are people still alive who will never see freedom again. But their fight is the only actual light of freedom in your memory. As I stated below: Using intellectual rationalization as a point of refuge to allow denial of actual political reality while the lives of fellow citizens are being destroyed is capitulation.

      Sorry MDGR and RICO. I shouldn’t have taken such an easy shot. As they say these days: My bad.

      Reality is, less than a handfull will show up for the fight but everybody likes to talk about it. As I said elsewhere most won’t even organize to be good followers and do grunt work much less lead. Is it any wonder the fascist have their boot on your neck.

mdgr:  “Personally, I can’t think of anything more boring.  Ditto.

I don’t see rightist (‘conservative’) opinions as particularly consistent.  The most outstanding contradiction is the desire for more war and empire abroad, more security and surveillance at home, which of course directly contradict the idea of small government.  Also contradicting the idea of small government is the urgent desire of the religious right, a very important component of the present Republican Party, to legislate sexual behavior, drug use, and other private matters.  There is also the matter of the mutual influence and attraction of government and large corporations for one another, which most of those who style themselves conservatives seem unwilling to recognize, much less deal with, but which undoubtedly enlarge the power of the government, or the class or groups which it represents.

Gerard,

>Shock!  Went to some Tarnas sites, reviews etc.  Guidance or determinisms from worlds beyond? . . . It isn’t the possibility of a “new day” I doubt.

Agree on rhetoric, but it works both ways. I apologize for my temper, but what you have said here is really quite supercilious. Nor did it speak to my original post. It focused on less than 1% of it, dismissing it out of hand, not just on matters of logic, but on the underlying possibility that I raised in my post.

That had to do with the possibility that what we see “out there” is reflective of what goes on inside—that the outside reflects the inside, and that the causal roots behind phenomena are perhaps not what we think they are.

You came back with what I considered to be a very sophomoric dismissal of all of that (including Tarnas). Ordinarily, I would not have given it a second thought but, yes, I held you to much higher standards.

For one thing, you passionate reject violence as an option. I am not meaning to single you out here, but I have found that people who do that usually tie that physical violence—which I believe is way too exclusionary.

Many of these people are very violent in a thousand other ways, albeit it not physically violent. If the outside does in fact reflect the inside—“as above, so below”—then their political rhetoric is also self-serving.

More often than not, it serves to exempt them from having to look any deeper, and I think that implies a certain kind of hypocrisy.

Then too, our Intellect gets in the way. It shuts out a whole range of feeling, empathy and intuition. It often ridicules these things and puffs itself up. It contrives to use itself as THE favored way of solving most of our problems.

Grandiose visions arise involving social engineering. On one hand, we have Ayn Rand. On the other, Karl Marx. Each side excoriates the other, but they fail to see that they share a common feature. They represent not just the inflation of our various egos, but also the Ego (as a function) which, in our culture, unconsciously identifies with Intellect.

We ourselves become puffed-up, ever-more brittle, ever-more incapable of solving our problems, ever-more destructive and crazy in our collective actions. We don’t even note our individual hubris, much less the trajectory of our collective hubris.
We ourselves seem to be right.

Other people—whose voices (e.g., me or Richard Tarnas in this example) we don’t even hear, much less understand—are reflexively held to be wrong. We might ridicule them out of hand, but without any depth of understanding (ridicule is fine as a tool, assuming the depth exists). We dismiss them out of hand.

More often than not, we “kill” them, at least existantially.

That’s par for the course in our culture, but it become particularly irksome when people do that and then espouse the principles of peace and non-violence. It once again smacks of “social engineering,” and the “disconnect” is usually light years wide. Moreover, they don’t work and almost always backfire.

What a lot of people like to do on boards like this is “debate.” Personally, I can’t think of anything more boring. I really doubt I’m going to change anyone’s opinion here about anything. At best, I can imagine that I’m a bit like Johnny Appleseed. Though that too seems to represent a dangerous leap into grandiosity and phantasmal illusion.

What I can do, I suppose, is be civil, even if the curmudgeon in me sometimes gets the upper hand. Once again, I apologize for my earlier tone. I wish you well in closing and am glad you care enough about these issues to post.

Gerard,

>Shock!  Went to some Tarnas sites, reviews etc.  Guidance or determinisms from worlds beyond? . . . It isn’t the possibility of a “new day” I doubt.

Agree on rhetoric, but it works both ways. I apologize for my temper, but what you have said here is really quite supercilious. Nor did it speak to my original post. It focused on less than 1% of it, dismissing it out of hand, not just on matters of logic, but on the underlying possibility that I raised in my post.

That had to do with the possibility that what we see “out there” is reflective of what goes on inside—that the outside reflects the inside, and that the causal roots behind phenomena are perhaps not what we think they are.

You came back with what I considered to be a very sophomoric dismissal of all of that (including Tarnas). Ordinarily, I would not have given it a second thought but, yes, I held you to much higher standards.

For one thing, you passionate reject violence as an option. I am not meaning to single you out here, but I have found that people who do that usually tie that physical violence—which I believe is way too exclusionary.

Many of these people are very violent in a thousand other ways, albeit it not physically violent. If the outside does in fact reflect the inside—“as above, so below”—then their political rhetoric is also self-serving.

More often than not, it serves to exempt them from having to look any deeper, and I think that implies a certain kind of hypocrisy.

Then too, our Intellect gets in the way. It shuts out a whole range of feeling, empathy and intuition. It often ridicules these things and puffs itself up. It contrives to use itself as THE favored way of solving most of our problems.

Grandiose visions arise involving social engineering. On one hand, we have Ayn Rand. On the other, Karl Marx. Each side excoriates the other, but they fail to see that they share a common feature. They represent not just the inflation of our various egos, but also the Ego (as a function) which, in our culture, unconsciously identifies with Intellect.

We ourselves become puffed-up, ever-more brittle, ever-more incapable of solving our problems, ever-more destructive and crazy in our collective actions. We don’t even note our individual hubris, much less the trajectory of our collective hubris.
We ourselves seem to be right.

Other people—whose voices (e.g., me or Richard Tarnas in this example) we don’t even hear, much less understand—are reflexively held to be wrong. We might ridicule them out of hand, but without any depth of understanding (ridicule is fine as a tool, assuming the depth exists). We dismiss them out of hand.

More often than not, we “kill” them, at least existantially.

That’s par for the course in our culture, but it become particularly irksome when people do that and then espouse the principles of peace and non-violence. It once again smacks of “social engineering,” and the “disconnect” is usually light years wide. Moreover, they don’t work and almost always backfire.

What a lot of people like to do on boards like this is “debate.” Personally, I can’t think of anything more boring. I really doubt I’m going to change anyone’s opinion here about anything. At best, I can imagine that I’m a bit like Johnny Appleseed. Though that too seems to represent a dangerous leap into grandiosity and phantasmal illusion.

What I can do, I suppose, is be civil, even if the curmudgeon in me often gets the upper hand. Once again, I apologize for my earlier tone. I wish you well in closing and am glad you care enough about these issues to post.

mdgr:  In all honesty, I am totally baffled by what I said that so upset your equilibrium.  I read back through all my posts and, blind pacifist and ignorant archytypical Vichy-ite that I am, my posts don’t seem abusive or insulting at all.  Sorry.  We might go on talking here except for the level of the rhetoric.

Rico,

We do not have #1.  We have an economy that favors HUGE businesses at the
expense of small business.  The tax structure favors the huge (Walmart et al) to
the detriment of the small business person.  The ease by which some can open a
business does not mean we favor small businesses.

I agree that we have most of #2.  You ask what leftists want.  I want to retain
those things, support them with the first #3 and use the second #3 (let’s call it
3b) to make all of the programs work better.

As far as not being able to get it; I disagree.  It just means holding people to
standards of conduct and professionalism.  If it is that we can not do the latter,
then I agree we will never get the former.  But I think a little ass kicking can and
a whole lots less tolerance for sniveling can produce a quality work force in the
state.

——-

gerard: Peace is my hope and wish for all in their personal lives as well as in
state policy.

——-

mdgr:  I didn’t mention abortion for two reasons.  1. I think if you improve the
safety net and the job availability problem you end up with less abortions. and 2.
I’m pro-life AND pro-choice.  That is, I am for freedom.

Peace.

Gerard,

I regret the back and forth, but in point of fact, you initiated it.

The earlier point I made was followed by the briefest of footnotes—which you ridiculed and subsequently focused on. Did you really expect that I would turn the other cheek?

My earlier statement holds. Your response was supercilious. Moreover, you seem to know little or nothing about Jung, Hillman, much less archetypal psychology. You expatiated on matters you knew nothing of not unlike a college sophomore.

Tarnas, whose POV you preseumed to reduce to an absurdity, has received superlative reviews from some of the most respected and accomplished writers alive. If you didn’t understand it, why didn’t you just come out and say so?

My earlier point stands. I think it’s the height of hypocrisy for people who espouse namaste or the philosophy of non-violence and then “kill” other people by failing to listen—treating them like “objects,” while unconsciously and compulsively taking refuge in an inflated view of their own intellect.

Fact is that our is a violent culture. It’s violent not because of AK-47s but because of our own hubris and ego-inflation.

And because, in a word, the species that you want to enshrine (homo sapiens) is self-destructive beyond belief. We call ourselves wise and we call ourselves human, but in truth, we are neither.

I am not faulting the species (I am part of it, after all) nor do I mean to fault/hurt you. It’s just that I am tired of the ubiquitous hubris, and of its consequent violence.

I am equally tired of sanctimonious pedants.

What is coming at us is much worse that we suspect, I sense. The Greeks called it Nemesis, and it was mediated by beings you would scoff at, with your 20th century Intellect and fine ideas about civil disobedience.

The Greeks called them “Furies.” Carl Jung called them archetypes, and they show up in some form in virtually every culture the world has ever known.

Good luck with your intellectual superiority to all of that. Good luck too going forward.

Finally, my chronological age should mean next to nothing to you, nor yours to me. What matters has to do with the maturity of spirit, and our century has none of that going for it.

Good luck again with your purely materialistic assumptions and of the “dynamic” they seem to portend.

We’ll leave it there.

Know that, in closing, I actually do wish you well.

Hi Redhorse,

(1) I appreciated your invite in another thread. I replied twice, the second time far more mannerly than the first. Would probably enjoy chatting with you but not sure how to do that. A room or out loud? Me, I’ve always preferred that latter.

(2) Much of what goes back and forth on TD is a sound-off. Or flaming. I’m not suggesting the former is bad, merely that it gets buried almost instantly. It is to communicating as masturbation is, um, to two-handed sex.

Rico and I come from very different political perspectives, and we started off by exchanging some witty, but not necessarily constructive words. At this point—after establishing certain ground rules which we are both following—I find myself talking with a person whose intelligence I respect, even if we don’t always agree.

Do we take this dialogue off the thread(s) or talk to each other in plain sight? I say that we hold to the latter. 

All of which raises the question of why I’d post on TD at all. Is it for narcissistic reasons, to see my name on Mr. Scheer’s website? Is it to argue about this or that polemical point with sophomoric intensity? Is it to flame people and subsequently puff myself up with a sense of self-importance?

I’m here for two reasons. I’ve spoken a lot about the first, though I think holding my breath would be rather ingenuous. As for the second, it’s a social thing. If and when there’s a constructive exchange of dialogue between people, I see no reason to stuff it in a room.

We got some serious windbaggery goin’ on now, eh, mdgr?

BTW, did you find us a room?

RedHorse:  Needless to say, thank you for the 60s bullshit!

By the way: MDGR and RICO should get a room.

60’s Bullshit

    My first insight into VietNam was a Monk in orange robes on the T.V. news setting himself on fire in protest of the War. I knew then it was a lost cause. The human moral imperative transcended the political rationale.

    My first actual encounter with the War was when, as we were searching a boat off the coast of VietNam for smuggled arms, a little man half my size, scared out of his mind for his family, shaking like a leaf, literally pissed his pants when the Gunner racked a round into the 50. The nightmare progressed and deepened, but, in my mind these two incidents represent my personal lines of choice and demarcation.

    Recent investigative reports have revealed the probability more VietNam Vets have committed suicide than died in the War itself. My personal insight is, that the consequence of moral choice and action define the nature of reality and it is sometimes, at least in this dimension of time and space, unsurvivable on a physical level.

    It appears, that despite the “lapel pin” patriotic lip service given our young warriors today, like Korean and VietNam Vets, they’re disposable. The present War though exploited for sensationalized “footage” and without question, the root cause of our impending financial collapse, isn’t even allowed depth discussion.

    My point?

    Standing up for human rights, human dignity and the moral human imperative doesn’t make one a “progressive”. It makes one an accountable human being. It was the intention of our now much maligned and discounted forefathers, no matter what their personal failings, to provide a foundation for what they personally experienced as the living breathing inalienable human right to freedom, dignity, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We are now beyond the luxury of labels. Using intellectual rationalization as a point of refuge to allow denial of actual political reality while fellow citizens are being destroyed is capitulation. “Gee, I’m doin’ O.K., fuck everybody else.” Isn’t that the Republican/corporatist fascist attitude exactly. Now, rationalize it. Then stuff it.

    Again, though there are a few good men and women there, Washington D.C. is a corpse. The names Dimocrat or Rethuglican, “Left” or “Right” mean nothing. Save yourself!! You no longer have a Country, you have a “homeland”. You no longer have a Constitution, you have the “Patriot Act”. You no longer have a Vote, you have the “Citizens United” decision.

      You exist in a moral vacuum. You’ve been hit hard. At this point opinion is only suppuration of the wound. Want to fight back? Then organize and stand in the presence OF and WITH others like yourself. What part of “WE the people—” don’t you understand?

mdgr:  Speaking of holding up mirrors .....

Gerard,

Thank you for your supercilious critique of things you have no clue of. I might expect such violence in thought/presentation from people who are passionate about the concept of non-violence, and I have previosuly held that mirror up to you.

We’ll leave it there.

Disperse.

mdgr:  It’s the pesky English teacher in me. Habits persist, don’t they?  However, a word to the wise ..... especially regarding first drafts.

I think Wardad’s was a brave attempt, but it seems to “institutionalize” the notion of “progressivism”—a homogeneously absurd concept in itself—and it also implies a kind of catechism for whatever calls itself that. I vehmently disagree, just as I’d disagree with the notion of a “homosexual agenda.” There is no Pope for gays, and there is no Pope for progressives.

Again, I would point to the primacy of the analytic and the general POV, not whether one is or is not a follower, say, of the “single payer” ethos.

To give an example, Wardad didn’t mentioned abortion (right to choose by my lights but not Sarah Palin’s), but it is a big deal bothsides of the political aisle. Kucinish is (or at least was) **against** abortion. Does that make him a pro-life conservative?

Caveat emptor:

I think that venturing too far out into the “what is” of Rico’s question can easily become the kind of plank that one inadvertently walks off of, as opposed to clarifying the plank of “progressivism.”

I do agree with Rico that much of what happens in blogland—never mind the political persuasion of the respondent—is sound-off, flame and noise.

I also think his question is sincere, not intended as a trap. It’s just that the answer isn’t canned.

mdgr:  Shock!  Went to some Tarnas sites, reviews etc.  Guidance or determinisms from worlds beyond?

It isn’t the possibility of a “new day” I doubt.  It’s how to get enough people to agree on some of the most self evident facts and then come together for action without killing each other in the process.

Being 96, I hope there is some human significance beyond the stars.  But meantime I find this world quite reassuring by comparison and wouldn’t mind at all coming back for another chance to make the usual mistakes and love the usual crazy, mixed-up people.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/06/bill-maher-vs-jon-stewart_n_779944.html

Excellent Bill Maher riff on the so-called “sanity rally” and the POV it espoused. It was arguably different from my riff, though no less trenchant.

How does it relate to a third party on the left? Only insofar as it calls into question the fundamentally “liberal” perspective of many who have expropriated the progressive moniker. Somewhere between Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart stands Botox Pelosi.

By that logic, the chance of a progressive-indie third party emerging in time for the critical 2012 election is virtually zero.

Still, hope lies fallow in the human heart. We shall see.

BTW, Girard:

I appreciate your good will, your ego and your friendly need to reach-out. But who are YOU to give me lectures on the importance of language?

Rico:

Back to you.

What you just said to someone else is, I think, important. I believe you when you say that you think there’s an invidious (or incoherently dark) agenda underlying “progressivism.”

Now, I don’t know about others, but that doesn’t really hold for me, and I think too that (this may surprise you), it doesn’t even hold for Chris Hedges or, say, Naomi Klein or Chomsky.

I myself have a wicked aversion to idealogues, per se. And, like you, I have an equal aversion to social engineering of the kind that Mao or Lenin undertook, as well as the kind of intellectually dessicated diatribes of Ayn Rand or people on the right (Dick Chewho often speak from a place that is devoid of human emotion, empathy and compassion.

Hedges, for example, is telling us what he SEES and how it affects him. He is, it is true, telling us what we should also be seeing, but in a way that follows the psychology of perception. Do you remember those little pop-quiz with the photo that from one point of view looked like an old man, and from another like a woman with a hat? It’s a matter of foreground/background relationship, and what you see (or gestalt) is of crucial importance. We all do this, right and left alike.

My point is that actions and agendas always follow one’s perceptions, and the writers cited above—who could be considered exemplary of progressive-thinking, perceive much the same thing. I won’t enumerate the percepts, because it’s better to go to the primary source.

What typically happens, however, is that people focus not on the underlying perceptions (the major and minor premises, so to speak) but on the derivative conclusions. Then they use that as a platform from which to infer the rightness of the world-view of whatever “ism” they associate with the conclusion. In a world where one wearing (or not wearing) a lapel pin of the American flag is held to be emblematic of goodness, it all seems to make good sense. Everything is reduced to an idiotic sound byte but things don’t really work that way.

You, for example, believe that the far right is are entropic (messy, less structured), progressive not. But that isn’t at all true, and here I could point not just to the concept of the Social Contract—or Dick Cheney—but “perception” itself.

Ayn Rand, who was as right wing as it gets, had to have been bombarded with a jillion bits of information every day, every hour really. Yet she coped. Her brain processed all the external (and internal) stimuli and, lo, order emerged out of chaos. I personally think that she was crazy as a loon, but she didn’t wind up in the funny farm. She didn’t go crazy. She didn’t go entirely solipsistic either, though others on TD might be way less generous than me.

Entropy be damned, in other words. It’s not a compelling argument.

Finally, I don’t think “progressivism” even exists. Does it look like to botox face of Nancy Pelosi? God, I hope not? Does it look like Bill Clinton, whom most progressives (including me) think was one of the most successful Republicans ever? Does it look like Barack Obama—who betrayed virtually every progressive promise her made before becoming president and was a gift to Wall Street, not Main Street?

I can only speak of individuals whom I am proud to call progressives and whose social insights, I think, are radical in that they cut to the core. Here, I point to some of the people named above, but there are others. In any case, it’s mostly not about agenda but perception, a perceptional POV that I myself agree with in that I think it explains what is happening today, at least on certain levels.

I think, however, that there are other explanations that go even deeper, and here I’d point to archetypal psychology or perhaps the works of Richard Tarnas and others like him. But that’s a side trip, one we needn’t go into at this time.

Rico,

Back to you.

What you just said to someone else is, I think, important. I believe you when you say that you think there’s an invidious (or incoherently dark) agenda underlying “progressivism.”

Now, I don’t know about others, but that doesn’t really hold for me, and I think too that (this may surprise you), it doesn’t even hold for Chris Hedges or, say, Naomi Klein or Chomsky.

I myself have a wicked aversion to idealogues, per se. And, like you, I have an equal aversion to social engineering of the kind that Mao or Lenin undertook, as well as the kind of intellectually dessicated diatribes of Ayn Rand or people on the right (Dick Chewho often speak from a place that is devoid of human emotion, empathy and compassion.

Hedges, for example, is telling us what he SEES and how it affects him. He is, it is true, telling us what we should also be seeing, but in a way that follows the psychology of perception. Do you remember those little pop-quiz with the photo that from one point of view looked like an old man, and from another like a woman with a hat? It’s a matter of foreground/background relationship, and what you see (or gestalt) is of crucial importance. We all do this, right and left alike.

My point is that actions and agendas always follow one’s perceptions, and the writers cited above—who could be considered exemplary of progressive-thinking, perceive much the same thing. I won’t enumerate the percepts, because it’s better to go to the primary source.

What typically happens, however, is that people focus not on the underlying perceptions (the major and minor premises, so to speak) but on the derivative conclusions. Then they use that as a platform from which to infer the rightness of the world-view of whatever “ism” they associate with the conclusion. In a world where one wearing (or not wearing) a lapel pin of the American flag is held to be emblematic of goodness, it all seems to make good sense. Everything is reduced to an idiotic sound byte but things don’t really work that way.

You, for example, believe that the far right is are entropic (messy, less structured), progressive not. But that isn’t at all true, and here I could point not just to the concept of the Social Contract—or Dick Cheney—but “perception” itself.

Ayn Rand, who was as right wing as it gets, had to have been bombarded with a jillion bits of information every day, every hour really. Yet she coped. Her brain processed all the external (and internal) stimuli and, lo, order emerged out of chaos. I personally think that she was crazy as a loon, but she didn’t wind up in the funny farm. She didn’t go crazy. She didn’t go entirely solipsistic either, though others on TD might be way less generous than me.

Entropy be damned, in other words. It’s not a compelling argument.

Finally, I don’t think “progressivism” even exists. Does it look like to botox face of Nancy Pelosi? God, I hope not? Does it look like Bill Clinton, whom most progressives (including me) think was one of the most successful Republicans ever? Does it look like Barack Obama—who betrayed virtually every progressive promise her made before becoming president and was a gift to Wall Street, not Main Street?

I can only speak of individuals whom I am proud to call progressives and whose social insights, I think, are radical in that they cut to the core. Here, I point to some of the people named above, but there are others. In any case, it’s mostly not about agenda but perception, a perceptional POV that I myself agree with in that I think it explains what is happening today, at least on certain levels.

I think, however, that there are other explanations that go even deeper, and here I’d point to archetypal psychology or perhaps the works of Richard Tarnas and others like him. But that’s a side trip, one we needn’t go into at this time.

Gmonst and wardad:  Thank you both!  Wardad, why do you put peace at the last, and in unnumbered ambiguity?
Just asking a “loopy 60s bullshitter” question.

wardad:

Great piece. Let’s debate it.

Briefly, we already have #1, most of #2 (except single payer). You’ll NEVER get #3 (you have two #3s, I mean the second one). #4 and #6 would be good. #5 has seen some proposals in the past but as they were formulated they scared conservatives for some reason.

Later.

This leftist is FOR the following;

1.  An economy that encourages SMALL business w/ low taxes and caps on
minimum wages regulations, and regulates the hell out of LARGE corporations
w/ sunsets on their charters and “stakeholder” management requirements.

2.  A social safety net that is a meager living if chosen but provides a real
foundation that encourages equal opportunity.  That means;
-single payer health insurance,
-unemployment insurance,
-Social welfare for the incapable and disabled.
-Jobs programs for the disinclined.  We have a moral responsibility support
those that can’t and encourage those that can.

3.  Meaningful education that meets the real needs of students rather then the
utopian dreams of policy makers
-PUBLICLY funded and RUN education that is mult-tracked in that it provides a
college bound student high quality preparation and a job bound student a trade. 
There is no reason kids should ever graduate an American school unskilled.  The
elementary school should have comprehensive “wrap around services,” parent
training, and healthy (non-USDA run) food for those families that need it.
-Free public college for those that meet the high standards.
-Free community college for higher end trades that can not be taught in the new
high-trade schools.

3.  A bureaucracy that is efficient, professionally staffed and run, and establishes
and enforces limits in its programs.

4.  The medicalization of drugs as opposed to its criminalization.

5.  Political reform.  We should have publicly funded campaigns.  We should
reform the congress so that it is based on proportional representation with a
ranked voting system, rather than the winner take all, two party system.  We
need to encourage more voices in the system rather than just Wall Street and K
Street’s.

6. Tort reform.

Peace.

Gmonst:

It’s late where I am, so this will be short, but I want to keep your attention.

I didn’t want that to sound like a conservative framing of progressive views. I want to know precisely what progressive views are. I don’t know. I want someone to describe for me a REALISTIC, sober, rational, transparent, ACHIEVABLE progressivism for the real United States as it is today. And when I say realistic and achievable I don’t mean, “that which would be acceptable to conservatives”. Unfortunately, most of what is presented on TD is rage against conservatism and loopy ‘60s retro bullshit.

My big frustration with liberals and progressives is less our ideological differences, than my perception that they are hiding their true agenda behind code words and deflection.

Later.

A suggestion for college sociology teachers for a course required of Freshemn Put together a selection of readings, discussions and community experiences in Consider Possibilities:  Your Importance and Relevance as an Activist to Support Democracy.
  Encourage young people to be politically active beyond mere voting, show them some principles of social action and some areas of need right in the communties where they live.  Through action, prove to them their abilities and their relevance and give them encouragement through experiencing the rewards of participation.

Why this isn’t done in a democracy is a yawning gap.
Many young people have no idea of what they can do or how to get started.  There are good books that could serve as texts based on real life contemporary experiences and problems.  Cooperation of a variety of NGOs with local projects would be available.  Not specialized on any one political belief system,  but opening opportunities should be the purpos but controversy should not be avoided. (American Friends Service Committee publishes a compendium on this under the title “It’s Your Life.” There are others also.)

Wow!  I’d like to organize and teach such a course myself, come to think of it!  Being too far on the grandmother side makes it unlikely if not impossible, but it has huge possibilities. Many young people, I think, feel stymied by lack of knowledge and confidence, plus not knowing how to leap across the chasm from adolescence into taking responsibility.  Am I wrong?

Im sorry ,  but the real need for a third party arises in the Democratic , not the
Republican Party.

The last two years, the elected so-called Democrats have:

1. Gutted real financial reform (no Glass-Steagle, no ‘too big too fail)
2. Rejected the only health care option that would simultaneously extend
coverage and cut costs (single payer)
3. Supported a stingy stimulus (one-third tax breaks)
4. Doubled-down & accelerated the Bush bailouts
5. Escalated a fruitless war in Afghanistan
6. Not helped people in bankruptcy & needing mortgage remediation
7. Not passed a jobs bill & had trouble extending unemployment compensation
8. Ignored previous Republican profligacy, crimes, misdemeanors
9. Used “Heck of a Job, Timmy” to promote low taxes for the wealthy on capital
gains, dividends and ‘carried interest’
10. Sandbagged his “Budget Commission” with Max Baucus clones to accelerate
the transfer of wealth from the middle class to the wealthy.

1 The American people wanted a government administered plan like Medicare -
for everyone. (72% - CBS/New York Times poll June 2009)
1A. Democrats gave private sector insurers a windfall: mandated customers,
with a taxpayer-paid overhead rate of 20% for ‘mandated customers’ (20% of
our premium spent on administration, CEO salaries, bonuses, Boards to set
rates and decide who’s covered and ‘profits’).

2 64% of the American people opposed expanding the war in Afghanistan and
wanted to disentangle from Bush-era ‘War on Terror’ and ‘preventive war’
policies.
2B. Democrats gave us an expansion of the war in Afghanistan.

3 The vast majority of Americans opposed the transfer of taxpayer wealth to
cover private company debt – the bailout.
3B. Democrats kept the 6 too-big-to-fail banks – now bigger than ever; kept
deposits at risk by maintaining huge grey areas between commercial and
investment banking; didn’t ‘punish’ the financial industry - now even more
profitable, with bonuses among the biggest ever.

Yes, you can say “Well, if the Democratic Party is broken asunder, the Liberals
wont have a chance.

So, the difference between sticking with the corporatist Democrats and not is
that Liberals ‘wont have a chance’. The track record shows Liberal dont have a
chance, when they stick with the Democratic Party.

Rico wrote:

What’s attractive to me about the conservative movement, apart from the fact that I agree with most of what they stand for, is the explicitness of their vision. They say what they want- tax cuts, smaller government, a fair, minimally regulated, capitalist economy, a strong national defense, and a diminution of the welfare state. All I know about the progressive agenda is “anti” all of the above. That’s not a platform that is attractive enough to validate a political party. You need a list of positives.

This represents the typical “conservative” framing of “progressive” views.  It diminishes progressive views to simply being against something and also weak.  If conservatives are for strong defense, progressives must be for weak defense.  If conservatives are for a fair capitalist society, progressives must be for an unfair non-capitalist society.  Its doesn’t really speak to the issues or problems.  Not even to mention those listed ideals the so called conservative politicians don’t seem to follow at all.  They don’t legislate small government, or diminuation of the welfare state.  They legislate large government that gives welfare to corporations as helping business, corporate welfare in guise of a strong defense, corporate welfare in low taxes, corporate welfare as subsidies and corporate welfare in the guise of minimal regulation.  They are very much about welfare and big government, they just regulate for the government fat to go to the highest bidders, and not the ordinary people.

I am for a modest government that is efficient and effective in delivering for the people.  I am for social programs to provide a safety net for the lowest amongst us.  I am for a strong defense that puts a priority on negotiation and conflict avoidance, seeing war as the most costly, wasteful, and destructive of actions which is only to be relied upon when it is absolutely necessary (generally meaning being actually attacked). I am for modest taxes which are spent well and wisely.  I am for strong government regulatory agencies which assure the safety of the American people against those who poison, pollute, or steal.  I am for corporations paying a fair chunk of their profits back into the system which allows them to flourish.  I am for social freedom and an end to the drug war.

mdgr:  As you pursue your ideas for the future, please get in touch with younger people and stay there.  For obvious reasons, they were missing in the midterms (compared to their original turnout for Obama) but they are the coming generation for whom the success of “progressive” politics is crucial.
They are also crucial for its success, and they already bend in a progressive direction naturally.
  I’m sure you follow sites like Center for American Progress.org and others.
  Also, regarding your reference to “changes happening overnight”—don’t count on it.  Any truly progressive movement has to be in for the long term, and it’s not a good idea to start in the beginning with the idea that by some clever political maneuvering great change can be maintained.  Perhaps you don’t mean to say this, but that’s an idea you project. 
  One more thing:  Success on college campuses and among the young in general will definitely influence their parents toward similar goals, particularly when jobless issues and rising expenses of college continue to impact this segment of the middle class.

Typo for Rico:

“He” obviously meant to refer to Ayn Rand—though I probably unconsciously balked at designating her a “she.” I apologize to our common male gender and should have used the pronoun “it.”

Rico,

I greatly appreciate your two posts here, along with their amplifications and clarifications. They deserve some serious thought, and an equally serious response. Our politics are different, but sound analysis that is both commanding and elegant always gets my attention.

Issue is that I am late for an appointment in Seattle, and I will be gone much of the day. I trust this thread will still exist on TD and I will reply to it later.

I am not inclined to question your conclusions about the likelihood of a third party going anywhere, but I see today that Pelosi may be coming back and that will be intolerable for progressives who held their nose and voted for the Dems. I know the WSJ describes her as a child of Satan and Karl Marx, but she is widely viewed on the left as little more than a shill and a whore. It will be interesting to see what that does to the third party dynamic.

I would gently point out that the “social contract” puts a burden on entropy too. I don’t see the progressive agenda as being “unnatural,” nor do I see its obverse—say, an Ayn Rand type of social Darwinism being natural.

Rand would be a good case to point to since she has been a thought leader for the right wing. Problem with Rand is that she had little to nothing in the way of empathy. Her values were fierce, true, but she had some interesting repressions sexually, as her affair with her protege suggested. He was, in a word, somewhat schizy with regard to this thing we call passion, and I would go further and say that it more generally applied to the realm of human emotion in general.

Following that logic, I find it somewhat interesting that repression, lack of empathy and an attending animus against humanity in general would be described as natural.

But Freud might well agree. After all, repression does have its uses. Still, I see Ayn Rand not as serving the forces of Life, but rather of Death.

If you can call that entropic, you may have made a point but not a definitive one. We’ll come back to this later on. Now I’m really late.

mdgr:

To give you an idea of where I’m coming from regarding “critical mass” for your proposed movement, I’ve just read an article at Politico.com describing the plans of MSNBC to rebrand itself into an explicitly anti-Fox network. A consultant working on the project said he was worried that there wouldn’t be enough liberal viewers out there to support it.

Before you pooh pooh this as “an irrelevant example of the plastic, showbiz falsity that is the problem,” remember that, valid or not, right or wrong, it is reality and you must get good at playing the current game before you can hope to change the rules.

Saying you want to create a vibrant Progressive Party to voice your dipleasure with the Democrats or whatever, is one thing. Theories and organizational charts are fine, but sooner or later, you’re going to have to flesh them out. Otherwise people will fairly ask, “Where’s the beef?”

The Tea Party was successful because it went way beyond, “We don’t like Obama, and the Republicans aren’t much better.” It had explicit goals, most of which, I’m sure, you disagreed with. But you knew what they were nonetheless.

It won’t be enough to call your party “Stop Palin”.

What’s attractive to me about the conservative movement, apart from the fact that I agree with most of what they stand for, is the explicitness of their vision. They say what they want- tax cuts, smaller government, a fair, minimally regulated, capitalist economy, a strong national defense, and a diminution of the welfare state. All I know about the progressive agenda is “anti” all of the above. That’s not a platform that is attractive enough to validate a political party. You need a list of positives.

How specifically are you going to turn this thing around in the long term, as you said you prefer to see the project? Platitudes and sleight of hand rhetoric will not satisfy very many people for very long. Hell, that’s what got mainline Dems and Pebs in trouble with the electorate in the first place.

Warning. To give you an idea what you’re up against in this country, remember Walter Mondale- “Yes, folks, I’ll be honest with you. I WILL raise your taxes.” Honest? Yes. Popular? Not so much.

I apologize for any lack of cohesion. It was more a stream of consciousness rant. Hope you can pick something out of it.

mdgr:

I’ve had my coffee and I’m studying your post.

Let me propose some definitions. When I use “liberal” I am thinking of LBJ. When I use “progressive” I am NOT thinking of Teddy Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson. I am thinking of the political offspring of the ‘60s. You may be thinking differently. So clear that up for me.

When I use “conservative” I am thinking of political and economic conservatives like William Buckley, Newt Gingrich and Reagan, NOT sectarian fascists or simpletons who think the Second Amendment is the sine qua non of freedom.

As for “heavy lifting.” My point earlier was that progressives have more heavy lifting to do than conservatives, because, to me, the desired progressive world order is more unnatural and structured than a conservative one. Organizing a movement around this progressivism will require lots of work for the same reason- selling someone on the superiority of a snowflake over a triangle will be difficult.

And please. Don’t worry about Palin. Ain’t gonna happen. I’ll vote for Kucinich before I vote for Palin! Can you imagine Palin going nose to nose with Putin or the Chinese? Neither can I. And I like to think I’m sitting in the center of the rightwing camp. (Actually, a third party may help her, a la Delaware and Alaska this time, so be careful what you wish for.)

As for your fears of a new Mideast war unlike any in the past, I don’t know what to think. Please explain your concerns.

Meanwhile——more coffee.

Rico,

Agree.

But again, let’s not try to be overly ambitious. I’m mostly wanting to ask you about the “weak links” in my argument below (and everywhere else on Mr. Scheer’s website).

BTW, if I myself were critiquing it, I’d weigh in as you did regarding the dearth of heavy lifting. You can’t pin it entirely on the “progressive” thing, however.

In the 60’s, it was progressives who went to Selma, protested Vietnam and brought down Humphrey and the Democratic Party in 1968. The Black Panthers were no slouches either. I mean, we did things.

So did our music.

Now, the best that liberals can do (notice I didn’t conflate the two terms) is gush about the Jon Stewart rally.

I agree, it’s personally discouraging. Good thing, as I suggested, that history will turn much more ugly very, very soon.

Still, my assumption that good things will happen if the progressive caucus declares its independence is itself somewhat shaky. It assumes that there will be something to fill the vacuum, that a progressive third party will emerge at all and be there to pick up our now independent senators.

Maybe it will. Maybe the left will seize the opportunity. But its leadership is virtually non-existent. I may like them but Naomi Klein or Chris Hedges do not command the audience of Eldridge Cleaver. They’re not Jerry Rubin. They speak for too few people.

And let’s face it, Freud may have been wrong about the Death Instinct, but pretty much everyone is tired.  Except, as Yeats put it, the very worst of us who, ironically, are filled with passionate intensity. Enter Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaud.

This seems to be, at least for awhile, the twilight of the gods. This is a time when we inadvertently do what we can to destroy the ecosystem, ourselves and the planet. It’s just how it is. Hopes lies eternal, but Obama proved that hope was just a cheap fix, no different from crack. May as well forget it.

For now, at least. I myself have hope but not in a progressive “reunion from the 60’s.” It almost certainly won’t happen. Alternately, we will crash and burn as a country, as a culture and as a planet. For awhile. For maybe a few decades.

But it will be OK.

We brushed against the evolutionary glass ceiling some time ago, I think. And ironically it wasn’t really anybody’s fault. It wasn’t even the fault of the species. But now—very soon, I sense—our white picket fences will come tumbling down in a crash.

And that too will be OK.

This is a time when the Ego puffs itself up in everything. In our politicians. In our corporations. In the very way we think. It’s reflected in our hubris, narcissism and rhetoric. And when I say “we,” I do not mean just America. I mean the whole bloody planet. And we’ve hit a crisis point, and the facade is cracking wide-open.

And that too is OK.

I only care about long-term changes at this point, nothing too near at hand. My only concern for this third party business is to prevent Palin—or someone like her—from getting the nuclear football in 2012. But 2012 is a long way off, light years really. This may not be the best of all possible worlds—Candide went to the “sanity rally” too—but, providentially, we survived against all odds. I suspect the planet (and a greatly transformed species) will make it through the night, even if my worst nightmare were realized politically.

Which is why I also sense it’s OK.

This has long ago turned into a screed. I apologize. It is probably time to sign off for tonight.

Nancy Bordier: thanks for the link, sounds like it
could be an excellent tool to empower voters.

mdgr:

I think this is a great place to continue our discussion, n’est-ce pas?

Patrick Henry: Yes! to a more representative
government.

And maybe progressives and the Tea Party can even find
common ground in opening up elections to third (and
fourth) party candidates. Coalitions of extreme Left
and Right can get some things done that Center Right
won’t do. The Libertarian faction of the Tea Party and
progressives could set limits to military intervention.

No doubt about it, the two party system is under a severe strain.

As I argue in Third Party Rising?, there are so many irate voters that it is only a matter of time before they either wrest control of one or both of the two major parties, or build one or more truly competitive third parties.

mdgr”  Bad word choice = cajole.  Look it up; then drop it.  Your ideas are interesting and deserve to be considered, but—watch the words.  (I already encouraged you to get rid of “Vichy” versus
“Berlin” so I suggest that you give that a second thought, too. Nitpicking?  Words are vitally important, never more so than in politics!

(Take your country back, as an example)

A third party and a fourth and a fifth.

We need a more representive society than we have now.

The Tea Party strategy of going after Republicans such as Hatch, Hutchinson and Wicker makes a lot of sense.  Each of them represents a state that is not likely to elect a Democrat, no matter what. 

Apparently their strategists have figured out, from the contrast between the losses suffered by Tea Party candidates in Nevada and Delaware and the victories of Tea Party candidates in Kentucky and other “red” states, that a Tea Party candidate can be elected in a state that is reliably Republican, but cannot win in a state with a strong Democratic Party presence.

“Another Meme for Our Times”

Many of the Blue Dogs are now gone. Good riddance, actually. The Dems nominally just moved to the left, but Harry Reid, as it were, still reflects the Democratic Party’s quintessential soul.

Which puts remaining progressives in a somewhat awkward position. Obama is making-nice with Republicans (now more than ever), and there have got to be a lot of progressive legislators who are yet serving who feel more than a bit betrayed.

Being a Democrat didn’t help Feingold very much. Nor Grayson, just to name two progressives whom I rather liked.

Of course, Kucinich has made a career out of trying to save Vichy’‘s (the D’s) soul, but his “principled” positions, in that light, seemed increasingly histrionic and self-conscious.

The Dems were seriously wounded on Tuesday, however, and there are a number of us who would like that wound to be mortal.

The R’s are what they are, and the Tea Party could be a very threatening presence in 2012. But to paraphrase Chris Hedges, it is not they who are the enemy—as much as that party of collaborators and passive-aggressive robots (e.g., Nancy Pelosi with her botox face and endless emotionless disconnect).

It is the D’s who are our chief impediment, the remaining progressive caucus notwithstanding.

My guess also is that the economy will continue to unravel exponentially. Moreover, Israel will almost certainly attack Iran very soon (by December, possibly, and Netanyahu as already served notice to Obama of that date). America will be dragged in, and the consequences are all too predictable and unavoidable.

Thus it is that an identity-crisis looms probably early next year for the progressive caucus. Will it stay and do nothing, or will it bolt—keeping its just-won Congressional seats, however—while declaring itself fully independent of the DNC.

Given the political winds, I think there’s rather more incentive to leave than to stay.

If that should happen, I see the distinct possibility of a viable and prodigious third party of lefties and indies emerging almost overnight.

You can scoff, but changes happened virtually “overnight” in the Soviet Union, Germany and even in Rome (allowing for a relative “snail’s pace” in the “speed of time and emergence of novelty” two millennia ago).

My point is not that such a third party is probable, but that it is possible, and if it were to happen, it could be historic.

Money would almost certainly follow as well, since lacking any real opponents, there is a real possibility that the Tea Party could win the Executive Branch in 2012. People like Warren Buffet, Soros and Bill Gates have to know that—they may be capitalists, but they have also managed to survive in our Darwinian world.  Not even they would relish Sarah Palin’s being given the nuclear access codes.

This perfect storm could be utilized to the advantage of progressives. There will be those who will make utterances whose intent is to demoralize us. But I think there is a brass ring showing.

All I am saying is that when the time is right (I am guessing it would be in the late winter, early spring), some of us may wish to come together and move this meme out into the world.

Which of us has community organizing skills? Which of us could build a formidable website? Which of us knows Wiki and SEO enough to begin getting this meme coming up in search engines? Which of us wants to take the initiative of Facebook?

The immediate goal would be to cajole as many progressives in Congress to declare themselves as independents.

The next stage would be to use that repudiation of the Dems to dramatize the enormous vacuum that has just been created.

The third stage would be to leverage that vacuum to give birth to a third party that would actually reflect the agenda and principles of these progressive Senators and Representatives.

My guess is that with the support of this caucus, it could be HUGE.