While our focus must be to keep Mitt out of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, the day after the election, the Democrats, including Obama and Hillary, need to be graabbed by the throat, and told in no uncertain terms that the right lean of the party is going to get corrected, and that their only choice is whether to be the steamroller or the pavement.

Make no mistake...Rahm and Cory are tuning up to be the next "centrist" Dems, and many will welcome the chance to pull many fleeing GOP rats into the lifeboat, especially as they will see it as a chance to A) attract wealthy people and b) shove us smelly poor out. The Wednesday after election Tuesday, we need to start doing the REAL work, of making sure that 2016 will have people like Liz Warren, Julian Castro, and other libs, as opposed to Rahm. We all need to gear up for 2014, to make sure the last of the TEA party falls, and to also make sure the Blue Dogs get whipped into shape, or simply get whipped.

Yes, it is unfair, but as a better person than me put it: "the price of liberty is eternal vigilence."

Places the issue of debt in a perspective that is not mentioned often enough.




. . . . As the heterodox economic thinkers J.W. Mason and Arjun Jayadev recently observed, household debt has climbed from 50 percent of GDP in 1980 to 100 percent just before the financial crisis. Yet according to Mason and Jayadev, this sharp increase does not primarily reflect an increase in borrowing. Had interest rates, growth and inflation remained the same in the three decades following 1980 as they had in the three decades preceding 1980, household debt levels would have actually decreased. One of the central problems, Mason and Jayadev argue, is that inflation levels decreased faster than households could decrease their borrowing levels. Back in 2009, Christopher Hayes, author of The Twilight of the Elites and host of MSNBC’s Up with Chris Hayes, argued that “a period of moderate, sustained inflation” was essential to addressing America’s economic woes. While this argument seems very technocratic, it has the virtue of speaking directly to the challenge of household debt.

The latest Census data indicates that real median household income in the United States has fallen to levels last seen in 1995. Income inequality, meanwhile, has increased. . . . .

http://blogs.reuters.com/reihan-salam/2012/09/14/how-the-occupy-movement-may-yet-lead-america/

Why the Occupy movement did not disintegrate into an irrelevant bunch of hippies but has been assimilated by the middle class: it spoke to the unmentionable reality of economic inequality in the US.

Very insightful argument. The themes of this election were not chiseled into our political language by the Teabaggers. That was 2010. This year, our dialogue responds to the concerns of the Occupiers even though with the exception of Elizabeth Warren our politicians dare not speak ill of Wall Street for fear of losing campaign dollars.

(and for what it's worth, nothing in this story suggests how they will).

Between their inability to focus public attention on core issues (yes, they started out that way and then diverged in to endless side issues, still important but much harder to focus on). their unwillingness to establish a leadership structure that could speak to what the money stood for, (as opposed to its myriad hangers-on), and their preference for building their own social and decision-making structure as opposed to working with the political process that actually decides things, they've given up their ability to have an influential voice in whatever happens after the election.

It gets a handful of posts per week and 90 percent of those are by one person. It doesn't look like it's going to take over the world any time soon.

because the core issue is absolutely clear.

it is, and always was, about income inequality and its societal consequences. if you don't understand that by now. you're most likely what they're protesting against.