General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsHuffPo: 15 Reasons Why American Politics Has Become An Apocalyptic Mess
Americans used to inhabit a world of shared social mores, even if millions of people were coerced into accepting them. Now voters now live in two barely overlapping moral worlds: Secular Metropolitan America and Biblical Traditional America. And that separation is enhanced by the isolating force of modern media. Americans can spend most of their waking hours enveloped in one journalistic gestalt or another, staring at one cable show/website version of reality or the other. It makes political differences harder to bridge.
As Democratic strategist James Carville once said, money is not only the milk of politics, it is the powdered milk and even the evaporated milk. But not since the Gilded Age has fantastically rich money been able to exert such single-minded and focused control. The U.S. Supreme Court is hell-bent on expanding that power. The result so far has been to unchain the militantly anti-government right, led by the billionaire likes of the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson. They have neither the patience for nor a belief in the regular order of Congress or its half-a-loaf legislative agreements. They are used to spending cash to enforce their unconditional way.
Political parties have collapsed as a means of whipping up consent. They dont control the money; fat cats do. They dont control the agenda; ideological interest groups do. All they have left is their reassuring absolutes: no new taxes for Republicans; defend Social Security, Medicare and Obamacare for Democrats. The more ideologically monochromatic the parties have become, the less able they are to engineer pragmatic legislative deals. As political scholars Norm Ornstein and Tom Mann put it, we now have all-or-nothing parliamentary-style tribal parties in a delicately balanced separation-of-powers system.
Much of the mainstream media has dismissed the president as a weak negotiator, and many Democrats were upset at his deals to extend the Bush tax cuts in 2010, to install the sequestration mechanism in 2011 and not to enact more sweeping tax hikes in 2012. But that chatter led Republicans to underestimate Obamas resolve and to assume they could force concessions on the one item he held most dear: Obamacare. It was a disastrous tactical choice. The public has doubts about the health care program -- doubts reinforced by the sloppy rollout of the insurance exchanges. But the public also doesnt want to use the government shutdown or debt ceiling fight to send health care messages.
riverbendviewgal
(4,253 posts)for the rest of the nations in this world to get off the US Dollar and to stop lending money to the USA and to stop investing in it.
The USA is ready to go off the cliff, why should the rest of the world go with it.
OmahaBlueDog
(10,000 posts)Admit it.. you know you want to.
DonCoquixote
(13,616 posts)I will belive Canada is not ready to jump off that cliff when they stop trying to maker that pipeline and when they can actually get Harper out of Office. Anti US schaenfreude is so 1990's.
riverbendviewgal
(4,253 posts)Many, many of us Canadians do not want the tars sands nor do we want the pipelines.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/b-c-first-nations-protest-kinder-morgan-pipeline-1.2054039
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/protesters-arrested-at-anti-enbridge-pipeline-rally-in-montreal-1.1959381
I am not one of those happy to have my tar sands oil go to your gulf ports....It is your republicans who want it.
I do sense a great deal of hostility in your post.
OmahaBlueDog
(10,000 posts)If I were being hostile, I'd rant about your so-called football only having three downs.
I didn't think disinvesting in the US is the answer. On the contrary - I think it's time for the investors (e.g. China, Japan, et. al. ) to send some lobbyists to meet with Mr. Cruz et. al. and explain the realities of what happens if we default on our debt, and what's likely to happen to their careers if they are left holding the bag for trillions in debt.
riverbendviewgal
(4,253 posts)see this....
http://dogwoodinitiative.org/blog/effective-vs-world-class
They just went nuts, he said. People were crying they said [the government] must be crazy [to entertain the idea of bringing oil tankers through here].
The potentially devastating consequences of an oil spill on our coast or into a major river are obvious to most, so companies like Enbridge and Kinder Morgan as well as the federal and provincial governments want British Columbians to feel confident that their treasured waterways will be protected.
grasswire
(50,130 posts)Lots of excellent comments there.
OmahaBlueDog
(10,000 posts)I only skimmed it, but what's there (even some of the stuff from the Cons) is worth the read.
grasswire
(50,130 posts).....in the list of problems.