eom

And that control has always rested in violence as we all know.

While we may have clear memories of a better America it existed as our government/CIA overturned democracies in other sovereign nations and supported dictatorships.

And while nature and our planet were declining under this scheme.

eom

few. One has to be utterly stupid, severely uneducated or on the take not to see this. How, can any reasonably sane individual expect an economy to function when a few hold all of the wealth. It does not make any sense even in the most spectacular delusion. Many Americans IMO are woefully deluded, naive and fall victim to the endless propaganda in this country.

However, change will not be easy. It was not by chance that police were militarized, citizens under surveillance and the power of DHS turned inward toward citizens. We need a peaceful rebuilding of our financial mechanisms, but I have no idea how that will come about, but it needs to be peacefully accomplished. The problem is, the oligarchs will use those generally on the wrong side of history in this country to wage war against any change that might affect their stranglehold on this country.

However, there is no utopia. With most "isms" some individuals almost always rise to the top and destroy the "ism" for everyone else, because they are fueled by greed, money and power. It seems intrinsic to human nature.

I'm not even sure I think there's anyone on planet earth who should have more than a few million, to be honest.

momentum going. ... most people will lose.

...and supports a wealth tax on those with over $1 Billion in assets. Like the founding fathers, he knows about the dangers of aggregated wealth and how it tilts the playing field.

Excellent and well-written post. You have nailed it as far as I'm concerned.

-Paige

There is no utopia but there is a place better than where we are now.

So what do we do about it?

www.workerspower.net

"The right’s strategy of defunding public education leaves parents with the option of sending their kids to a for-profit school or a theological school that teaches kids our ancestors kept dinosaurs as pets."

But there are still some shoveling sand against the tide.

will WE put an end to it?

time on trying to "get" any Democratic president, or trying to roll back any law or legislation they don't like.

When we STOP letting the bad guys get to us and giving into discouragement, and START FIGHTING BACK as hard OR HARDER (or, yes, MORE DEVIOUSLY) than they do.

When some of us STOP sniffing and sneering and saying "both parties the same." Or "both sides are alike." Or "meh, makes no difference who we vote for, they're all screwed..."

When some of us STOP resolutely insulting and chipping away at the leaders we have, so the result is: they're left undermined and their support lags and their poll numbers go down - which gets noticed and covered all over like a cheap suit by the media.

When some of us STOP insisting on voting for splinter candidates who might sound good but don't have the big muscle to get anywhere realistically and WILL, GUARANTEED, only be spoilers of the greater objective - of KEEPING THE WHITE HOUSE AND THE STATE HOUSES securely in DEMOCRATIC hands.

Ahhh... don't like the Dems? Don't think they're worthy or good enough or strong enough or whatever-it-is-this-week enough? Hey! Try the republi-CON party!!! See how THAT works out for ya!!!

THAT'S when.

You really seem blind to the fact that what was once the Democratic party has become (with a few exceptions)
a part of the ruling corporate/elite "party."
Hopefully, we can remedy this and return to the Progressive Democratic party, led by (the imperfect) FDR.
It may take what you consider spoilers who have proven themselves to be actual representatives of the majority of Americans.
Not all of those proven leaders have a" D" behind their names. I am unaware of ANY who an "R" behind their name. Have a nice day.

You can't govern if you don't WIN. I hate to boil it down because this particular message appears to endorse purity.

Look: I would personally LOVE to have a Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren IN THE WHITE HOUSE, IN THE OVAL OFFICE, with THEIR agenda which is far less corporate and far less compromised. You're correct in one regard, dotymed. They are, policy-wise, unimpeachable. They're pretty damn perfect and impeccable, and their views coincide with mine completely. Frankly, I myself would RATHER have one of them in there because one of them would better represent how I personally feel about things! But they can't win. They won't have enough money to mount an aggressive campaign and be everywhere and buy the big ad buys like a Hillary Clinton will, and already does. And their views will scare a lot of independents and wafflers and people who think most of us on the left (or the so-called "far left&quot are too extreme. Imperfect practicality intrudes, I'm afraid. That isn't how I'd prefer it either, dotymed. But that's what IS!!!

So, YES I'm willing to settle. I'm willing to settle for the good rather than the perfect. Because Number One Priority for me, at least, is to WIN.

You can't do squat if you don't WIN. You can't decide who's gonna be on the Supreme Court. You can't do damage control. You can't set the agenda. You can't even decide what comes up for discussion, much less for a vote, in the House of Reps. You can slow things up, and if, heaven forbid, we lose the Senate, AT LEAST WE HAVE OUR GUY IN THE WHITE HOUSE with a nice little veto pen to head off some of the anticipated onslaught of shit that would result and try to flood over the White House and thus also the rest of us.

And as long as we've got a mere two main parties to deal with, we're forced to choose between the pretty good and the absolutely SHITTY. I know you don't like that. Wanna know something? I don't like it, either. But THAT is where we are and THAT is what we have to work with. That's what we're stuck with. So it seems to me we are honor-bound to make the most of it, as imperfect as it IS!

I still remember the candidacy of Peter Camejo, of the Green Party, here in California in the governor's race in 2002. He had no chance. NONE. But there were people out there at rallies I attended that were mainly opposed to the Iraq War (back then, during the run-up to same, that we were hoping in vain to stop). These wide eyed optimists and unrealistics said again and again - "we need to send a MESSAGE!!!" It just left me shaking my head. In these things, I'm baldly and blatantly and ruthlessly practical above all else. I told this one young woman handing out flyers and trying to sign people up at the Camejo table - "my friend, the only message you're gonna send is the one that'll get you a nice smirking 'Thanks, CHUMP! Thanks for the cakewalk, CHUMP! Thanks for handing us an easy win, CHUMP!' You're NOT gonna win. You're not even gonna get close. But you're VERY likely to spoil it for the guy who's mostly on our side, isn't perfect but IS good, and is a HELLUVA LOT better than the republi-CON running for the bad-guys team. Your pushing of another candidate who risks splintering the vote and siphoning off otherwise-sure support and dividing us on the left - will allow the wrong-wing to conquer!" She and others like her wouldn't listen. They knew better. THANK GOD Peter Camejo did not siphon off enough votes to allow the bad guys to take over the statehouse. Just lucky, we were. However, that would, of course, come later with darrell issa funding a recall campaign against Gray Davis which AH-nold then slithered in and stole out from under him. (Remember how ol' darrell openly sobbed and sniveled and blithered and puddled pathetically into the microphones and cameras during that amazing press conference after he realized the governorship he'd just bought and paid for - was gonna go to somebody else? We here all had a good laugh about that one, as I recall!)

I'm just being cold-bloodedly and ruthlessly practical, and REALISTIC, here. Sending a message is for shit. It's fucking USELESS. It doesn't work. It only sets you back. The only message that will be send is "HERE, we're gonna just hand it to you! Have herself a nice cakewalk!" And the message the winner we didn't want will get to send back (because sometimes it's the bad guys able to squeak through because the "message-senders" sucked off enough votes from the candidate who had the most realistic chance to take it otherwise), is a happy, hearty, chortling, guffawing "Thanks, CHUMP!!!" You'll have the satisfaction of delivering to the bad guys a fine, tasty, nicely-roasted sacrificial lamb, with YOU as the potatoes and carrots arranged around it on the serving platter brought to THEIR table. That they can laugh at, as they feast.

Sorry - just trying to get rid of all the extra bold-face...

Currently we have two "viable" candidates, approved by TPTB, from which to choose. That IS NOT DEMOCRACY.

5 days ago a new PAC formed to elect politicians who want to take money out of politics.
They have a novel approach. They are raising money in stages, each stage coincides with one of their stated goals.

They are not going to concentrate on electing Independents at this time but choose proven Democrats that want to get money out of politics. In 5 days they have already raised over 1/2 of their goal ($1,000,000) to launch their first stage. They have broken their goals into stages that they will implement as they reach pre-determined levels of money.
Their ultimate goal is to stop TPTB candidates from having an unfair advantage. Ironically, realistically, they have to use money in order to get the money out of politics.
I want to vote for real representatives whose goal is to represent the people.
here is a link: http://mayone.us/
I saw this on RT yesterday, read up on it and they have great goals on a set schedule, they are aiming to get money out of politics by the 2016 election.

The most heinous and obscene thing about it all is that these asshats will send you, your children and your parents to foreign lands to die in wars that are occurring to protect their singular economic interests, and at the same time not only do they not want to pay taxes to help the country that has GIVEN them the infrastructure in which their success could occur, they don't want to pay taxes to support the military and soldiers whom they expect to die for them. And to top it all off, they brag about it and call you un American for saying anything about it.

of what patriotism really means from birth, those easily deluded and convince them to sign up to die or be maimed to protect or spread the oligarchs' economic interests. And, when then they return, many get fucked over by the oligarchs. The real freeloaders in this country are the oligarchs.

Sadly.

propaganda will be heaped with vast $$$$$ to convince the naive to vote them into power. When it comes to $$$$$ IMO R=D=I.

I can remember coming home from school and smelling all the dinners cooking in all the houses on the way home because most families could get by on 1 income.

I remember when advances in technology promised to continually reduce the work week.

I remember when about 4pm nearly every dad was home.

I remember when most everybody had weekends off.

I remember when people lived close to where they worked and had a very short commute.

I remember when during the day if you were building a go cart or some other thing kids built that you could always find some retired guy out on his porch who would take you to his workshop and show you how to do it.

I remember my mom and aunt taking me, my cousins, my brother and kids in the neighborhood swimming in the summer.

I remember when the curfew in my town was declared illegal.

I'm glad I lived in the golden age of the middle class. We may get back there before I'm gone but it will be a long slog.

had a blue collar job that paid enough to comfortably support a family.

always people in the neighborhood interested in helping us with our projects. In our small town education was the most important thing one could do. Everyone was big on education as being the most important thing a youth could accomplish. Almost everyone in our small town had a decent job if they wanted one. It was pretty hard to get fired or laid off, one really had to be drunk on the job or tell their boss to F off. It was just more peaceful and everyone seemed to be moving forward. And, people retired with fair pensions, many at the same company for over 30 years or more. Changing jobs was a big deal, often frowned upon as to the reason.

And teachers were respected, not seen as "public employee takers"!

greatest liability a company has, and dispensable for the next cheapest one on the shelf of consumables to be used and tossed "at will."

The pride was mutual (employer-employee)

People think the post-war years in the US were somehow normal. They were not. Europe was burned to the ground. Germany was a ruin then half of it went communist. The two world wars were a demographic disaster for France. UK went socialist. The low countries, etc. Spain suffered under Franco.

Africa was how it has always been. The middle east has not been a manufacturing hub since Hulugu. India had barely thrown off the colonists who just extracted.

After a century of tearing itself apart then being invaded China went communist and had the disaster of the Great Leap Forward - the single dumbest idea ever.

Japan was burned, then nuked.

The USA was the only game in town. Labor was scarce and was able to bid up it's price.

Why do you think there was a Baby Boom? Everyone could afford babies so they had them. A lot of them.

This free trade and open borders lunacy has created more workers, both here and abroad. If you want a middle class then make less of their labor, thereby bidding up the price. KIA wants to sell cars here - then build a factory here and sell away. Same with Apple. Don't allow much immigration so a person can make a living with their hands.

The post WWII era when we were the only country in the world that didn't need rebuilt.

Of course some other factors were the 91% top marginal tax rate and the huge number of anti-trust regulations in place, but it was in this era when we lead the world in everything - because everyone else in the world had been bombed into the Stone Age.

Thanks for pointing that out so eloquently - this has been on my mind since I saw McCain on TV talking about American exceptionalism.

an upper 1% that would toss those overall advantages aside for cheaper labor offshore, thereby, eventually, decimating U.S. consumers for their products. But hey, they'll have so much socked away and so much global mobility that who cares if the nation that gave them their opportunity is left in shambles.

They're exactly what the Republicans say they're for -- their nostalgic dream of a golden past era. But it's their policies that have destroyed it.

Small town economies were fueled by family farms and small agriculture supporting businesses. We even had a train to haul the wheat and lumber to a shipping port in my small Pacific Northwest community.

It's odd to me that so many of these small town folk worship Reagan - when he was at the helm when it all went to shit.

He blamed it all on Carter in the same manner that everything was Clinton's fault during the Dubya years. For some reason the party of personal responsibility is particularly adept at demonstrating just how bad things get when THEY refuse to take responsibility for THEIR actions.

The principle of Cause-And-Effect.


They are unable to grasp the idea, so they totally reject it.
With anger.

Go look at threads about tolls... it seems almost nobody on DU want toll roads to help pay for infrastructure, yet most also don't want to raise the gas tax to pay for it either!

It's hard to justify raising taxes or fees on the middle and lower classes when people have become so aware of the way the tax system is rigged to favor the wealthiest. I don't sense this is a "nobody wants to pay for anything" deal ... I think people are looking for where to draw a line in the sand.

Trav

and other bills, sending the kids to school, etc.

Then one day Mi$$ RobMe comes along and buys the company and fires everyone so he can have the work done more cheaply in Vietnam. Then you are foreclosed because the bank marketed low-interest no qualifying loans to millions of you and your neighbors using the trust the banks had to commit a massive fraud, 7 million families have been foreclosed on, while 9 million homes TODAY have loans that are underwater (worth less than they are mortgage for), and 50 million families are on food stamps. And we have a government that says you haven't given enough.

Now you have a part-time job, living in some dinky-ass apartment, the kids owe about $80,000 apiece on student loans, and the only reason you have health insurance is because other people are working to pay for it. And bankers report record profits for 2013 because the taxpayers have paid them trillions of dollars to profit from, like the $1.2 trillion they have gotten in the last year to prop up a housing market that is mostly selling houses to investors for cash.

And then some ass of a pol suggests that you need to pay for the road you drive on to his workplace every day where your boss pays you less than you need to live, while she profits handsomely from your work.

It's not that people don't want to pay. They have already paid too much.

It was a fantastic ride, ya got to admit.

We have just about everything we could dream up. Creators and other artists have produced a cornucopia of 'things'. We travel the world in a matter of hours.

We are living today, as a king might have lived 200 years ago. And we are living like kings compared to probably 90% of the rest of our humans.

We've hit a ceiling. How far and how fast we drop will be up to us, or it could be an external event which runs us off the rails as we swerve over the cliff which is our future.

Whatever. This transitional rollercoaster ride from here to there will be made much easier or harder depending on what kind of congresscritters we have taking care of us. Go vote? Hell yes.

The Chinese will be on the Moon while we are baying at it.

My 2 cents:

There's no way to directly stop ultra-rich sociopaths like the Kochs from pushing America further into decline. But there might be a way to do it indirectly, by appealing to the patriotism of their right-wing acolytes with questions like this one:

"Are you willing to bet our country's future on the continuation of policies that, if not the source of America's decline, have demonstrably failed to halt it?"

Here's the left-brain path to the same question:

1. Demonstrate that the US is in decline (this post is a great start). There are many metrics available in many areas that prove the point.

2. Demonstrate that there is no evidence that privatization, deregulation, trickle-down tax policies, and "free market" policies have improved matters - in fact, temporal correlation implies that these pillars of right-wing ideology have accelerated America's decline. By itself, this argument won't convince right wingers that they've been had, but it plants the seeds of doubt.

3. Use income and asset inequality trends to show who really benefits from right wing ideology, and who has been hurt the most. Point out that lobbying by wealthy interests aimed at deregulation and tax "reform" have gutted US manufacturing and replaced it with resource extraction, rent-seeking, and financial fraud. And that the "shining city on the hill" that Reagan promised is really a few big mansions surrounded by miles of slums and deteriorating middle class neighborhoods.

4. Demonstrate that fabricated war, social, and religious diversions have been used to prevent the US populace from focusing on the problems that matter most - wealth inequality, education decline, infrastructure deterioration, etc. This isn't a central pillar of the argument, but it's an important innoculation step.

Even with evidence that our national decline correlates with the rise of right-wing policies that emerged around Reagan's first election, many right wingers won't admit causation. In fact, some might believe that we just need to give those policies more time.

But the decline is real. All of us see it happening. The numbers prove it. And just as with the climate change argument, we need to get right wingers to start thinking in terms of outcomes, rather than ideology. It will take a long time to change hearts and minds, but if we don't start asking questions like these, that change will never happen:

"If you don't like what America is becoming and want to see change, does it really make sense to persist with policies that coincided with the start of America's decline?"

"Do you believe that policies that encourage widening inequality, privatized institutions and infrastructure, depleted national resources, and fewer regulators to ensure compliance with our laws will improve your life and the lives of your children?"

"Are you willing to bet the future of America - and that of your descendants - that more of the same will reverse America's decline?"

and redirect their anger reflex about street crime.

Street crime has been a dog whistle to evoke fear and distract right wingers' frustrations away from Wall Street mega-heists for decades using the "tough on crime" narrative.

One or the other of the two "One Big Money Parties" are beginning to wake up.

A real and true "Third Way" is about to ignite America's political life. If Democratic leadership doesn't immediately join people, it won't be very pretty. (The idea that "When the people lead, the leaders must follow" applies only when leaders are not egotistically tied to their power and wealth.)

This documentary, which traces the demise of Bethlehem Steel through the 1990s and how it devastated the Lehigh Valley in Eastern Pennsylvania, shows this tragic decline -- the ruin of manufacturing in the United States and the utter devastation of the working classes. Men whose families had worked for generations in these plants had their pensions and everything else stolen. Tragic. And the greed of the rich, the root of capitalism, will continue to drive this country into the ground.

I googled top 100 airports (2104)

and just started scanning the list: Denver at 29 and San Francisco at 39...didn't go any
further...but if you do you'll find Dallas, Houston, JFK, even Raleigh and quite a few others on the list. You might want to fix that little bit of info.

http://www.worldairportawards.com/awards_2014/worlds_top_100Airports.htm

about Capitalism left to its own devices would destroy itself.

I'm reminded of a story of a foreign visitor, who took the Acela train either to or from Washington DC. Many of his fellow passengers were DC lobbyists. When the visitor noticed the dilapidated condition of the roads, bridges, and other infrastructure along the way, he dared to broach the question of why doesn't the government invest more money into these projects. The lobbyists immediately shot back "Communist!", "Collectivist!", and other Lew Rockwell/Ayn Rand/"Libertarian" bullshit.

Why is our infrastructure dilapidated and unrepaired? I would submit that it's an intentional campaign to reduce their value so far that they can be sold to a private entity for pennies on the dollar. These lobbyists (the direct representatives of the real owners of this country) know this - their clients want a piece of this action.

Yeah. Forgive me for not leaping for joy. Bad back, you know.