What does it mean to be a Democrat?

On this board, we have Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhist, Atheists and just about any other belief system known to man, and yet, you call yourself a Democrat.

We have Conservative Democrats, Liberal Democrats and Middle of the Road Democrats and yet, you call yourself a Democrat.

We have Male Democrats, Female Democrats and probably a few with a little bit of both and yet, you call yourself a Democrat.

So what is a Democrat, what is the core values that binds us all together?

Are we just another label? Or... Are we the just merely the "Left-over" Party? Are we made up of all those voices that don't feel at ease with the Republican Party? Is that who we are; just a hodge-podge of political flotsam and jetsam?

Who are we?

What is the tie that binds us and forces us to put our faith in this Party? What is that "Greater Good" that we are all working together to achieve? There must be something that we all agree on other than "We hate Repukes" or "Bush is a Fucker". What is it?

I know what it is to be a Christian. I know what it is to be a Liberal. I know what it is to be a Man. Yet, lately, I have no idea what it means to be a Democrat. If I cannot define it, how can I be it?

We are heading into some very rough waters in the months to come; everyone knows this by now. Our country is transforming right before our eyes and this comes at a time when our Constitution is under siege and our people are divided. When the shit hits the fan, the country has no choice but to turn to us. Are we prepared to come together and save this country under the banner of the Democratic Party? If so, I need to know what that means.

That is what I believe it is

CORE VALUES
** stolen in part from earthlink's core values as written originally by Charles Brewer
http://www.earthlink.net/about/cvb/

We believe the core democratic value, above all other democratic values if the RIGHT TO VOTE unencumbered by election fraud or disenfranchisement or elections that are run other than by hand counted paper ballots and counted by citizens on election night with an UNBROKEN CHAIN OF CUSTODY. After all, representative government is the cornerstone of any democracy.

Respect for the individual (and the civil rights of all Americans)

Respect for the constitution and bill of rights as written and understood since before 2000 (before the 9/11 shredding of the document)

We require complete honesty and integrity in everything we do.

We are frugal. We guard and conserve the nation's resources with at least the same vigilance that we would use to guard and conserve our own personal resources. ** same for environment

We make commitments with care, and then live up to them. In all things, we do what we say we are going to do.

We feel a sense of urgency on any matters related to our citizens. We own problems and we are always responsive. We are citizen-driven.

We are believers in the Golden Rule. In all our dealings we will strive to be friendly and courteous, as well as fair and compassionate. ** In other words, we will not wage pre-emptive war for the sake of trying out the Pentagon's new WMD toys!!

and finally

** We will follow the RULE OF LAW because anything else is pure anarchy...

YES! Exactly!
Ringo

love your songs.. really, quite a huge fan of yours... but that picture.. it doesn't quite look like you....

Why, thanks. I enjoyed that run with The Beatles.

The picture's just something I found online. Ringo - er....I - was very young in the picture
Ringo

Before EarthLink corporatized and destroyed what Brewer had created. As soon as those ELNK bastards moved in, they started shutting down call centers and outsourcing support.

Brewer is awesome, and so was Mindspring. Thanks for the reminder!

To the point of the thread: Social Justice.

handwritten stuck with a tack on the wall..

his legacy was wiped out by a mad Scientologist, Skye, and it is a sad thing that brewer sold out in the end....

but for a while, there was a company with ethics in our midst.. I agree. I loved mindspring too....

but the video conferences with ATL were great... He'd play guitar, we all be treated to beer and eats... Best company i've EVER worked for, hands down. Viva Mindspring!

When they gave us our pink slips here in seattle (well, the call center was actually in bellevue), the first thing I did was drop my earthlink domain e-mail addresses. I wanted to wash my hands of those bastards as quickly as possible. Skye is a miserable little puke. Blah!

We watched them systematically rid themselves of the CVandBs as soon as EarthLink walked in the door. It went from a fun, inventive, environment to a corporate hatchet man world in just a year.

When I was hired in, new hire technical support agents made 12$ hour to start (after the 3 month contigent period) plus medical, dental and stock options. As soon as ELNK came in the door, outsourcing began, and for the remaining stateside call centers, starting wages dropped THREE DOLLARS AN HOUR ...and the bennies slashed as well. Further, the culture changed completely. From a fun environment that "Recognized the difference between good mistakes and bad mistakes", Skye and his corporate freakshow introduced a culture of fear.

I was an instructional designer that came up through the ranks and finally made it to my own little office. What hurt the most was watching people I hired in with that were still on the phones go from loving what they did for a living to hating their jobs. The difference was drastic.

I'm a bit of a Mindspring o'Phile myself...
was personally responsible for mindspring to be the first to offer webhosting cause my little startup - 8 months behind mindspring, set the price at $50/month for webhosting and realized it was a 90% margin cash machine..

Charles invited me to his office and said, "how are you supporting 9 employees over that at netoffice" and I said, well sir, we're selling webhosting and making a killing, along with T1...

now realize brewer physically started mindspring in the basement of Diane Hetzel's house. but they quickly had a splitting of the ways... he could take ISDN and DIalup services and she could take T1 and higher.. eventually he realized the hicap was where the real profit was and had to change his agreement

but overall, a very gentle / quiet and spiritual man.. aside from an behemoth of a pink house in ansley, he's done well for the community... started building ecologically friendly living communities which I think is the wave of the future, but his are a bit me tooish looking......

as for their customer care, if you was your guys I was talking to, let me elaborate an actual exchange I had calling mindspring.. i called and got a person immediately and the guy took like 3 seconds to fix my very complex problem.. i profusely thanked him told him i'd write a good review, etc. ect.. and then the next day, what the hell, my phone rings... it was the guy again saying, 'are you still up and running, i'm just checking to see if your service is running optimally'.. i almost fell off my chair.. that was customer service of the highest quality.. and I do know what you mean about Skye.. another story..

I recently interviewed at Earthlink... ok, i was slumming, for a position well beneath my talent and my resume, but thought it would be cool to ride my bike to work and wear jeans for a while, so I went and interviewed... I get all the way to the VP of Who the hell cares.. some dipshit yes man that was more afraid of himself and the lights than having a backbone.. I get to the point of the interview where I say,
"your DSL + DirectTV bundle is a complete failure.. you won't win customers by playing ME TOO with bellsouth, they have more money and better margins and you can't afford the $200 Giftcards" so then the jellyfish of man gets red in the face and sits quietly contemplating, then he tried to backpeddle... "well uh, our outsourcing to the phillippines, well it hasn't quite gone as smoothly as we hoped, well, uh, apparently the filipinos don't know to call thing Sunday NFL ticket instead of the scripted 'football program' and folks don't like talking to folks that sound so robotic', i just laughed a little and held back from saying, 'you idiot, accenture or IBM or whoever promised you $5/per call to the call center really took you for a ride.. there are millions in hidden costs to outsourcing and that single southern sounding person on the line that helps quickly i worth a million dollars because it saves thousands of 2K/year potential income customers..' anyway,

on my way out, i considered saying 'why don't you market HEY WE DON'T SPY ON YOU" and let the customers roll in the door..

but I thought, not worth these idiot's level of reasoning.. i saw that earthlink had become a shell of the company I once knew..

it's so nice to hear from someone that was in the trenches and groked how cool that company once was...
it sounds like you were part of the mindspring success. too bad brewer ran off with millions and you got a pink slip.. too bad his core values did not have a line...

'we share our wealth with all employees on a cooperative basis, making the wealth of the company the wealth of the empoyees too'

damn shame.. you probably earned a few good pennies out of that place...

Thanks for you note. It's great to hear from you.

Although there was a lot of wavering around average call time, first call resolution, and a host of other support metrics, the bottom line at Mindspring was that you owned your customer's issue and made sure that they were satsified before you hung up the phone. When I came in as a tech support rep, we didn't even have an L2 or escalation team. You got the call, you own the customer. Team managers were always attentive and there for you if you got stuck; as were more experienced team mates. It was a supportive environment that empowered people to better their skills and there was a lot of room for career advancement (I went from TS rep, to trainer, to lead instructional designer in about a year). Further, they were committed to their employees. Frankly, as a TS rep, I sucked. I got people fixed with a pretty impressive solve rate, but I never really made the metrics for MPI. But instead of firing me, they looked at my skills and helped me find areas that better suited my skillset. And because of this sincere interest in developing their employees, I am an eLearning Manager for a large corporation today. In many ways, I have Mindspring to thank for my career. After the EarthLink "merger", on the other hand, the newly expanded EarthLink was quick to fire people for not meeting call metrics.

I suppose I could go on. :shrug:

I've been a registered Democrat since 1965.

I have always considered the Democratic Party as the "lesser of two evils". The "not as bad as the Republicans" party.

Like all political parties, it's main goal is to achieve and retain power. And, as Lord Acton said, "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely."

As an Anarchist (aka Socialist-Libertarian) I see power as the enemy of the people, no matter who wields it.

The Democratic Party is a means to an end not the end itself.

I admit to being a big D Democrat only for practical reasons--if things were different I might belong to a different party, perhaps a red one with a star of some sort. But it seems to me that the one unifying principle *I* can think of among us is a belief in democracy--which Repubs LIKE to espouse, but don't really want. What they want is a meritocracy--a consensus among those who are LIKE THEM, those who they feel "deserve" a voice in things.

since if we hope to have any power at all as citizens in a republic we have to organize to get proper representatives voted in. We have evolved poltical parties to do this and we are, for the foreseeable future, stuck with just two.

Many of us do have ideals, and we chose the Democratic Party because it comes closer to our ideals, but we can't expect it to be perfect and to reflect everyone. We can't expect the party alone to advance all of our hopes and programs, or even to get decent people elected-- that's still up to us as individuals and members of other groups.

No political party is something to be "believed" in any more than we "believe" in any institution or organization like a car manufacturer or church. We might like some of the products, but the institution itself is merely a means of getting to those products and cannot be relied upon to continue to do the job.

and why I am one.