"...the stillbirth of the new progressive era .."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/05/AR2010010502989.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

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Every Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson -- Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama -- has raised the hope that he would bring with him a new era of progressive reform. The legislative torrents of the New Deal and the Great Society -- a few brief years in the 1930s and the '60s that fundamentally reshaped the nation's economy and society -- are the templates that fire the liberal imagination.

<snip>
And each time, they have been disappointed. While Carter and Clinton could both point to progressive legislation enacted during their terms, many of their most significant achievements -- the deregulation of transportation, the consolidation and deregulation of finance, the abolition of welfare, the enactment of trade agreements with low-wage nations -- actually eroded the economic security that Franklin Roosevelt, Johnson and their congressional contemporaries had worked to hard to create.

Unlike Carter and Clinton, however, Obama took office at a moment when the intellectual force of laissez-faire economics was plainly spent. His reform agenda was nothing if not ambitious: health care for all, financial re-regulation, climate-change legislation and a Keynesian stimulus to revive a wounded economy. But as the first anniversary of his inauguration approaches, it's clear that despite the impending enactment of a genuinely epochal expansion of health care, a progressive era has not burst forth. Major legislation languishes or is watered down. Right-wing pseudo-populism stalks the land. The liberal base is demobilized. The '30s or the '60s it ain't.

The reasons for the stillbirth of the new progressive era are many and much discussed. There's the death of liberal and moderate Republicanism, the reluctance of some administration officials and congressional Democrats to challenge the banks, the ever-larger role of money in politics (see reluctance to challenge banks, above), the weakness of labor, the dysfunctionality of the Senate -- the list is long and familiar. But if there's a common feature to the political landscapes in which Carter, Clinton and now Obama were compelled to work, it's the absence of a vibrant left movement.

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We are OWNED by big money interests controlled by the upper 1%.

It has little to nothing to do with political parties or "left vs. right."

But we all sort of KNOW the above information already, don't we?

to clarify, corporations own our politicians, even our so-called democrats and self-styled progressives.

Give me Kennedy, Feingold or Hackett any day of the week. Enough with the lawyers and consitutional scholars and "MBA's".

This country needs politicians who are in public service and in the service of people, not people who are fascinated with words and numbers.

I say, remember why we had The American Revolution? Yes, partly to KICK out *ROYALTY* and *CRONYISM.*

I have no use for dynastic families. Our political system needs new people with fresh ideas who have integrity ... not those who practice cronyism and/or nepotism.

<snip>
"The America over which FDR presided was home to mass organizations of the unemployed; farmers' groups that blocked foreclosures, sometimes at gunpoint; general strikes that shut down entire cities, and militant new unions that seized factories. Both communists and democratic socialists were enough of a presence in America to help shape these movements, generating so much street heat in so many congressional districts that Democrats were compelled to look leftward as they crafted their response to the Depression. During Lyndon Johnson's presidency, the civil rights movement, among whose leaders were such avowed democratic socialists as Martin Luther King Jr. and James Farmer, provided a new generation of street heat that both compelled and abetted the president and Congress to enact fundamental reforms."

"the absence of a vibrant left movement."

Just the sort of claptrap that the Post has grown laughable for.

Check out Dean Baker's piece in Editorials & Opinion:

Washington Post RIP to see how low they've sunk and why many of us haven't taken them as a serious source for quite a long time.

Do you think there is a "vibrant left movement"?

I can't even look at the Editorial Page without my blood pressure going through the roof.

Want some WP? Charles Krauthammer anyone? :puke:

it could rise politically