From a friend:
“Not saying that this is "right" but I suppose I'm less of an idealist, less out of the box, more work within the system that we have. If such a political movement could take place, it would be great!”
My Response:
The political movement has already started. Check out Coffee Party U.S.A. It seems to be one option for sane dialogue and non-partisan discussions.
If the system includes the halls and meeting rooms of Congress and the White House; if the system includes the executive, judicial, and legislative branches; if the system includes our constitution; ----I agree that we can still work within the system while thinking outside the box. It's broke and we have to put all of our heads to together and get it fixed.
Think about this. If there was a Tea Partier a full-blown conservative Republican, and a dedicated Progressive Democrat in the Apollo 13 module, they would only be thinking about how to survive so that they could see their families again.
They would listen to every idea that was proposed, debate their options as calmly as possible (have to save oxygen), and come up with a plan that worked just like the actual astronauts did in April 1970.
Good ideas (life-saving ideas) trumped any rivalries or petty resentments among the crew. Their mission was more important than their egos or anything else.
Why do I feel like Bluto making the speech to the rest of the Animal House frat right before they fought back against the Dean for being put on “double secret probation”?
Anyhow, back to the Apollo 13. It's kind of like that for us right now. We are all in that module and we damned well better listen for good ideas and give them a shot. And if the first good idea doesn't work then we try the next one. It’s a matter of life and death for us, also. But we can do this. We can hear the good ideas if we all listen with our intellects AND with our hearts. And I honestly don't give a rat's ass if the great ideas come from Tea Partiers, Conservatives, Liberals, or Moderates.
I just want us to save ourselves. I do not accept that there is nothing we can do about the 1.5 million homeless children tonight in this country. I know we can fix it. Someone in this country has the solution.
I don't believe it is right that people I know and love have to live without health insurance in order to pay the rent or the mortgage or buy shoes for their kids. Someone in this country has the answer.
There is a way for corporations to make a fair profit, pay fair taxes, and create jobs in this country. It is not necessary for corporations to wring their employees for one more drop of productivity with no more compassion than one would extend to a dish rag. Someone knows how to change this so that families have time to be families AND to be productive employees who work for profit-generating companies. Someone in this country has the plan.
Kris--you are an intelligent, politically aware person. Think about how sad it is that you wrote "I suppose I'm less of an idealist, less out of the box, more work within the system that we have." This is NOT a slam and it is NOT meant to be condescending. I swear it’s not.
It genuinely saddens me. If bright, politically aware, respectful, and kind people like you see ideals as things to be abandoned while accepting the status quo (when the status quo is corrupt, controlled by money and those who use it to buy the attention of our elected officials), that is sad and it should be a wake-up call for all of us.
Being idealistic is not a bad thing. It is a GOOD thing. We can make positive changes but we have to stop using the word CHANGE as a noun and start using it as VERB. Maybe we could start using “Transcendence” or we could talk about "bringing empathy and fairness" into every interaction, transaction, legislative activity, political debate, etc.
No more screaming. No more bumper sticker philosophies. No more blue states and red states.
Let's refuse to fall for the simple parlor tricks that have dazzled us and confused us for too long.
When a politician, a CEO or a CFO, a President, the head of the Federal Reserve or a Lobbyist tells us to watch his or her right hand while pulling the rabbit out of the hat, let us look instead at what the left hand is doing. That should generate some ideas!
We have become mesmerized and we have been turned against each other by those who benefit from it. If we are fighting each other, our attention is not on those who are really making the decisions that are destroying the Middle Class in this country.
The real decision makers in this country are horrified that we might stop fighting each other long enough to look up and catch a glimpse of one of them staring down at us with a bemused smirk from the balcony of one of their mansions. We can turn this around. We really don't have a choice, do we?
You ARE an idealist, Kris. We all are. We've just been kind of sleeping for a while. See you when we all wake up, man.
Friday, November 5, 2010
Thursday, November 4, 2010
WHENCE FROM HERE AMOREICA? A response to a good friend on FaceBook
If we decide to start two wars, allow Wall Street to continue being a megacasino with insane derivatives schemes, allow insurance companies to keep raising premiums and minimizing services while the US continues to have the most expensive (but far from the most effective) health care, then you should pay the 300.00 a month and feel happy about it.
We could just stop starting wars for a while against an ideology. Hint: you cannot shoot or bomb an ideology (Tuhrer-Ism) or a social problem like drugs.
Has to be some other way and instead of fighting about non-issues we should ALL put our heads together and find solutions to our problems or at least PROPOSE solutions instead of trumpeting inane, vague, heart-tugging, bumper sticker philosophies like TAKE OUR COUNTRY BACK and DON'T TREAD ON ME...or CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN.
Adam--I really am open to thinking about your solutions to our current situation. 10% unemployment; escalating foreclosures; out of control health care costs; a recovery that benefits Wall Street but not the middle and lower middle class etc.
OR we can find a way to balance the budget deficit (a big deal for Tea Partiers, Repubs, and future generations) while allowing the wealthiest Americans to keep paying 15% taxes (for hedge fund managers while mere 16milionaires like Warren Buffet pay 17%) while folks like you and me pay 25%. C'mon we gotta get this right.
How do we make sure everyone has health care, that social security remains intact (and not privatized so that the financial/banking complex make even more money), that our veterans and active service members are taken care of, that we GROW JOBS in the US in this new world economy, AND extend tax cuts to millionaires, man? I honestly want to know.
Flat tax? No way. The wealth of the top income earners in the US and top corporations are estimated to avoid 100 BILLION in taxes by using offshore instruments/strategies. They don't spend that money buying stuff. Therefore a flat tax would be disproportionately paid by the rest of us who actually BUY STUFF.
How about this: Give the tax breaks ONLY to people who buy stuff i.e. the MIDDLE CLASS? Maybe then we would see the middle class grow again, see some improvement in employment figures, see some increase in public confidence in the economy....And the progressive income tax worked fine when it was PROGRESSIVE.
Trickle down economics (read Reganomics)has almost destroyed the middle class. The continued influence (on both Democrats and Republicans alike) of lobbyists who represent the energy, banking, other financial, insurance, health care, gaming, military industrial complex (referring to Boeing, and their ilk who make the nice bombs and beautiful bombers not those who serve in our military while they had to fight the Bush admin for acceptable living conditions) cannot be allowed to continue.
Productivity at workplaces in the US has risen while job satisfaction, wages, and the opportunity to maintain a home life with enough quality time while doing the job of three (laid off, downsized, outsourced) people at work has fallen.
Over 30% of former Senators and House members become lobbyists! C'mon....let's get this right.
This is no longer about Repubs versus Dems or Left versus Right. It is about the HAVES (whose ranks have grown a LOT in the last 20 years) and the HAVE NOTS (whose ranks have also grown exponentially including 1.5 MILLION HOMELESS CHILDREN for God's sake). And I am NOT talking about "redistribution of income". Such BS that this phrase is thrown around so much. I am talking about everyone paying a fair share, not redistributing income. We don't even NEED socialism or communism. Capitalism has become a monster that has the poor whistling a happy tune while digging their own graves because they believed lies over and over and over. A recent poll shows that most Americans don't even believe in the American dream anymore. C'mon!
The top 25 hedge fund managers made a billion dollars each in 2009. One of them made 4 BILLION. They were taxed as if their income was "carried interest".
In other words they were taxed at the capital gains rate of 15%.
I bet you''d like to have some of THAT, Adam.
If we closed this loophole for these hedge fund managers we have 20 billion in revenue to spend on infrastructure, not firing teachers or closing schools or limiting basic humane support programs for people who need them I am not talking permanent Welfare here. We know that creates a class of people dependent on it.
We can do better than we are doing.
We need to keep the best of what Capitalism has to offer (competition, the ability to do better than our parents did, the ability to have an educated population, the ability of individuals and corporations to make a fair profit while paying a fair amount of tax, etc) and end the horrors of other aspects of Capitalism (War <<anywhere and against anyone>> as a driving force in a growing economy; the unfettered greed of corporations; the insane idea that anyone (INCLUDING HEDGE FUND MANAGERS) deserve to make a BILLION dollars a year while paying 15% in tax.
C'mon we have to stop the madness. We have to stop being so Ayn Rand-ish....What have we become?
The numbers I used here are available for anyone to find via non-partisan, non-activist channels.
I would also (AGAIN) suggest reading anything by Robert Reich and Arianna Huffington. They are really smart and they use accurate numbers instead of speaking in vague, nebulous, and endorphin-releasing patrio-speak like we hear from each political party and all those who want to TAKE OUR COUNTRY BACK.
We could just stop starting wars for a while against an ideology. Hint: you cannot shoot or bomb an ideology (Tuhrer-Ism) or a social problem like drugs.
Has to be some other way and instead of fighting about non-issues we should ALL put our heads together and find solutions to our problems or at least PROPOSE solutions instead of trumpeting inane, vague, heart-tugging, bumper sticker philosophies like TAKE OUR COUNTRY BACK and DON'T TREAD ON ME...or CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN.
Adam--I really am open to thinking about your solutions to our current situation. 10% unemployment; escalating foreclosures; out of control health care costs; a recovery that benefits Wall Street but not the middle and lower middle class etc.
OR we can find a way to balance the budget deficit (a big deal for Tea Partiers, Repubs, and future generations) while allowing the wealthiest Americans to keep paying 15% taxes (for hedge fund managers while mere 16milionaires like Warren Buffet pay 17%) while folks like you and me pay 25%. C'mon we gotta get this right.
How do we make sure everyone has health care, that social security remains intact (and not privatized so that the financial/banking complex make even more money), that our veterans and active service members are taken care of, that we GROW JOBS in the US in this new world economy, AND extend tax cuts to millionaires, man? I honestly want to know.
Flat tax? No way. The wealth of the top income earners in the US and top corporations are estimated to avoid 100 BILLION in taxes by using offshore instruments/strategies. They don't spend that money buying stuff. Therefore a flat tax would be disproportionately paid by the rest of us who actually BUY STUFF.
How about this: Give the tax breaks ONLY to people who buy stuff i.e. the MIDDLE CLASS? Maybe then we would see the middle class grow again, see some improvement in employment figures, see some increase in public confidence in the economy....And the progressive income tax worked fine when it was PROGRESSIVE.
Trickle down economics (read Reganomics)has almost destroyed the middle class. The continued influence (on both Democrats and Republicans alike) of lobbyists who represent the energy, banking, other financial, insurance, health care, gaming, military industrial complex (referring to Boeing, and their ilk who make the nice bombs and beautiful bombers not those who serve in our military while they had to fight the Bush admin for acceptable living conditions) cannot be allowed to continue.
Productivity at workplaces in the US has risen while job satisfaction, wages, and the opportunity to maintain a home life with enough quality time while doing the job of three (laid off, downsized, outsourced) people at work has fallen.
Over 30% of former Senators and House members become lobbyists! C'mon....let's get this right.
This is no longer about Repubs versus Dems or Left versus Right. It is about the HAVES (whose ranks have grown a LOT in the last 20 years) and the HAVE NOTS (whose ranks have also grown exponentially including 1.5 MILLION HOMELESS CHILDREN for God's sake). And I am NOT talking about "redistribution of income". Such BS that this phrase is thrown around so much. I am talking about everyone paying a fair share, not redistributing income. We don't even NEED socialism or communism. Capitalism has become a monster that has the poor whistling a happy tune while digging their own graves because they believed lies over and over and over. A recent poll shows that most Americans don't even believe in the American dream anymore. C'mon!
The top 25 hedge fund managers made a billion dollars each in 2009. One of them made 4 BILLION. They were taxed as if their income was "carried interest".
In other words they were taxed at the capital gains rate of 15%.
I bet you''d like to have some of THAT, Adam.
If we closed this loophole for these hedge fund managers we have 20 billion in revenue to spend on infrastructure, not firing teachers or closing schools or limiting basic humane support programs for people who need them I am not talking permanent Welfare here. We know that creates a class of people dependent on it.
We can do better than we are doing.
We need to keep the best of what Capitalism has to offer (competition, the ability to do better than our parents did, the ability to have an educated population, the ability of individuals and corporations to make a fair profit while paying a fair amount of tax, etc) and end the horrors of other aspects of Capitalism (War <<anywhere and against anyone>> as a driving force in a growing economy; the unfettered greed of corporations; the insane idea that anyone (INCLUDING HEDGE FUND MANAGERS) deserve to make a BILLION dollars a year while paying 15% in tax.
C'mon we have to stop the madness. We have to stop being so Ayn Rand-ish....What have we become?
The numbers I used here are available for anyone to find via non-partisan, non-activist channels.
I would also (AGAIN) suggest reading anything by Robert Reich and Arianna Huffington. They are really smart and they use accurate numbers instead of speaking in vague, nebulous, and endorphin-releasing patrio-speak like we hear from each political party and all those who want to TAKE OUR COUNTRY BACK.
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