dreamnightwind
dreamnightwind's JournalIn present circumstances, establishment IS a dirty word
Multiple, perpetual wars.
Raging income inequality.
The world's largest prison population.
Global climate change that threatens everything we know and love.
Republicans in control of both congressional houses, the result of years of establishment, corporate-funded Democratic strategies.
Mandated corporate health insurance.
A brutal police state to keep the lid on the blowback of poverty and disaffected citizens.
A vast and unprecented surveillance system that monitors prety much anything and everything an of us do, and records it for eternity, with access restricted to police and intelligence operatives.
Recent studies showing the complete uncoupling of what the public wants, and what legislation gets enacted, in a supposedly democratic nation.
I'm pretty sure I've left out some of the most egregious examples, just riffing off the top of my head.
In this context, establishment is the problem, and that establishment is the representation of corporate interests over populist interests, in both major parties.
We need a true "underground" political movement, not just victories for the corrporate wing of our party.
I wish it were not so and that I could just cheerlead for the team, it would be so much easier, but that is not even close to right action given our current context.
Yes, they have become what they have long been fighting against
In order to do battle with Republicans, using the same corporate-funded campaign model as the Republicans (adopted for Democrats by the third way/DLC/new dem types), they can no longer stand on the issues, as their donors won't allow them to work for the issues the people need.
So they've spent the last 30 years engaged in a blood match with Republicans for electoral victories, fighting on Republican terms, taking positions slightly better than Republicans but from the exact same intellectual premises the Republicans start with, rather than fighting honestly for a Democratic agenda that has nothing to do with the bogus world-view that comes out of entities like Heritage, AEI, PPI, or even Brookings for the most part.
Sometimes they win elections, sometimes they lose, and either way, we lose, with probably 90% of the population rightly recognizing that both sides are entirely corrupt and that their arguments are disingenuous manipulative political games rather than policies designed to make anyone's lives better.
The massive disaffection is our opportunity. This is not the time to compromise, it's the time to double down on grass-roots truth-telling and oganizing for real change.
We have to learn to defeat corporate-funded candidates
with candidates who are willing to run using only small clean public donations. That's not an excuse, that''s the reality. Everything else is just a diversion. The first victories will be the most difficult, then momentum will buld.
What you describe is the existing model, where issues aren't what matter. Corporate-funded ad buys, slick mailers, bogus policy positions and wedge politics. It gets us nowhere even when we win.
Honest, genuine and plain-spoken truth-telling about what Americans are up against, how we are being used by the powers that be, and what the candidate will work to do about it, coupled with grass-roots funding and activism, is the way out of this.
Enough people are sick and tired of the old politics, and hurting in their own lives, plus we have issues driving abandonment of the old ways, such as climate change and perpetual resource wars, police and surveillance states with massive prison populations, people retiring into poverty, kids in huge debt out of college, the times have changed to bring about conditions for doing things the right way, and to win by doing so. Social media and a less consolidated information backbone on the internet enable people-based campaigns to compete.
Now what we have to do is convince people who are still entrenched in the old ways of machine politics to get on board. Hence these emails.
Sanders is a good example, but we need a lot of candidates like him, at all levels of government. It's a process where we have to literally learn to win elections this way. I sincerely believe that the conditions presently exist to allow this to happen, and it's imperative that it does happen.
Yes that is it exactly
though you weren't supposed to notice. We will get exactly nowhere on any progressive ideas under Clinton, instead she'll continue neocon foreign policy, neoliberal economic policy, work with Republicans to implement reforms we don't want ("fixing" social security was a good example, less benefits for the seniors and a later retirement age is what we would get), and Republicans would be used as the reason to support her and politicians like her so the crazies don't get to run the ship.
It's the triangulation two-step, we've been living it for 40 years now and we know the dance well. We also know what it gets us.
It's time to re-energize the party, wean ourselves from our party's corporate money dependency, and strongly advocate for reforms and politicians that serve the people rather than corporate interests, re-engaging the vast pool of disaffected voters who have given up after so many years of disingenuous triangulation.
It's completely disheartening to see so many selling us the same old crap. For the democratic party, it's the path to irrelevance, for the people it's the slow road to hell.
Our Bernie pumpkin, show us yours!
Third way triangulation trick or socialist treat!
My son's:
Mine:
Anyone else carvin' for Bernie?
That hurts
He is my rep. I campaigned against him, thinking he was more of a corporate Democrat than a real progressive. I was supporting Norman Solomon, a true progressive. Also the local Coalition for Grassroots Progress, one of the best progressive groups I know of, is fully behind Bernie and worked hard for Solomon.
Huffman had the money and easily defeated Solomon in the primary. He's been ok on most issues, not so great on others.
This is one of the most progressive districts in the country, very safely blue, it's stretched along the coast, I think it goes as far south as part of Marin county (not sre of that), covers all of coastal Sonoma county, and some or all of coastal Humboldt county.
If Huffman were in any other district I would say he's a decent Democrat. But he's in perhaps the most progressive district on the country, we deserve someone more in line with our views here, and had an excellent candidate representing those views in Solomon.
Huffman is yet another example of money getting in the way of progressive representation, the rot at the center of the Democratic Party, much the same as I see the POTUS primary fight.
It looks like we haven't figured out to defeat monied interests yet. I consider that to be the left's challenge. I expect to see the money used against us by Republicans, which we can handle, because our issues clearly set us on the side of the people.
I would like to see our own party compete with ideas rather than money in the primaries, rather than the corporate wing using it against the left while taking primary election policy positions designed to obscure the very real differences in their policies and those of more leftwing candidates. For those of us on the left, getting our positions represented is ironically blocked as much by our own party as by Republicans.
There was one discovered here off the coast of northern California
between 5 and 10 years ago, couldn't find the link but I remember the fear tickle it set off in me. I think there is more of this happening than we are aware of. Can they globally identify these via some kind of imaging from satellite? Seems possible. I'll read the article, maybe they are doing just that. Anyway, a very unhappy K & R to this OP.
It's time, people, we have to change this society, ASAP.
To the people who claim India and China are the real problems, ever think about whose goods they are making over there? Plenty of them are made for us, by multinational corporations that were formerly U.S. corporations, who offshored their manufacturing to get cheap labor and unregulated polllution for their facilities.
This offshoring activity is directly supported by the corporate owners of both of our major parties. Our own party is fully onboard with this system, offering only slight disinsentives which are far outweighed by the corporate incentives to go the other way. They pretend to be on our side while cashing the campaign donations from the perps, and behind doors they laugh at our concerns.
Meanwhile, methane plumes from the seafloor. Polar ice melts. We're in big trouble here, and need to vote like it.
edit to add perspectve after reading the article, we're still in huge trouble but perhaps these plumes aren't the beginning of the end. I'm far from convinced. Anyway here is an excerpt:
"These are interesting but they are minor issues," Schmidt said of the plumes. "People have detected methane seeps all over the place off the continental shelves and mostly they are in equilibrium with what is going on. So if the water is warm, you will get a little bit more or a little bit less … The overall constraints are such that it's really hard to see how in the present climate situation how it could be a big effect."
Related: A Massive Amount of Death Is Plaguing the World's Oceans
But Kevin Schaefer, a research scientist with the National Snow and Ice Data Center who studies emissions from permafrost, was not as dismissive. The challenge, he said, was that so little is known about these methane plumes including just how much is being released on a global scale.
"It's a potential risk but I'm not sure the scientific community has a good estimate of how much this might be in the future," he said. "We don't know. It could have an impact. Whether it's radical, I would probably say not."
Wow, I read the links Bernie wrote in a downthread post
I can't respond, I've had that poster on ignore for a long time, but I was expecting some crazy way off base writings given the context and intention those links were provided in.
Instead, I am grateful to that poster, I had not read them before, and I found absolute verification that Bernie is the real thing. At last, there is someone to support that isn't a programmed product of a sick society, but has always been (these writing, I think, undated, were probably from 40 years ago or more) on the frontier of rethinking the mechanized militarized soul-less environment destroying empty materialistic society we are thrown into as our only valid choice.
I only read the first two links, not the third, too long and I only have so much time for this, but they were beautiful. It is sad to see a DU'er cherry pick such honest and thoughtful work for some controversial gotcha. Every word of it rang true, the spirit of truth and working to create something better was alive in his words. Obviously many of those thoughts would not be approved by any candidate's focus group as what a candidate ought to say. So much the better, let's be real.
The most offensive thing I found was Bernie referencing Ron Morrison of The Doors, when it was Jim Morrison.
Nice to see him even way back then railing against the gun lobby, I knew the gun framing against Bernie was disingenuous. So many other principled positions, too, an endless stream of them, truly a representative of the culture I've always wished could establish itself here rather than the corporate phoniness that has shaded every light to dim darkness.
So happy to support such a man as Bernie, I was dreading the soulless wasteland the party was offering us with more third way dreck, wanted Warren to step up, and Bernie has been amazing, much closer to my overall beliefs and worldview than Warren.
Yes!
Get off the corporate bandwagon and lend a hand, it is not the time for business as usual, the planet is overheating and capitalism won't be satisfied until it profits off of our own destruction.
Join us in our fight, there is no time to lose and we're up against long odds, we (all of us) desperately need for this to happen.
Sanders and Warren are definitely part of the solution. If Hillary would have an epiphany and fully commit to reform, she is intelligent and strong and would make an excellent ally too, but I mean a total complete conversion experience, otherwise she is fighting for the extinction team, quite literally.
Please see past my lame attempts to communicate the importance of this, and see behind it to the reality it comes from. This crisis is real, people, wake up and commit.
In my opinion this study understates or simply doesn't even begin to address the worst of outcomes, which on our current trajectory will surely come to pass. But it is hopefully enough to begin to appreciate the magnitude of what is coming.
It's Too Late to Save Over 400 U.S. Cities From Rising Seas, Scientists Say | Alternet
http://www.alternet.org/environment/rising-sea-levels-will-overtake-hundreds-american-cities
and to head off the inevitable cries of "why change when it's already too late" BS, it's too late for a few outcomes (New Orleans and Miami, for instance), but it's not at all too late to survive as a species, or at least to keep earth as an inhabitable planet (this is a possible outcome, that a chain reaction of methane clathrates and sulfuric acid releases poison our atmosphere and kill everything on this planet)
don't know if this is a good source, but it explains the problem
Planet Extinction - The Clathrate 'Smoking Gun'
http://www.planetextinction.com/planet_extinction_clathrates.htm
Back to bad but less doomsday futures:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10027266411#post34
"In our analysis, a lot of cities have futures that depend on our carbon choices but some appear to be already lost...
...
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/10/07/1511186112
Carbon choices determine US cities committed to futures below sea level
The PDF containing the supporting datasets they used for different cities and carbon scenarios can be downloaded here:
http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2015/10/08/1511186112.DCSupplemental
It does appear as if a number of cities, including Miami and New Orleans, are beyond hope no matter how much carbon we reduce. Let's hope we can turn this thing around in time to prevent collapse on a scale we can't survive.
Anyone who believes supporting the current status quo third way corporatist du jour is a step in the right direction is fooling themselves, corporate greed has gotten us into this mess. Just leave those games behind and commit to the magnitude of change we all know has to happen. This isn't about your candidate or mine, it's about having a future.
Excellent, substantive OP
Bernie did all of ths at a time when Hillary was on a roll. There were calls from various corners that Bernie supporters should just give it up and circle the wagons around Hillary to defeat the Republicans. The Benghazi hearing gave her a national platform to show how strong, competent and presidential she can be (with no relation to issues that help the American people, just a platform to withstand Republican attacks and look good while doing so). She nailed that opportunity, and she nailed the DNC debate.
Bernie's response? Right back to what matters. Issue by issue, making his case. Nothing but resolve and determination. I haven't seen a candidate like this in, oh, forever. Thanks for the OP highlighting some of his statements.
I would like to see him wade more into foreign policy, debunk some of the conventional wisdom and centrist policies about resource wars, U.S. hyperinvolvement in the middle east, reliance on fossil fuels as it relates to foreign policy decisions, making our country more about building a decent and sustainable future for its citizens than about global resource exploration and empire. A lot of the money we need for social policies is being wasted on the military to support corporate resource procurement and extraction.
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Gender: MaleCurrent location: northern California
Member since: Fri Jan 26, 2007, 08:20 PM
Number of posts: 4,775
