while doing nothing but holding a series of public offices, accumulates a personal net worth in the $100M range, would be a sufficient clue.

when faced with the truth that destroys a cherished fantasy.

The Emperor Caligula was wildly popular in the beginning of his reign. He was replaced 5 years later with Claudius.

that is resulting in this story is not lost on some of us. I'm not quite a boomer (jones - x, I'm not sure and don't really care), but I was old enough to see and mostly understand what the line; "It was not the life he had envisioned as a young man in the 1960s and ’70s", implies.

Many of you were not alive, and some of us have forgotten, but this nation was far better and improving prior to the '80s.It was far from perfect and rife with problems in just about every aspect of society, but things were better and most importantly, on a trajectory toward enlightenment.

Racism was still rampant, but it was not acceptable in polite society. Your violently racist uncle was an embarrassment and not invited to parties.

Sexism was less prevalent than today and the "hey baby, nice rack!" asshole-on-the-street was just as likely to be confronted and ridiculed by a group of whoever was around as he was to be ignored.

Unemployment was high, but when you finally did land a job, it was far more likely to pay enough to live on.

Government was corrupt and likely as not to make things worse, but it strove to do great things, not devoted to lowering expectations.

Listen to the content of Jimmy Carter's State of the Union speeches. Any leader that tried to pass off "This sucks but it's the best we can hope for" as a strategy would not be the leader of anything the following week.

These people have lived the lives they are living, not because of some amorphous 'vision', but under the terms of a contract. That contract has not just been broken, its very existence is denied. Their future was stolen from them and simply handed to the very worst criminals around in exchange for nothing.

A black President. Wiccan symbols in Arlington. Gay marriage. Women in executive positions. Cars that get 40mpg and are able to keep you alive after a catastrophic accident. The computer or phone you are reading this on and the internet which links us all together. The list goes on and on, are all the direct results of what we were doing then.

What are we making today that we will have 30 years from now?

it is what we love to do, and make no mistake, you can make a good living doing it. It simply precludes the potential to become a billionaire by stealing other people's work claiming it as your own property and then reselling it forever.

The world has been moving to Linux for almost two decades now because of two basic factors; it doesn't lock you into becoming, what is for all intents and purposes, a permanent slave to a single corporate overlord that you must pay regardless of circumstance. And it just works.

As for my previous comment, and I don't expect that you are going to believe this, the urgent need for the so-called STEM workers is a myth. There has always been enough of us, more than enough, to fill the need. What they want is cheap and disposable and nothing says cheap and disposable like a bumper crop of new grads willing to work for as close to nothing as possible until they can be replaced by the next crop.

Reality is that technology has forever changed the world of the 21st century, but we're still supporting a 19th century social model and the beneficiaries of that old model want to keep their gravy train going as long a possible. Studying something that you really don't like simply because you believe that it will make finding a job more likely is a tragedy on several levels.

Employment is not a goal, it is a sentence.

not bad looking, possess a wide range of salable knowledge, experience, skills, and talents, I'll be just fine. In fact, all I have to do to be much better than fine is to stop seeing the world around me and succumb to the authoritarian BS you seem to have so thoroughly embraced.

I've just always wanted to help the people that always get the shitty end of the stick by giving them what they need to have a better life. Usually all they need is an understanding of how things actually are, rather than how they've been told and believe it is.

The Wall Street economy won.

Government won't enforce laws that major players break, no matter how egregiously, so there are ever shrinking chances of competing with them successfully, so there is less willingness to invest in the start up because the investors don't want to lose their investments. State and local governments, after giving away the farm to the corporations and thus, faced with decreasing revenues, are squeezing small businesses more and more to make them up.

Couple this with the fact that the number of individuals with sufficient assets to self-finance a small or even micro business is still falling and you have a negative feedback loop.

Nobody in power is working for us, there is no longer any refuge or support for people or businesses that are not the plutonomy.

with the sentiment, but the fact is that assholes have become the overwhelming majority in this nation (maybe that they always were and I just failed to notice) and they are very well represented on this site. I've no doubt that I am counted among them, perhaps by you, certainly by those for whom being a DU "cool kid" is the pinnacle of, and reason for, their existence.

We're not on the same, or any team. This is not a community, it's not a club (literally anybody can join), and nobody that matters pays any attention to what goes on here. It has had no effect on the issues that it pretends to address. It's just a means to an income for three people. Thom Hartmann seems to occasionally use this place to find topics on slow news days or when his show gets stale, but like Thom's show, the unfortunate fact is that you could stuff the entirety of it into the eye of any major players and it wouldn't even feel the need to blink.

I don't know if you are younger, more tolerant, or perhaps you just haven't experienced the consequences of their ministrations to the same degree that so many of their victims have, but it should be clear to you by now that many of the most prolific posters here are here for no other purpose than to exorcise and validate their own selfish agendas.

Anyone that is outraged and pissed off by this oh-so-very-unacceptable reply, before you hit the alert button, do yourself a favor; spend the next two weeks tracking how much time you waste here and promise yourself that you will spend that much time actually working to help alleviate the real human suffering that Manny and xchrom are talking about.

liberal party that actually instituted real progress for almost half a century before Big Money authoritarians took it over. For the overwhelming majority of its history the Democratic party has been the party that unflinchingly defended the status quo. Both of our Roosevelt Presidents were traitors to their parties and both enjoyed great popularity from those betrayals.

Political parties have no allegiance or purpose beyond gaining political power. The Democratic Party is no more liberal than the republican party is conservative, they are merely facades hiding the real powers behind each of them. Gore Vidal, IMO, put it best when he stated that,

"There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party ... and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt — until recently ... and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties"

The only difference that matters, and I think that if one simply spends some time here it becomes apparent, is the difference between the authoritarians and the egalitarians. If one truly believes in equality, the inevitable conclusion is that we must accept and make allowances for the entire range of diversity and therefore become truly egalitarian. If one cannot make take that step and insists that some things are just too different to be acceptable, than you are, to at least some degree, an authoritarian and willing to suppress some in order to accommodate the prejudices of the current majority. In essence it boils down to either; "I would like to relieve your burden, as long is it doesn't inconvenience me to much." or, "we really are all equal and I am willing to sacrifice in order for you to achieve yours."

Unfortunately, far too many of us fall into the former.

going on just has it has for centuries. The only thing that has changed is that they are much more efficient and can move more quickly than was previously possible.

Those of us that have no power or control are always either ignorant of what is being done or marginalized until it it is too late to do anything about it.

On this thread there is mention of climate change, green energy, and media control. All of these are perceived as being among the current issues, but the reality is that it's too late to do anything about them now.

The cycle of global warming passed the tipping point five minutes after anyone outside the field cared anything about it. We had some of those people telling us what was going on 40 years ago, but they were ignored and marginalized because stopping it would hurt the energy interests. By the time Al Gore was writing his book and road show the cycle was irreversible and the best that could be done was immediate action on a global scale to slow it and alleviate some of the worst consequences. A decade later we're still talking about what might be done 20 years from now.

Green energy is part and parcel to the warming of our planet and the resulting changes in weather patterns, but again, the best we can do is to try to catch up with what we should and could have been doing for at least 30 years. This is not to say we shouldn't do anything, but I use it to point out the real flaw is our own submission to the "pragmatic" voices that dominate every conversation and the underlying instruction to comply with authority.

If we're going to change what is being done to us we have to look at what is coming, instead of focusing entirely on what has passed. If we are to make any difference. The major part of that is going to be to take back our power from those that hold it. Nationality or political party affiliation are irrelevant. Those in power don't care about them, they only care about gaining or holding power and will change their line or location in any way that helps them achieve those goals.

For those of us that knew what was going on in 2001 - 2002, don't waste the energy re-fighting a battle that has been over for a decade, look at what is happening now, at the preparations those with real power are making, and focus your energy there. For those of you that didn't get it then, perhaps you might want to give some credit to the people who were right and listen to what they're saying now, instead of ridiculing and marginalizing them because what they're telling you is uncomfortable or inconvenient to you.

The only real problems the USPS has are Congress and gross mismanagement.