the consistent effort by conservative, corporate dems to try and tarnish progressive

[JDPriestly]

29. This will make very little difference in the lives of working people and families.

Obama needs to get ideas from the working people and families themselves about what needs to be done. Enforcing existing antitrust laws and asking for new, more stringent ones would help. That would make it possible for small businesses to grow and compete, businesses that try to start out on Main Street and are crushed by the conglomerates.

Another idea would be to make sure we get net neutrality. That gives small, local businesses the opportunity to reach local customers through the internet. If we lose the neutrality we have now, the big companies will get even bigger and smaller companies will have even fewer chances to do well..

Same for working people. The TPP will again take a chunk out of our manufacturing sector. It could even completely put the finishing touches on the destruction of that sector.

But most important, Obama needs to do something really new and set up local commissions of ordinary people who come up with ideas for solutions to the nation's problems. And Obama needs to meet with those groups just as he does with Jamie Dimon and other big business representatives. Just having conversations on the internet with occasional ordinary people in no deliberative context is pretty useless -- just a show and not very meaningful. Obama needs to hold much more dialogue with people outside Wall Street and the beltway.