October 18, 2014

Amen. Actually, I think there would be an explosion of creativity and innovation in this country

if we had a guaranteed living income. How many people do you imagine are never able to go to school or develop their real talents or follow a dream, because they get trapped trying to find or keep a drudge/make-work job, any job, in the corporate hamster wheel, just trying to survive? One third of Americans risk homelessness by missing a single paycheck.

People complain that Americans are stupid and lazy, but our whole system is set up so that most are toiling all day as corporate drones and coming home at the end of the day too broke and exhausted to do anything except turn on the boob tube and get a dose of corporate propaganda.

I'm always reminded of those heart-stirring photos people post here all the time, of how shelter animals are transformed from hopeless, dull, pathetic creatures into vibrant, busy family members, just by ensuring they have their basic needs met. Yet we are supposed to believe that the same dynamic doesn't apply to human beings.

If not a guaranteed living income, then at least a living wage, and restructuring of the system to keep everyone out of poverty. The truth is that 21st century technology and productivity don't REQUIRE a 40-hour work week anymore. We have enough wealth to give everyone freedom from fear and a life beyond constantly scraping and competing to survive. I think you would see tremendous new creativity and innovation. It would take breaking the monopoly on profit and power, though, and the corporations and CEO's prefer it the way it is.

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October 18, 2014

The partisanship is all great theater.

The real agenda has nothing to do with party. It's about advancing the corporate policy agenda that enriches and empowers corporatists in both parties.

Corporate politicians want us to think they have fierce loyalties to party, too, but their real loyalty is to the agenda of the corporate masters who reward them. The only reason everyone is so confused about "weird" behavior is that we persist in believing that party is as important to them as it is to us. They'll use the parties any way they can, and they'll happily manipulate and collude across party lines, to get the AGENDA.

October 18, 2014

The political con game in corporate-owned America.

Corporate Republicans must be batshit crazy, so that corporate Democrats can continue to move rightward.

October 18, 2014

Well, maybe we can "compromise" at 69 and a half, then?

October 18, 2014

Important, important OP. IMO we've learned that the real goal

of corporatists in both parties is divided government, not majorities. "Gridlock" is their excuse for continuing to shove a predatory corporate agenda down our throats in the guise of "compromise," even though the "compromise" never resembles anything either side out in the country wants.

They know that any party with strong majorities cannot continue to claim to be unable to respond to the will of the People,

The con game is very familiar by now:

Perhaps the administration is not really all that into having progressive majorities in Congress.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1014&pid=337938

For so long we mysteriously fell short of Democratic votes for filibuster reform.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021809132

The Democratic Party’s deceitful game
http://www.salon.com/2010/02/23/democrats_34/

And all the examples of bizarre support for candidates from the other side, or withdrawal of support from our own candidates who could have won, or attacks on the party's own base.

Both sides work to make sure that neither party wins too much. They get away with it because they keep us hyperpartisan and misperceiving their intentions and goals. We are taught to believe, and we want to believe, that our corporate-backed party leaders see elections the same way we do: as a battle between two fundamentally different parties, one of which we desperately want to win over the other.

They don't want us to realize that things have changed. They want us to remember when corporate influence lived only in one party and to maintain the old assumption that they have a deep attachment to one side or the other, too. They want us to assume that they are as invested in the partisan game as we are, when the truth is that their first loyalty isn't to party at all.

Their first and only loyalty is to continuation of the corporate agenda that enriches and empowers them. They don't give a whit which side actually wins, as long as the agenda can be continued and advanced. They don't want us to realize that they now happily use *both* parties, and manipulate our attachment to them, in order to keep that agenda going.

To pretend that politics today is about one party versus another is to entirely miss how corporatism works and fall for the theater and the con game. We have to keep remembering the corporate money that floods Washington on both sides of the aisle and watch *policies,* not party.

K&R, and I think this should go to the Greatest Page. I think this is a critically important OP. We have to rethink the game that's actually being played here.

October 17, 2014

They're certainly working on it:

Financial growth of private prison industry...Profiting from caging humans.

http://l.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/BshteP8i282pcaeH8pdUsA--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7cT04NTt3PTUyMA--/

We heard about private prisons...but do you know of the private probation industry?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025380204

NYT: Probation Fees Rise, Firms Profit and the Poor Go to Jail
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002893040

No Safe Place: How Cities Are Making It Illegal to be Homeless
http://www.democraticunderground.com/101699724

Thrown in jail for being poor: the booming for-profit probation industry
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024603515

The exploitation of Ferguson I: In 2013 the town issued over 24,000 arrest warrants..
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025404667

The exploitation of Ferguson II: The Seamy Underbelly Of Ferguson Starts To Appear
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025416747

The exploitation of Ferguson III: Ferguson Feeds Off the Poor: Three Warrants a Year Per Household
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025428157

October 17, 2014

K&R. If our government weren't corrupt, this would be an emergency vastly dwarfing 911.

We would have politicians addressing crowds with bullhorns, expressing outrage about the gutting of our middle class and devastation of the poor, the destruction of major parts of our Constitution's Bill of Rights, and vowing a relentless response to restore this country to the people our government is supposed to represent.

Instead, what's on the horizon? Another round of food stamp cuts signed by our Democratic president. Implementation of a farm bill based on more "pension smoothing." A new extended war in the Middle East, that just happens to continue the PNAC playbook. A new trillion-dollar ramping up of US nuclear weapons from a Democratic President. Use of our money to carpet-bomb a captive population in Gaza. More defense of mass surveillance and secret laws and secret courts, and the impending imprisonment of a journalist who dared to promise confidentiality to the source whistleblowing about it. And two more massive, predatory "trade" agreements that will further gut jobs, force Americans to compete with Third World wages, and hand corporations the power to censor the internet and override democratic protections of human beings and the environment against their abuses.

October 17, 2014

Oh. My. Word.

Thank you for that absolutely perfect example of Third Way arguments for predation.

October 16, 2014

Don't miss this one, too. TPP to be a disaster for public health, betrays administration promises.

The TPP is a holy grail for corporate liars and predators. It is a massive assault on human beings and on democracy itself.

October 16, 2014

K&R But no more pretending it is only the GOP doing this.

Corporate money, corporate policies, and the corporate Third Way are a raging cancer within our party, too. Corporate corruption is SYSTEMIC now and must be fought in both parties.

Time to fight privatization from both parties: