The River

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

This is satire:



Unfortunately, when Obama is President, we'll be able drag this week's New Yorker cover out, tweak it a bit to show that the violent ideology flies under an intact, not burning, American flag, and it WILL work as satire. After all, obama, like Bush, doesn't seem to have any problem with using terror to try to subjugate a region to the fundamentalist tyranny of so-called American interests.

Comments:
Re: Nader & covering fire.

Right on, Bruce. As MLK would tell Ralph Abernathy, "Get on over there (with radical positions on issues) so you can give me some space to move." My problems aren't with Nader or Paul, they're with the 2-party system. If we had a Green Party in America, one that could hold congressional seats and which got public funding, it would be a political force.

As it is, votes can be drained away from one Corporate Party candidate, handing the victory to the other. If you ever meet GHWB in a club, it's a great idea to ask him about Ross Perot.

Paul, Barr and Nader could easily total in at 12-16% of the vote. Democrat operatives typically see Paul and Barr as hurting McCain, but I think on balance they hurt Obama more. All 3 are strict Constitutionalists, as am I, and that's why I'm so against Obama's FISA vote. He squandered a golden political moment when he didn't filibuster, and McCain didn't even show up at all.

I think it would be a very smart idea for Obama to offer to meet with Nader, and with Paul.
 
Difficult not to simply wallow in depression with the sure and certain knowledge that we've lost all forward progress, and in fact are pretty much back where we started in the late 19th century as far as labor and economic regulatory safeguards are concerned.

The aristocracy pushed back against organized resistance from the working and middle classes and they won. Sadly, I think not even Nader and certainly neither Paul nor Barr have an interest in encountering the problem of class struggle head-on.
 
frank,

for class restructuring to be revived in a meaningful way, we have to "bottom," and we're not past The Lifestyles of The Rich and Famous yet.
 
class struggle is the nub of it, isn't it? The "privatize the benefits, socialize the costs" approach" is a powerful destructive force with a great PR machine and a horde of zombies (and they don't admire you, Marc).
 
I think the system is breaking up. They, the elite, have overreached, and whether each of them loses all their power and wealth, or whether just most of them, the end result is likely to be less power for any of them.

On the other hand, that does not necessarily mean a gain for those in the lower classes; more like a shrinking of the level of disparity between the top and the bottom.

"It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine." - REM
 
Leigh and I were quoting that just yesterday, Rick. Also another REM song, "the world is collapsing around our ears..."

May you live in interesting times...and have decent pop culture.
 
fp, comment from a fine post at Reconstitution:

“When economic power became concentrated in a few hands, then political power flowed to those possessors and away from the citizens, ultimately resulting in an oligarchy or tyranny.”

John Adams
 
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