Photo courtesy of wikimedia.org
On June 13 in New York City, Hillary Clinton officially launched her presidential campaign.
“Democracy can’t be just for billionaires and corporations,” she yelled to the crowd of excited spectators and supporters (billmoyers.com).
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Photo courtesy of wikipedia.org
At OnTheIssues.org, you can find out where every U.S. representative and senator stands on every issue, including their voting records (how they have voted on legislation). As voters, it’s incredibly important that we keep an eye on what our politicians are doing and make informed decisions about who to support.
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Americans want a Government that functions.
Right now, Republicans seem to be doing everything they can to make it stop functioning.
Why?
Why are Republicans hurting America?
After watching FOX news for 1 hour, just 1 hour today, I’ve discovered that President Obama ( and it was hinted that he might not even be a ‘real’ citizen) and the Democrats are to blame for everything.
In fact, it has gotten so bad that Speaker of the House Republican John Boehner will be suing the President for issuing Executive Orders thus abusing his powers.
Interestingly enough, Speaker Boehner gave no specifics as to what powers the President was abusing……just that he was abusing them.
But Speaker Boehner was specific earlier in the day when he told the press that there would be no vote in the House on immigration reform this year.
And that’s when the President said he would act…
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By Robert A. Vella
A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released this month clearly supports the assertion that the American public is increasingly disapproving of its political leaders regardless of their partisan affiliation. This is a disturbing trend because a continuing rise in institutional distrust will eventually lead to social unrest, and at some point, internal dissent would destabilize the nation.
Yet, America’s political, business, and media establishment seems determined to maintain the status quo.
Here are the highlights from NBC News:
* * * * *
Only 32 percent of voters say their member of Congress deserves to be re-elected, compared with 57 percent who want to give a new person a chance.
And just 25 percent of Americans…
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Reblogged from The Secular Jurist:
By Robert A. Vella
America’s institutional establishment – those politicians, business leaders, and media pundits who reside in a sanitized and incestuous bubble apart from the lives of ordinary citizens – has once again displayed a self-serving disregard for any realities which cast a negative light upon it.
The Pew Research Center’s report released this week on the nation’s worsening societal polarization provides yet another example of this detachment. The prevailing theme heard across the airwaves Thursday blamed “political partisanship” for the increase in polarization. As John Sides editorialized on The Washington Post:
The Pew report doesn’t get into the origins of these trends. But I think the prevailing view in political science — for example, in Matt Levendusky’s “The Partisan Sort” or this article by Marc Hetherington– is this: political leaders polarized first, and the public has followed.
Sides also trivially equated political partisanship with sports fanaticism as if public policy were of no more importance than athletic entertainment:
The key here is not that people have become more attached to their own party. It’s that they’ve become more hostile to the other party. So polarization in American politics shouldn’t be understood as purely about ideology or issues — although that is certainly a component. It’s also about how people feel about the parties as groups. Partisan politics is increasingly like sports: you not only root for your team, but you really dislike the other. (Think Redskins vs. Cowboys or North Carolina vs. Duke.)
Perhaps even more troubling was his inference that participation in democracy cannot be civil:
People who are consistently liberal or conservative are much more likely to vote or donate. This may not be surprising. But it speaks to a real tension that is often unacknowledged. On the one hand, many bemoan the fact that so many Americans don’t know facts about politics or don’t vote in elections. On the other hand, many bemoan partisanship and ideology and yearn for moderation and compromise. Well, to put it bluntly, we don’t get to have a politically engaged public and a moderate one.
Considering the profound socioeconomic changes that have transpired in the U.S. over the last 3-4 decades, the hierarchical disconnect between The Establishment and The People exhibited by Mr. Sides seems most egregious. Over that span, inequality in America’s economic, political, and judicial systems have risen to alarming levels which threaten the very stability of the country. Americans are not becoming more polarized merely because of arbitrary politics, but because their deteriorating quality of life is making them more amenable to extreme political views.
Michael Eric Dyson vociferously expressed this populist angst from the political left on The Ed Show Thursday (see: The Nation’s Great Divide). The stunning upset of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor after Tuesday’s Republican primary election in Virginia captures well the populist angst on the political right – albeit for more complex reasons. Right-wing populism in America is further complicated by racial and religious tribalism, although the root economic causes are consistently shared across the political spectrum.
The issue of inequality-triggered populism is raising alarm bells throughout the developed world. Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), has been trying – along with other notable figures – to convince world leaders to start addressing the problem. Even Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein has admitted the “destabilizing” potential of income inequality, as ThinkProgress‘ Bryce Covert detailed on Friday:
Rising income inequality comes with a host of negative consequences: It pushes Americans into more debt, makes them sicker, makes them less safe, and keeps them from moving up the economic ladder. It also hurts economic growth, while addressing it through modestly redistributive policies doesn’t.
And it destabilizes the political system, as Blankfein predicts. Research has found that high inequality leads to a less representative democracy and a higher chance of revolution as the less well off come to believe that the government only serves the rich. And those people would be right, as our current political system is far more responsive to the wealthy — like Blankfein himself — and doesn’t listen to what the middle class and poor want and need.
Unfortunately, these admonitions from within establishment circles seem to be largely falling on deaf ears (see: Someone finally polled the 1% – And it’s not pretty). Apparently, a stubborn commitment to the status quo will be maintained indefinitely by the entrenched power elite. The costs of their intransigence will be eventually realized, though no one can say right now just how painful or destructive it might be.
Meanwhile, increasing economic stress and the widespread availability of firearms has created an epidemic of gun violence in the U.S. (see: Another school shooting, and America is completely ignoring what’s causing it). The European Union is struggling to survive amidst a resurgence of political radicalization. The Middle East is awash in sectarian warfare, South Asia is in turmoil, anarchy rules much of Africa, and the callous machinations of geopolitical imperialism continue to wreck devastation upon unsuspecting peoples all around the globe.
But, in the halls of America’s institutional establishment, the sound of “all is well” chimes loudly.
Further reading on the Pew report: 7 things to know about polarization in America
via Has America Gone Crazy? on Creators.com.
It might appear that the U-S-of-A has gone bonkers. So let me clear up any confusion that you might have: Yes, it has!
Yet, it hasn’t. More on that in a moment.
First, though — whether looking at the “tea party” congress critters who’ve swerved our nation’s political debate to the hard right, or at the peacocks of Wall Street who continue to preen and profit atop the wreckage they’ve made of our real economy — it’s plain to see that America is suffering a pestilence of nuts and narcissists in high places. These “leaders” are hell bent to enthrone themselves and their ilk as the potentates of our economic, governmental and social systems, and they are aggressively trying to snuff out the light of egalitarianism that historically has been our society’s unifying force.
Bill Moyers, America’s most public-spirited journalist, summarized the…
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via GOP’s new plutocratic populism: A bizarre vision of the working class – Salon.com.
FRIDAY, MAY 23, 2014
What’s the way to win over struggling middle-class voters? A union-busting right-to-work act, says Mitch McConnell
JOAN WALSH
Tim Scott, Mitch McConnell (Credit: AP/Jose Luis Magana/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
Fresh off his victory over Tea Party challenger Matt Bevin, Senate Minority LeaderMitch McConnell headed to the American Enterprise Institute Thursday to make himself over as a GOP populist. The party, as you’ve heard, has decided it needs “middle-class outreach” – since it’s given up on outreach to women, Latinos, African-Americans and the LGBT community – and thus some intellectuals and politicians have tried to craft “a middle class agenda.”
While the party should continue to stand for the free market and business interests, McConnell said, it had to face facts: “For most Americans whose daily concerns revolve around aging parents, long…
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Reblogged from The Secular Jurist:
By Robert A. Vella
When progressives look at the Democratic Party, they see both great potential and abysmal leadership. Its potential rests with a latent numerical advantage in elections which will only grow with time. Its leadership at the national level, however, has largely failed to exploit this enormously valuable asset. Now that the Democrats’ 2014 midterm election strategy is being revealed, it appears once more to be plagued with the mangled political priorities of self-defeating pragmatism.
From: Priorities USA Action-Hillary PAC-will NOT support Dems in 2014
The Priorities USA Action PAC, supporting Hillary Clinton for President in 2016, says it will NOT support any Democratic candidates in the off year election this november…This according to The Ed Show this afternoon…
Priorities USA Action was the largest liberal super-pac during the 2012 presidential election cycle. It raised over $79 million in donations and spent over $65 million in advocacy ads to reelect President Obama (see: http://www.opensecrets.org/).
From: Democrats: Cede the House to save the Senate
With Democrats’ grasp on the Senate increasingly tenuous — and the House all but beyond reach — some top party donors and strategists are moving to do something in the midterm election as painful as it is coldblooded: Admit the House can’t be won and go all in to save the Senate.
Their calculation is uncomplicated. With only so much money to go around in an election year that is tilting the GOP’s way, Democrats need to concentrate resources on preserving the chamber they have now. Losing the Senate, they know, could doom whatever hopes Barack Obama has of salvaging the final years of his presidency.
The triage idea is taking hold in phone conversations among donors and in strategy sessions between party operatives. Even some of the people who have invested the most to get House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi back into the speaker’s chair are moving in that direction.
As the great Green Bay Packers (NFL) head coach once yelled in frustration from the sidelines, “what the hell is going on out there?“
Obviously, Democrats are in a dispirited mood after a rocky 2013 which saw their leader in the White House suffer damaging hits to his popularity. The NSA surveillance revelations, the ongoing drone strike killings, the authoritarian persecution of journalists, the secret Trans-Pacific Partnership trade negotiations, the botched Obamacare roll-out, and the fake Benghazi and IRS scandals, all contributed to Obama’s presidential approval numbers falling by nearly 15 percent.
If that wasn’t bad enough, Democrats also know that the voter turnout they depend on drops precipitously in midterm elections (see: http://elections.gmu.edu/voter_turnout.htm).
But considering that the Tea Party-dominated GOP has done nothing to endear itself with the majority of the American people, one wonders why Democrats aren’t tackling this last problem head on.
From: How progressives can turn the deep South blue
Sitting at the intersection of these crossing currents is the state of Georgia. In the past few years, every demographic trend in Georgia has favored progressives. Ruy Teixeira at the Center for American Progress sums it up nicely:
In the last decade, Georgia had a rapid rate of increase in its minority population, going from 37% to 44% minority over the time period. The increase in the minority population accounted for 81% of Georgia’s growth over the decade.
How has this played out in elections? In 2000, whites made up 75% of voters in the Georgia presidential race. Twelve years later, they made up 61%. Mitt Romney won the state, but only by 304,000 votes – despite the fact that Obama hardly invested any time or energy there.
The question of whether Georgia will become blue is actually a question of when. The answer to that question depends on voter registration. There are more than 600,000 unregistered black Americans in Georgia, plus thousands of unregistered Latinos, Asian-Americans, women and millennials. At an average cost of $12 per registration, it would cost less than $8 million to register virtually all of Georgia’s unregistered black voters. If even half of them had voted for President Obama in 2012, we would be having a very different conversation today.
That’s over 800,000 unregistered people in Georgia alone who would tend to choose Democratic candidates over Republican candidates if they could be motivated to vote. What might motivate them to vote? It certainly isn’t the status quo corporatist politics practiced by both parties at the national level. On the contrary, it is the message of economic populism that speaks directly to the experience of everyday Americans which might motivate them to vote. Why aren’t Democrats promoting this message? Why aren’t Democrats countering the Republicans’ anti-government propaganda with a public information campaign that advocates for civic participation?
Why aren’t Democrats answering these questions? Do they want to lose the 2014 election? If not, they sure have chosen an odd strategy. Trying to minimize losses is not a recipe for victory.
“No one knows which drop of water is the one that will bring down the levees.”
League of Bloggers For a Better World 
