Why are all those busy body adbusters people riling up plain folks?
Educate yourself.
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I don’t know what to make of the liberals for Ron Paul phenomenon except that they seem to edge towards the “Single Issue voter” side of the spectrum. Civil liberties and war are the primary problems for them. If I recall correctly, Matt Stoller voted for Obama in the primary because of his reputed anti-war position. I can remember the day that Stoller announced his decision on Open Left even though up to that point he was at least pretending to be objective.
But I would like to suggest that the best way to end the wars and take on the military industrial complex once and for all is to fix the economy. Because the vast majority of Americans are stressed out, trying to make ends meet. It was already stressful enough before the crash of 2008 to keep a job and everything that goes with it, like money for housing, food, healthcare and retirement. Now, it’s almost impossible. And when people are that stressed out, trying to keep track of dozens of tasks and walking on eggshells to make sure they’re not on the list for the next layoff, they don’t have time to get all up the grill of the US government about wars. Did you notice what happened to the anti-war movement since 2008? From what I can tell, it’s been replaced in the news with endless bad economic news.
So, to those single issue voters who have the luxury to pick lint out of your belly buttons and get all breathlessly righteous about the war, turn your attention to fixing the economy. It shouldn’t have to be said again, but the economy was THE most important issue in the 2008 election. Because if you want to keep the anti-war pressure up, you need to get people to care about it. And right now, they’ve got more important things on their minds. I know this is a foreign concept to young men who have no families to worry about but, frankly, your single issue? Not even on our radar right now. That’s alarming, I know. That doesn’t mean we aren’t just as anti-war as you are, especially those of us who have brothers over there (I do, do you?). It’s just that we are fighting our own wars right now and feeding our kids is more important. That’s how the bad guys get their way and their wars. They distract the very people who care.
People who are overwhelmed with fighting for their own economic survival are less interested in their civil liberties and war. It is, and always has been, the economy, stupid. Fix that first and the rest will follow. And if you are following that much of my logic, then you will stop toying with the Ron Paul option.
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As long as we’re speculating on whether it is acceptable to vote for the lesser evil, why don’t we take a poll?
Of course I can throw Hillary on that list. Whether the Matt Stollers and Chris Hedges types like her or not, the Stollers and Hedges types are a tiny fraction of the American electorate and they may find out just how tiny a fraction they are come election day. There are much bigger fractions out there that the Democrats are in danger of losing right now, like women and people with families and the unemployed. Remember, it’s the economy stupid. So, if you had to pick a lesser evil, why not Hillary? How much more eeeeeevil than Barack Obama is she? The party changes its rules when it wants to. Right now, it *thinks* it can shove Obama down our throats again but there are plenty of us who are not interested in what either party is selling. Give us a different option, someone we see as less evil, and we might come back.
Think about that. Do you want a Democrat in the White House or Barack Obama?
Filed under: General | Tagged: Chris Hedges, Economy, Matt Stoller, Propaganda techniques, Ron Paul, single issue voters, unemployment |
The Confluence 
Here in Kansas we’re losing thousands of jobs when Boeing closes all it’s Wichita operations…… It’s a terrible tragedy all the way around. Those are pretty much the best jobs in the state. We might gradually get more jobs to replace those. But, not at the pay levels of the jobs we’re losing.
Why are they shutting things down? Because with there isn’t enough war business on the horizon to keep them going.
It’s like a devious form of blackmail.
Too bad there isn’t anyone at Boeing thinking about some way to use their assets for good.
The Detroit auto makers have been blasted for years (rightfully, IMHO) for not keeping up with with foreign cars and expanding their horizons. I heard a lot of that when they were “bailed” out – that they were blamed for their problems.
Obviously the same could be said about Boeing….strange that they are not being pressed to be creative and expand their business into other areas.
I remember at the end of the Vietnam war defense contractors going through the same thing and wondering how they could transition into domestic product manufacture. The problem was they were so used to the government handing over wads of cash to keep projects going whenever they fucked up they couldn’t compete. I worked for a company that had a military products division, the culture there wasn’t quality but how to make the stuff pass the governments QC tests.
Forgot to add that the tree huggers were always complaining that Detroit didn’t build the small fuel efficient cars they wanted. They were building what was selling and made them the best profit 4 wheel drive pick-up trucks and SUV’s. Two things did them in, the gas price spike due to speculation, and finances drying up in the wake of the housing bubble collapse. Ford came though it because they had gotten their operating capital financing done before the shit hit the fan.
Actually, a lot of people did buy the small economy-efficiency cars. It is just that Japan and Europe were making them, not Detroit. The Detroit approach was captured by Henry Ford II’s famous comment:
“mini-cars make mini-profits”. So the Detroit car companies somewhat backed themselves into an island of big car specialization.
Oil and gas prices were due to rise eventually due to building shortages of supply compared to longages of demand. Remove the price spikes and troughs due to speculation and the price will still rise due to more people wanting oil versus less new oil waiting to be discovered. There are institutions and groups who study and write about this. ASPO (Association for the Study of Peak Oil), ODAC (Oil Depletion Analysis Center), TOD (The Oil Drum), as well as individuals like Matthew Simmons (now recently dead) who was a famous-within-the-industry oil-banker in Houston, a great friend of the Bushes, and a raiser of firmly voiced suspicions that Saudi Arabia had/has nowhere near the amount of oil they pretend to have. All this can be googled.
One thing we can be grateful to Obama for is his permission/mandate to his pack of experts to organize a fast-forward forced bankrupty of GM and Chrysler to save the parts worth saving and lend them the money to save themselves if they can. I believe they are repaying the money out of Real Earnings, not like the banks who are “repaying” the TARP money out of secret Fed lendings. (In the same spirit, we can be grateful to President Clinton for breaking Gingrich’s drive to become Prime Minister and forcing Gingrich and his Repuglans into their part of a tax-and-budget regimen which was paying back down the Reagandebt. See how fair I can be?)
But this is GM’s and Chrysler’s very last chance. If they go bankrupt again through another round of bad decisions and bad behavior, no one will rescue them. Not Obama, not anyone. That is why Obama doesn’t have my vote even though he has my gratitude for
the GM-Chrysler rescue. Because if they need it again, he won’t be able to do it again anyway, so I have to think about what else he will do based on what else he has done. And we know he will keep conspiring to destroy Social Security and we know he will keep conspiring to make the Bush Tax Cuts permanent under cover of pretending to seek “new taxes” on “the wealthiest”. And that’s not something I can vote for unless the Rs nominate a candidate designed
to push America into the kind of civil strife which would lead to a Spanish Civil War situation. That’s why I find it so important that the Rs nominate Romney or Huntsman. Though if their convention is so deadlocked that they have to broker it for someone like the Country Club Republicans Libby Dole or Kay Bailey Hutchison I could live with them as President too. But not with one of the Rapturists or Armageddonites or Dominionists or CLAN authoritarians which the Rs will nominate if they don’t nominate a Romney or a Huntsman or a Dole or a Hutchison.
I reluctantly voted for Hillary. The reluctance is because she isn’t evil.
Are you waiting for a doe-eyed female to ask you to what you attribute your reluctance?
uhhh … RIF?
I also do not believe SOS Clinton is any shade of evil; I voted for her, too.
Mr Mike, I couldn’t vote for that same reason. She isn’t evil. So I could not vote.
Can we have another category please?
I voted for Hillary. 🙂
Nobody gives a crap about the war(s) when the sheriff is at the door and the kids are hungry. Nobody.
Last night, I caught Phil Donahue with Piers(gag me)Morgan, and I swear that old Phil is flirting with Ron Paul because of Paul’s anti war stance.
That’s fine Phil but what about Paul’s other crazy ass ideas like abolishing Social Security and Medicare?
Oh, that’s right, Mr. Marlo Thomas is never going to need the shreds of the safety net, so he has the luxury of supporting nutty uncle Paul.
It turns out that some of the liberal one percent is as tone deaf, if not as heartless although the results are the same, as the conservative one percent.
Marat, we’re poor!
As usual, sharp and incisive writing, riverdaughter.
Social Security and Medicare, Obama isn’t?
In no way was I making a statement of support for Obama.
There has to be some sane, honorable alternative to this clown car of candidates.
Sorry for the c word.
Phil also supported Nader. These people are idiots when it comes to politics. They do not suffer the consequences the way every one else does.
Apparently they haven’t noticed that Ron Paul doesn’t give a crap about civil liberties, he just doesn’t want the federal government involved. He’s just fine with the states doing whatever they want.
He’s a neo-confederate whose brand of libertarianism is one of the surest paths to actual tyranny. Supporting him is just plain stupid.
Heck I think people are so desperate to find a candidate that they agree with on something that they’re even willing to give Paul a look/see. I mean if you’re against the war you at least have that in agreement with Paul and which you don’t have with either Obama or Romney.
That may be right but liberals supporting Paul are still emotionally needy children under the surface. Note that quite a lot of Paul’s support in ’08 wound up voting for Obama.
He’s the only candidate I know who can go from zero to batshit insane in 2 words. Nobody else comes close.
Obummer and Uncle Scrooge McPaul have something in common: both are candidates who gain popularity by offering false hope.
Here’s the lunacy of that idea, the liberals who supported Obama wholeheartedly in 2008 are proposing to abandon him in 2012 for a candidate with a Dickensian economic worldview. Why won’t thy just lean on their own party to replace Obama??? Wouldn’t that be a better option for everyone in the long run? If they don’t like the candidate their party is offering, they should be screaming for an alternative and having a hissy fit and holding their breath. But they don’t. They don’t because they don’t think it will work. They haven’t even tried it but they think it won’t work. And then there is the possibility of Hillary. I swear, the guys, and they are all guys, who are ready to chuck Obama for Paul have a pathological problem with women. It has to be sexism.
I have no problem with them turning on the Democrats for dicking around in the past 3 years and giving us a banker lackey like Obama. But this is not the way to do it. Unless ou want a catastrophe. If you can avoid one and get a real Democrat to run, isn’t that a better option?
But but but…if they did that someone might call them a racist! That’s why I say racisr is the new communist. Both terms in their time were drained of meaning in order to kneecap those who stepped out of line.
They tried, remember?
they do not see her as a real democrat. They see her as they always have, an appendage of Bill who is a hawk, a b*tch and where she is only because she is married to him. She is no better than Obama and would have run things just as he has done. In fact it is probably her bad advice that has led him astray.
Well I keep asking this and draw blank stares. When you have a charter member of the Obama Fan Boyz Club Robert Reich stating that Biden needs to be dumped for Hillary, there’s some DC Dem Elites sweating bullets about what is going to happen in November. I keep saying that no one is willing to deal with the real problem: Obama. They are proposing changing VPs or hoping the GOP will self destruct (not an impossibility) or willing to do anything but deal with the real problem. To me if Obama has been such a failure, then they need to go talk to him and tell him that if he runs, he’s going to be a certain loser and that he should step down and we can hold a primary. Of course, at this date, it’s too late to have a primary. I think most of us are either looking at sitting out the election or finding a candidate we can vote FOR.
Unfortunately, that is the way I see this. Paul is the worst candidate of the bunch, by far. He just cloaks who he really is with his anti-war and legalization of drugs schtick. The reality is that he wouldn’t end any war or legalize any drug.
So we’d all be stuck with the libertarian madness of wanting to eliminate all government programs that actually do good. Can you imagine how bad crime would become if we didn’t have food stamps, public education including the school lunch program, federal student loans and grants, AFDC, Medicaid, SS, Medicare, etc. I just shudder to think of how bad and how quickly our society would degrade.
I think this is partly a death wish. If it gets bad enough, there will be crowds in the street that will make occupy marches look like charming little street fairs. And I can see the method to that madness. But there are still a bunch of us who have to feed our kids. And paradoxically, they could be making the whole situation worse because the fundamentalist eschatologists will be having a filed day. The more catastrophic it gets, the more they will egg Paul on. They want society to fall apart. The quicker the better. If children die in the process, they comfort themselves with the notion that they will be resurrected into paradise.
Don’t look at me in that tone of voice. I’m not kidding. So, what we have here is a battle of eschatologists. One wants a new enlightened democracy, the other wants a old testament style theocracy. I just want both groups to take their meds.
Neo-Confederate, absolutely. I was talking to zee French husband tonight about Paul’s view that heavy-handed government intervention dates back to the civil rights movement. What, as if Jim Crow weren’t one giant government intervention? One that affected everyone, from the anonymous poor to the most highly privileged, in both the public and private realms? (The Federal Government was segregated under Woodrow Wilson, which proved disruptive to FDR’s office.) And what is the Civil War but the most colossal government intervention of all time–and over slavery? F.U. Ron Paul.
He’s literally the last person I want in office.
You and me both. He wants to kill our parents. He likens Medicare to handing someone an open-ended credit card. How fucking irresponsible of seniors to persist living in their dotage! Pro-life my pasty white ass.
Not to mention he’s just about as bad on women’s rights as Santorum, All those liberal asshats threw women under the bus big time to support him. Guess we shouldn’t be surprised by that.
Well, my vote put Hillary up to 87.59%. I don’t think she’ll run, though. Why would she allow her name to be linked to the possibly-terminal fustercluck which has been engineered for us?
My brother is not there. But he was near there last year. He was in
Qatar for a 4-month stretch.
My brother was on a communications ship off the coast of Iraq when the war started. He was a Navy communications specialist and after 20 years retired to continue teaching but as a civilian. I am so glad he was never closer than that. Had Iraq ever been a real military threat he would have been in danger. His ship would have been a main target. As it was, I mostly knew he was going to be okay. I worried anyway. I have four brothers, I’d hate the idea of a world without any of them.
This is off topic (sort of) but, I just stumbled across this link to a government site designed to help people find Health Insurance.
OMG — I’ve always thought that at $950/mo our insurance was too high. I was totally wrong.
How long can this situation last without totally blowing up?
It can’t continue on as it is for much longer or it’ll sink a lot of people and small businesses.
On the bright side, I became eligible for Medicare this year and found supplemental coverage, which seems very good, to be affordable.
I punted, ie I emigrated.
Wish I could. … I wonder if they’ve got Universal Health Care in the Azores?
Wonder if I could afford to live in the Azores? If I could I would go back to Australia but can’t emigrate at my age, darn it.
{{snort!}}. Or Tahiti.
My mom has first cousins there. I know for a fact I’d be welcome. Also, The Archbishop’s will gave my family permission to stay in his house through August. Every August. How weird is that?
I think that once you get there, it’s pretty cheap. Airfare is a killer though.
Tahiti is expensive but some of the other island nations are really cheap. For example, a resident visa in Tonga only requires an income of $6K USD per year.
I want to be adopted.
I’m assuming the deals off if I stay in Kansas? … And do you need a lawyer for an adult adoption?
me also Ralph. I am too young but 25 years of back issues accidental and congenital took their tole and I am now on medicare. It’s a pretty darn good deal. Everyone should be on it and if they were, it would be much cheaper. With all those young healthy people paying in to it, can you imagine how healthy medicare would be? And also, people could leave their corporate jobs and start new businesses if they had medicare they could take with them.
This is just great. Buddy Roemer on Democracy Now.
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/1/6/buddy_roemer_gop_pres_candidate_who
I do not get it. How can they deny this guy a chance to be in the debates? He is more sane than Ron Paul.
Sing it, Mavis.
OMG — My sister just a second ago posted this exact same video on Facebook!! I guess I’ll have to watch it… 🙂
Coming at you from all directions. Can’t escape Mavis 🙂
Nice!!
Here’s an interesting video. I originally read about it in a Facebook Link, .
I had never heard of Matt Stoller till I started reading his articles (which I like) on Yves Smith’s NaCap blog. I didn’t entirely like all aspects of his Ron Paul article, though. Still and all, I wouldn’t have thought of him as being connected to Chris Hedges. Or is that only a connection-by-analogy in terms of their not being representative majority-ordinary types of people?
I dimly remember Vast Left. I think I remember it being announced as a sort of serious talk-shop blog where serious politicogressives and stuff could write about strategy and tactics and stuff with eachother. I dimly remember seeing an article there by Digby about how the sort of rebellion/ identity-display which led young people away from or against the Democratic Party in the late 60’s must never ever ever be allowed to happen again. Disaffected Democrats must be kept Democratic at all costs no matter what. I KNOW I saw that article. But I don’t remember for sure where I saw it. Maybe Vast Left, maybe somewhere else. Perhaps that is why she brought Atkins onto Hullabaloo. Perhaps she feels it is now chips-are-down desperation panic-button time for the Democratic Party.
The Capital Steps lampooning corporate greed. Would that it weren’t so true!