Do you like Bill Moyers? He is not happy with the Democratic Party. He lays out the problem very, very clearly in this video:
In it he says that the problem is the Democratic Party, that we have two corporate parties, the Republicans and the Democrats. If we don’t pass meaningful health care reform, don’t put Ted Kennedy’s name on it. If what we get because of the influence of heavy money in our party a very watered down bill, that is not health care reform. Money, money, money.
Watch it, especially if you’re not outraged yet. Then decide what you’re going to do about it.
Remacrats and Depublicans… makes no difference …. campaign finance is at the root of it.
I don’t think it’s quite that simple. There’s a lot of overlap but there are major differences on the edges, we juts need to clearly recognize the large area of overlap and work to expand the edges
Hailed by who would be a key component.
It’s not just health care …. it is the energy bill too ….. too many Blue Dogs and not enough Mad Dogs
Folks are welcome to support Progressives (with votes or money) anytime.
I do not see our (the Progressives) job as one to “take down” the D’s (as many believe is our goal). But in fact, if we grow, it puts pressure on the D’s to expand those margins and make a more clear difference with the R’s.
I will be the first to admit, there are many good individual D’s who serve in DC and in Montpelier and in local governments. However, the group think and advisors and paid consultants all go the same way…towards that preverbial “middle”. It makes the language used become muted on many key parts of the issues.
We lose because we have lost before we have even begun on most issues. This is because too many politicians are afraid to talk about the real challenges we face and the changes in policy that we need to make on a regular ongoing basis. This means the advocacy groups stop using the language as well (Single payer for instance)
Since Reagan we have reversed our tax policies and now governments and working people are suffering for it. We can barely talk about raising taxes on the wealthiest. Even this last session we gave away $6 million in income taxes to the richest 1000 Vermont taxpayers.
We have an unwillingness to truly speak of the changes and sacrifices we all need to make with respect to energy consumption and our environment.
Universal, single payer healthcare is virtually off the table. Not because Obama bargained it away…but because it has not been talked about seriously by “talking heads” in leadership positions for a long time, so “the people” are not prepared to fight for it.
We can not expect people to get behind something that is little understood unless we are willing to stand up and repeatedly talk about it, even in the face of fire from the right.
I am sure I will get challenged on this. I will be told the party (Democratic) would be better etc. etc. if the “lefties” all joined it. But considering Washington does not have the third party caucus that Vermont has…I am not sure how the argument holds up. They seem to have drifted without having lost people to the dark “third party” left. There are plenty of lefties in the D party…generally they get a small cookie and are asked not to make too much noise.
There is a great article in the Nation this week about the filibuster and how the Democrats have the ability to 1) get rid of it (thus removing the power of the blue dogs, Baucus and Nelson etc.) or 2) at leats make it be the real act that it used to be where someone truly had to get up there and talk non-stop until people either agreed or voted on it. Apparently (I did not know this), now it is just a motion that anyone can make (without public disclosure who) and so it is far easier to do than it was when one had to read book after book and take the heat for truly gumming up the process.
Anyway…I digress. The point it, there are enough Democrats to do the right thing. I hope they do.
At this point the best I can hope for (and I am not holding my breath) is that they will allow for states to do single payer so we can show how it will work.
Paul Krugman’s excellent NY Times op-ed today – entitled “Missing Richard Nixon”…
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08…
The drum I have been banging for a while is a new civil rights movement – but oddly enough, one of the majority. No racial content here, so bear with me, please.
Read the US Public Interest Research Group study, “The Wealth Primary.” The short and nasty (On average, nationally): Whichever candidate in a congressional primary spends the most money wins, 9 times out of 10. The high spending winners outspend the #2 candidates 3:1 – it’s not even close. Most of this money, about 80%, comes in donations of more than $500. A lot of it comes in $1,000 checks.
So, a primary candidate with opinions that might offend millionaires has, at best, a 1 in 10 chance of winning. In reality it is worse, because the #2 and #3 candidates generally rely on big donations as well. A lot of potential candidates never make it into the process due to their relative lack of funds.
The reality is that the wealthiest 0.1% of our population is the de facto nominating committee for congress. They vote with their checkbooks and then we pick from their selections.
There needs to be a civil rights movement for the 99.9% of us who can’t afford to write multiple $1,000 checks at every election.
The political donation limit should be a day’s wages at minimum wage. That should be multiple matched by the FEC. 7:1 would make a $50 donation into a $400 donation, probably enough to get around Buckley v. Valeo. It would cost us about $2.5 billion a year. We’d make that back 100 times over in savings.
Public financing would turn the whole system on its head. Bill Gates and the guy who mows his lawn would have the same clout. Likewise the CEO of a health insurance company and the poor schmuck paying in premiums.
I don’t see much chance of success at anything intelligent or beneficial to the general population until we get the big money out of the system. And that is going to be a fight and a half.
VT will easily break $2M next year just for the governor’s race, maybe even $3M. Throw in the Senate and House seats, even if unopposed and we are over $4M. Boggles the mind.
Thanks for the Krugman piece. It is incredulous how far gone toward ungovernable we have gone and how we have let the corporations win. It is almost like we need a completely new system of government, say a parliament-type, and completely jettison what we have now as it is so corrupt that it is unworkable. We will not get any kind of meaningful health care reform, on the Federal or the State level, until we either change our government or get another party (progressives in Vt)that is not so beholden to money to do it.
Canada looks better and better every day.