And a Merry Christmas and Happy New year to everyone.
Took a long time to figure this out-lol. Response to Chinu.
What works. Democracy works as a political system and capitalism works as an economic system. But democracy has to vigorously monitor and regulate capitalism. And unions must remain strong.
Ask yourself, why did the US constitution work so well, when all of South America failed to establish democracies, time after time, and has been ruled mostly by military Juntas.
Our founding fathers, above all, put in counter balancing powers (three arms of government) and that probably was their largest concern. We have drifted from our constitution.
Going to war was not only SOLELY the responsibility of the congress. They cannot even delegate the responsibility to the President. But they did. Supreme court stealing elections and making decision based on primitive ideology alone, by rationalizing the law: 5/4,5/4,5/4,5/4.
And, Bush and Cheney, openly, setting up an imperial presidency using 9/11 to do anything they wanted right up to suspending habeus corpus.
As the Republicans controlled the congress for the first six years of the bush presidency, the deal was, we will not mess with you and you do not mess with us. So the Republican's stripped out all the rules and regulations they could. They literally worked to deconstruct the government and replace it with private businesse's with results like Iraq and Katrina and Wall street.
The congress, led by De Lay (imagine what his ideas are-lol) and an enthusiastic bush, cheney and the neo cons, tore up our laws and regulations, and fed as much money by whatever means they could to their rich friends. Bush never vetoed one bill for those entire six years. A new record. And congress did not challenge his imperial presidency.
The dems had no power and the US had no checks and balances.
So the toxic formula was first, no government and no rules, combined with the Ayn Rand "pure capitalism" ideology (Greespan was a worshiper of it and recently did a mea culpa) combined with 1% free fed money, and repeal of Glass Steagall, legislation to prevent regulation, leverage going from 12 to 1 to 40 to 1 and more with CDS insurance and all appointments made to emasculate government programs of oversight e.g. EPA.
Wall street started gambling with no rules at all and 40 to 1 + leverage and engaging in blatant fraud e.g. Moody's taking CCC paper and calling it AAA paper and then striping out the worst loans putting them in CDO's and selling them around the world. And they even gambled with trillions of CDS's thinking waht easy money getting these insurance payments.
They lost 10's of trillions in this gambling, and that loss is now bringing down the world in a massive deflationary depression caused by debt not being backed up by goods and services. This is what caused the great depression.
NO one knows what to do now, or where this is going. But the only failure was the failure to follow our consitutional structure of checks and balances. And this failure was super charged with the criminality and idiocy of the right wing neo cons.
Chinu, I was a planner and administrator for years and worked with budgets and politics daily, so I got to see democracy and human behavior first hand for a long time. In short here, when I set up programs I always set up advisory councils of very diverse people to oversee those programs. We have councils for everything-lol.
We are a small state, so democracy is very real to everyone i.e. everyone has power and is involved in decision making. And we build our institutions from the ground up. Not the top down.
Many people consider our state to have one of the best consitutions, especially for protecting indvidual rights, we are the richest state, our social systems are intact, our school systems are top notch and because of our permanent fund we pay no state taxes.
But personalities and political philosophy makes a difference. Looking back 50 years to our statehood almost every smart move we made was made by the lberal democrates. I can think of nothing the conservative Republican's did to help us except impede us. We had to fight them every step of the way. They were all like Bush, cheney and Palin-lol.
PS one of our founding fathers, the great Earnest Gruening, was one of only two senators to have the wisdom to vote agaisnt the Viet Nam war. This man in his great wisdom, along with seenator Bob Bartlett, both dems, got us off to a great start like Jefferson did for the country.
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Koan, so what in your opinion works. We know that communism does not work and recently we saw capitalism go into a tailspin.
It seems now retailers want bailout money. This is becoming some sort of a joke.
You think after Obama takes office, the banks will be forced to fall in line and tell the people what they are doing with the TARP they received?
And Greetings of the Season to you and all on this thread.<, |
