How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, & the Middle Class Got Shafted

Politics and religion
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The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted

It’s a book, but it’s a political book, so I figured this was the better forum. Just finished reading it last night. Pretty quick read, only took me a couple of days.

Lofgren is a Republican staffer who started in the 80s and gradually grew disillusioned with the direction the party moved, eventually retiring and writing this book. He’s very up front about this, and uses lots of anecdotes from his time on Capitol Hill in the writing. The majority of the book rips into just about every aspect of the current Republican party, with frequent asides pointing out how the Democrats aren’t any better.

Underlying everything is the primary point of the book…there’s too much money in politics. Whether it’s superPAC contributions or defense contracts or fundraisers in Washington, the money drives everything. Lofgren’s suggestion for a fix (limiting all elections to public money, removing all the advertising dollars and fundraising) makes sense to me, but I can’t see it ever being enacted since it would have to somehow make it through the very system that it’s trying to fix.

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Note that this book is written by the same author of the “Revolt of the Rich” essay linked earlier.

The insight on current problems and how they developed is excellent, but I agree that the last chapter on ways to reform seemed depressingly utopian. If you had any functioning actors (a media with a backbone, an informed and motivated public, good men in government), it could happen but right now it seems like it could only happen in a movie script.

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Ideally change has to come from some of all three of the things you mention, wisefool, but mostly from an informed and motivated public. Unfortunately the last times any major improvements happened in the US (the Progressive Era reforms, the New Deal) it was because people with influence and education realized that their goose was going to be cooked if changes weren’t made. So I think it’s going to take events and conditions on the scale of what was happening ca. 1900 and 1930 to wake people the f*ck up.

4

Civil Rights and the Great Society weren’t major improvements?

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Of course they were. Of course, the Great Society has to a large extent been rolled back. What I meant was that in those earlier periods, the rulers felt a real existential threat to the social order. I don’t think that was really the case in the '60s, however turbulent they were.

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The Great Society had a lot of things in it, only a few have been gutted. Civil rights, medicare, and medicaid are bigger than ever. There’s a lot of things in that list, and really only the War On Poverty has been cut.

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I used to live adjacent to Columbia Heights, a neighborhood in DC that was burned out in 60s riots. There were entire empty blocks almost 40 years later (the neighborhood is now thriving). The era may not have been as difficult as the great depression for middle-class whites, but our country had some serious issues.

8

Couple of things showed up in my RSS feed today that fit nicely into this narrative of “both parties are beholden to big money”:

JP Morgan’s Food Stamp Empire

How the Government Failed to Fix Wall Street

9

Well, perhaps, but that example is a poor one. If I’m punching someone lightly in the arm for fifty years and one day he hauls off and wallops me, that’s not equivalent.

10

Exactly. We are all probably screwed…unless…i don’t know? vote for anybody but the Republicans and Democrats, en masse? perhaps? Oh and switch off the darn talk-radio/TV ‘opinion’ news already - it is pure poision.

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The horror of the Tea Party aside, they did actually demonstrate that activists can make a difference in this country. Maybe it’s easier to do if motivated by hate, I don’t know. But, I do know I’m guilty in not making a difference - my participation begins and ends with monetary donations to politicians and groups I agree with and nothing more.

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The problem with that assessment being that the Tea Party was underwritten by massive amounts of corporate cash, directed by Beltway insiders, and carefully nurtured by a major media outlet. The activism of individual Tea Partiers may have been sincere, but the movement, such as it was, had a lot of external benefactors that undercut the idea that it was a purely activist group.

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I stand corrected. Thanks.

Here’s an organization some of you might be interested in: No Labels. A non-partisan group desinged to bread Congressional gridlock. Here’s a list on their current roadmap:

[ol]
[li]Continue to generate widespread support and ultimately implement all of the reforms in the Make Congress Work! action plan.
[/li]> [li]Introduce and promote the Make the Presidency Work! campaign
[/li]> [li]Grow our supporter base to more than 750,000 to help create a constituency for problem-solving in Washington and across the country
[/li]> [li]Build a network of more than 50,000 Digital Leaders who will lead the effort in spreading the No Labels message online and across all social media.
[/li]> [li]Monitor and track the activities of all members of Congress so citizens can reward those who are working to solve problems and call out those who are playing hyper-partisan games.
[/li]> [li]Host a Meeting to Make America Work on January 14th, 2013 with 1,000 citizens in New York City to send a message to the leaders of this country that there is a powerful constituency of people who want to end the political posturing and start problem-solving.
[/li]> [li]Create a No Labels congressional “working group” of 40 members in Congress that will provide a space for lawmakers from both parties to work across the aisle to solve problems.
[/li]> [/ol]

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Goo-goo idiots, in general. They don’t even know how the fucking filibuster works, judging by their reference to “real” vs. “virtual” filiusters.

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I read this thread before work and wanted to respond but didn’t have time; you, however, stated it better than I would have anyways.

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I poked around a bit and No Labels is another rich insider pretend-non-partisan variant, really something. Really.

McKinnon worked on George W. Bush’s campaign before becoming a senior executive at Hill & Knowlton, the Beltway PR firm whose clients prior to his joining included the tobacco industry as it tried to suppress proof that cigarettes cause cancer, and Bank of Commerce and Credit International after it was hit with faced drug-money laundering charges. It continues to represent a variety of dictatorships around the world, and is currently helping the oil and gas industry confuse the public about the health implications of fracking.

Jacobson worked for Bill Clinton, conservative Democrat turned Chamber of Commerce lobbyist Evan Bayh, and and the right-leaning Democratic Leadership Council, and has a raised large sums of money for “centrist” (right-leaning) Democratic candidates. She also reportedly worked as a de facto industry lobbyist, as a PAC Director raising money for Congressional candidates sympathetic to her industry’s interests.[1] She is married to another Washington insider, Mark Penn, who is the CEO of Burson-Marsteller.

Walker is a longtime associate of right-wing billionaire Pete Peterson (who, as his press staff never fails to reminds me, sometimes also funds less political areas of economic research through his Foundation.) Walker’s work with Peterson, however, has been dedicated for many many years to the single-minded pursuit of a policy package that would cut Social Security and Medicare benefits while simultaneously lowering the top tax rate for the wealthiest Americans.

McKinnon’s scam is premised on the notion that the American president is not powerful enough to “get things done.” No Labels is all about “getting things done,” as though history were not replete with examples where simply “getting things done” for the sake of doing so led to misery, deceit, and the Bay of Pigs. (These people owe the estate of Richard Neustadt a big honking royalty check.) Anyway, here’s what No Labels thinks the problem is:

Just over four months from now, we will elect either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney as president based on what they say they want to do. But America’s future will be decided by what our president can do in the years ahead. And increasingly, he can’t do enough. Almost 40 years after Congress began the post-Watergate roll-back of the “Imperial Presidency,” America’s chief executive now arguably faces too many impediments to enacting his or her agenda.

These people have to be kidding. Were they alive in the past 40 years? Almost all of those “post-Watergate reforms” — which can be more accurately described as “post-Vietnam” reforms, since the price of the imperial presidencies in question was a few million dead Asians — have been repealed, gutted, or simply ignored. The revelations of the Church Committee into the activities of the CIA had the primary result of helping elect Ronald Reagan with a Republican Senate in 1980, which led to the crimes of Iran-Contra, which the “rollbacks” in presidential power seem to have not hindered in the least. How’s the War Powers Act doing these days?

17

‘Republican congressman Paul Broun dismisses evolution and other theories’:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/06/republican-congressman-paul-broun-evolution-video

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This is about education in the usa, especially the middle class aspirations, and i have a theory why it wraps up nicely into the thread title, so here is the link to the bbc article:

‘Downward mobility haunts US education’:

An integral part of the American Dream is under threat - as “downward mobility” seems to be threatening the education system in the United States.

The idea of going to college - and the expectation that the next generation will be better educated and more prosperous than its predecessor - has been hardwired into the ambitions of the middle classes in the United States.

But there are deep-seated worries about whether this upward mobility is going into reverse.

Andreas Schleicher, special adviser on education at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), says the US is now the only major economy in the world where the younger generation is not going to be better educated than the older.

“It’s something of great significance because much of today’s economic power of the United States rests on a very high degree of adult skills - and that is now at risk,” says Mr Schleicher.

“These skills are the engine of the US economy and the engine is stuttering,” says Mr Schleicher, one of the world’s most influential experts on international education comparisons.
To borrow from Fox News, ‘I’ll tell you what i think’…i think in particular in the usa the whole personally paid for (and all ways getting more expensive) education thing has just been a method of social control of the middle class, and of course it is the 1% ers that are behind it, from pushing the legislation to manipulating the ‘education market’ value. By taking wealth from the middle class you effectively weaken their ability to effect wider society, they eventually become, financially speaking, working class and just part of the big powerless poor. You also ensure they are not comfortable enough to sit around and analyze to understand and then be able to criticize and hold those in power to account.

These past decades we have seen the 1%ers push for ‘world domination’, through every avenue available to them (from manufacturing financial market crashes, to the election system, to education) and make no mistake, they really want a world of only masters and slaves and chances are you are on their ‘slave’ roster.

So whenever you see someone on the ‘right’ try to justify this re-balancing of power (for whatever reason), you need to see it for what it is, the will of the 1% to entrench their new feudalism on the world. This is, as always, especially apparent in the usa, you are a vital lens for the free world and where this stuff happens first.

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I’m not 100% sold on the claim that the younger generation is less educated in the positive sense of that word, only that they are getting fewer formal degrees. The younger generation is far better informed about the world and how it works than their parents were at the same age, IMO, because of the internet. Yes, perhaps that means that American dominance is fading as knowledge becomes easier to obtain, but the solution isn’t to push more people into college, it is to identify the types of learning that are necessary and make knowing those things cool.

Also, there is no conspiracy of the 1% - everyone tries to get as much as they can, and some of them actually care about how their actions affect the lives of others, while some only care about how they ensure future profits.

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The younger generation is far better informed about the world and how it works than their parents were at the same age, IMO, because of the internet.

I don’t know how old you are or if you have kids but from my experience (I am old and have 20 +/- kids) I can’t agree with that statement. Granted there is news of the world on the internet but just because kids access the source of the news doesn’t mean they pay any attention to it.