Republicans control the Congress, the Supreme Court, and the White House. The Senate is about the only bulwark against the Chaos, and the bookies are saying it’s about to go, too.
Also, @andy_hilmer, Warren has been asked about 624730657012 times and she’s very firm about not running,
Hrm. I think it’s good that ya’ll are holding Democrats’ feets to the fire, but the party’s been getting much, much better about things since 2006, when for the first time they were able to win elections by not-apologizing for being lefterds of the Rs. Since then the right-wing Democrats have been losing ground to the point where don’t entirely run the party any more. Think back to the pre-2006 era and tell me things are not different.
A lot of the right-wing Ds are still running around, and they and some Rs are getting nominated to jobs and holding swing seats, but the right-wing credentials of the D leadership are at least debatable now, and the right-wing Ds have been stumbling as much as the Rs. Right now the only thing the left wing of U.S. politics can do is hold up the mirror to the public and let more and more areas lose faith in the right-wing fantasies. As optimism goes, it’s not much to go on, but too many think politics is about ultimate triumph. That never happens.
The best we can do with our democratic-republican sovereignty is to push the debate forward, bit by bit, and keep our sovereignty from drifting out of our grasp. It was a near thing in the nineties and early nulldrums, but things are definitely different now. The fraud class thought they’d be firmly in control of all corners of government and the media by now. Whups. Ultimate triumph never happens: it’s just a sign of the impending collapse of popular support. In the absence of a full police state, victory is never assured.
I agree. But it’s still agonizing.
Not-quite-half-ass Malformed Poe is the name of my new Nouvelle Vague cover band.
Letting corporations take the blame for the actions of the people inside it is still a little like blaming a car for hitting a pedestrian.
If you’re a BitCoin entrepreneur and someone uses your system to buy drugs, you go to jail.
If you’re a big bank and do billions of dollars of laundering with the drug cartels, you get a fine.
The justice system isn’t even corrupt…
[nod] Another way of looking at it is that the financial/political system is more-or-less working as designed. Most of what we see as bugs are actually features, as far as the people who have the most direct influence on the system are concerned. Laws, regulations, and even fines have become mere formalities – just some of the costs of doing business, and costs that can be contained by sufficent investment in lobbying.
Hell, as noted by Matt and others, even the big fines are designed to be partly illusions. When you dig behind the flashy headlines, it usually turns out large chunks of “fines” can be written off via tax policy and/or take into account costs for things the company would (or should) be doing anyway.
The Executive (of which the “Justice” Dept is a part) is owned by Obama (D.
The only way for the D voters to get the attention of the D party is to be willing to enforce ideological purity, that is - they have to be willing to lose elections to get rid of the “bad” Ds, a la the tea party.
We can hope a Democratically minded individual owns the first company to mine an asteroid.
That’s all I got.
Oh, you still count the President as a Democrat? I think of him as a moderate Republican.
If this was 30 years ago, but no, I think he acts like the entire leadership of the Blue party. If you want the most liberal president in the last 40 years, I think you need to look to Nixon.
I think Nixon is every Teaper’s nightmare of a progressive President: liberal actions for the sake of convenience and popularity mixed with pathological lawbreaking, paranoia, and willingness to massacre large numbers of people with troops and bombs—except for that pesky approval rating. Their projections onto Obama are pretty telling.
…just another politician - its all talk
This statement is a bit to unravel. Besides, aren’t corporation legally recognized as people? Makes it even more complicated.
Corporations only see money and respond to money. By monetarily punishing a corporation for the actions of those within it, the corporation will only then try to govern the actions of those individuals within it and take measures to prevent it from happening in the future.
Otherwise it will turn a blind eye as long as money is being made.
In addition the individuals should be held accountable.
Iceland also has a GDP that’s still about 25% below it’s pre-crash peak, having been as much as 40% down. Closing down its banks was an unprecedented economic disaster, leading to the worst recession of all of those arising from the credit crunch. Its unemployment rate is low because being a small country with its own currency has made it easier to make everyone 25% poorer instead of spreading the pain more unevenly due to economic inertia.
When that loss of GDP was in a sector made up of overseas business transacting non-real goods in an unsustainable way, calling the collapse of that sector an “unprecedented economic disaster” is pushing it a bit. Unprecedented economic disaster is more along the lines of a collapse of food production, or the appropriation of your industrial capacity by an occupying power.
The fact that Iceland was able to recover from this with a devaluation and a commitment to regulate their financial sector a bit better is a testament to the adaptability of fiat currency in a modern economy. The fact that they’ve decided to join the euro anyway is kind of baffling. I feel the same way about the Scottish establishment endorsing a trade of the pound for the euro. If the eurozone doesn’t achieve real fiscal union in the next few years, the whole project is going to collapse to shit in the old-timey “unprecedented economic disaster” kind of way.
Does GDP really correlate closely with individual rich/poor? Does quality of life, and other important non-macroeconomic parameters, correlate with GDP? How did GDP become The Number, and how many economists have to be shot in order to establish a better metrics of national success?
Economists are happy to use other measurements if they are useful. GDP is a useful, yet not all-encompassing measurement of overall activity which doesn’t say much about the balance of activity within that measurement. Economists are often eager to use other measurements, and often discuss the balance of activities contained within GDP, yet GDP remains a good measure of overall activity. The only people who invest the measurement with moral weight are ideologues.
Instead of shooting a profession, let’s shoot the masters of rhetoric-for-hire. Who do you think came up with the happiness index, especially as an alternative to GDP? A lawyer? Perhaps a venture capitalist? It was an economist.
All of them?
