To make realistic and rational decisions that can be expected to have value, it is first necessary to see the truth, most importantly starting with being honest with one's own self. If we only look for information to support the rationalizing of predetermined decisions, it is the same as accepting being lied to. The following are truths that if ignored or rationalized, they make resulting decisions highly questionable at best.
* Bush-Cheney, with the complete and irresponsibly stubborn support of the Republican Party, were aggressively arrogant and even obnoxious in saying anything to control public opinion and then doing whatever they wanted to benefit only the few.
* The Republican Party has constantly said anything and everything to fault every effort by the Democrats, while trying to block/obstruct all efforts to address problems.
* The Republican Party has literally made no positive or constructive contributions.
* With the strong support of Special Interests and the select few, who benefit, the Republican Party has relied on subterfuge to appeal to people's fears and emotions.
* The Republican Party has clearly put their political ambitions above all else as they show no concern for responsibilities or the American people.
* The Republican Party has openly demonstrated their efforts to intimidate and coerce their own people in demanding full support for the Party's positions, even to effectively squelching individual consciences.
* There is an obvious intention to have Republican Party representatives be 'puppet' like in their adherence to the Party's goals and in benefiting Special Interests and the select few, most often without regard for the 'puppet's' qualifications or quality.
* You can't trust what they say as they say anything to manipulate public opinion, then do whatever they want and then say whatever they think will rationalize what they did.
* All of these things clearly demonstrate a grossly dishonest unified and stubborn pursuit of a private agenda to benefit the few and a total disregard for their responsibility and the substantial costs to the majority.
* The current Republican Party is literally owned and controlled by the powerful, influential and extremely wealthy few.
It is a shame there isn't one perfect choice but there isn't as the Democrats are far from perfect. In 2003 I became fed up and totally alienated by Bush-Cheney and the Republican Party and changed my registration from 'Republican' to 'Undeclared Party' (independent). Nothing has changed since and I remain heavily concerned over the Republican continuing gross dishonesty and for their arrogantly taking the American people for granted. There is no doubt in my mind that the Democrats, while not perfect, currently offer a more conscientious choice and then the possibility of ever returning to 'more of the same' literally scares me.
The Wisdom of Crowds
When populist rage leads to smart policy.
Email To A Friend
Please fill in the following information and we'll email this link.
John Dingell is one of the few people in Washington who remembers the last time so much populist anger gripped the country. It was early 1933, the worst year of the Great Depression. The Michigan congressman, now 83, was a wide-eyed kid listening to his father—also a congressman—speak at the family dinner table about losing his entire net worth of $7,500. "Americans all hated the damn bankers, they hated Wall Street," Dingell tells NEWSWEEK. "We had more communists in this country than there were in the Soviet Union because" of rage against the so-called banksters. No one knew this better than the incoming president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. The story is told that a supporter warned FDR that if he failed now, with the nation in chaos, he'd be known as "our worst president," and Roosevelt supposedly replied: "If I fail, I'll be your last president." FDR exhorted his New Dealers, "Above all, try something!" While it took time to get going, the hodgepodge of recovery programs he came up with—some successful, others not—managed to appease most of the populist outrage.
Barack Obama isn't saddled with the same degree of economic disaster as Franklin Roosevelt; the nation suffers 10 percent unemployment, which is bad, but it's not 25 percent. Yet the 44th president may face a political problem almost as sticky. Obama, like FDR, must appease populist anger rising from both left and right. Obama's giant stimulus, his health-care plan, and his continuation of the Bush administration's various bailout programs have ignited a prairie-fire backlash from the right (fueled in part by cynical Beltway Republicans). They call themselves tea partiers. The left's outrage is less organized (it's the left, after all), but reflects a visceral sense that the president has coddled Wall Street and given short shrift to Main Street. "The Democratic base is out of patience here," says a senior labor leader. "We're at a breaking point." There's something deeper at work beyond politics. We've witnessed an epic failure of the establishment—political, financial, business, even cultural.
All of which adds up to a very unhappy moment for Obama. The president and the Ivy Leaguers he has surrounded himself with are not natural populists. Since its appearance on the scene in the late 19th century, the language of populism has been one of opposition and incitement, clashes and fights—the Eastern bankers vs. the Midwestern farmers, rich white urban elites vs. poorer rural whites. That's not the language Obama traffics in. When the cerebral Obama inveighs against "fat-cat bankers," the phrase doesn't trip off his tongue. He's a community organizer, not a rabble-rouser. And he must know that populism, generally speaking, has been the refuge for losers in the American political process. No populist candidate has even come close to the presidency, though Teddy Roosevelt hit the 27 percent mark with his Bull Moose run in 1912 (he'd already been president, after all) and Ross Perot amassed an impressive 19 percent in 1992. William Jennings Bryan, the original Populist candidate, was the Democratic nominee in 1896, 1900, and 1908, but received fewer votes in each successive campaign.
Above all, populist uprisings usually careen out of control, driven by mindless anger. To some extent that's what is happening now. By the time of his confirmation vote last week, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke had been blamed for everything from Alan Greenspan's deregulatory policies to the flawed oversight of Wall Street, even though most of the worst-hit financial institutions were outside the Fed's supervisory reach. Yes, Bernanke made mistakes—serious ones—in the run-up to the financial crisis. But he also arguably did more than anyone to pull the global economy back from the brink of a Great Depression. Bernanke survived, but his populist penance was to suffer the largest "no" vote ever in the history of the Fed chairmanship, 70 to 30, with damage to the Fed's reputation that could be permanent.
Even so, smart presidents don't confront the populists head-on, they defang them by giving them some of what they want. After FDR launched the New Deal—and John Dingell's father helped to write the Glass-Steagall law separating commercial from investment banking—the nation slowly recovered and Roosevelt's personal popularity soared. Populist rabble-rousers like Huey Long on the left and Charles Coughlin on the right lost their resonance (or, in Long's case, were assassinated).
In recent weeks Obama has tried to mollify both populist camps. To satisfy the left, he announced a $100 billion fee on large banks, a new jobs program, infrastructure investments, and middle-class tax cuts. He also abruptly embraced a proposal from one his most prominent progressive critics, former Federal Reserve chairman and sometime adviser Paul Volcker, to ban banks from risky trading. Appealing to the right—and, increasingly, a piqued center that includes deficit-hawk Dems like Evan Bayh—Obama has announced a three-year spending freeze for discretionary programs that don't include defense and national security, Medicare, or Social Security. Above all, hoping to appeal to both sides, Obama has become far more strident in speaking against Wall Street.
- 1
- 2
- 3
- Next Page »
Discuss