Yeah, right - I got some swampland I've been trying to unload! Easy pickings!!!
Politicians, especially at the top and especially this regime, do not make strange bedfellows with corporate executives and billionaire heirs. It's not intervention but oversight that is necessary. If someone breaks the law and should be prosecuted, I don't call that intervention. I call that justice. They will make all the gestures, yes including the liberals, of protecting us but are they really? They are ultimately going to protect the big money that put them into office. We are just the instrument -- the voters who are given virtually no choice as to what kind of a second-rate attorney or businessman we are going to elect to office. It's also not beneath us to elect second rate actors...
So what would you suggest as a resolution?
Quote:You sure can paint 280,000,000 people with one stroke of your brush. I'm sure none of the adjectives you used for Americans do not apply to anybody else in this world.
The sphere of influence of the American way of life is indeed enveloping the globe. Although I am an admirer of the ambition, energy and resourcefulness of America, I fear that the unregulated capitalist system it drives upon will also become more and more detrimental to internatinoal civilizations and their well-being. As long as the system is built upon the axiom that, eventually, your own neck is much more important than that of the others, and that it's all against all. This is the philosophy of corporate extremism that tries to dominate our lives.
In the long run that's a very unhealthy lifestyle, for all of us.
PL
I don't want to be misunderstood. I'm not at all anti-American. But I'm formulating a critique vs. the capitalism that the Bushes advocate, and that lingers in the American way of life: competition instead of altruism.
I can assure you that the European continental citizens have understood that you need to regulate capitalism politically, or the worst of the human character will, eventually, win the capitalist struggle and dominate economics.
That's precisely what your country is suffering from, and consecutively the world.
Philosophically, you need a change towards less competition in economical models, and more altruism.
A resolution? Don't get frustrated about how the government works because there isn't much of a way to change it short of revolution which would also be an exercise in futility. As Voltaire said at the end of "Candide," just mind your own garden (and then Candide's cow dies).
I don't blame those who don't vote as a protest -- one can change government about as much by voting as not voting. Machiavelli wrote the bible for opportunistic politicians and it's worked ever since. Those who have the gold make the rules.
That's not true at all. I thought the last presidential election proved that. If more people had gone and voted, Gore may have won. Then, imagine what a rosey world we would live in!
What's not true? Anyone who thinks Gore would have been any better or worse is living in a world of delusions. Actually, more people did vote for Gore anyway -- our system of government is corrupted from the bottom up or the bottom down?
ok....
*Backs away from LW.*
It's the truth. With Gore as president we certainly would have had less covert ops trying to dupe the public.
Considering what I was saying before (c.i.), here's another way of formulating it:
"The fact that Bush is keen on war has little or nothing to do with his psyche, but a great deal with the American economic system. This system -- America's brand of capitalism -- functions first and foremost to make extremely rich Americans like the Bush "money dynasty" even richer. Without warm or cold wars, however, this system can no longer produce the expected result in the form of the ever-higher profits the moneyed and powerful of America consider as their birthright."
Source
That's what a Darwinistic system amounts to: violence as the most extreme way of assuring economical gains. Only in America, I'm afraid
Actually wolf, in many other countries it is worse. It's just that it has become so obvious and blatant under the current regime!
I have trouble believing we'd be any better or worse off with Gore. The artificiality he picked up from who knows where (?) certainly didn't instill confidence in me. When he debated Ross Pirot on Larry King, he was deft and devastating. Where did he lose that? I wonder...
I think Gore was so sensitive and calculating to public opinion that it sometimes paralyzed him. But he is also one of the rare decent human beings in current politics... still alive anyway.
I had a basic tendancy to mistrust Gore, because his father had been a Senator, and Gore essentially grew up "inside the beltway" (which hadn't been completed when he first went there, but i think my point will be taken). However, i began to mistrust Bush right away, the way he was rakin' in the cash, and an early story that one donor had given well over the limit by making donations in the names of his grandchildren. Where there is smoke, there is often fire. I voted for Gore more in the hope that we wouldn't get Bush, rather than any great admiration for Gore. I agree with LW's assessment of the type of governance we would likely have gotten, with the caveat that Gore would not likely have felt impelled toward war in the middle east, as he would probably have been less beholden to the energy industry, and had no direct connection to it, and didn't have any legacy of revenge from his father.
In other words, even if Gore's heart is in it, his head is likely not in it (at least, not as he used to be perceived).
I don't believe after Clinton that most Democratic politicians aren't succumbing to the lure of the clout that energy entities have in our society. Grey Davis was taken in by Enron hook, line and sinker and it may be his downfall. He can bitch and moan now about how he was cheated (that's what happened in Orange County when a democrat was hookwinked by the sharp-shooters at Merril Lynch -- and "Lynch" is hardly a misnomer).
We would have likely signed the Kyoto Agreement but I even wonder about that.
Who has the ear of our politicians? The ones who manage to slip them a buck under the table. Okay, more than a buck...
I didn't care for Gore either, so why did I vote for him? Because a friend of mine was appointed to the commission he set up to make sure that the internet would be made accessible to everyone, regardless of income and rural situation or whatever barrier might stand in the way. She was VERY surprised by the guy and said so. Far from being stiff and low-key, he was active, interesting and very effective and not afraid of being considered a progressive. So, in spite of all the gibes and jokes and media spin, and though I'm still not personally enthusiastic about him, I think he's the real McCoy -- because my friend was. He has to take responsibility for his own (bad) campaign in the end, but I tend to point my finger at Donna Brazille who I think is a major chump. Well, and the damn DLC. Remember, in spite of them, he won.
On the California energy crisis (which is now being used against Grey Davis, who is admittedly below par), I think it was a set-up. A little bit of media attention would blow that one open, I'm convinced.
The media does seem to have a tendency to look the other way, espcially wheh it contradicts what they've been tooting their horn about ad nauseum. Grey Davis has the naive accounting demeanor about him that fails to gain points with the press.
But isn't he considered, even by his supporters, to be a bit of a loser? That's been my impression...
He didn't lose even if the election was close. Every governor in every state is in the same situation with cash shortfalls, having to cut back on services and finding ways to tax that won't get so noticed. Here, it's a new tax on cigarettes being proposed, under the guise of imporving the public's health. Yikes! Will see where this recall effort goes -- it seems to be an effort to get Arnold to run for governor. Of course, if he only lasts one term, he can always say, "I'll be back."
