bnw wrote:

“Conservatives can at least say, “Yeah, I hear what you’re saying, but I don’t care because other people aren’t my problem. I’m in it for me.”

I would say I don’t want other people making their problems, mine. Especially if they choose to live what I consider an immoral, extravagant, reckless life. That definitely should not be my problem.

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Well, i think you summed up a core fundamental difference between Left
and Right, right there with that paragraph.

I am always looking for statements with that kind of clarity.

That was very clear. I also talked to a liberal, Catholic, Grad-School-Educated professional the other day who said exactly the same thing. He was a Clinton supporter, btw.

At any rate, the core difference I am talking about here, stems from how to view human “choices” and the question of how/when do conditions overwhelm or influence ‘choices’.

w
v

Yes, i like him too. I bin skimming his book. Got it for a penny at amazon. I came across him in an Adolph Reed article. He influenced Reed, apparently.
(Reed is in this thread:

"Identity Politics is Neoliberalism"

w
v

Mackeyser wrote:

Wow!!! Had never heard her speak before! This will be the easiest ballot to cast!

I’m good with Bernie until they kick him out, then it’s Jill Stein.

#noregrets

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Ditto

w
v
—
“…While working people struggle, over 90% of income gains have gone to the top 1%, corporate profits have tripled, and the richest 0.1% now owns more than the lower 90% of us combined. A mere 20 billionaires now own as much as the entire lower half of the US population. Globally, only 80 billionaires own as much as the entire lower half of the world’s population, 3.5 billion people.

This unconscionable state of affairs cannot simply be blamed on greedy Republicans. The President himself has been leading the charge, with bipartisan Congressional help, to slash food and medicine for the vulnerable, cut critical social programs by nearly a trillion dollars in 2011 alone, and repeatedly threaten Medicare and Social Security. Meanwhile, Democrats oversaw a $16 trillion bailout for big banks and $5 trillion in tax favors for the wealthy. They made the Bush tax cuts for the rich permanent just as they were about to expire, and locked in low capital gains and inheritance taxes.
Source: Green Party response to 2016 State of the Union speech , Jan 12, 2016

Just somethin i read.
w
v
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http://www.salon.com/2016/04/24/bernies_greatest_legacy_suddenly_its_ok_to_question_capitalism/

Bernie’s greatest legacy: Suddenly, it’s OK to question capitalism!

Sanders will never be president, but he unveiled an explosive political truth: Capitalism has eaten democracy
Andrew O’Hehir

Bernie Sanders is not going to be president. But in defeat he has accomplished something extraordinary, probably something more important than anything he could have achieved in four or eight frustrating years in the White House. For the first time since the end of the Cold War — and perhaps since the beginning of the Cold War — large numbers of Americans have begun to ask questions about capitalism. Questions about whether it works, and how, and for whose benefit. Questions about whether capitalism is really the indispensable companion of democracy, as we have confidently been told for the last century or so, and about how those two things interact in the real world.

Bernie Sanders did not invent those questions or cause them to emerge, to be sure. They have emerged from a whole range of objective conditions and subjective perceptions, including the dramatic worsening of economic inequality, the near-total paralysis of our political system and the awakening of an entire generation of young Americans, supposedly from the non-poor classes, who have graduated from college tens of thousands of dollars in debt. But Sanders has served as an important channel or catalyst for such questions and the shift in consciousness they represent. He or his advisers appeared to see or sense a rising current of discontent that took nearly everyone else by surprise.

After several generations in which a capitalist economy dominated by the neoliberal policy prescriptions of tax cuts, deregulation, privatization and fiscal austerity has been understood as the natural order of things — and as the oxygen necessary to nourish democracy around the world — the Western world’s entire leadership caste has been startled to encounter a resurgence of systematic nonbelief. To the bankers and politicians, it feels almost as if a crusty old Vermonter had come close to stealing a major-party presidential nomination on a platform of Flat-Earthism, or by professing that the moon landing was a fake. (Those politics, to be fair, are largely confined to the other party.)

For many decades, all lingering remnants of nonbelief in the goodness and naturalness and blessedness of capitalism have been endlessly derided and driven to the margins of political discourse, which now looks like an admission of weakness or the work of a bad conscience. In the United States, “socialism” became a bad word, apparently poisoned forever by the disastrous failures of Eastern-bloc Communism. (While the situation has always been different in Europe, most of the so-called socialist parties have drifted steadily rightward and embraced market ideology.) Pockets of socialist or Marxist thought could be found in the groves of academe, layered in dust, but in the realm of politics those terms belonged only to zealots and weirdos. Cornel West’s pre-Bernie quest for an alternative radical politics, for instance, led him into the arms of Bob Avakian and the Revolutionary Communist Party, a tiny Maoist sect that has haunted the far left since the mid-’70s.

In its eagerness to avoid all such associations, the Democratic Party has spent the last few decades prostrating itself before the temple of Big Money — a process greatly accelerated under the husband of its current frontrunner — and renouncing any semblance of class-based politics or egalitarian economics. You can almost understand why West found Avakian’s revolutionary fantasies refreshing, or at least honest. (The six-hour videos are tough to take.) What the Sanders insurgency has exposed, even more clearly than usual, is that the Democratic Party does not represent the material interests of most of the people who vote for it. (This is of course even more true of the Republican Party.) Those who insist, in tones resonant of “get off my lawn,” that it’s time for Sanders voters to grow up and support Hillary Clinton in the name of party unity are missing the point of the 2016 campaign, perhaps deliberately.

That Clinton is preferable to Donald Trump or Ted Cruz in the near term, for most Sanders supporters, is not in question. But the assertion that we need to get over all this nonsense about “free stuff” and get back to real politics is itself a tactic of warfare, in an overarching conflict that will long outlive this particular nomination battle. The division between Clinton and Sanders is more than symbolic or semiotic, as the 2008 division between Clinton and Barack Obama largely was. Hillary Clinton stands with and for capitalism, forcefully and forthrightly. Sanders’ position is more paradoxical, perhaps of necessity, but let’s put it this way: He stands outside capitalism and to some degree against capitalism, far more so than any American presidential candidate of living memory.

The Sanders campaign was an attempt to seize power in the Democratic Party, largely from outside, and renounce its allegiance to capitalism and its subservience to the entire package of economic, ideological and military imperialism sometimes called the “Washington consensus.” The true danger that campaign presented to the American political establishment lay not so much in Bernie Sanders himself — an unlikely candidate, and a less likely nominee — as in the
heretical ideas it embodied, which may now prove difficult to contain.

I never thought that Sanders had any realistic shot at beating Clinton. (He got closer than I ever expected.) Furthermore, I was never convinced that was a viable solution to any of our problems. Sanders calls himself a socialist, at least sometimes, and within his coy or imprecise rhetoric about “political revolution” you can discern an awareness that revolutions don’t start from the top, and that their goals cannot be achieved by electing a new figurehead. I voted for Sanders in the New York primary, for all the good that did anyone, but Hillary Clinton’s supporters have had a viable case all along that given the system we have, she makes a more plausible chief executive for the corroded American republic.
The problem, of course, is precisely that: The system we have doesn’t work. Maybe it used to work a whole lot better than it does now, and maybe it just looked that way — that’s a tendentious historical debate that speaks to important underlying questions, but we’d better set it aside for now. But almost no one, across the ideological spectrum, will try to convince you that the interlocking systems of American politics and the American economy are functioning smoothly for the benefit of all. Reckoning with that political and material reality has required impressive rhetorical agility from Clinton, who more than any other current or former 2016 candidate stands at the intersection of those systems and represents their promise of stability and order. But then, no one has ever accused her of an unwillingness to change her mind, or an inability to mold her language to the moment.

Last week I took a first stab…… see link

Zooey wrote:

bnw wrote:

wv wrote:

I’ll tell ya though, people always want to talk about
the ‘middle-class’ and helping the middle-class. Politicians
just love talking about the MC. But I’d prefer it
if they’d talk more about the flat-out-Poor.

The emphasis on the MC kinda suggests the poor
dont ‘deserve’ help but the glorious middle-class does.

Middle class is the engine of job creation. It is also the largest group of consumers of means. It is also a reasonable quality of life which is why it is aspired to by the middle class and the poor. It is also a starting point with a certain level of inherent advantage in which to attain greater economic success. The concept of upward mobility is appealing to most people.

I am inclined to agree with bnw, here. And I think it is because I see the fortunes of the middle class and the poor more-or-less hitched together. You find huge disparity gaps between the rich and poor every so often. In those cases, the middle class has also been weakened like the poor. You don’t find big gaps between the middle class and poor, with the middle class’ prosperity tied to the wealthy and only the poor left behind. Unions were a great binder, but even in their absence, the two classes have more in common than they do apart in terms of the trajectories of their circumstances. I think, anyway. I think you will find that the arcs of their experience are pretty similar whereas the line denoting the wealthy will operate independently. Helping the middle class helps the poor. Helping the poor helps the middle class.

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Well, I dont know that i agree that “helping the middle class helps the poor”.

I’d liken the situation to…oh…a triage (sp?) situation. The poor
are laying outside the Emergency Room, in the street, with gaping wounds and head trauma. The middle-class have the flu.

The middle-class are worried they wont be able to send buffy to that nice college they like. The poor are on crystal meth, living in squalor, and wondering if they will be evicted tomorrow.

And the politicians are talking about the middle-class problems.

I’m tellin ya, i work with the poor every week, and it is
a big ugly emergency. Never seen anything like it. Its much worse
than ten years ago. At least thats how it is in WV.

I think the politicians talk about the mid-class cause
thats where the votes are. Not because of any lofty or ideological reasons.

w
v