I've been thinking about why we can't seem to fix obvious problems anymore. The 2008 crisis should have changed everything, but instead, we just patched the system and kept going. We gonna do it again
It's wonderful to find a writer who sees it as it is and addresses the institutional dysfunction directly. It's also interesting to note that there are political opponents (conservatives) that agree with a liberal author. Remember that Massachusetts voters in 2010 rejected a Liberal sitting AG and voted for Scott Brown, the first Massachusetts Republican US Senator elected in 35 years. He opposed Obama Care, its current legacy a mere 27 million uninsured, and was the deciding vote in favor of Dodd/Frank which was the singular legislative response to the 2008 financial debacle. Mind you, his political mentor, Mitt Romney of Bain Capital and $100 million trust fund for the kids fame loved nothing more than to buy a solid productive corporate entity only to sell it for parts and profit.
My point being that there is a possible meeting of the minds, liberal and conservative, the AOC and Bernie supporting crowd with conservative "America First-ers" on the point addressed by the author- we need to build for the long haul not for the short term profit of the few.
Many things to add and subtract here. Agree with urgent need for massive change. Tweaks are useless. But firewalls abound, everywhere. Citizenry is entirely boxed in, like herded cattle awaiting slaughter.
1 - Who runs is controlled by who is nominated and how they get nominated. Party structures weed out the independent doers and cooperative thinkers. Hacks already controlled by power and money get to run a combined beauty pageant/highly charged insult shitshow/lie fest/promise fest/TV propaganda fiasco.
2 - The 'party paradigm' is a monstrous failure. It is the ultimate zero-sum game, the only game, in which, at the fed level, says ONE political hack gets to think for 750k very different citizens, most of whom are completely left out of the needs/barriers to needs/access to solutions process.
3 - Why left out? The 'parties' are dinosaurs hitched up to the wagon of corporate capitalist daisy chains Corbin describes so well. Nothing happens anywhere that does not start and end with 'profit' for corporations and bonuses for their CEO stooges.
4 - The structures of House/Senate are pathetic failures. All 'rules' that control who gets to introduce legislation and how/when that happens must GO! Period, full stop.
5 - The Congress is a failure. It is built on either daisy chains or circular firing squads. The pecking order process looks like a hen house full of bloodied chickens and nasty little roosters. A simple, orderly, efficient process to take citizen NEEDS to a vote must be installed and followed, without obfuscation by ships, overlords, and crazy rules.
6 - Two term limits, House has one four-year term and one two-year term. Senate has two 4-year terms. No revolving doors follow for at least ten years. You are in and then you are out, back into the citizenry to do some actual real work.
7 - No politico anywhere receives ANY remuneration other than salary. Period. Talk about kings and queens, the executive is not the only one.
8 - SCOTUS is ELECTED, period. Two 6-year terms.
9 - NO PRIVATE MONEY in elections. All who can acquire a ten percent signed endorsement to run can run for any office. All elections are ranked-choice votes. No party preferences.
10 - Very important - The needs of the many always outweigh the needs of the few. If the few complain, then the many will fund a PILOT alternative to legislation to test the legitimacy of the 'needs' of the few.
11 - All federal elections run for eight weeks, all campaigns are equally funded and all publicity is equally divided. TV et. al. do not get to set advertising costs - one cost fits all. All ads are thoroughly screened PRIOR TO running to eliminate BS, lies, exaggerations or personal assaults.
12 - Post election, citizen committees that rotate membership for one-year terms will gather info preferences from an inventory or at least 35 percent of the voters in each type of district. The broad outlines will be hashed out and given to politicos, whose only job is to frame the legislation to most effectively/efficiently GET THE VOTE DONE so the WORK can get done.
13 - Whether public or private, all work contracts are seen while being drafted by the entire public and its committees. There is an iron-clad CALL if the contract looks hinky.
This is a primer, but without this, the same trainwreck will ensure, and we all will burn, drown or starve to death on a planet we have destroyed via vanity, arrogance and ignorance.
“We've created a system where money chases money in endless circles, completely divorced from building anything of value.”
This is so spot on. I used to describe it this way: We’ve monitized everything to the point that monitization is pointless - and harming us.
The beauty of choosing to build something that matters, is that people will want to be a part of it. To be a cog in the wheel of something great or needed, is to feel sated from meaningful work. Very little work today feels meaningful or beneficial to society, and if it does, it often comes with the stress of survival-level living, which leads to the insidious “hack” and “hustle” game.
I work in the water industry and it is filled with people wanting to maintain the status quo at all costs despite all the new technologies and obvious solutions. I saw one project where it took 7 years for a water utilitiy to replace a reservoir. Another project spent $5M dollars to replace a chemical feed system in a combined sewer overflow that treats 5 million gallons a year. These organizations TALK about environmental justice then recklessly spend poor rate payers money on programs where they haven’t done a simple cost benefit anaylsis. It makes me extremely sad that nobody will change because I think building infrastructure is the only way out of the climate crisis and the United States continues to fail at infrastructure.
The time for any peaceful transformation is over, was over a long time ago. Change will come when our Capitalism becomes savage like the Czar's Capitalism that Stalin remarked on when asked why the Revolution succeeded only in Russia and not anywhere else. As for Bernie, while I admire his integrity I am unable to explain why he has not inspired a 100 other Bernies in Vermont and elsewhere. If that were true he would have handed over his Senate seat ti a much younger Bernie in who we can all trust, yes? So when is he going to retire? All he has done so far in the Senate is give respectability to the utterly corrupt Corporate Democrats. It's is hard to tell if this is genuine naivety or studied disingenousness.
"If Democrats want to lead again, they need to stop defending bureaucracy and start championing what government could build: a clean energy grid, climate-resilient infrastructure, next-generation transportation, advanced manufacturing in forgotten communities."
In 2022, they did exactly that, not just championing but also passing the biggest climate bill in the world. Check out this video that explains it in delightfully nerdy detail:
249 years into our nation’s story and the bedrock of its foundation, capitalism, is crumbling for the majority of Americans; and the foundation of the story itself, democracy, is being crushed by the elite. We had a fairly good run trying to balance a steady stream of wealth for the 1% and a middle class lifestyle with all the comforts one could want for the majority of Americans, but the Oligarchs - being the selfish bastards they are - wanted more: they realized they could make even more money if they destroyed the government and the government institutions that made them rich. So here we are: one year away from our nation’s 250th anniversary of our revolution. Maybe we should spend that anniversary conjuring up another revolution: one for average everyday Americans, not the Oligarchs.
I agree on your observations but not your solution. Violence begets violence and the victor writes the history to suit themselves. The problem facing those under the age of forty is that history teaches us that wars are inevitable when faced with financial crises. Over $300 trillion in debt worldwide with only $100 trillion in GDP to support it suggests that we are facing a financial cliff far worse than the 2008 Financial Crisis. Europe is facing a Depression in the next two years per economists. Russia has a 20% interest rate as it faces sanctions and a war economy, The Mideast is a horror show. And China's Xi planned for a military capable of annexing Taiwan by 2035, that is capable of doing so today. All of this clearly related to the neocon policies which support the slash and burn financialization strategies that leave nations at each other's throats.
To suggest that a war is not coming within the next 10 years takes a Pollyanish conviction and ignorance of history and the human condition. It's more about creating community that can withstand disaster and can be inclusive based on a compassionate perspective rather than a deviant capitalist desire to control it all. ( BTW do not worry about nuclear annihilation-there's no money in it).
I'm 71. I've been a trial lawyer and partisan political activist most of my life. I've opposed neocon wars and Presidents of both parties who are directed by the Billionaire few who wish to aggregate power and money for their own ends since 1971. I've championed Free Speech as the only anti-septic that can scour away the lies and deceptions of the sociopathic few who seek mind control of the average person to further their selfish ends. I applaud those of you who can envision a better world.
I hope I'm wrong about war. Keep faith with the compassionate notions that represent our better angels. And persevere. Better days await, of that I am certain.
I’d say some serious war is coming this year. Europe vs Russia, US vs Iran, Pakistan vs India, China takes Taiwan. Most of that even if Trump croaks. Along with economic collapse, mainly in the US.
Trembling with fear maybe the nations will reinvigorate the moribund and toothless UN and try to create a peace plan. It won’t work, but people may hail it as their only hope. We will see.
I agree that we do have leaders, and I have seen that they are the people in 'the trenches' of all the actual industries - the doctors and nurses, the house builders, engineers, teachers, and so so many others. I have seen time and time again how Congress, as well as state legislatures, use all sorts of methods to ensure that the public image centers them and essentially silences the actual people fighting for a snowball's chance in hell at change.
Of course I'm talking about Citizens United and all the other ways that dollars represent votes, not constituents. But I'm also talking about a system that, if not designed to gaslight, seems to do that very effectively: over and over I've seen "leaders" use Robert's Rules and just sleazy conversational tactics to say, without saying literally, that they have control over what gets discussed and what doesn't, and they always err on the side of their own interest.
To me the latter is a number of structural flaws in (democratic) governance where it's easy to feign democracy and obfuscate self-interest. There's also a layer of "popular confidence" that is an extension of this lack of transparency; how do we, as Democrats (or Republicans), see through our own biased belief that these folks have our backs when there are so many ways they don't that we are convinced, by them and others, to overlook?
Back to the leadership point: yes, we do have leaders, and I agree we have to elect them, but we also have to change the ways in which our organic leaders have access to power, and powerful ears, and ways of changing what those powerful people can and can't do.
I agree with your take but your solutions are impractical. Bernie, AOC? Need smarter people than these duds. The change will occur when Americans reject the entities that perpetuate their decline. This includes globalization, fixing healthcare and collective disengagement from monopolies. We are the solution we are looking for. Unfortunately, most people stare at their phones nowadays and don't even consider tomorrow.
Our voices have been silenced by corporate media and corporate-funded political parties. We just accept the hierarchical status quo as dictated by party leadership rather than demand something different…together! We the people must decide and make corporate politicians on both sides of the aisle obsolete.
The technology now exists to pool small amounts of money into large sums. Then why would we continue to support the two parties who have been perpetuating this oligarchical bullshit? Your article deftly points out that Democrats had the chance to create real systemic change, but instead—AGAIN—caved to lobbyists on every meaningful reform. Anyone else remember the “public option” from Obamacare? Yeah, the corporate-paid lobbyists killed it. Remember the “fat cat bankers?” Yeah, they’re even fatter now. The solution *must* be a new party. These two have shown us who they are. Front organizations for big money. Until we commit to abandoning them, we will never get out of this. For all the people who voted democrat in the last election solely because the Republicans are worse—what good did it do? ‘Publicans won all three prizes anyway. WE NEED A NEW PARTY. NOW
It's wonderful to find a writer who sees it as it is and addresses the institutional dysfunction directly. It's also interesting to note that there are political opponents (conservatives) that agree with a liberal author. Remember that Massachusetts voters in 2010 rejected a Liberal sitting AG and voted for Scott Brown, the first Massachusetts Republican US Senator elected in 35 years. He opposed Obama Care, its current legacy a mere 27 million uninsured, and was the deciding vote in favor of Dodd/Frank which was the singular legislative response to the 2008 financial debacle. Mind you, his political mentor, Mitt Romney of Bain Capital and $100 million trust fund for the kids fame loved nothing more than to buy a solid productive corporate entity only to sell it for parts and profit.
My point being that there is a possible meeting of the minds, liberal and conservative, the AOC and Bernie supporting crowd with conservative "America First-ers" on the point addressed by the author- we need to build for the long haul not for the short term profit of the few.
Keep writing!
Many things to add and subtract here. Agree with urgent need for massive change. Tweaks are useless. But firewalls abound, everywhere. Citizenry is entirely boxed in, like herded cattle awaiting slaughter.
1 - Who runs is controlled by who is nominated and how they get nominated. Party structures weed out the independent doers and cooperative thinkers. Hacks already controlled by power and money get to run a combined beauty pageant/highly charged insult shitshow/lie fest/promise fest/TV propaganda fiasco.
2 - The 'party paradigm' is a monstrous failure. It is the ultimate zero-sum game, the only game, in which, at the fed level, says ONE political hack gets to think for 750k very different citizens, most of whom are completely left out of the needs/barriers to needs/access to solutions process.
3 - Why left out? The 'parties' are dinosaurs hitched up to the wagon of corporate capitalist daisy chains Corbin describes so well. Nothing happens anywhere that does not start and end with 'profit' for corporations and bonuses for their CEO stooges.
4 - The structures of House/Senate are pathetic failures. All 'rules' that control who gets to introduce legislation and how/when that happens must GO! Period, full stop.
5 - The Congress is a failure. It is built on either daisy chains or circular firing squads. The pecking order process looks like a hen house full of bloodied chickens and nasty little roosters. A simple, orderly, efficient process to take citizen NEEDS to a vote must be installed and followed, without obfuscation by ships, overlords, and crazy rules.
6 - Two term limits, House has one four-year term and one two-year term. Senate has two 4-year terms. No revolving doors follow for at least ten years. You are in and then you are out, back into the citizenry to do some actual real work.
7 - No politico anywhere receives ANY remuneration other than salary. Period. Talk about kings and queens, the executive is not the only one.
8 - SCOTUS is ELECTED, period. Two 6-year terms.
9 - NO PRIVATE MONEY in elections. All who can acquire a ten percent signed endorsement to run can run for any office. All elections are ranked-choice votes. No party preferences.
10 - Very important - The needs of the many always outweigh the needs of the few. If the few complain, then the many will fund a PILOT alternative to legislation to test the legitimacy of the 'needs' of the few.
11 - All federal elections run for eight weeks, all campaigns are equally funded and all publicity is equally divided. TV et. al. do not get to set advertising costs - one cost fits all. All ads are thoroughly screened PRIOR TO running to eliminate BS, lies, exaggerations or personal assaults.
12 - Post election, citizen committees that rotate membership for one-year terms will gather info preferences from an inventory or at least 35 percent of the voters in each type of district. The broad outlines will be hashed out and given to politicos, whose only job is to frame the legislation to most effectively/efficiently GET THE VOTE DONE so the WORK can get done.
13 - Whether public or private, all work contracts are seen while being drafted by the entire public and its committees. There is an iron-clad CALL if the contract looks hinky.
This is a primer, but without this, the same trainwreck will ensure, and we all will burn, drown or starve to death on a planet we have destroyed via vanity, arrogance and ignorance.
“We've created a system where money chases money in endless circles, completely divorced from building anything of value.”
This is so spot on. I used to describe it this way: We’ve monitized everything to the point that monitization is pointless - and harming us.
The beauty of choosing to build something that matters, is that people will want to be a part of it. To be a cog in the wheel of something great or needed, is to feel sated from meaningful work. Very little work today feels meaningful or beneficial to society, and if it does, it often comes with the stress of survival-level living, which leads to the insidious “hack” and “hustle” game.
I work in the water industry and it is filled with people wanting to maintain the status quo at all costs despite all the new technologies and obvious solutions. I saw one project where it took 7 years for a water utilitiy to replace a reservoir. Another project spent $5M dollars to replace a chemical feed system in a combined sewer overflow that treats 5 million gallons a year. These organizations TALK about environmental justice then recklessly spend poor rate payers money on programs where they haven’t done a simple cost benefit anaylsis. It makes me extremely sad that nobody will change because I think building infrastructure is the only way out of the climate crisis and the United States continues to fail at infrastructure.
have to get the Dems off the $ stream from corporations and the rich - or there will NEVER be the fundamental changes we need
The time for any peaceful transformation is over, was over a long time ago. Change will come when our Capitalism becomes savage like the Czar's Capitalism that Stalin remarked on when asked why the Revolution succeeded only in Russia and not anywhere else. As for Bernie, while I admire his integrity I am unable to explain why he has not inspired a 100 other Bernies in Vermont and elsewhere. If that were true he would have handed over his Senate seat ti a much younger Bernie in who we can all trust, yes? So when is he going to retire? All he has done so far in the Senate is give respectability to the utterly corrupt Corporate Democrats. It's is hard to tell if this is genuine naivety or studied disingenousness.
"If Democrats want to lead again, they need to stop defending bureaucracy and start championing what government could build: a clean energy grid, climate-resilient infrastructure, next-generation transportation, advanced manufacturing in forgotten communities."
In 2022, they did exactly that, not just championing but also passing the biggest climate bill in the world. Check out this video that explains it in delightfully nerdy detail:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw5zzrOpo2s
249 years into our nation’s story and the bedrock of its foundation, capitalism, is crumbling for the majority of Americans; and the foundation of the story itself, democracy, is being crushed by the elite. We had a fairly good run trying to balance a steady stream of wealth for the 1% and a middle class lifestyle with all the comforts one could want for the majority of Americans, but the Oligarchs - being the selfish bastards they are - wanted more: they realized they could make even more money if they destroyed the government and the government institutions that made them rich. So here we are: one year away from our nation’s 250th anniversary of our revolution. Maybe we should spend that anniversary conjuring up another revolution: one for average everyday Americans, not the Oligarchs.
I agree on your observations but not your solution. Violence begets violence and the victor writes the history to suit themselves. The problem facing those under the age of forty is that history teaches us that wars are inevitable when faced with financial crises. Over $300 trillion in debt worldwide with only $100 trillion in GDP to support it suggests that we are facing a financial cliff far worse than the 2008 Financial Crisis. Europe is facing a Depression in the next two years per economists. Russia has a 20% interest rate as it faces sanctions and a war economy, The Mideast is a horror show. And China's Xi planned for a military capable of annexing Taiwan by 2035, that is capable of doing so today. All of this clearly related to the neocon policies which support the slash and burn financialization strategies that leave nations at each other's throats.
To suggest that a war is not coming within the next 10 years takes a Pollyanish conviction and ignorance of history and the human condition. It's more about creating community that can withstand disaster and can be inclusive based on a compassionate perspective rather than a deviant capitalist desire to control it all. ( BTW do not worry about nuclear annihilation-there's no money in it).
I'm 71. I've been a trial lawyer and partisan political activist most of my life. I've opposed neocon wars and Presidents of both parties who are directed by the Billionaire few who wish to aggregate power and money for their own ends since 1971. I've championed Free Speech as the only anti-septic that can scour away the lies and deceptions of the sociopathic few who seek mind control of the average person to further their selfish ends. I applaud those of you who can envision a better world.
I hope I'm wrong about war. Keep faith with the compassionate notions that represent our better angels. And persevere. Better days await, of that I am certain.
(sorry for the soapbox spouting.)
I’d say some serious war is coming this year. Europe vs Russia, US vs Iran, Pakistan vs India, China takes Taiwan. Most of that even if Trump croaks. Along with economic collapse, mainly in the US.
Trembling with fear maybe the nations will reinvigorate the moribund and toothless UN and try to create a peace plan. It won’t work, but people may hail it as their only hope. We will see.
I agree that we do have leaders, and I have seen that they are the people in 'the trenches' of all the actual industries - the doctors and nurses, the house builders, engineers, teachers, and so so many others. I have seen time and time again how Congress, as well as state legislatures, use all sorts of methods to ensure that the public image centers them and essentially silences the actual people fighting for a snowball's chance in hell at change.
Of course I'm talking about Citizens United and all the other ways that dollars represent votes, not constituents. But I'm also talking about a system that, if not designed to gaslight, seems to do that very effectively: over and over I've seen "leaders" use Robert's Rules and just sleazy conversational tactics to say, without saying literally, that they have control over what gets discussed and what doesn't, and they always err on the side of their own interest.
To me the latter is a number of structural flaws in (democratic) governance where it's easy to feign democracy and obfuscate self-interest. There's also a layer of "popular confidence" that is an extension of this lack of transparency; how do we, as Democrats (or Republicans), see through our own biased belief that these folks have our backs when there are so many ways they don't that we are convinced, by them and others, to overlook?
Back to the leadership point: yes, we do have leaders, and I agree we have to elect them, but we also have to change the ways in which our organic leaders have access to power, and powerful ears, and ways of changing what those powerful people can and can't do.
Excellent!
I like where you’re going with this post.
I agree with your take but your solutions are impractical. Bernie, AOC? Need smarter people than these duds. The change will occur when Americans reject the entities that perpetuate their decline. This includes globalization, fixing healthcare and collective disengagement from monopolies. We are the solution we are looking for. Unfortunately, most people stare at their phones nowadays and don't even consider tomorrow.
Thanks for posting.
Our voices have been silenced by corporate media and corporate-funded political parties. We just accept the hierarchical status quo as dictated by party leadership rather than demand something different…together! We the people must decide and make corporate politicians on both sides of the aisle obsolete.
The technology now exists to pool small amounts of money into large sums. Then why would we continue to support the two parties who have been perpetuating this oligarchical bullshit? Your article deftly points out that Democrats had the chance to create real systemic change, but instead—AGAIN—caved to lobbyists on every meaningful reform. Anyone else remember the “public option” from Obamacare? Yeah, the corporate-paid lobbyists killed it. Remember the “fat cat bankers?” Yeah, they’re even fatter now. The solution *must* be a new party. These two have shown us who they are. Front organizations for big money. Until we commit to abandoning them, we will never get out of this. For all the people who voted democrat in the last election solely because the Republicans are worse—what good did it do? ‘Publicans won all three prizes anyway. WE NEED A NEW PARTY. NOW