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Helping the little woman with her chores
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Topic Started: Aug 3 2009, 08:42 AM (544 Views)
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dumblonde
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Aug 3 2009, 08:53 PM
Post #11
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- archer
- Aug 3 2009, 08:47 PM
Bullshit
You lost, we won, get over it.
did it not occur to you that every first lady spends more than the ones before her....it's called inflation.....you have heard of that haven't you? They can't and they won't admit that their hatred of the Obamas is based on a thin tissue of lies put forth by the right-wing media. They accept these half-assed emails as true without doing even the tiniest amount of research on their own because they so badly want it to be true. They hate having an "uppity" black couple in the White House that are doing a kick ass job. It put a lie to all their preconceptions of blacks, of liberals, of anyone who is not like them. They hate that we can see through them so they true to label everyone but them racists.
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Gringa
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Aug 3 2009, 09:54 PM
Post #12
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- dumblonde
- Aug 3 2009, 08:53 PM
- archer
- Aug 3 2009, 08:47 PM
Bullshit
You lost, we won, get over it.
did it not occur to you that every first lady spends more than the ones before her....it's called inflation.....you have heard of that haven't you?
They can't and they won't admit that their hatred of the Obamas is based on a thin tissue of lies put forth by the right-wing media. They accept these half-assed emails as true without doing even the tiniest amount of research on their own because they so badly want it to be true. They hate having an "uppity" black couple in the White House that are doing a kick ass job. It put a lie to all their preconceptions of blacks, of liberals, of anyone who is not like them. They hate that we can see through them so they true to label everyone but them racists. Man-O-Man, DB.... you just made a SLAM DUNK with that post and Man-O-Man are "they" going to hate you for that truthism......
Impressive, to say the very least.....
<gringa, bowing to the Lordess DB>
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dumblonde
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Aug 3 2009, 10:00 PM
Post #13
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Nah. They can't admit it to themselves. They'll claim they hate them because they're "destroying America". The fact that Bush betrayed everything America stands for while they stood by and cheered (a fact they are now loath to admit) doesn't seem to faze them.
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Gringa
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Aug 3 2009, 10:08 PM
Post #14
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Your post will rub them wrong - you can count on that, DB. When you rub the truth too close, the anger will fly. They will never admit it...never admit they can't stand that not only is a black man in the White House as commander and chief, his black wife lives there, too and expects the same pleasures as former First Ladies - the Gall! But, no, no, of course not.... DB, it is because he is destroying America.
Edited by Gringa, Aug 3 2009, 10:09 PM.
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dumblonde
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Aug 3 2009, 10:11 PM
Post #15
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No doubt about it Gringa. They'll call me every name in the book. Anything to avoid discussing the actual issue at hand- why they so vehemently hate this determinedly centrist president. Why they are so determined to label him a "socialist" even though he stands far to the right of most of his own party.
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Gringa
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Aug 3 2009, 10:16 PM
Post #16
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Actually, I have never heard Obama say or imply he doesn't believe in private ownership of property. Yet, the say he wants the USA to become a socialist country - go figure.
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dumblonde
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Aug 3 2009, 10:28 PM
Post #17
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It's ridiculous. He hasn't even pushed for single payer, he declined to investigate the former administration, he's continued their policies in the middle east, he continued the bank payoff, he compromised on the stimulus doing too little in the wrong areas, he left in place numerous Bush appointees, he appointed Republicans to key spots.....The list goes on and on. I wish he'd get it that no matter how much he gives to the other side, no matter how bipartisan he seeks to be, that they'll never, ever give him an ounce of credit. I wish he'd just turn into a wild assed liberal, tell them to go fuck themselves and the horses they rode in on and push through a true liberal agenda in this brief window when the Dems hold a majority. But no.
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archer
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Aug 3 2009, 10:34 PM
Post #18
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- dumblonde
- Aug 3 2009, 10:28 PM
It's ridiculous. He hasn't even pushed for single payer, he declined to investigate the former administration, he's continued their policies in the middle east, he continued the bank payoff, he compromised on the stimulus doing too little in the wrong areas, he left in place numerous Bush appointees, he appointed Republicans to key spots.....The list goes on and on. I wish he'd get it that no matter how much he gives to the other side, no matter how bipartisan he seeks to be, that they'll never, ever give him an ounce of credit. I wish he'd just turn into a wild assed liberal, tell them to go fuck themselves and the horses they rode in on and push through a true liberal agenda in this brief window when the Dems hold a majority. But no. That, DB, is exactly what I have wished for since Obama took office...... take a true liberal agenda....ram it through congress....and put this country back on track. Not with the Republicans....but in spite of them. All this pandering to a bunch of nay-sayer hypocrites is just wrong.
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Bigtoe
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Aug 4 2009, 10:36 AM
Post #19
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An excellent article in Salon spoke to this issue:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/08/04/neoliberalism/index.html
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Can Obama be deprogrammed? The president is a prisoner of the cult of neoliberalism By Michael Lind
...............
The free-market fundamentalists found an audience among Democrats as well as Republicans. A growing number of Democratic economists and economic policymakers were attracted to the revival of free-market economics, among them Obama's chief economic advisor Larry Summers, a professed admirer of Milton Friedman. These center-right Democrats agreed with the libertarians that the New Deal approach to the economy had been too interventionist. At the same time, they thought that government had a role in providing a safety net. The result was what came to be called "neoliberalism" in the 1980s and 1990s -- a synthesis of conservative free-market economics with "progressive" welfare-state redistribution for the losers. Its institutional base was the Democratic Leadership Council, headed by Bill Clinton and Al Gore, and the affiliated Progressive Policy Institute.
Beginning in the Carter years, the Democrats later called neoliberals supported the deregulation of infrastructure industries that the New Deal had regulated, like airlines, trucking and electricity, a sector in which deregulation resulted in California blackouts and the Enron scandal. Neoliberals teamed up with conservatives to persuade Bill Clinton to go along with the Republican Congress's dismantling of New Deal-era financial regulations, a move that contributed to the cancerous growth of Wall Street and the resulting global economic collapse. As Asian mercantilist nations like Japan and then China rigged their domestic markets while enjoying free access to the U.S. market, neoliberal Democrats either turned a blind eye to the foreign mercantilist assault on American manufacturing or claimed that it marked the beneficial transition from an industrial economy to a "knowledge economy." While Congress allowed inflation to slash the minimum wage and while corporations smashed unions, neoliberals chattered about sending everybody to college so they could work in the high-wage "knowledge jobs" of the future. Finally, many (not all) neoliberals agreed with conservatives that entitlements like Social Security were too expensive, and that it was more efficient to cut benefits for the middle class in order to expand benefits for the very poor.
The transition from New Deal liberalism to neoliberalism began with Carter, but it was not complete until the Clinton years. Clinton, like Carter, ran as a populist and was elected on the basis of his New Deal-ish "Putting People First" program, which emphasized public investment and a tough policy toward Japanese industrial mercantilism. But early in the first term, the Clinton administration was captured by neoliberals, of whom the most important was Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Under Rubin's influence, Clinton sacrificed public investment to the misguided goal of balancing the budget, a dubious accomplishment made possible only by the short-lived tech bubble. And Rubin helped to wreck American manufacturing, by pursuing a strong dollar policy that helped Wall Street but hurt American exporters and encouraged American companies to transfer production for the U.S. domestic market to China and other Asian countries that deliberately undervalued their currencies to help their exports.
By the time Barack Obama was inaugurated, the neoliberal capture of the presidential branch of the Democratic Party was complete. Instead of presiding over an administration with diverse economic views, Obama froze out progressives, except for Jared Bernstein in the vice-president's office, and surrounded himself with neoliberal protégés of Robert Rubin like Larry Summers and Tim Geithner. The fact that Robert Rubin's son James helped select Obama's economic team may not be irrelevant.
Instead of the updated Rooseveltonomics that America needs, Obama's team offers warmed-over Rubinomics from the 1990s. Consider the priorities of the Obama administration: the environment, healthcare and education. Why these priorities, as opposed to others, like employment, high wages and manufacturing? The answer is that these three goals co-opt the activist left while fitting neatly into a neoliberal narrative that could as easily have been told in 1999 as in 2009. The story is this: New Dealers and Keynesians are wrong to think that industrial capitalism is permanently and inherently prone to self-destruction, if left to itself. Except in hundred-year disasters, the market economy is basically sound and self-correcting. Government can, however, help the market indirectly, by providing these three public goods, which, thanks to "market failures," the private sector will not provide.
Healthcare? New Deal liberals favored a single-payer system like Social Security and Medicare. Obama, however, says that single payer is out of the question because the U.S. is not Canada. (Evidently the New Deal America of FDR and LBJ was too "Canadian.") The goal is not to provide universal healthcare, rather it is to provide universal health insurance, by means that, even if they include a shriveled "public option," don't upset the bloated American private health insurance industry.
Education? In the 1990s, the conventional wisdom of the neoliberal Democrats held that the "jobs of the future" were "knowledge jobs." America's workers would sit in offices with diplomas on the wall and design new products that would be made in third-world sweatshops. We could cede the brawn work and keep the brain work. Since then, we've learned that brain work follows brawn work overseas. R&D, finance and insurance jobs tend to follow the factories to Asia.
Education is also used by neoliberals to explain stagnant wages in the U.S. By claiming that American workers are insufficiently educated for the "knowledge economy," neoliberal Democrats divert attention from the real reasons for stagnant and declining wages -- the offshoring of manufacturing, the decline of labor unions, and, at the bottom of the labor market, a declining minimum wage and mass unskilled immigration. One study after another since the 1990s has refuted the theory that wage inequality results from skill-biased technical change. But the neoliberal cultists around Obama who write his economic speeches either don't know or don't care. Like Bill Clinton before him, Barack Obama continues to tell Americans that to get higher wages they need to go to college and improve their skills, as though there weren't a surplus of underemployed college grads already. Quantcast
Environment? Here the differences between the New Deal Democrats and the Obama Democrats could not be wider. Their pro-industrial program did not prevent New Deal Democrats from being passionate about resource conservation and wilderness preservation. They did not hesitate to use regulations to shut down pollution. And their approach to energy was based on direct government R&D (the Manhattan Project) and direct public deployment (the TVA).
Contrast the straightforward New Deal approaches with the energy and environment policies of Obama and the Democratic leadership, which are at once too conservative and too radical. They are too conservative, because cap and trade relies on a system of market incentives that are not only indirect and feeble but likely to create a subprime market in carbon, enriching a few green profiteers. At the same time, they are too radical, because any serious attempt to shift the U.S. economy in a green direction by hiking the costs of non-renewable energy would accelerate the transfer of U.S. industry to Asia -- and with it not only industry-related "knowledge jobs" but also the manufacture of those overhyped icons of the "green economy," solar panels and windmills.
While we can't go back to the New Deal of the mid-20th century in its details, we need to re-create its spirit. But short of confining them in motel rooms and making them watch newsreels about the Hoover Dam, Glass-Steagall, the TVA and the Manhattan Project, is it possible to liberate President Obama and the Democratic leadership from the cult of neoliberalism?
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Mtnman
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Aug 4 2009, 11:13 AM
Post #20
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he's just a politition like all the rest....No Change there...
now the new taxes will be showing up,, so you peeps making 50K or less will have to give it up... NO change
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