Other people think the way I do: caring about small American businesses, caring about ethics, wanting to challenge big business, appreciating Ralph Nader, who is a genius.
I would also mention that citizen privacy matters profoundly to me. The government does not have the right to read my emails nor to listen to my phone conversations, even if the most dangerous thing I ever talk about is clipping my own hangnail.
It is a great joy to discover intelligent writings on how the Democrats and the Republicans have let us down. To Bill Curry, author of the piece: Great work!
Here’s the article on Salon: My Party Has Lost Its Soul: Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Victory of Wall Street Democrats.
Speaking of Ralph Nader, here’s what the article says:
His latest book, “Unstoppable,” argues for the existence and utility of an “emerging left-right alliance to dismantle the corporate state.” The book is vintage Nader and ranks with his best. The questions it poses should greatly interest progressives. The question is, will any read it.
The corporate state is evil.
And here is my biggest beef about the Democratic Party, to which I used to belong:
Democrats aren’t even having a debate. Their one think tank, the Center for American Progress, serves their establishment. …If Democrats had caught populist fever they’d be reappraising their own orthodoxy and offing a few of their own incumbents. Owing only partly to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, they instead spend their days as Republicans do, in an endless search for new ways to help the rich pump money into politics.
The Democratic Party has become about the very rich, whose money is protected, imposing lower-middle-class socialism on the middle class. The Wall Street Democrats, also known as Cadillac Communists, congratulate themselves on being good people when they vote in socialist reform.
So who will stand up for the middle class?
It isn’t Obama: “By buying into Bush’s bailout, Obama co-signed the biggest check ever cut by a government, made out to the culprits, not the victims. As for his stimulus, it didn’t cure the disease and hefty portions of it smelled like pork.”
Here’s one of my favorite quotes:
This isn’t just a slow recovery from a financial sector collapse, or damage done by debt overhang or Obama’s weak tea Keynesianism. We’re in crisis because of all our broken systems; because we still let big banks prey on homeowners, students, consumers and retailers; because our infrastructure is decrepit; because our tax code breeds inefficiency and inequality; because foreign interventions bled us dry. We’re in peril because our democracy is dying. Reviving it will take more than deficit spending and easy money. It will take reform, and before that, a whole new political debate.
Populists offer hope.