To the DUers who constantly bemoan: what happened to DU?

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

What you're seeing here is playing out as follows:

On one side are the passive voice populists, which include both Clintons and Obama. They argue that our Gilded Age inequality is the product of technology and globalization, as if these were autonomous forces like the weather. The effects — a declining middle class, stagnant wages, spreading misery — can be ameliorated by sensible policies, like the agenda Sargent ticks off. Most of all, Americans need to make certain the next generation gets better education and training so they can better compete in the global marketplace. Universal preschool is a first step to that. But the largest thrust — driven by the party’s deep pocket donors — is an assault on teacher’s unions and public schools, investment in charters, public and private, and a focus on high-stakes testing to measure teacher and school performance.

Undergirding this is an acceptance that we can’t really afford to do even the minimum in public education or child poverty, so the focus has to be on cheaper ways to make progress. This assumption also fuels the interest in cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits, experimenting with public-private partnerships to raise funds, and so on. All this assumes that we’re close to the limits on taxes, that corporate tax reform should be “revenue neutral,” (that is, companies should not contribute one dime more to our investment or budget needs), and that taxes on the wealthy can’t produce much additional revenue.

The activist-voice populists disagree fundamentally with both the analysis and the prescription. They argue that extreme inequality results from rules that were rigged to benefit the few and not the many. That leads to the demand for structural reforms to change the rules: fair and balanced trade and tax policies to replace those created by and for the multinationals; breaking up big banks and curbing Wall Street’s casino as opposed to accepting banks that are too big to fail and too big to save; progressive tax reforms to create revenue for the public investments that we need in everything from education to infrastructure to an expanded safety net; empowering workers and curbing CEO license to ensure workers share in the profits they help to produce; expanding Social Security and public pensions while moving further towards true universal, affordable health care.

These differences are only now emerging, as the failure of the recovery forces a bigger debate about our economy.

The Wall Street wing presses forward with corporate trade deals that are opposed by a growing majority of voters. The bankers bear no accountability for their pervasive frauds and lawlessness, while most Americans are looking for perp walks. Well-heeled lobbies block any sensible tax reform, while polls show Americans strongly want the rich and the corporations to pay their fair share of taxes. Obama has already felt the revolt of the Democratic base against his plans to pare Social Security benefits. Clinton and Obama have been essentially AWOL in the war on labor and collective bargaining, essential elements of any strategy to rebuild the middle class.

Capicse?

http://billmoyers.com/2014/07/10/economic-populism-at-heart-of-emerging-debate-among-democrats/

[DonCoquixote]

1. b ookmarked

and K and R

[Igel]

2. It's "capisci."

Non capisco.

It's not typically a disagreement over ideas. Those have always been here. The break really came last year with all the "if you're not with me then you're obviously for all things evil and bad and against all things sound and good ... against me and what I think, in other words."

It was topic by topic. And it was not only personal, it was played as personal. (Most people hold their beliefs fairly tightly but they were offensive.) Moreover, there were groups.

A lot of people that started reasonable threads vanished. Some just had it. Others were canned. It used to be that you'd have to check back every few hours to see everything in Latest Breaking News except maybe on Sunday. Politics would have several screenfulls per day. And general discussion wasn't the lounge, with a lot of people making single-post call outs that weren't canned.

DU's a sadder place to be. It became less diverse, more riven, and overall a coarser, meaner and pettier place. (Even if some like OldLeftyLawyer could just flay people alive adroitly.)

[Maedhros]

6. There is a large Obama personality cult,

as evidenced by threads filled with hagiographic photo essays and post after post of adherents chiming in with their praises and pledges of loyalty. That cult mentality spills out into other threads questioning Administration policy, and they treat the questions as personal attacks on their leader. The more questions raised, the more certain they become that there is a conspiracy to destroy their hero. The end result is toxicity and division.

[Hekate]

7. riiiiight

[MannyGoldstein]

3. Great piece, insightful, but it doesn't give the "passive voice populists" enough credit

They are actively undermining the economy, e.g. repealing Glass-Steagall, "free"-trade agreements of all sorts, busting unions, etc.

And they're not very populist - they're to the right of 2/3rds of Americans on issues like expanding Medicare, taxing the rich, slashing the military, and so forth.

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

5. yep, and hopefully Hillary will reveal that she's...

only on a book tour, sooner than later so that Warren can run.

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

4. lol did you get it right this time?

Well... at least we all might agree one one thing: DU is better than Discussionists.

[msongs]

8. neither clinton nor obama are populists. nt

[Enthusiast]

9. The President said, "Corporate taxes are too high in this country."

He also proposed adopting Chained CPI to deal with the deficit driving social security.

The President is also in favor of additional trade deals. He is insisting on these new and improved trade deals. But we aren't allowed to know what is in them.

So I am in 100% agreement with this piece.

Wake up, people, we have been had!

But the Republicans are attacking the President! I remember when they did that to Bill Clinton. Then, when the smoke cleared, we found out Bill Clinton had signed several key pieces of legislation that betrayed the interests of the American working class.

[Enthusiast]

10. Kicked and recommended!

I'm curious to see how many recommendations we see for this thread. So far, it isn't looking too good.

I guess people simply have little awareness of what the fuck is really going on. It is little wonder because the smoke screen is presently turned up on high. They are using real smoke this time, too.

[Scuba]

11. ...

[Blue_Adept]

12. Very worthy

And easy to share. I'm in the active-voice populist side of things and just putting that paragraph out there on places like Facebook and saying, "this is what I'm after" works well.

[Javaman]

13. as soon as another repuke is back in the white house, DU will self correct overnight. nt

[Electric Monk]

14. k&r

[carolinayellowdog]

15. The 2006 election was the watershed moment for me

The instant that Pelosi said impeachment was off the table, to be a party loyalist meant to abandon the consensus that united us at DU for five years. Everything since then that has treated the economic changes of the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush years as irreversible, by bipartisan consensus, has further undermined solidarity.

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

16. yep, Pelosi/Obama created monsters when...

...they took prosecuting BushCo for war crimes off the table.