Forget the damn Dem politicians - if the Left doesn't start channelling the very real populist anger

[scarletwoman]

out there, the Right will have them. With all the attendant ugliness that a right-wing led populist movement entails.

If we don't start directly addressing the People -- the anger and despair and betrayal they're feeling -- instead of twisting ourselves into knots over how to rationalize and defend the machinations of the "D" faction of the fucking RULING CLASS, this country -- OUR country -- is heading into a certain nightmare.

If we don't start standing with our fellow citizens AGAINST the DC Ruling Class, then they will fall into the hands of the LIARS on the Right, who will NEVER tell them who the real enemy is.

The REAL enemy is the Oligarchy to which BOTH Dem and Repug politicians cater and give loyal obeisance.

If you aren't calling your fellow citizens to arms in the Class War, you are abandoning them to the tender mercies of the Right Wing. This is bigger than partisan politics. It's time to abandon the Democratic party and make common cause with the PEOPLE.

sw

[leftstreet]

1. No truer words

:applause:

[cliffordu]

2. K&R

Right on.

[scarletwoman]

26. Thank you, cliffordu.

I really appreciate having your support.

[liberal N proud]

3. And you will be happy with someone more right than the Democrats?

Makes so much sense.































:sarcasm:

[Ken Burch]

4. Not what the OP is saying

The point is, we can't win if our leaders keep putting corporations first. "Pro-Business" Democrats are working for Republican victory.

[glitch]

11. Since that is the path you are taking by appeasing the right what exactly is the difference? nt

[liberal N proud]

16. How soon they forget

[USA_1]

5. 100% Correct

I'm sick and tired of the Democratic betrayal and party member passivity.

I have threatened to stop voting Democrat if they give up the majority in 2010. Perhaps I should just vote for somebody else regardless of what the hell they do. This fuckin' betrayal has gone on for far too long and I'm sick of it.

[WeDidIt]

6. Too late, The Tea Party is already there

Prepare for PResident Sarah Palin, coming to a White House near you on January 20, 2013.

[scarletwoman]

7. It doesn't have to be too late. There are still many who could be turned our way if we reach out to

them. Not all of them are hysterics, but we're letting the Right Wing herd them away from the truth.

[appal_jack]

28. HOW? is the big question

Excellent & relevant topic scarletwoman.

I thing that the big trick will be for we as progressives to effectively draw the lines of Soildarity such that we attract the widest group of useful allies and alienate the fewest 'real people' as possible.

FDR did this solidarity-coalition-building effectively by being a self-avowed 'traitor to his class' (his class being the uber-wealthy, ultra-elite: i.e.- not 'real people') and fighting for both poor and middle-class to get a bigger piece of the pie. He also was not afraid fight corporations (NOT 'real people' at all) head-on.

More recently (i.e- Reagan and afterwards), the right has effectively peeled-away much of the middle class with a combination of lies (mostly) but also some truths. It IS true that the middle-class have been over-taxed and under-served at times. Of course WE (DU'ers) know that much of that over-taxation comes from the FICA increase that Alan Greenspan pushed to 'save Social Security,' but then was promptly stolen by Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush to pay for wars/corruption/etc. I hate to implicate the Big Dawg in this mess, but it's true that the "Balanced Budget" of the Clinton years is only so when one does not count the "borrowing" from the SS "trust fund" as a legitimate debt.

There have at times (way pre-Clinton) also been excesses and abuses in some American Welfare programs. I know as soon as I say this, I will get jumped for echoing rw lies, but believe me, as the son of a NYC public school teacher, I saw some of these abuses first-hand and/or through my Dad (who himself is a proud Union man and Democrat, so it's not like he was making shit up or echoing Limbaugh or anything like that). That said, all of the abuses of all welfare programs ever in this country don't add up to being even a significant fraction of the abuse that has been perpetrated by Wall St./Banks/Fed./Derivatives-traders/currency-speculators/etc. So I need to emphasize that while abuses of social/progressive programs are comparatively insignificant, they did exist enough to get some real people really angry. The right used this anger to their advantage during the 'Reagan Revolution,' and they continue to do so when spreading stories about ACORN, etc.

The end result of this is that the poor/middle class coalition of FDR-Carter has been splintered and then supplanted by the Rich/middle-class coalition of Reagan and afterwards.

I suggest that we need a new poor-middle-class coalition that grows to a critical mass of numbers/skills/education/resources to succeed. To achieve such, it will take elegant compromises. "Solidarity' may need to extend to some strata of society that may strike some others as overly wealthy, but indeed, the movement will need successful entrepreneurs. The more Marxist among us may want to confiscate properties willy-nilly for 'the good of the people,' but that sort of thing will shatter any such coalition post-haste (I also believe that Marxism is a dead-end on numerous other levels, but that's another conversation entirely). I suggest that we should follow the more libertarian (note small'l') philosophy of Pierre Proudhon, who:

...in his earliest works analyzed the nature and problems of the capitalist economy. While deeply critical of capitalism, he also objected to those contemporary socialists who idolized association. In a sequence of commentaries, from What is Property? (1840) through the posthumously-published Théorie de la propriété (Theory of Property, 1863-64), he declared in turn that "property is theft", "property is impossible", "property is despotism" and "property is freedom". When he said "property is theft", he was referring to the landowner or capitalist who he believed "stole" the profits from laborers. For Proudhon, the capitalist's employee was "subordinated, exploited: his permanent condition is one of obedience".<6>
In asserting that property is freedom, he was referring not only to the product of an individual's labor, but to the peasant or artisan's home and tools of his trade and the income he received by selling his goods. For Proudhon, the only legitimate source of property is labor. What one produces is one's property and anything beyond that is not. He advocated worker self-management and was in favor of private ownership of the means of production. He strenuously rejected the ownership of the products of labor by society, arguing in What is Property? that while "property in product <...> does not carry with it property in the means of production"<7> <...> The right to product is exclusive <...>

(see source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-Joseph_Proudhon for more fascinating history and philosophy of this great man)

Proudhon's philosophy could be updated to state that the carpenter is to own his own shop and tools, the farmer her own land and tractors, the plumbing contractor his tools and van, and the machine-shop owner her own lathes and presses, AS LONG AS THEY ALL are working in those venues directly. Absentee ownership and speculative trading is what he opposed.

If we could translate this concept into modern American society, I think that we could overcome the reflexive-anti-left reactions of many business-people at the middle-class lever (the farmers/plumbers/shop-owners/etc.) Of course, we would piss-off the bankers and stock traders, but that's a necessary and good thing for our coalition, right?

Of course, this all is a tall order, what with too many Americans having been swindled by the 401K/market mania of recent decades. But building this coalition of Solidarity, along with moving toward community/ecological sustainability are THE projects of our time.

-app

[scarletwoman]

29. Thank you for your most excellent post! It far more deserves to be an OP than my feeble effort.

Your trenchant summation of the shift of middle class loyalties is dead on, and I very much appreciate your citation of Proudhon.

I haven't the time this morning to respond in depth to your wonderful contribution to this thread, all I can say is that there is nothing that you've written with which I disagree in the slightest. It's all so very well said.

Thank you again, and I hope we may converse on this further.

sw

[appal_jack]

35. cheers, sw

:) :hi:

I may indeed try to refine & expand this response into an OP some time. Thanks for the encouragement, and for your OP which caused me to get started.

We've got big projects ahead of us: I look forward to the conversations and the actions together.

-app

[scarletwoman]

39. I hope you do craft it into an OP. Your post was truly a thing of beauty.

Myself, I'm constantly fighting the urge to just chuck it all and withdraw into survival mode for what years I have left on this earth.

At 60 years old I've watched things just get worse and worse over the decades. I'm caught in the Yeats poem -- "the center does not hold".

I'm reduced to raising a cry every now and again that we need to look at this differently. That we need to talk about this differently. But I'm just a single sad voice who is ready to pack it all in and tend to my garden and let the world destroy itself around me. :(

Thank you for your kind words.

sw

[EmeraldCityGrl]

47. Your post brings the following quote to mind...

"Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom."
Albert Einstein, in Out of My Later Years (1950)

[scarletwoman]

49. Thank you for that quote. The first thing we have to free is our minds.

Unlock our thinking from partisan electoral politics and consider what REALLY needs to be done in the real world of the People being fucked over.

[appal_jack]

52. true, that

Old Albert knew what was up.

-app

[Odin2005]

66. Yay, another Proudhon fan!

:hi:

[DontTreadOnMe]

8. The Republicans are ALREADY caterering the Tea Party.

At first they were trying to distance themselves from this populist anger,
but the Republicans figured out REAL FAST that they need to support and embrace the Teabaggers,
before some other Party does.

The Progressive Movement needs to start announcing candidates NOW.

[tavalon]

19. At least we'll know with no doubt that she's the enemy

We're only starting to wake up to the fact that Obama and his ostensibly Democratic Congress is not our friend. He's actually dangerous to progressives.

[leftstreet]

21. Has it occurred to you that some of those people voted for Obama?

He won by significant margins.

:shrug:

[WeDidIt]

24. With this shithole piece of crap that mandates I be a slave to insurance companies in place

my primary objective in 2010 and 2012 is getting the piece of shit repealed, regardless.

I'm pretty sure I won't be the only Obama voter in that predicament.

[sendero]

56. In what way.,.

... is a drooling moron president any worse than a bought and sold president?

[StarfarerBill]

9. Class struggle has been necessary for over 150 years;

and while we've all been on the front lines, only a few have fought back. How many will join the cause now?

[scarletwoman]

10. The biggest reason there's no effective Left wing in this country is because we've allowed ourselves

to be co-opted by the Democratic party and partisan electoral politics. We won't get ANYWHERE until we cut loose from electoral politics and concentrate on building a social movement.

NO ONE in government represents our interests. It's useless to worry about elections, when all elections do is preserve the illusion that we live in a democracy. We do NOT live in a democracy, we live in Plutocracy.

[StarfarerBill]

13. You'll get no argument from me, SW.

Unfortunately, most want to cling to what they've always known; they fear change viscerally. Raising class consciousness in the face of such fear will be hard, to say the least.

[slipslidingaway]

12. So true - knr nt

[quiet.american]

14. WTF? "It's time to abandon the Democratic party..."

Who left the damn door open today? This place is rife.

[scarletwoman]

17. That's okay. If you prefer to serve the Master in the Big House, please just ignore us field hands.

[quiet.american]

18. Useless. nt

[AndrewP]

48. LOL. There has been a lot of that this week.

"Hey, you are being mean to our dear leader!"

LOL

I support the progressive movement, not one person.

[scarletwoman]

50. It's a question of loyalty and identity.

Do you identify with and give your fealty to the Ruling Class? Or do you identify with and give your fealty to the People?

[Gregorian]

15. If I may say, I find this thread most enjoyable.

I like the truth.

Enjoyment and sadness. The work that it took all of humanity to arrive at our present condition. Will we ever succeed in restraining the greed to a level below which the majority of society may live in satisfaction.

I just want to express support, even if I am simple.

[scarletwoman]

22. Thank you. Your post is lovely.

Truth is simple. We also need to realize that simple does not equal easy.

Thank you again,
sw

[truedelphi]

27. Gregorian is right.

Your simply stated OP makes me a bit hopeful. (Although lately that feeling has been stolen away.)

[begin_within]

20. Amen

[David Zephyr]

23. Yes.

K&R.

[dusmcj]

25. the right has fucked the pople for years - they can't fool all the pople all the time

good luck with that shit, dungmunchers

[glowing]

30. I just had this convo with my boss.. 2010 will be a year that the shit will

finally fly.. After the holidays and when the outlook for the new year is coming. Regular people who never pay a bit of attention have had it. We do need to capture their rage and direct it in our positive way rather than the kooky birther/ 9/12rs.

[izzybeans]

31. Agreed, except for the abandoning the party bit.

Steer the party to the people. It's our only lever of power. It's unfortunate but that's how it works.

[scarletwoman]

32. I honestly don't agree. I think we desperately need to think outside the partisan politics box.

How many years have we already spent trying to "steer the party to the people"? How many letters, emails, and phone calls have we sent and made? And to what end? It's clear they don't listen to us they listen to the money guys, we only matter at election time.

"It's our only lever of power."

No, that's a falsehood and it's time we unequivocally reject it. That's the kind of thinking that's gotten us into this mess in the first place. It's the kind of thinking that gives OUR power away.

Power MUST reside in the People. It's time to reclaim it from the politicians who serve only the interests of the Ruling Class while tossing us a few rhetorical crumbs now and then to keep up the illusion that this is still a democracy and not what it really is; a Plutocracy.

sw

[izzybeans]

36. Having participated with Greens and seen how that goes, I found it invigorating, but

futile.

i think its possible to do what you say, but the risks are huge and for me at this moment are too large to risk further slipping into Republican control. Because regardless of how good it feels to say they are the same as Democrats, its just not true.

The last 8 years and the 12 years of Reagan and Bush I taught us they are far worse. I respect what you say though, I feel the same way sometimes. It's definitely an ideal to subscribe to. I have before.

[scarletwoman]

38. That's exactly why I've been advocating (for years!) that we stop focusing on electoral politics

and focus instead on building a social movement.

I have very little respect for the Greens. To me, they have utterly failed in building a new narrative about the relationship between government and the governed.

As Emma Goldman said, "If voting actually changed anything, it would be made illegal."

sw

[SIMPLYB1980]

33. The right already has them,

they are called teabaggers.

[scarletwoman]

40. We could still change that. Some of those teabaggers will always remain unredeemable, of course.

But we should not give up without a fight. A true progressive message could reach some of those people if we would just stop mindlessly mocking them and look for the ways in which we have anger and complaints in common.

sw

[SIMPLYB1980]

42. I doubt it.

Waste your time on them if you want though.

[scarletwoman]

53. "They" are part of "Us". The Right Wing is more than happy to lead them astray.

Why should we leave our fellow suffering citizens to the lying machinations of the Right Wing? We should be standing in solidarity with our fellow citizens who instinctively know that they're being screwed.

The problem is, the Right Wing will lie to them about who's really to blame. Why should we stand by silently and allow that?

[Blue_In_AK]

34. We need a new party, ScarletWoman

I've been saying this for weeks now.

If America had a four-party system, we would get a much better read on the mood of the country. It would look like this, from left to right:

Progressive/Liberal - Democratic - Republican - Conservative/Teabagger

We need our own candidates, our own conventions and our own platforms.

The two highest vote-getters from the four parties could go head to head in a run-off. Obviously the Democrats don't speak for a lot of us, just as the Republicans don't seem to represent the teabaggers (or vice versa). The two-party system is NOT working.

[scarletwoman]

37. I'd love to see that. One of the biggest problems we face

is a society ingrained with dualistic thinking. Our collective political consciousness is fraught with false dichotomies.

Of course, I'm speaking about another dichotomy -- which just happens to be a true dichotomy, and the most important one we are faced with: the Class War. :)

sw

[ljm2002]

41. Exactly right...

...but the Democratic party abandoned the riff raff long ago. And as you say, there is a right wing contingent that will be only too happy to embrace the anger and channel it to their own nefarious ends.

Unfortunately, unlike the Republican party, the Democratic party has never embraced its so-called "fringe". The left has always been vilified, at least as long as I can remember and at this point in my life that's a pretty long time. So the left is in a weak position as far as harnessing the energy of the angry populace. Makes it harder to organize. The damn teabaggers were given respect by the Republican party and the media; while any hint of leftist rhetoric is ignored or met with derision on all sides.

That is the challenge.

[scarletwoman]

44. "...the Democratic party abandoned the riff raff long ago." True, that.

I'm all for making it mutual.

Yes, that is the challenge, as you say. I don't have any answers, all I know is that we are headed the wrong way and we need to change direction. We are all in great danger if we don't start working to point the angry mob in the direction of the truth, in the direction of the real enemy.

The Right Wing will point them in the direction of all kinds of false enemies, we need to set a goal of setting before the People the REAL enemy. How to do that is a problem, yes. But unless we at least commit to the goal, there's no hope at all.

Set your goal, and the means of achieving it will unfold as you move toward it.

sw

[mike_c]

43. "...the D faction of the fucking ruling class...."

That's one of the best characterizations I've ever read.

[scarletwoman]

45. Thanks. It's pretty damn obvious, isn't it?

I find myself wanting to simply post, over and over again: "Quit pissing on me and telling me it's raining."

sw

[AndrewP]

46. You are damn right about that

Thom Hartmann has been saying something similar on his program.

[scarletwoman]

51. My hope is that lots more people will be saying this.

Thanks.

[Bonobo]

54. Ding Ding. nt

[G_j]

55. aho

that's the truth you're tellin'!

[scarletwoman]

57. *sigh* For all the good it does...

[G_j]

59. Lao Tzu said something to the effect of

the one who knows they are sick, is not so sick.

that's square one. the critical mass is definitely not there yet.

now look at the bullshit the ruling class masquerades as "caring about the planet" at the climate summit.
the greedy sociopaths are about the crash the spaceship.

[BeHereNow]

58. Hey SW...

We don't sound so crazy anymore, do we?:hi: :loveya: :hug:
BHN

[G_j]

60. kick

[G_j]

61. kick

[BrklynLiberal]

62. A kick...a bit late, but still sincere.

[Armstead]

63. AMEN

[G_j]

64. ==

[Odin2005]

65. I agree with you except for the "abandoning the party" part.

We must take back the party.