We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

[Penguin]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

Ain't that the truth. Isn't it a crying shame when the miniscule 2% majority you mention has become the new "mandate"? Shows you how far we've fallen.

Will

[Woodsman]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

come on - cant ya come up with better one-liners than them 2, slim?

this story (and the reactions to it) seems to me, is The Political Divide.

i might not be (any where near) educated enough to credibly debate on stuff like this - but i do know BS when eye see it

adding: IMHO, the money being spent/blown on political 'science' in The US today, along with the credence heaped upon it/them, is THE ROOT of most of the political evil in The US today...

Lek, I appreciate you taking the time to read and consider the piece. Given your reaction, my suggestion that you step back further and begin from the original Atlantic article will probably fall somewhat flat. We spoke of the anti-intellectual stance and how I believe the scorn it heaps on certain elements of the intelligentsia is well deserved so there's no need to tread that ground again. That said, I grok your point on the political divide. And darn if its not right here between us because its like we read a different story. Literally, the actual words employed don't seem to mean the same thing, never mind their considerable emotional connotations.

Daylight saving time has me beat and given the comments so far, I'd call this one an epic fail anyway. I have miles to go before I sleep and am content to leave everyone to their certainty.

[lektrode]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

the only thing i'm certain of is that its 5oclock somewhere and the 2nd one is the sweet spot...

;)

[Raz]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

I read every word until I came to this:

"So in effect, and I think this gets to the point I was making in the article, that the choice is between two neoliberal parties, one of which distinguishes itself by being actively in favor of multiculturalism and diversity and the other of which distinguishes itself as being actively opposed to multiculturalism and diversity. But on 80 percent of the issues on which 80 percent of the population is concerned 80 percent of the time there is no real difference between them.

When people say things like that they often run into trouble. Because, you look at something like Fox News, and they talk about Obama as if he were a socialist or a communist or a dictator. And as you point out in your article, Obama’s entire career has been triangulation, conciliation, and compromise — and yet they look at him and see red.

Well, yeah, kind of. This gets into another issue. In a way, I think their hysteria about Obama being a communist or a socialist is in a funny way a backhanded acknowledgment of the success of the Civil Rights movement. Because they can’t say he’s a n—– in the White House. Right? And I don’t even necessarily think that people are being consciously disingenuous about it."


The race card is wearing thin on just about everyone except the race-baiting industry and the truly socialist Left. It doesn't seem to matter that they can't produce any recordings of the N-word being bandied about at Tea Party rallies, but we're all supposed to take the word of "it's always 1962" people like John Lewis, Julian Bond and Al Sharpton.


And this is nothing but spin (I would call it an outright lie but I'm trying to be nice):

"But I still think there’s a lot of astro-turf there. I go back to the founding moment of the Tea Party. And I’ve watched this clip a number of time since then. That day that Rick Santelli…

I’ve written about that at great length.

Oh good, I need to read that because when I watched it after the founding moment it seemed pretty clear to me—I mean, you can tell me if I’m wrong—that the co-host knew what was coming. That this was not a spontaneous rant.

It might have been planned, I dunno. You know what got me about it, is that it was on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. And you think about Populist movements, like my favorite one from the 1890s, where the Chicago Board of Trade was the pit of evil. And here’s a guy launching his populist movement from that same spot.
Remember, he’s not yelling at the traders, he’s not chastising the traders, he’s speaking on their behalf. What kind of populist movement is that? It’s like they were trying to reverse the fundamental symbolism (of populism). Because that’s what the Tea Party movement is: it takes all of the classic populist symbolism and reverses it."

Santelli was yelling about the Feds bailing out bankers, homeowners, automakers, etc. and systematically destroying the value of the US Dollar in the process. He wasn't defending anyone except the people who hold Dollars and don't want to see their country looted and destroyed. I watched Santelli LIVE as he said it!
And by the way, it's not the traders who are going to be hurt the most by all of this - it's the wage earners and pensioners.


So while I only skimmed the article after the race-baiting I did come across the key point (and the only decisive one) as did Penguin:

"The labor movement. You said to reverse all this, it requires a “vibrant labor movement.”

Well it won't reverse all of this but it seems that without it everything will continue on as it is until we suffer a socioeconomic collapse.

Labor got too greedy in the late Fifties and Sixties and by the Eighties a whole lot of voters were tired of it. But after Papa Bush and during the Clinton years capital (and the financial recipients of Fed printed "capital") pushed labor completely out of the room with NAFTA. Then came Little Bush and the tax grab.

It's very interesting that Pat Buchanan warned the Republican establishment they were not only going to gut America's manufacturing base but they would also undermine the "Reagan Democrats" who put them in office. Buchanan said that the overwhelming majority of rank and file labor detested the intellectual elite of the Democratic Party, but if Republicans were stupid enough to ship their jobs overseas then they would be the ones who eventually rebuilt the Democratic majority!

If we don't have an economy that works for everyone who's willing to work then we will NEVER turn this mess around.

[ProdigyofZen]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

I prefer her:

[GRG55]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

I heard somewhere that blondes have more fun.

Well that pretty well covers all the check boxes on the HR Dept interview form...you're the perfect diversity employee hire; job security doesn't get any better than that

[vt]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

Now the FCC and Justice Department are racist:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...station-fight/

[vt]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

Here's a couple of true stories about the left wing:

In a political science class, at GW in DC in 1968, an SDS punk burst into the class and declared that all students are N*****s. He then proceeded to try to lecture everyone about the SDS agenda.

The second example is when 3 leftist apparatchiks tried to take over a 16 member Vista unit in Southern Maryland. They left the group a few days after, and we proceeded to help mostly poor blacks with housing, a low income credit union, and starting to create local employment opportunities.

I was there in both instances.

And now there are worries about Fox up against all the other media on the left? From one who claims he dislikes both sides, but protests too much about the right?

Progress starts when FIRE is tamed, and the we all turn deaf ears to conversations about left and right.

[vt]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

OPINION

Joseph Malchow: Those Nonsensical 'Google Bus' Attacks

Why declare war on the tech workers who pour $14.5 billion of income tax into California?

• By JOSEPH MALCHOW

March 10, 2014 7:11 p.m. ET

Palo Alto, Calif.
Complaining about inequality isn't just the purview of the Obama administration. Lately, it has become a preoccupation in Silicon Valley, a part of the world used to thinking of growth as an unalloyed good.
The class warriors here have a lot to learn from Washington: So far, their main target has been the sleek buses that shuttle programmers and other workers from San Francisco to their offices at Apple, Google GOOG -0.27% and a constellation of startups in the Valley. Dubbed "Google buses," the shuttles remove thousands of cars from San Francisco's madcap streets and allow coders to continue building the enterprises that help to keep the city's jobless rate at 4.8%.
But leftists in San Francisco see daggers in Google buses, which they insist are symbols of growing inequality. In December, Oakland protesters broke the windows on a Google bus, and last spring a few dozen street demonstrators in San Francisco's Mission District smacked piñata buses. Local writer-activist Rebecca Solnit summed up the populist perspective about the buses when she wrote recently in the London Review of Books that "some days I think of them as the spaceships on which our alien overlords have landed to rule over us."
Enlarge Image


Google Inc. employees board a bus that will take them to the company's campus, in Mountain View, from San Francisco, California. Bloomberg




Yet the presumptions behind this simmering obsession are disproved by the example of Silicon Valley. There is vast wealth in the Valley, and last year $29.4 billion was invested in about 4,000 venture-capital deals. Cash on hand at large technology companies—about $350 billion at Apple, Google, Cisco CSCO -0.18% and MicrosoftMSFT -0.21% alone—has swollen startup valuations.
But the more one looks at the areas in which Silicon Valley companies are working—from social networking to genetic testing—the clearer it becomes that tech companies are targeting those industries where small coteries of incumbents had been funneling value into their own pockets, largely through the instrument of government. The startup process may yield outsize returns for founders, but the returns are shared broadly.
To take the most recent example, late last month when Facebook FB +3.19% announced its $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp, the mobile-messaging company, it minted a couple of billionaires and about two dozen new millionaires.
One of the new billionaires is the company's CEO and co-founder, 37-year-old Jan Koum, who grew up in Ukraine behind the Iron Curtain. His family reached the U.S. when he was 16. They lived on food stamps in Mountain View, Calif., and he founded the company after dropping out of a public university. WhatsApp serves 450 million users, principally in emerging markets like Brazil and India, and processes more than 30 billion messages each day.
With 32 engineers over four years, WhatsApp built something that's as speedy and reliable as telecom text networks without any of the regulatory, pricing or spectrum advantages enjoyed by those companies. Globally, texting fees come in at about $100 billion annually; WhatsApp charges a nominal fee of 99 cents a year. F or far-flung families and those of very limited means, WhatsApp provides meaningful savings. Facebook's bid for the company suggests optimism in its own stock price, but also a conviction that the app's users in emerging markets are going to become valuable customers.
That the app has such robust privacy settings, including server-side deletion of the messages and photos that people send over the platform, is not a coincidence. "I grew up in a society where everything you did was eavesdropped on, recorded, snitched on," he said recently in Wired magazine of his life under Soviet rule. "[T]he kind of state I escaped as a kid to come to this country where you have democracy and freedom of speech."
Or consider what Uber, the car-service app launched in 2010, has done for Andualem Bahru, who emigrated from Ethiopia in 2005 to drive yellow cabs in Seattle. Last year he switched to Uber. "I think I made more money driving a cab, but there's a lot of things I count—like driving my own car [and] making my own schedule—as worth money," he told a reporter last October.
Uber has battled with politicians and taxi-medallion barons in cities including Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and Chicago in order to make this possible. That Mr. Bahru is thinking like a business owner is a consequence of an app.
And let's not forget that all of Silicon Valley's high-tech companies—and their employees who fill Google buses—pay taxes. Loads of them. A study in January by the state's Legislative Analyst's Office showed that the 18% of Californians who live in Silicon Valley (about 6.8 million people) pay 33% of the state's personal income taxes. That's $14.5 billion annually, or three Stanford Universities.
Oh, and Rebecca Solnit, the writer who compared Silicon Valley engineers to "alien overlords"? She also noted: "I sold my apartment to a Google engineer last year."
Mr. Malchow, a former Robert L. Bartley Fellow with the Journal, is the co-founder of Publir. He also advises News Corp on venture investments.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/...&mg=reno64-wsj

[vt]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

1930-Something

Old-school leftists are unhappy with Obama's America

By JAMES TARANTO


March 10, 2014

At Salon.com two old-school leftists, Thomas Frank and Adolph Reed Jr., offer a surprisingly interesting critique of the contemporary left and President Obama. Notwithstanding the unwieldy headline, "We Are All Right-Wingers Now: How Fox News, Ineffective Liberals, Corporate Dems and GOP Money Captured Everything," parts of the critique--though to be sure, only parts of it--could easily have come from conservative critics.
The format is an interview, with Frank (best known as author of "What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America") asking the questions and Reed (a University of Pennsylvania political scientist) answering them. But it's really more a dialogue between two like-minded leftist dissenters, occasioned by what Frank calls Reed's "great and important essay in the current issue of Harper's Magazine," in which Reed, again quoting Frank, "manages to throw bucket after bucket of cold water over a Democratic Party that is still exulting after its big win in 2012."
Reed's central criticism of the contemporary left is that it has become focused on identity politics. As he says in the interview: "The problem with a notion of equality or social justice that's rooted in the perspectives of multiculturalism and diversity is that from those perspectives you can have a society that's perfectly just if less than 1 percent of the population controls 95 percent of the stuff, so long as that one percent is half women and 12 percent black, and 12 percent Latino and whatever the appropriate numbers are gay."
This he attributes to "electoralitis," the imperative of electing Democrats to public office. While Reed and Frank acknowledge that such an approach has been successful in some elections, they are scornful of it. Says Frank: "[Democrats] think they have an iron clad coalition behind them. They have this term for it: the Coalition for [actually 'of'] the Ascendent. I forget what it is. Made up of these groups, and labor is not one of them."
Reed disdains what he calls "the cult of the most oppressed," the idea "that there's something about the purity of these oppressed people that has the power to condense the mass uprising. I've often compared it to the cargo cults. . . . As my dad used to say, 'If oppression conferred heightened political consciousness there would be a People's Republic of Mississippi.' " (This all seems a bit out of place in Salon, whose usual stock in trade is exotic identity-based grievances. Last week the site ran an article by Randa Jarrar, an Arab-American novelist, titled "Why I Can't Stand White Belly Dancers.")
Conservatives share Reed's and Frank's aversion to identity politics, though of course for different reasons. They (we) see it as anathema to the classical liberal ideas of individual freedom and equality of opportunity. Reed pointedly rejects what he calls "a neoliberal understanding of an equality of opportunity."
Enlarge Image


A picket line during the 1938 King Farm strike near Morrisville, Pa.Getty Images




What Reed wishes for instead, in his Harper's article, is a radical "redistributive vision," which "requires grounding in a vibrant labor movement." There's more than a bit of nostalgia here: He opens by observing that the left "crested in influence between 1935 and 1945, when it anchored a coalition centered in the labor movement," and that "at the federal level its high point may have come in 1944, when FDR propounded what he called 'a second Bill of Rights,' " including "the right to a 'useful and remunerative job,' 'adequate medical care,' and 'adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment.' "
Doesn't today's Democratic Party support such goals? Only with empty rhetoric, claim Reed and Frank. "It's one thing to talk about inequality," Reed says in his interview. "Most people who are not on the Fox list will at least nod and say, yeah, inequality, tut tut. But then the question becomes: what approaches do we take for combating inequality? And that's where you look at stuff like cultivation of petty entrepreneurship, human capital tales, breaking teachers unions and destroying the public schools to make them better."
Reed also accuses Obama of insincerity in his support for Big Labor. "One of my hopes for Obama was card check," Frank says, referring to proposed legislation that would have enabled unionization without a secret ballot. "Remember, he had been in favor of that when he was a senator." To which Reed replies: "Well, no, he wasn't. He said he was. I had no illusions nor did anybody I know in the labor movement have any illusions that that was going to last."
A major weakness of the argument is that it seems oblivious to the massive social, technological and economic changes that have occurred since FDR's day. Industrial unions didn't decline only because the Democratic Party came to value them less; probably the truth is closer to the converse. And with more than half of Americans owning stock, either directly or through retirement funds, the distinction between "labor" and "capital" is blurrier than it was 80 years ago.
As private-sector unions have declined, public-sector ones have risen. Their adversaries, at least formally, are governmental entities, creating for liberals a conflict of loyalties between the unions and the consumers of government services. In equating "breaking teachers unions" with "destroying the public schools," Reed indicates he is blind to this problem. No one would equate breaking an industrial union with destroying the company whose workers it represents.
Also interesting is Reed's criticism of the president himself. Here's an excerpt from the interview:

In your Harper's article you talk about Obama as a symbol, that he's a cipher. I think you're quoting someone . . .

I think I'm quoting Matt Taibbi I believe, but I'll take it. I'll take credit for it also. Because he is. He's always been a cipher. You know that.

Obama's a highly intelligent man. You've met him.

Yes.

Maybe he's a cipher in the sense that he's a symbol. But he's not a cipher of a human.

I don't know. Look, I've taught a bunch of versions of him.

You mean you've had people like him as students?

Yeah. So his cohort in the Ivy League. His style. There's superficial polish or there's a polish that may go down to the core. I don't know. A performance of a judicious intellectuality. A capacity to show an ability to understand and empathize with multiple sides of an argument. Obama has described himself in that way himself in one or maybe both of his books and elsewhere. He's said that he has this knack for encouraging people to see a better world for themselves through him.

Yeah, he's like a blank slate.

Right. Which in a less charitable moment you might say is like a sociopath.

Come on now!

I'm not saying that. But I'm just saying. I'm not saying he's a sociopath but . . .

That (blank slate personality) seems like the classic . . . the kind of people who lead the Democratic Party. Only he's got considerably more charisma than most of them.

He's better at it than most. And this is another point that I make. That any public figure, especially a politician or a figure in a movement, is going to be like a hologram that's created by the array of forces that he or she feels the need to respond to. That's how it was that we got more out of Richard Nixon from the left than we've gotten from either Clinton or Obama.

This column has also referred to Obama as a cipher, though Taibbi used the term years before we did. We suspect some of our Obama-averse readers nodded along even with "sociopath" (which seems to us a bit over the top).
What about that great liberal triumph, ObamaCare? It barely figures into Frank's and Reed's critique--mentioned not at all in the interview (which runs 7,300 words) and only in passing in the article (5,400 words). Reid writes at one point that the president's approach to health-care reform "was built around placating the insurance and pharmaceutical industries," and at another that it "illustrated [that] the Obama Administration defines as 'responsible' those who support it without criticism; those who do not are by definition the 'far left' and therefore dismissible." (The latter point is another on which conservatives can sympathize.)
He also cites "single-payer health care"--i.e., a government monopsony on medical services and products, à la Canada--as an example of the sort of "goals that require long-term organizing" that he says "seem fanciful" to Democrats because they "cannot be met within one or two election cycles."
Optimistic liberals and pessimistic conservatives have argued that the failures ofObamaCare will, in the long run, create an irresistible political movement for single payer, as people left uninsured demand redress from government. Some even believe that's the idea. Reed doesn't address those claims directly, but one can infer he doesn't buy them.
But if Reed is reticent about ObamaCare, that doesn't necessarily mean the labor left is.Unite Here--a 265,000-strong union formed a decade ago by the merger of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees and Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union--has a new study out titled "The Irony of ObamaCare: Making Inequality Worse." Here's the summary:

Ironically, the Administration's own signature healthcare victory poses one of the most immediate challenges to redressing inequality. Yes, the Affordable Care Act will help many more Americans gain some health insurance coverage, a significant step forward for equality. At the same time, without smart fixes, the ACA threatens the middle class with higher premiums, loss of hours, and a shift to part-time work and less comprehensive coverage.

Whether "many more Americans gain some health insurance coverage" remains to be seen, but that last sentence sounds awfully familiar. That Salon interview's title began "We Are All Right-Wingers Now." Maybe the headline writer was on to something after all.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/...&mg=reno64-wsj

[Thailandnotes]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

“With more than half of Americans owning stock, either directly or through retirement funds, the distinction between "labor" and "capital" is blurrier than it was 80 years ago.”

vs.

“Ours were built of glue and vinyl, with most of the work completed thirty years ago so that it’s all delaminating under a yellow-gray patina of auto emissions. Inside these miserable structures, American citizens with no prospects and no hope huddle around electric space heaters. They have no idea how they’re going to pay the bill come April.”

It really depends on who you know, doesn’t it?

[lektrode]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

Lek, I appreciate you taking the time to read and consider the piece. Given your reaction, my suggestion that you step back further and begin from the original Atlantic article will probably fall somewhat flat. We spoke of the anti-intellectual stance and how I believe the scorn it heaps on certain elements of the intelligentsia is well deserved so there's no need to tread that ground again. That said, I grok your point on the political divide. And darn if its not right here between us because its like we read a different story. Literally, the actual words employed don't seem to mean the same thing, never mind their considerable emotional connotations.

Daylight saving time has me beat and given the comments so far, I'd call this one an epic fail anyway. I have miles to go before I sleep and am content to leave everyone to their certainty.

ok woody - seriously now - tell me the story that you got - we've seen penguin's take away and even mr raz agrees on his point about the 'dems abandoning labor after clinton' (ie: they followed the money )

this is why i like the op/ed/letters section of the newspaper - the overview one gets from those more informed

as i've mentioned before, i LIKE to hear/appreciate your take on topics like this - i ALWAYS listen to both sides.

but my take away from the dems 'activist wing' flavor of politix is they - generally - spin their heads 360degrees around their shoulders, depending on which 'special' interest group they happen to be talking to and will say anything they have to, to pick up another 1% sliver from whatever social-activist-activated group that happens to have the loudest 'cause du jour' - or continue the ole legislative churn with hundreds and hundreds of new 'activist initiatives' year after year - which then typically contradict/complicate/subvert something else and ON AND ON AND ON it all goes

i'm not going to 'defend' the opposition, but what does resonate for (some) people is they at least appear to focus on economic issues, where the dems mostly pander to the activist cause du jour and to hell with how any of that affects .gov spending, the deficit, the economy and JOBS

the only thing i'm 'certain' about is the failure of the current occupants to focus on just about ANYTHING/EVERYTHING *BUT*

[shiny!]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

Progress starts when FIRE is tamed, and the we all turn deaf ears to conversations about left and right.

I wish more people would internalize this.

PS- It'd be an interesting experiment to see if we could have conversations without anyone once uttering the terms left or right. Just debate ideas with regards to whether or not they will work. In another thread I posted some ideas about education reform. jk responded with his thoughts (which I agree with) of why they wouldn't work, but he didn't apply any labels of left or right.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

In 1936 FDR said:

"We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace--business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob."

[vt]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

Today it would be Government collusion with FIRE including speculation, reckless banking, and crony captialism/socialism for donors.

Plus Government/education complex monopoly to fleece children from K through college. We've seen college costs go up far faster than inflation.

State and local spending has also gone up faster than inflation and population growth.