As the Republican party goes through its very public convulsions trying to find out what they will sell going forward I am struck by a very simple distinction between the two philosophies:
Republicans think that government should NOT help you live your life but should tell you how you can or cannot live it.
Democrats think that government should help you live your life but should NOT tell you how you can or cannot live it.
Ask yourself: do you think government should be telling you how to live your life? If the answer is yes, you are a Republican. If you think the government should tell you what you can believe then you are a Republican.
Yes, it can be said that Democrats have some agendas in regards to life choices, but these are all expressed economically. For example: when the Democrats decide that people should be living their lives in a way that does not kill the planet they do not make it illegal for you to pollute, they make it the more expensive choice through taxation.
Republicans, on the other hand, actually want to take away your liberties, not just tax behaviour that they don’t like, but actually put people in jail for it.
What I am getting at here is that Republicans, essentially, are anti-American. They do not believe in liberty, they believe in the tyranny of one group over another (so long as the group in charge is theirs). They don’t want you to be free, they want you to take marching orders from them. Fall in line. Do as I say (not as I do). Sound familiar?
Let’s take two of their main issues: the sanctity of marriage and abortion. Two issues which, by the way, I generally agree are important social issues.
When Republicans work to “protect” traditional marriage where do they put all their energy? They put it all into the courts, trying to make laws that say that gay people cannot be married. They don’t try to do anything about reducing the number of divorces. They don’t do anything about reducing the number of teen pregnancies. They don’t fight for raising the minimum wage, or better yet, for a family wage. The main thing destroying the traditional family right now is economic, both parents have to work and nobody is staying home raising the kids. But none of these things involve actually taking away rights, so they focus all their energy on same-sex marriage.
Abortion is a similar issue. While they claim to abhor abortion, they do absolutely nothing to reduce the number of abortions. In fact, I would argue that they are responsible for many of them through their irresponsible and ineffective abstinence-only sex education policies. They are against condoms, against teaching kids about sex and pregnancy. But making laws that allow the government to have more say over what a woman does with her body than the woman does? They love that idea.
Both of these issues raised above are socio-cultural issues and they should be fought in that arena. Instead, these people have ceded that ground completely and instead focus all their energy into an assault on fundamental civil liberties… turning what should be issues that we can all generally agree on into the most serious threat to America that exists today.
The problem with this approach is that history has proven to us over and over again that it is a slippery slope that goes straight to hell. America is the proof that civil liberties that are above and beyond the reach of any individual leader or majority group are the strongest and most enduring foundation that any nation can be built upon. These people put all their energy into eroding that foundation and then turn around and call themselves patriots. Stunning.
There is a reason why the Republicans put all the focus into legislation: it allows them to take highly charged social issues and turn them into political power. They don’t want people to spend their dollars funding real social programs to reduce divorce and abortion, they want them to spend that money getting Republican politicians elected on the false promise that Republican politicians will do something about these issues (and the false assertion that the thing to be done about them involves legislation). The truth is they don’t want either of these issues to be “solved” or even mitigated to any degree because that would take away their primary levers to power. Republicans have been in power for 20 of the past 30 years, and in that time all the measures have risen: divorce rates, teen pregnancy rates, abortion rates. Ask yourself: why?
Its a neat simple presentation, and I like simplicity but it is still based on the current ideology and economic system of capitalism. We have seen the enormous bail out scams and executive payouts.c I would ask this question: Can we legislate on greed?
Okay, so tax the upper middle class and the wealthy a little more for their right to live as they want.Even tho they made that wealth from sweat shop,minimum waged or atleast less than living waged workers.
In the end, they still get to live extravagantly and continue to invest in companies causing suffering to other beings on the planet as well as having plenty of money to play with while a pound of butter becomes a luxury item for someone else.
I have to ask where is the morality in this and is it a Christian principle for someone like John McCain to own 10 houses while homelessness statistics are ever increasing or for Bill Gates and Al Gore to occupy mansions?
Sure, people with Hummers had to pay a little more for gas but did that help relieve the congestion and deaths of 47,500 Americans due to automobile accidents.?
Does it allow you and your corporation to manufacture something that turns out to be a health hazard and still pocket the money from the product?
Quickly invest it and make some more money before a possible class action suit gets underway?
Is it quite alright for me to cut down all the trees in front of my house because they are blocking my view and allow everyone else to do the same so that we have fewer and fewer trees to filter the carbon emissions from all the woodstoves burning and all the cars with their god given right to drive spewing out their emissions.?Does it help me get across a road with small children in hands or elderly people with canes.?
Sometimes I think Democrats are just what someone described the new Liberal leader of the opposition as: “a Harper Lite!”
Well first… I kind of like basing my thoughts on “the current reality” because I find it’s more constructive to deal with reality than fantasy. I agree that this analysis I presented is simplistic; it is meant to be so. You see, I am not concerned with creating Utopia, I am concerned about the prospect of another George Bush/Sarah Palin/Rush Limbaugh winning in 2012… or even sooner, the Repubs taking back congress in 2010. In other words: the current reality.
As for the rest of what you have to say here… I agree that it is offensive and repugnant to see this kind of disparity (and oh boy how that disparity has gotten out of hand!)… but I don’t want to live in ANY kind of police state… not even one that agrees with me on everything.
You see this is the big problem with the left. For far too long our “intellectual leaders” have been way out to lunch. They don’t want to deal with reality, they want to scream and cry about all the things that are wrong with the system and say “we need a complete overhaul!” and then, when describing that overhaul, they sound like a green version of Stalin. Nobody is going to vote for that. We haven’t even managed to legislate a carbon emissions tax yet and you are talking about making greed illegal?? And on what planet is there even close to 50% of the population that will support such an idea? I might agree with you, but I was raised by anarchists, and I am savvy enough to know that nobody wants an anarchist running anything.
It does the planet no good if the people who care about it are continuously marginalized politically because they want it all. The fact is that political power in a democracy is controlled by the people in the center. The people on the fringe far too often control the debate, but they do not (and should not) decide who is in power. I tailor my arguments for those in the middle, because whether you think Obama is sent from God or “Harper lite” you have to admit that he is a HUGE improvement over Bush & co. And if you can’t admit that then all I can say is I hope you are used to being disappointed because Obama is already better than the best we could have realistically hoped for… with emphasis on realistically. We have to play this game with the cards we are dealt, not the cards we imagine would be perfect.
I agree about Obama. He is very very intelligent.And he and many others have responded to the need of humanity to install participatory democracy. He is definitely listening and doing the best he can.
Even though I am Canadian, I am on his email list and connect with focus groups across the border plugging in to his overall network.
The Organic Growers ,Producers and Consumers Association did a massive petition about his unacceptable (to them) choice for Agriculture. Vilsack. What did Obama do in response: appointed a 2nd in command who was one of the persons recommended by this lobby. People are feeling good now.Something to work with.
When it comes to Obama, I tend to be more on the godsend side.
And yes, he is dealing quite fabulously with the reality. And so is Michelle.
An interesting read, sort of relevant to the topic of greed, at the Daily Beast: “How to Shakedown the Banks” by Matt Miller. A letter from Learch.
And then,from” Confessions of an Economic Hitman: the corruption is very bipartisan!”
And: Tommy Douglas, a socialist, was chosen as Canada’s Greatest Canadian.
I sent in a nomination for him, as did others. Was e in the middle?
Obama’s team would seem to need some tweaking.Listen in as
Democracy Now reports on the Healthcare talks and intervwiew with author of “Sick in the Head”. Harpers.
Also: Report on report at Dem. Now: “Sold Out”.
I was rethinking the stuff about leftists and my sort of “pie in the sky “thinking and maybe TC Douglas and Medicaire happened because in those days the corporations were not yet so big and powerful, and ubiquitous and it was before the Free Trade agreements.
We have to accept and work with reality .Ex hit man Perkins uses the term “corpotocracy”
.Well, I went Saturday to Victoria ,where you live ,to Uvic for a conference called: “Remaking the Economy through people’s eyes.” It was put on by BC Institute for Cooperative Studies and the BC Community Economic Development Network.
I learned about community capital and social capital.
Interesting to learn that in this big recession so many big guys, big banks,and big everything are going down, asking for bailouts while all these little credit unions that could are just perking along very well.
Coop organizations that reinvested in themselves are smiling and those that put their profits in the Wall St way and the recommended diversify scheme are biting their nails about their losses.
As Dr. James Tully said: Those little microinvestments to women and other small coops in Africa and Third World countries are what people should have invested in because they are showing tremendous increase in profits and sales.
After seeing yesterday the film on the economic hitman, I thought I’d see what I could find on him and ended up listening to a couple of hours interviews with him on You Tube.The second part was showing a matured man.
So I looked some more and ended up at Dream Change.
He,John Perkins, has some more books and he is talking about the “paradigm shift” and he has a page listing ‘Wakeful” organizations.
There is a silver lining in this recession. It is getting mined by the mindful. It is good news and there is the potential for this co-op movement to become the norm.
Just the confessions and exposures of corruption is contributing to change. So many of those Republicans are left babbleing and sputtering on media spots or probably being even used to save some networks asses.
But what was it that got Perkins in to the hitman career? He says its the 3 pillars: power, money and sex. Seduced! by one or all.
What got him out? Guilt, yes, and an epiphany.A sustainable epiphany.
I think that Obama must have read his book. Not sure about some other Democrats. They always have a future election to win and can be seduced themselves.
It did help me to understand human nature a little better but I still do wonder why so many republicans have such wacko attitudes about what people should not do.
Blame religion. Partly. But then those Buddhists in Tibet and some now India have been quite divided over who is right and who is wrong.
Do you have any thoughts about this?
The Dream People of the Amazon showed here on Sunday. Ahhh…the noble savage,taking the time to dream and first thing in the morning discussing their dreams and what they mean.No cars. No oil. No technology. Sensitive to danger.Sensitive to life.