Yesterday was very impressive. Your wife and sister deserve our gratitude.
This is how change comes about, not through the political system, which always has had to be forced into making changes from the outside by mass movements and organizations like the labor movement, Civil Rights movement, women's movement, environmental movement, etc. As we can see very clearly right now. The Democratic Party, despite having lost virtually the entire country to Republicans, are blaming the Russians and reinstalling a leadership of corporate fundraising stars like Nancy Pelosi and haven't made any attempt to do anything that would help the working class Americans they abandoned in favor of their Wall Street/upper middle class identity politics coalition.
And as we saw from their behavior yesterday. Aside from a few outsiders like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders who attended protests in their home states all Democrats were hiding under their desks in their offices hoping to god this latest citizens' uprising blows over or that they can co-opt it somehow so they can get back to serving their corporate benefactors by colluding with Republicans to further increase the wealth and income inequality that they themselves propelled to record levels under nominal Democrat Barak Obama.
What Peter Leyden says is all true, but he doesn't really say anything about the economics of this new economy.
Because consumer purchasing power has been in steady decline for several decades now and there were no real bubbles during his tenure Barak Obama was the first president in US history who didn't oversee a single quarter of 3 percent growth. In Leyden's economy a few, like himself, will benefit but the rest of us are engaged in pretty much the same economy as always providing the goods and services humans need to live -- food, housing, garbage pickup, electricity, transportation, doctors and nurses and dentists, education, etc. The things most of your paycheck goes for every week. Technology makes production and delivery of those more efficient and always has and there have been people like Leyden who saw themselves as riding the crest of a wave of science and technology that would improve the lot of everyone, eventually, somehow.
The technology isn't what improves our lot because the economic benefits of it are captured by a small segment of the population, who aren't generous with it but who pile it up, because of human nature and because of the nature of our economic system.
What improves our lot is redistribution of power and by that wealth, wealth that was created by our labor by the way, and having more power is something us regular old averagely smart people have to accomplish for ourselves.
Radicals? Really? I attended the rally with a group from my church. (I'm a man, by the way). Our group included ministers, business managers, computer programmers, sales professionals, teachers, and retirees, just to name a few. The crowd was as peaceful and respectful as any I've ever been part of, as well as being one of the largest groups I've ever seen gathered in Albuquerque. The crowd was diverse in terms of age, gender, race, and reason for participating. In my opinion, it reflected extremely positively on Albuquerque as a whole. Unless simply opposing the policies of the Trump administration, or advocating for different policies, counts as 'radical' behavior in your book, there was nothing radical about the rally or the group on Civic Plaza last Saturday. Now, if you think it was radical because you saw some right wing media reports that tried to conflate the global Women's Marches with isolated pockets of anti-Inaugaration conflict the previous day, all I can say is don't fall for fake news or 'alternative facts.'
7 comments:
Yesterday was very impressive. Your wife and sister deserve our gratitude.
This is how change comes about, not through the political system, which always has had to be forced into making changes from the outside by mass movements and organizations like the labor movement, Civil Rights movement, women's movement, environmental movement, etc. As we can see very clearly right now. The Democratic Party, despite having lost virtually the entire country to Republicans, are blaming the Russians and reinstalling a leadership of corporate fundraising stars like Nancy Pelosi and haven't made any attempt to do anything that would help the working class Americans they abandoned in favor of their Wall Street/upper middle class identity politics coalition.
And as we saw from their behavior yesterday. Aside from a few outsiders like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders who attended protests in their home states all Democrats were hiding under their desks in their offices hoping to god this latest citizens' uprising blows over or that they can co-opt it somehow so they can get back to serving their corporate benefactors by colluding with Republicans to further increase the wealth and income inequality that they themselves propelled to record levels under nominal Democrat Barak Obama.
What Peter Leyden says is all true, but he doesn't really say anything about the economics of this new economy.
Because consumer purchasing power has been in steady decline for several decades now and there were no real bubbles during his tenure Barak Obama was the first president in US history who didn't oversee a single quarter of 3 percent growth. In Leyden's economy a few, like himself, will benefit but the rest of us are engaged in pretty much the same economy as always providing the goods and services humans need to live -- food, housing, garbage pickup, electricity, transportation, doctors and nurses and dentists, education, etc. The things most of your paycheck goes for every week. Technology makes production and delivery of those more efficient and always has and there have been people like Leyden who saw themselves as riding the crest of a wave of science and technology that would improve the lot of everyone, eventually, somehow.
The technology isn't what improves our lot because the economic benefits of it are captured by a small segment of the population, who aren't generous with it but who pile it up, because of human nature and because of the nature of our economic system.
What improves our lot is redistribution of power and by that wealth, wealth that was created by our labor by the way, and having more power is something us regular old averagely smart people have to accomplish for ourselves.
Nice gathering, but what was really accomplished?
what was accomplished? It is called a shot across the bow.
It was a gathering of closet lesbians that's all it was.
A shot across who's bow?
Radicals? Really? I attended the rally with a group from my church. (I'm a man, by the way). Our group included ministers, business managers, computer programmers, sales professionals, teachers, and retirees, just to name a few. The crowd was as peaceful and respectful as any I've ever been part of, as well as being one of the largest groups I've ever seen gathered in Albuquerque. The crowd was diverse in terms of age, gender, race, and reason for participating. In my opinion, it reflected extremely positively on Albuquerque as a whole. Unless simply opposing the policies of the Trump administration, or advocating for different policies, counts as 'radical' behavior in your book, there was nothing radical about the rally or the group on Civic Plaza last Saturday. Now, if you think it was radical because you saw some right wing media reports that tried to conflate the global Women's Marches with isolated pockets of anti-Inaugaration conflict the previous day, all I can say is don't fall for fake news or 'alternative facts.'
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