Politics
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Are We Too Far Gone?
Have we already reached the point where it's every man for himself in the political sphere? Have we reached a point in which the Reagan/Thatcher Libertarian mindset has so penetrated our thinking that we have become incapable of imagining that we are a part of a "society?" Those were some of the afterthoughts I had
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The Immigration Dilemma
We have to ask the question: Who benefits from open borders? Well, desperate Latinos seeking a better life for themselves and their families clearly benefit. But so does the overclass which delights in having a buyer’s market for its labor. In capitalist logic, the more surplus labor there is, the more difficult it will
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The New Feudalism: How We Are Divided and Ruled
The Civil Rights Revolution was perverted into a racial preference revolution by white leaders in the public and private sectors to end disruptive black agitation by quickly appeasing and co-opting black leaders. One of the unintended side effects of this shift in civil rights strategy was to shatter the New Deal coalition that had supported
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Dream vs. Reality
I revised and renamed the post I put up yesterday, but I wanted to add a few thoughts today. The most serious objection to what I wrote in yesterday's post and in some of the others in the last week is that I'm defending precisely what I'm condemning the Bush administration of doing. Couldn't it
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End of the Republic
From Chalmers Johnson: What does this administration think it's doing, reducing taxes when it needs to be reducing huge deficits? As far as I can see, its policies have nothing to do with Republican or Democratic ideology, except that its opposite would be traditional, old Republican conservatism, in the sense of being fiscally responsible, not
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Vanishing Middle
Under the current regime, we are regressing to 1929. Believe that this a conscious strategy goal of key factions within the GOP. And we are allowing it because of the traditional values smokescreen that the architects of this plan are hiding behind. This from Tom Paine: The share of national income going to wages and
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Defending Our Ports
From Think Progress: Moments ago [3/16], the House of Representatives narrowly defeated an amendment proposed by Rep. Martin Sabo (D-MN) that would have provided $1.25 billion in desperately needed funding for port security and disaster preparedness. The Sabo amendment included: – $300 million to enable U.S. customs agents to inspect high-risk containers at all 140
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The Beltway Courtier Class
Journalists, with a few rare exceptions, are not intrepid truthtellers. They are cautious careerists, and they do what conventionally ambitious people do to advance their careers. That's their primary concern. And that almost always means kowtowing to power and doing whatever one has to to do in playing the game that leads to getting ahead.
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Branded
E.J. Dionne points out in his column yesterday: In the 2004 election, according to the main media exit poll, President Bush won 63 percent of the votes cast by Americans in households earning over $200,000 a year, and 57 percent from those in the $100,000 to $200,000 range. All things being equal, wealthier people vote
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Ports Deal Quashed, Kind of.
Rather than my repeating myself about this deal, I was waiting for somebody else to say it. Maureen Dowd does a good job this morning: President Bush does not seem to understand that it was his bumbling — rather than our bigotry — that led Americans to gulp and yelp at the idea of an