Mitt Romney -- whaddaya think???

[Ben]

The Reaganization of Romney

[Ben]

US Politics: Illusion of Choice...

RT: "Abby Martin interviews Bruce Dixon of the Black Agenda Report about the state of American politics and the false illusion of choice when it comes to electing our leaders."
Addendum (from me -- ): Under Dems Wall Street do better. And, too, Obama is more bellicose than Bush. Bush, I believe, is a moderate. Cheney, the de facto President, was the hawkish one. That doesn't excuse ol' Bush....

[sexyasianescorts]

I think that if Romney gets in he is going to cause you guys all sorts of political problems with other countries. However Obama needs to realise that you cannot spend your way out of an economic crisis!

[thombergeron]

However Obama needs to realise that you cannot spend your way out of an economic crisis!

Why not? The current rate on 10-year U.S. treasuries is 1.732% That's pretty much exactly the current rate of inflation in the U.S.

Lenders are currently willing to loan funds to the U.S. government for free. Why would we not take that free money and use it to employ people in public works?

[trish]

Lenders are currently willing to loan funds to the U.S. government for free. Why would we not take that free money and use it to employ people in public works?

Exactly

[broncofan]

Romney needs to realize that you cannot tighten fiscal and monetary policy during a recession. The national debt has not been the cause of our current crisis but in part (that part that has grown) a result of the severe recession. One needs to carefully calibrate the use of tax benefits that do not cost too much revenue and useful spending as a stimulus.

But recessions are often exacerbated by a lack of demand. There is a limit to how much you can encourage capital owners to produce without customers with disposable income to sell to. If there is nothing fundamental underlying the economic crisis and it continues because of low consumer confidence and little new home development then you absolutely need to spend your way out of it. By tightening fiscal and monetary policy right now you paralyze the system. Thombergeron is right, the government should increase the size of its own workforce; they not only get useful things done with a low borrowing rate but they employ people and this is crucial to breaking the cycle of continued depressed demand.

[Ben]

Maybe Romney should listen to the Green Party presidential nominee Dr. Jill Stein. I don't support her or the Green Party. But we certainly need a viable 3rd. -- or even 2nd. -- party.
I mean, the Republican Party is barely a political party. And the Dems are moving in that direction.
Point being: we need to eradicate the stark democratic deficit. The democratic deficit is: the wide gap between American public opinion and American public policy. Public policy does not reflect public opinion.
American public opinion is way to the left of both the Dems and the Republicans. But, of course, they don't serve the American people. They serve corporate power. Which Americans know -- and understand.
More parties would hopefully address this longstanding democratic deficiency....



Or even Rocky Anderson:

[Prospero]

This is a review from a british newspaper of a book I've been reading these last few days - which has made my bleak view of your American future even more bleak. A collective insanity now seems to grip a large part of the US population - many of whom would put back into power the very people who took your nation and the world to the brink of economic disaster and who will, if returned to power, topple it further towards catastrophe with their still greater ideological fervour.

This review gives only a hint of the appalling situation its' author chronicles - further evidence of what most people here feel and fear (though the rabid ideological right wingers where will scoff. Anything that challenges their headlong tumble into a collapse of civilisational values is simple "lies" by the Liberal media - the loathed elite).

Pity the Billionaire by Thomas Frank - review
The evil roots of the American right

Does anyone know how truly evil Ayn Rand was? I once tried, a long time ago, to get through Atlas Shrugged, but gave up pretty quickly, on the grounds that life was too short to spend a chunk of it in the company of a wicked lunatic who can't write "bum" on a wall. So I missed this bit, summarised here by Thomas Frank, who has read the book so we don't have to: at one point, in what would appear to be the most clunking symbolism, a train crashes because – this is always happening on trains – a powerful politician insists on the crew driving into a dangerous tunnel.

"And then, in a notorious passage, the narrator goes through all the other passenger cars on the train and tells us why each casualty-to-be deserves the fate that is coming to him or her. One of them, she points out, received government loans; another doesn't like businessmen; a third is married to a federal regulator; a fourth foolishly thinks she has a right to ride on a train even when she doesn't personally own the train in question."

I am going to trust Frank's precis; it certainly does not contradict what I already knew of Rand's opinions, even though it seems improbably extreme. (But it's not. It really is in the book, and our own George Monbiot was recently denounced by a Randian – frighteningly, former ambassador George Crawford – for taking issue with the passage. The problem with Rand is that she is still hugely popular among Americans of certain political convictions. This is also our problem, too, as Frank, in his astute assessment of her, shows.

The title and subtitle of his book give you a pretty good idea of what to expect: a horrific catalogue of the Tea Party's hijacking of populist outrage at the crash of 2008, when audiences were invited – in true Randian fashion – to save their pity and their sympathy for the very architects of that crash. There are also plenty of revealing asides. Because we are nice herbivores on this paper, we have been sheltered from, for example, the spending advice given in a 2007 edition of Trader Monthly, which gave as one compelling reason for buying a $300,000 turntable, the opportunity to give "a huge middle finger to everyone who enters your home".

Frank does not pussyfoot around the implications we can draw about the soul of such a person. "A trader was not just an überconsumer but a bullying, self-maximising, wealth-extracting he-man: a lout, in full."

It is, for some chapters, an extremely depressing read, but a very compelling one, and useful to place the otherwise mystifying ascendancy of the Tea Party movement, and its subsequent near-takeover of the Republican party, in context. Frank has a breezy way with comparative history: his description of the differences between how Roosevelt managed the 1929 crash, and how the 2008 disaster was handled, is concise – and enough to make you weep. As, too, is his explanation of how it came about that the Democrats have become so removed from what should have been their grass-roots support. (This, admittedly, is not a phenomenon we are unaware of over here.)

There is hope – the Occupy movement, the reclamation of some level of proper populist outrage (the 99% v the 1%), and – although Frank's book came out too early for this – the astonishing stupidity and crassness of just about everything Mitt Romney has said during his election campaign. Then again, when you have people claiming that universal healthcare is tantamount to communism or euthanasia, or both, or that Europe, in its adoption of "socialism" after the second world war, became, in its entirety, a stranger to freedom of speech and thought ever after; and when you have any number of flat-earthers and Fox news ranters who peddle similar distortions – you really have to worry. This is a deeply troubling book, and at times I felt like the Jewish kids in Howard Jacobson's Kalooki Nights, with their fascination for books about the Third Reich; but as a clear picture of the problem, it's important.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012...s-frank-review

[Ben]

This is a review from a british newspaper of a book I've been reading these last few days - which has made my bleak view of your American future even more bleak. A collective insanity now seems to grip a large part of the US population - many of whom would put back into power the very people who took your nation and the world to the brink of economic disaster and who will, if returned to power, topple it further towards catastrophe with their still greater ideological fervour.

This review gives only a hint of the appalling situation its' author chronicles - further evidence of what most people here feel and fear (though the rabid ideological right wingers where will scoff. Anything that challenges their headlong tumble into a collapse of civilisational values is simple "lies" by the Liberal media - the loathed elite).

Pity the Billionaire by Thomas Frank - review
The evil roots of the American right

Thomas Frank is a very good writer. All his books are worth reading. Especially What's the matter w/ Kansas?

[Prospero]

His Kansas book was the last one he wrote before this