Thank you Will. EXACTLY.

[Dover]

From your "Lion's mouth" thread:


A great line from the West Wing at a midterms rally: "It's a remarkable thing in America that we can have a revolution every two years."

Those bi-annual revolutions in the House, along with the ones we have every four years for the Oval and every six for the Senate, are one of our greatest strengths...at least on paper. Keep the new blood flowing while maintaining institutional memory, install accountability into the system, etc.

The flaw, of course, is that the truly powerful ones you refer to aren't elected, are able to buy and sell those who are elected, and tend to exist beyond any accountability. Theirs is a generational affair, a command and control position that truly grew roots with the railroad barons, the oil industrialists and all the folks who get the government contracts in times of war.

Every once in a while they get pushed back a bit - the breaking of Standard Oil is one example - but by and large they have remained, and grown in power, and insulated themselves from any kind of accountability.

They are the new aristocracy, the 1% of the 1%, and I don't think they give a wet damn who is President. Can you name for me a President that hasn't made sure to take care of them? Especially since the end of WWII? I can't. The ones who might have caused a power shift were either shot or discredited and checkmated.

Imagine yourself as that 1% of the 1%. You backed Bush, and now he is teetering. So what? That Clinton surplus is in your bank account thanks to the tax cuts, your oil-and-weapons stock portfolio is bursting with profits, and all this mayhem serves only to make sure that oil and weapons won't become unprofitable anytime soon...which means, in short, that your relatively meager investment into Bush has paid massive dividends.

Presidents and politicians, for these people, are window-dressing. They come and go. Money is forever, as is the power that comes with it. If Bush goes down, that 1% of the 1% won't bat an eye. They've already invested in ten possible replacements, and their great-grandfathers wired the system itself to serve them in any case. It's Madisonian democracy on steroids and behind a thick curtain.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=3107946&mesg_id=3107946
______________________________________


So let's stop pretending that we have a functional, representative government. The corruption is deep and wide. Why beat our heads against a stage set white house wall or their puppets? Why not seek out the big fish where they live? Why not refuse to be their servants through organized resistance (like national or even global extended strikes), etc.?
My math ain't that good but let's see......1% of 1% vs. 99.9999999999999999999999%.
Seems like good odds to me!

[Viva_La_Revolution]

1. link to the thread?

I'd hate to miss one of Will's master works.

[Dover]

2. Good idea. I added it to the OP...n/t

[tnlefty]

3. kick

This should make for good debate!

[Dover]

4. Thanks. Please feel free to begin that discussion/debate.

No bystanding...

[tnlefty]

5. I thought that your post stated anything/everything that needed to

be said, I wasn't trying to be a bystander. Money, power and greed are the driving forces in American foreign policy, IMO, and until enough citizens wake up and figure it out it won't change. :hi:

[Dover]

6. The silence is deafening, isn't it?....n/t

[EstimatedProphet]

7. Full agreement

We will just replace this asshole with the next asshole until we wake up and realize the system is gamed to work for the best interests of a very few.

[Dover]

9. I guess everyone is in agreement....

So how do we begin to model new ways of being active within and dealing with our current 'situation'? People seem to be stuck in the old model and can't break out.

[EstimatedProphet]

10. Tough question

Of course it's tough, too - we haven't been able to fix the system yet.

We need to remodel what it means to be successful, and also we need to reevaluate gender roles. People are too easily trapped in the rat race, and they never even notice sometimes that they are. Add to that the idea we still carryover from1950's TV about 'manliness' and we have a lot of the population playing a game they don't know is rigged against them, and they won't allow themselves to quit. That is a long term change we need to make.

In the short term, we need the Fairness Doctrine back, we need to drop the idea that all sides should be given automatic equal credence (not time, of course - all sides need to have equal time for their views), and most importantly we need to rein in multinational corporations.

[Jcrowley]

8. A comment

The earth is not dying. It is being killed, and the people killing it have names and addresses. --Utah Phillips