mccain and palin, the wanker and the winker, are looking increasingly desperate.
The only question remaining is if the American public as wakier and winkier than that pair. Unfortunately , evan, if this was a contest of minds McGoo /Palin wouldn't even be running.
Latest SurveyUSA poll
Do you support the Eliminates Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry Act also know as Prop 8?
Yes - 44%
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Vote NO on Prop 8.
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The show today played a clip of Sarah Palin "explaining" her answer about powers of the VP. Again she demonstrates her unparalleled ignorance. It is instructive to see how little the Constitution says about the VP. One wonders what she means by flexibility. It says very little about the VP other than taking over if something happens to the President, and being President of the Senate. In other words, there are two powers. Here's what it says about the Senate:
The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.
The Senate shall choose their other Officers, and also a President pro tempore, in the absence of the Vice President, or when he shall exercise the Office of President of the United States.
This Kuttner person sounds like another Obama worshipper, the POWER of a TRANSFORMATIVE PRESIDENCY. Please. Obama has surrounded himself with Clinton people and recited the Clinton policy agenda from day one. That's fine with me. But it's not quite fair given how he and his followers acted in the primary.
Now he's transformative? Why stop there? How about naming him a shining gift of sweet heavenly light from above?
Smears and lies indeed! One almost wants to pull one's hair out. And depressing to see how these smears and lies seem to work with all too many people. Listen to what Mark Danner has to say in a debate held at this year's Brooklyn Book Festival and CRY - not that the other members of the panel are not worth listening to (scroll down a bit):
http://www.nybooks.com/podcasts/
And I trust you won't brutalise Robert Kuttner, Michelangelo!
The idea of a transformative presidency is by no means Clintons. In fact,the first person for decades to talk about regulating corporations is Obama . Bill Clinton only enlarged grotesuely the ongoing seamrolling of labor by signing NAFTA, and acting inhumanly to Iraq which could easily be seen as a continuation of the Bush Oil agenda . Let's give credit where credit is due.
Ms Palin has her own language for concepts which apparently mean something to her, or more likely, she is trying to cover up the fact that she really is a moron. When McCain signed her on for V.P. , I'm guessing she thought it was a movie role. Indeed the V.P is only important in this race , on that side because McCain will likely die before he gets too far, and that would be our president! Can you even imagine. I think that most people in my grade school knew more than she seems to.
If I recall, the modern corporation was a creation of the Ulysses S. Grant era, a time of corruption and bought government. It gave to corporations the status of a legal person whereas earlier the life of a corporation was limited to one working lifetime, forty years. After forty years, if it was still in existence, it was required to be broken up and sold off and to go out of existence.
Now we have a legal person whose conduct is less regulated than that of a living person. Try conducting a class action suit or declaring bankruptcy and compare your possibilities with that of a corporation. Try putting a corporation in jail. Try claiming a fine as part of the costs of doing business that you can pass on to the consumer.
All legal persons are not equal under the law. Conservatives would regulate you and deregulate business. Your rights are to be restricted, theirs to be enlarged.
William: Thanks. The inecqitable view which you discribe of the relative rights and privilages of corporations vs. persons is , I believe one of the reasons if not the reason why all of the privatized nations of ,e.g., So and Central America could only be maintained as long as we put and kept dictatorships in power, and democracy squelched. Interestingly, in most of those cases, what has happened is that
democracy eventually prevailed and the resultant governments were determined by contests between Corporatization and nationalization(where the individual mattered first.)
Americans are too brainwashed into seeing anything that is not lazzaiz faire Capitalism as Stalinism of some kind which is just primative and mindless.
Mark: The United States is still a right-of-center country. Some years ago I tried to argue that Charles de Gaulle represented a more realistic brand of conservatism. I was rapidly denounced as a "socialist," a "communist," and a "Marxist" operative. Add "alien" to it, and those "conservatives" would have added xenophobia to neo-fascism.
Nationalization and privatization in Latin America is a slick game. When the foreign firms get nationalized, the foreigners get cleaned out and the locals stuff the cash in their pockets as they loot the revenues of the "national" firm. When it's run bankrupt, it's privatized and a new generation of "foreign investment" is lured in. Of course, what the locals get for the sale goes into local pockets. The locals profit unless the foreign entity is backed up by guns and government abroad. When the foreigners are big and tough enough, the locals are their preferred locals and paid off right and left. The workers, peasants, middle-class, and weaker parties always get cleaned out of whatever they've accumulated.
Little wonder that the big drug lords are admired and considered Robin Hoods. They're more generous that lawful authorities and foreign corporations.
Patriotism is a great tool in this game. If they nationalize, it's "the national patrimony" that's not going to be given to filthy foreigners. When it's broke, it's all about the need for the nation to join all the other prestigious modern nations and enjoy its share of glory and prosperity.
"What's good for General Motors is good for the country." That kind of patriotism certainly hasn't gone out of style. Free markets are patriotic until it's bipartisanship rushing to the defense of our God-given prosperity. North America or South America, it's basically the same package of lies and the same refuge, first and last, of scoundrels.
Certainly, it seems so strange to me that Americans don't seem to be right of center by virtue of legitimate choice, but more out of ignorance that there are a variety of options. At least in European systems they seem to have a better sense of reality. You're right about De Gaulle.
I have to keep going back to the situation in So America to understand just what has happened, between CIA planted dictators (e.g. Pinochet) +privatized American corporations. The World Bank vs. "developmentalism".
I don't know if you're familiar with the book "Shock Doctrine" by Naomi Klein, but she describes a situation where U.S. Corporations and the CIA plant a dictator who run away with everything between them.(Milton Friedman project) The country is then broke and goes to the World Bank who lends them Money on terms that they privatize and give political support to the U.S..
What has happened in some countries recently is ,as I understand it (from elsewhere) that the countries have voted for anti-corporatization governments which have worked so far. They are governments where only certain essential industries are nationalized, and regulated privatization occur in other industries..
Living in Mexico at times doesn't make me a real Latin Americanist with a good knowledge of its economic systems. I do know that I profoundly distrust a lot of the so-called Latin American pundits and specialists and experts who are so regularly cited in the mainstream media. They just don't ring true. I used to read some of the British reviewers and they sounded like they were living in Florida getting feeds from places that they had never seen all neatly translated by people who had a definite interest in what got translated. One guy used to write wonderful travel brochures and local tourist guides, all from his hotel room in one town--if they can do that with travel advice, what do you think they do with insights into local politics? Just compare articles that crop up about Venezuela--you wouldn't think they were talking about the same country.
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