Booman recently made a short post titled Casual Observation.
Here’s what he said.
I’m especially discouraged because I allowed myself to become optimistic about the United Auto Workers’ chances of unionizing the Volkswagon plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
I’m feeling downhearted.
Poor Booman!!!
“Casual observation,” indeed. The general anti-south commentary that follows is fairly lockstep.
“All southerners are stupid, so where’s the surprise when they vote against their own self-interest?” This of course is a racist stereotype. Left pretty much unsaid is the idea that it’s the “redneck white faction” that’s doing all of the stupid voting.
However…large corporate factories in the south are thoroughly integrated. Thoroughly. You remember…the Civil Rights act and alla that? So who’s doing this voting? Well, let’s assume that the racial distribution in this VW plant is pretty much the same as the racial distribution in Chattanooga, TN.
Other pics look about the same, demographically.
Read on for more.
Here is the racial breakdown of the Chattanooga area according to Wikipedia:
As of the census[4] of 2010, there were 167,674 people, 70,749 households, and 40,384 families residing in the city. The population density was 1,222.5 people per square mile (472.5/km²). There were 79,607 housing units at an average density of 588.8 per square mile (226.0/km²). The racial makeup of the city was 58% White, 34.9% Black, 0.4% American Indian, 2% Asian, 0.1% Pacific Islander, 1.9% from other races, and 1.3% from two or more races. 5.5% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race. Non-Hispanic Whites were 55.9% of the population in 2010, down from 67.3% in 1980
The only surprise to me here is that Hispanics were way underrepresented. Dunno why. In 2010 the total percentage of Hispanic Americans living in the U.S., was more like 16%. That doesn’t of course include the Hispanics who felt threatened by the census because they had immigration problems, but my guess is that this holds true for quoted the “5.5%” Hispanic population of Chattanooga as well. However I also guess that so-called “illegals” would have a hard time getting a gig at that plant as well, so I’ll go with these numbers.
Now unless you think that the racial groups in this vote acted in unison…something I highly doubt because their livelihoods and the survival of their families are at stake here…or the vote was somehow skewed by the people who did the counting, then the results are a fairly accurate picture of how the voters saw the question at hand.
To wit: “Considering the current terrible employment conditions in the U.S., is it worth the risk of unionizing to possibly get better pay and working conditions?” And the answer was 712 to 626 against. A 53% majority considered it too risky even though the owners of the plant were apparently for the move.
Hmmmm…
I wonder what caused that vote to happen?
Could it be…
SATAN!!!???
Or could it be what occurred in Detroit after the bipartisan Bush I/Clinton I/Bush II selling off of American industry to the lowest wage bidders?
?
Maybe some of them remember the prediction that the original non-personed presidential candidate made (Ross Perot, way before Ron Paul…the template for media non-personing, actually.) back in 1992:
To those of you in the audience who are business people, pretty simple: If you’re paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, hire young — let’s assume you’ve been in business for a long time and you’ve got a mature work force — pay a dollar an hour for your labor, have no health care — that’s the most expensive single element in making a car — have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don’t care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south.
So we — if the people send me to Washington the first thing I’ll do is study that 2,000-page agreement and make sure it’s a two-way street. One last part here — I decided I was dumb and didn’t understand it so I called the Who’s Who of the folks who’ve been around it and I said, “Why won’t everybody go South?” They say, “It’d be disruptive.” I said, “For how long?” I finally got them up from 12 to 15 years. And I said, “well, how does it stop being disruptive?” And that is when their jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it’s leveled again. But in the meantime, you’ve wrecked the country with these kinds of deals. We’ve got to cut it out.
Ross Perot, 3-way debate w/Clinton and Bush, 1992
These people in Chattanooga fear a “giant sucking sound” not just going south of the border but from anywhere else in the country that is offering the kind of cheap labor that resulted almost exactly 15 years from Perot’s prophecy.
“…when their jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it’s leveled again. But in the meantime, you’ve wrecked the country with these kinds of deals.”
Money will talk, and they fear…no matter the protestations of their German owners…that it will also walk. Away from them. To Buttfuck, Georgia or Boil Lance North Dakota. Wherever. Meanwhile, they have their mortgages and their other debts and…a lucky few in the U.S. today…they are actually managing to pay them off.
Remember the “Job One” Ford hype campaign from the ’80s? Well…now it’s “Job Done,” and many of the workers in Chattanooga apparently know it. They are playing the hand that the financial overlords of this country have dealt them. They are not stupid…no stupider than any other clearsighted American workers, anyway…and at least 53% of them have no faith in the UAW whatsoever.
Sorry, leftinesses…it’s a done deal. The only way it will change is if U.S. voters elect a radically new government, and as long as the media is owned by the very people who have made huge fortunes from that “giant whoosh”…a whoosh that has now come home, just as Perot predicted…as long as we exist under a corporate-owned government and its controller media complex (See the whole Comcast/Time-Warner fiasco for more on that.) it ain’t gonna change.
So go ahead and support Bush III…errr, ahhh, I mean Barack Obama…and Clinton II. And…watch out if you belong to a union. They’ve been outplayed by the corporatists for almost 50 years now.
Bet on it.
“WHOOSH!!!”
The sound of Malcolm X’s…and Ross Perot’s as well… chickens coming home to roost.
Sorry, but there it is.
Deal wid it.
Station WTFU once again signing off.
Get real.
AG
Go ahead.
Vote for a real change.
I dare ya.
AG
So according to your analysis, racism and segregation disappeared with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, is that correct? And the proof of this is the integration of the workplace, right?
Gilroy, racism and segregation (de facto type) has lessened but they are both still with us. Got it?
Learn to read, Shergald.
I wrote:
I agree…racism and segregation have indeed lessened and yes they are both still with us. Where they are definitely not with us is in the hiring practices of major industries. Any industrial giant that hired according to segregationist policies would be busted almost immediately, because it would simply be too obviously a criminal act..as in “against the law.” What law? The Civil Rights Act. Duh. In fact, any quotas that they might feel necessary to enforce would be of the “politically correct” type. That is what has changed, for sure. And that was the linchpin of my argument. I smell knee-jerk middle class white liberal bias in that post of Booman’s and in most of its comments as well…as if the workforce that rejected the UAW thing was comprised of a bunch of ignorant, backwoods Tea Party types. That isn’t the way it’s going down. Those workers believe that they are acting in their own self-interest, and I am not at all sure that they are wrong in that belief. I would wager that most of that factory’s workforce is the cream of the working class crop in that area. Of all races. Why? Because big industry can pick and choose now. There are more applicants than there are jobs. Thanks, PermaGov. You’ve done your dirty job well. People are scared and they are begging for work. Supply and demand in action. Too many workers, not enough jobs? Wages are depressed. Depressed wages? Profits rise. Duh twice. And who runs this whole nasty game? The same people who shipped our jobs to the lowest bidders in the ’80 and ’90s. Bipartisan, permanent government Washington DC and its financial controllers…those who are making that enormous profit due to depressed wages…run it and have done so for decades. The whole of industrial America is all just one stinking rust belt now. Detroit writ large. When scuffling people get a chance to make an honest buck they grab at it and they are not willing to take a chance of losing it. So it goes. Fire the PermaGov controllers…also called “voting”…and things might change, but that’s not about to happen because the corporate-owned media keep everyone in a state of almost complete ignorance regarding what has really gone down here. So it goes.
Learn to read.
Learn to think a little before you shoot your mouth off.
Please.
Later…
AG
Laughable, Gilroy.
The auto industry in the south in “thoroughly” integrated, ergo the UAW vote could not have been influenced by racism.
PS: If you were to cut your typical blabby posts down to essentials, more of your output would be read. Well, maybe.
One man’s blabby is another man’s thorough. You can’t cut through my detail thus you ask me to gloss instead. Homey don’t do glossing. Deal with that as well.
Or…simply skip my posts.
No problem as far as I am concerned.
It’s a complex universe, Shergald. You want simplification?
Go read “My Pet Goat.”
“Simplification” is why the controllers prop fools up in positions of supposed power.
Bet on it.
It’s also how the media control the population.
WTFU.
AG
If VW wanted to put the jobs elsewhere, it would have expanded its large existing plant in Mexico rather than spending lots of money and setting up an entirely new one in Chatanooga in 2011. If the potential sucking sound of lost jobs influenced voting, these folks ought to take a step back.
It’s not really about “VW,” boran2. It’s simply about profit. VW and all of its competitors are presently in a price war with the developing (and recently developed) countries. It’s just going to get worse, too. (Here come China and India. Bet on it. Within a decade if not sooner. And not just with cars.)
If you know anything about automobiles, you know that Hyundai/Kia is making some damned good cars and selling them at way under the price of competitive cars made elsewhere…selling them with an amazing warranty as well. Korea is already pretty much “developed,” and now it’s in the overbuilding stage that Japan pioneered when it took over the low and middle end of the American market. “Overbuilding”…that’s where a company makes a product that is actually worth more than the price at which it is selling in an attempt to corner a given market. The Japanese actually have a word for it…”kyōkyū kajō” I believe…and the Koreans are using the same idea now that the Japanese economy has grown (and stagnated) to the point that it can no longer afford to do so.
All the news reports coming out of the Chattanooga situate credit the VW company with “neutrality” regarding the establishment of a union shop at the factory. Great, but money talks and nobody walks, especially with capitalist industries. What happens if the profit margins begin to shrink due to union action at that Chattanooga plant? I’ll tell you exactly what happens because I watched it happen at the GM plant in North Tarrytown, NY (About 30 miles north of Manhattan) in the ’80s. North Tarrytown…now known as “Sleepy Hollow” because the entire town economy collapsed when GM closed that plant and the real-estate schmucks had to start hustling it as a cute little Hudson River bedroom community town for commuters instead of the healthy working class town that it had been for decades…fucking collapsed during the space of about two years. Since the factory was a union shop, GM had to buy out a great deal of its workforce and it did so without a second thought because that’s what they believed the long term bottom line required. No doubt they moved the factory to a right to work state and after a few years broke even on the deal because the wages, new robotics etc. were so much cheaper to operate than had been the North Tarrytown factory.
That’s what spooked the Chattanooga workers.
So it goes.
Watch.
This movement will continue.
Sure the RatPub hustlers were droning on in the local media to further scare the workers. But these people are not stupid. They see what’s up and the majority of them (You know,…like in a democracy?) decided to keep the status quo rather than gamble on things beyond their control.
I don’t blame them.
They don’t trust big business.
They don’t trust big government.
They don’t trust big labor.
And they do trust their own desire and ability to work.
I ask you…on the evidence of the last 50+ years here, why should they trust big anything?
This vote is another piece of evidence that the movement sometimes called “libertarianism”…basically a lack of trust in remote controllers of any kind and a sense that individuals can and should take care of their own business…is gaining momentum here in the U.S. It is not a “political” movement per se, although these people are going to vote for sure, especially if they can vote for people who understand their needs and beliefs. It is simply a self-protective movement that is forming against the depredations of big everything, and I think…again, on the evidence of the last 50+ years…that it is totally justified.
A sea change is now in progress in the U.S.
Bet on that as well.
Watch.
Will it prevail?
Maybe. But even if it doesn’t (this time) it will continue to grow as long as the drone state…remote controlled from afar, just another, much bigger and more dangerous version of the Predator drone…continues to murder the hopes and dreams of working Americans.
Sorry, but there it is.
Deal wid it.
AG
Dude, I do not get you. This:
“What happens if the profit margins begin to shrink due to union action at that Chattanooga plant? I’ll tell you exactly what happens because I watched it happen at the GM plant in North Tarrytown, NY (About 30 miles north of Manhattan) in the ’80s. North Tarrytown…fucking collapsed during the space of about two years. Since the factory was a union shop, GM had to buy out a great deal of its workforce and it did so without a second thought because that’s what they believed the long term bottom line required. No doubt they moved the factory to a right to work state and after a few years broke even on the deal because the wages, new robotics etc. were so much cheaper to operate than had been the North Tarrytown factory.”
This all perfectly matches managements’ explanations (not just GM, but nearly all U.S. anti-Union employers) why Unions destroy jobs. You blame the decision to close the North Tarrytown factory on the fact that the workers had middle-class compensation and decent working conditions? What happened to the Arthur who endorsed, a few paragraphs later, Americans’ mistrust of Big Business? Because it’s an attack on Unions, all of a sudden GM’s word is accepted that the closure was what “the long term bottom line required”? Did GM upper level executives or shareholders take cuts between 1992 and 1996, the years of the North Tarrytown plant closure? No? I thought that’s what “the long term bottom line required,” didn’t it?
I take it back- I do get you. You’re an anti-worker nut job. How dare you try to pass yourself off as sympathetic to the Chattanooga VW workers. They voted to continue to expose their jugular veins to management and politicians alike, and you approve.
Workers and organizers cite outside interference, management collusion, union missteps, two-tier agreements and Neil Young
In the 1974 song “Sweet Home Alabama,” Ronnie Van Zant of Lynyrd Skynyrd sings, “Well I hope Neil Young will remember: A Southern man don’t need him around anyhow.” The lyric is a reference to Canadian singer Neil Young’s “Southern Man,” which criticized Southerners for being opposed to social change.
But for one Southern man, progress still feels achievable. “I’m a stubborn man,” says Cliett. “Some are talking about quitting. I will be walking into the plant on Monday with my head held high and preaching the message of solidarity.”
Yeah.
Right.
But the reality of the situation is that lots of people who were directly involved made up their own minds and then fought.
Why?
From your linked article:
People looked at things and then they made up their own minds.
Like…like “democracy.” You remember that idea, right?
When “democracy” doesn’t work according to Big Government plan in international affairs…as has happened innumerable instances in the Muslim world and elsewhere over the past 60 years or so…the PermaGov “takes measures.” usually they are quite violent measures, but domestically that sort of good ol’ ultraviolence has been replaced by…cleaner but not necessarily always more effective…media work.
In this instance, it has been an overwhelming attempt by the neo-liberal wing of the government media complex…the most powerful wing in the Obama years, by far…to paint this vote as just another example of southern cracker mentality in action that was boosted…even created… by virulent right-wing media and politicians.
‘Tain’t the way it happened, seabe. Not entirely, by any means.
Bet on it.
These are people, seabe. Hard-working people. Give ’em some credit.
Please.
Later…
AG
In an upthread comment, you point out that the status quo for American workers is horrible. Then you move on to talk about how it makes sense that these VW workers would choose the status quo over something out of their control.
This infers that the workers will have more things in their control by remaining unorganized. Let me disabuse you of that notion with a question. Do you think that Tennessee VW workers will be protected from the “giant sucking sound of jobs” you decry because they voted No on Union? If you think these workers increased their job security by rejecting the UAW, I pity you for your ideological blindness.
It is revealing that you “snipped” the following section from the linked story:
“Last week, Tennessee’s Republican Governor Bill Haslam told the Tennessean, “I think that there are some ramifications to the vote in terms of our ability to attract other suppliers. When we recruit other companies, that comes up every time.”
On Monday, two days before the election began, Republican State Senate Speaker Pro Tempore Bo Watson and Republican House Majority Leader Gerald McCormick suggested that Volkswagen might not receive future state subsidies if the plant unionized.
Then on Wednesday, U.S. Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.)–the former mayor of Chattanooga–who had pledged the previous week not to comment publicly about the ongoing election, waded back into the debate to declare, “I’ve had conversations today and based on those am assured that should the workers vote against the UAW, Volkswagen will announce in the coming weeks that it will manufacture its new mid-size SUV here in Chattanooga.”
When Volkswagen Chattanooga Chairman and CEO Frank Fischer refuted Corker, saying the union election would have no effect on the SUV decision, Corker doubled down. “Believe me, the decisions regarding the Volkswagen expansion are not being made by anyone in management at the Chattanooga plant, and we are also very aware Frank Fischer is having to use old talking points when he responds to press inquiries,” Corker said in a statement on Thursday. “After all these years and my involvement with Volkswagen, I would not have made the statement I made yesterday without being confident it was true and factual.””
I know you know nothing about the National Labor Relation Board and its enforcement of our shabby Federal labor laws, but these comments by Corker, Haslam, Watson and McCormick are extraordinarily coercive, and according to VW management Corker’s comments were explicit lies. Those coercions could and should be used by the NLRB to overturn the results of this election and cause a new one to take place. Unfortunately, much damage has been done, and much fear has been improperly placed into the workers’ considerations. There’s a poisoning of the well here which will be difficult to overcome for UAW. With the closeness of the vote, if the core worker organizing committee can help keep their side together, perhaps they can overcome the poison in a future election.
What makes me furious about your glib slide back into your easy bullshit here is that you display no interest in finding solutions for the steepened economic slide of the American middle class. YOU’RE FUCKED AND IT’S YOUR FAULT is your message. You babble on here about PermaGov and avoid actually grappling with how to reverse the undermining of the Labor movement, only offering VOTE FOR SOMEONE ELSE and BIG LABOR IS THE SAME BULLSHIT as answers.
I note that the Paul movement is the one you write of most frequently as offering the change we need, but they HATEHATEHATE American workers and LOVELOVELOVE placing all the power in the hands of the property and business owners and the theocrats and oligarchs, so we know you have no answers if you point us in your usual direction.
Who? Who do you recommend we vote for who will lead us out of this wilderness? What? What must be done to restore the middle class? I want answers from you for a change.
After six plus years of big talk and no real, effective action, the major “ideological blindness” seems to me to reside with those who continue to support the Obama version of PermaGov rule.
Who do I recommend as a good, practical candidate to “lead us out of this wilderness?” Elizabeth Warren is looking good, but she is not a practical candidate so far. Things could change…Hillary could drop out. She’s not looking that healthy these days.
Other than that?
Oh. You mean that guy who…along with his father, of course…”HATEHATEHATES American workers and LOVELOVELOVES placing all the power in the hands of the property and business owners and the theocrats and oligarchs,” right?
If Rand Paul actually gets nominated…something I highly doubt because the media will do a number on him just as they did on his father…and further convinces me that you clomp-clomp-clomping DemRat toadies are the actual “HATEHATEHATE” brigade (Like the continuing semi-tacit “HATEHATEHATING” going on in this blog towards white working folk north, south and all points east and west…you know…people like alla them supposed peckerwood dummies who voted against their own self-interest in this Chattanooga brouhaha.), yes, I will vote for him.
Color me allied with whomever truly fights Big Government and The United Glitzing of America.
As Rand Paul’s father so simply answered when he was asked how soon he would bring the troops back home if he was elected President:
“As soon as the ships could get there.”
Are they both conniving liars?
I think not.
We are about to find out, though.
Watch.
AG
You posted the title of the original piece here. I responded to it.
Look at your last comment here. Do you address at all the difficult circumstances for American auto workers? No. Do you extend your response into a broader discussion of the middle class or the Labor movement? No.
Big business is bigger than ever, and its abuses of worker and consumer alike are getting extremer by the day. When you advocate for Rand Paul becoming our next President because he “truly fights Big Government,” you are asking us to abandon the United State’s meager support for the American middle and lower classes. Rand Paul was highly public recently in his vicious opposition for extending unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed.
“When you allow people to be on unemployment insurance for 99 weeks, you’re causing them to become part of this perpetual unemployed group in our economy,” Paul remarked. “And while it seems good, it actually does a disservice to the people you’re trying to help.”
“You know, I don’t doubt the president’s motives, but black unemployment in America is double white unemployment. And it hasn’t budged under this president. A lot of African-Americans voted for him, but I don’t think it’s worked, I don’t think his policies work.”
Like that MF’er cares about African-Americans. He condescends to them as if they were small children. Did you get a load of his incredible performance in front of student leaders at Howard University? It’s quite a document:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7aW1Hv1xXs
Rand Paul wants to destroy effective collective bargaining nationwide; he’s presented a national Right-To-Work (for less) Bill to the Senate. Rand Paul thinks there are problems with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, which defend the most basic and important powers of working people. Rand Paul thinks the Supreme County got it right in 1905’s Lochner decision; he believes businesses should have the power to dominate workers without regulation or protection from government. Minimum wages, overtime pay, safe working conditions, even the ban on child labor would be under extreme threat from a Paul Administration. He’s a radical.
How do these policy positions help the 99% you pretend, increasingly unconvincingly, to care about?
In a long career as a freelance musician…a type of career that is all too often cursed with unemployment/underemployment, believe me…I have never and will never take government benefits like unemployment. Why? Because I believe that doing so wrecks the will to fight. This is not something that I lapped up off of Paulist speeches; it is the way I was taught to live by my highly independent parents and grandparents. I fight to survive with everything I have. Will everyone agree with me? No, only the weak-minded, but I support those who do.
Regarding Rand Paul at Howard? (I listened to the whole video.) I think he aquitted himself very well. Condescending? I don’t hear it. He was honestly stating his beliefs and almost all of the audience seemed to grant him the respect that he deserves.
You?
HATEHATEHATE.
Kneejerk;leftiness.
So it goes.
Is he right about what he believes?
I dunno. It has yet to be put to the test.
However, the fact that big government has proven itself ineffective on almost every level for upwards of 50 years seems to me to be ample evidence regarding the need for change.
Ronald Reagan…or rather, one of his speechwriters because Reagan was just an actor (unlike Rand Paul, who can quite obviously think for himself)…asked in 1980 “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” I now ask “Are you better off than you were 25 or 30 years ago?” If you believe that you and the rest of the country are indeed better off than you were before the corporate-owned Permanent Government sold the entire country downriver to the highest bidders/lowest wages then by all means support one of the PermaGov candidates that the media will no doubt try to foist off on a credulous, media-blinded public. If you…if we…are not, then start looking for radical change.
You say about Rand Paul “He’s a radical.” Great!!! So’s Elizabeth Warren…just a different kind of radical. Choose someone who actually wants basic, root-level change and that person will be a “radical” by definition.
From the Merriam Webster Dictionary:
We must “root out” the disease before healing can begin.
Warren is not…yet…running for president. Rand Paul is obviously doing so, thus I am more interested in his approach than I am in that of Senator Warren. He is the only potential candidate who can be truly defined as a “radical” other than a few looney tunes who have no shot whatsoever.
There you have it. Deal with it as you must. One way or another both the mainstream DemRats and mainstream RatPubs are headed for the tar pits of history. The only questions left in this matter are:
1- How long the tarpit process will take.
and
2-Whether we will accede to be taken down with them.
Let us pray that we are not.
Let us pray.
Later…
AG
AG, perhaps you are acquainted with the concept of payroll taxes, which pay for unemployment insurance and the other major government benefits Americans enjoy. You infer here that those who avail themselves of UI and other benefits are made corrupt and lazy by them.
Will you be refusing your Medicare, then?
Let me be clear about something: you should accept your Medicare benefit. Don’t try to “fight” your way through your future illnesses, OK? You’re not the only one who would lose out in that scenario: health care costs for everyone would rise because of your misguided decision.
You have convinced me that you’ve never applied for UI, though. If you had, you would know that in order to continue to receive the benefit, you must show a government official on a regular basis that you have continued to “fight” for work by putting in new job applications.
Rand’s address at Howard: Yes, the students are some of the most outstanding among us, so they heard him out with respect. Paul fell short of returning their respect by straight-out lying about his views about the Civil Rights Act, asking the students if they knew that the founders of the NAACP were Republicans (you can hear from the students’ response how well-respected they felt by that), by misidentifying the Howard graduate who was the first African-American elected to the Senate (Edward Brooke), and so many other gems.
But let’s not let this glaring omission of yours go, AG. You grabbed onto the 3-word “radical” sentence and ignored the rest of the paragraph which preceded it. You eluded response to the subsequent question I asked: “How do these policy positions help the 99% you pretend, increasingly unconvincingly, to care about?”
And arguing with AG reminds me of what it’s like to argue with the guys holding the signs in the picture.
We are all going to permagov leftiness hell, and only repenting and accepting the Pauls as our saviours will prevent eternal damnation, or so the story goes. Lots of yelling ensues. It is an exercise in futility, but at least it’s exercise?
Let us pray, indeed. ROFL.
AG is what he is and always will be. I’m not foolish enough to believe anyone will flip him. It’s the other readers I’m talking to. They seem worth my while.
In your photo, the dude on the right seems very persuasive. Who wouldn’t want to hear him out? He’s bringing a joyful message from the Lord.
“Father rapers, mother stabbers…” Group W revisited.
If there were any doubts as to his allegiances, I would like to hope they have now been laid to rest – Ron & Rand Paul, H. Ross Perot, talk about rugged individualism, coupled with a hostility to a “left” that seems like a caricature from FauxNews. He really should try to get a column on antiwar.com. They’d love his act there.
Yeah, AG’s statement that either Warren or Paul (but preferably the latter) would do as the next POTUS was a gobsmacker. That the two Senators reside near opposite poles on almost all economic and partisan issues seems to have eluded Arthur.
Arthur is like the young people in the late ’60’s who heard the distorted howl which led “Revolution” and thought Lennon was encouraging them to tear down the whole thing, man. They, like AG, would have been well advised to listen to John’s lyrics and think about them for a short spell.
You missed my point.
As usual.
I am not “ideologically” committed to any faction. Neither are the (45% and rising) uncommitted voters in this country. “Ideologies” are simply tactical positions regarding the achievement of given strategic goals. The strategic goals of the corporate-owned-and-controlled PermaGov are quite obvious now. Make the population of the United States so fearful that it will obey and and all dictums from above. Keep ’em broke and barefoot. Then rake in the profits. End of story.
Elizabeth Warren opposes this situation.
So does Rand Paul.
They have similar strategic goals, the same goals that said 45% of the population..the 45% that is now thoroughly are disgusted with both parties…seems to have. An end to corporate dominance of the economy and foreign policy and an end to non-representative government. They only differ tactically.
I do not really give a rat’s ass which tactical concepts win this war for America’s survival any more than I might have for the tactical ideas of some number of generals in a shooting war. I only want positive change.Victory. I would really like to see a détente between the so-called “conservative” and “progressive” sides of this system in an effort to defeat a centrist (read “corporate) government that now appears to be a larger threat to our freedoms than has been any foreign threat over the history of this country. You know…like the cooperation between the capitalist West and communist Russia that ended Hitler’s mad rampage?
Job One?
Survival.
Then let ’em duke it out over tactics. Neither the progressive nor the conservative/libertarian tactical positions have been proven to be a sure thing. As Ron Paul once said about the potential success of real free market capitalism, “I don’t know. It’s never been tried.” Ditto so-called “progressive” or “socialist” ideas. Not in America they haven’t been tried, anyway. Not even close. Not successfully, for sure.
So here we are.
I really don’t care which one takes which office, myself. Let the Vice-President have an equal say in things. Or…hell, let’s have two Presidents! Think of the fun that would be!!! They could veto each other!!!
Functional anarchy.
What a concept!!!
WTFU.
AG
Arthur, but you aren’t dealing with the fact that Rand Paul does NOT oppose corporate dominance of the economy. He WANTS corporate dominance, on big motherfucking steroids. He WANTS non-representative government with his support of anti-voter, anti-civil rights, anti-choice laws.
To stay on the subject of your original post, Rand’s leadership on the Federal Right-To-Work Bill shows he wants to eliminate effective collective bargaining and worker political power, handing all power to business and property owners.
Good Lord, you’re willfully blind in believing that Warren and Paul have “similar strategic goals.” This is your “one revolution’s as good as another” attitude. That’s simply untrue. I’d support a revolution with Warren’s values, and I would viciously oppose a revolution with Paul’s. The two would oppose each other’s revolution; can’t you see that?
Call Rand Paul’s Senate office up, or his Presidential campaign office once he officially sets that up, and demand that he nominate Elizabeth as his VP. Enjoy the hostile/derisive response.
My sentiments exactly. If someone or some group of people (Any group of people, really, as long as they aren’t a bunch of total liars.) could manage to unite the existing opposition…call it the 45% although from the polls I see regarding presidential and congressional approval it’s looking more and more like the 70% to me…in an attempt to revise the going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket situation now in PermaGov place, that would be doing “the best we know how at the moment.”
Is an effective alliance between the libs and the progs a real possibility? Between say the Paulistas and the Warrenistas? I doubt it. But I would love to see it happen. I would enjoy watching people like you stew in their own ideological juices as real change developed.
However…as you say, it’s not likely to happen. The fix will once again be in and the left will force down their rising bile and vote for HRC.
So it goes.
Hunker down. It’s gonna be a long decade.
Bet on it.
Later…
AG