My brother helped set up the Iowa Heartland Forum which you can stream at Huffington Post.
HuffPost is teaming up Saturday with Open Markets, as well as the Iowa Farmers Union and the Storm Lake Times, for the Heartland Forum, a discussion with 2020 candidates on rural issues. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Art Cullen of the Storm Lake Times will be the moderator, along with HuffPost reporter Zach Carter and me. We’ll also be taking questions from members of the Storm Lake community.
Tune in to our livestream on HuffPost at 1 p.m. Central Time/2 p.m. Eastern today to hear from four 2020 candidates ― former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, former Rep. John Delaney (Md.), Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) ― as well as Rep. Tim Ryan (Ohio), who has been considering a bid, about their vision for rural America.
Related to this, check out our new feature, Meet the New Trustbusters, by Eric Cortelessa. It includes some information you’ll want to know about Cory Booker.
Hearing aids are OTC now?
This just changed my life.
The Washington Monthly article was well written, detailed and informative. I’m still not certain what the takeaway is on Cory Booker. That he has come to understand the needs of agriculture and orchardists because of fruit growers in NJ? OK, but why make that point so difficult fo find.
It is often not appreciated that agriculture is an important part of the NJ economy. It’s nickname is “The Garden State” not the “Oil Refinery State”. Yes, a lot of that is truck garden crops and fruit (including cranberries) but there’s also cattle raising in the state too. But the big agribusness trusts are much more of a problem in the monoculture states of the Midwest where the family farm is a critically endangered species.
In a sense, this is not a new problem. In the 1870s, Midwest farmers were victimized by vicious bankers (there were no USDA farm loans until 1933) and greedy railroad owners. Railroads at the time were critical to getting crops to market in the (then) far away Midwest. The panic of 1873 led to horrible conditions for those farmers and there were many protest movements and political mobilization.
Democrats should be trying to change the self-destructive mentality of Midwest farmers that leads them to support the GOP to get subsidies that mainly go to Big Ag.
In memory of HRC’s catastrophic public positions/private positions gaffe:
Yes, some Dems are indeed talking…publicly…about “Antitrust and Agriculture,” and also about many other needed reforms on other levels.
The thing is…how are we to know whether they are saying the same things to Big Money that are being said in public?
I have more than a modicum of trust that Elizabeth Warren is on the level. She has been very consistent in her actions and words for a long time. The rest mentioned in your quote? I really have no idea. I do have an idea about Corey Booker, though….an idea formed from long, local observation, well before he catapulted himself into national prominence. He will do whatever it is that he considers necessary to advance himself. Not a recommendation in the public poitions/private positions wars, as far as I am concerned.
Watch how these people…all of the candidates, as well…secure their campaign funds.
“Follow the money,” and “cui bono.”
Two useful concepts in the honesty wars.
Bet on it.
Later…
ASG
Arthur Gilroy believes in a raft of far right wing policies and social views. He explicitly opposes the enforcements of a broad set of Federal civil rights protections, he believes unemployment insurance is bad policy because he claims it saps initiative, and through his frequently expressed desire to allow States and portions of States to secede from the U.S., he believes in stripping Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and other Federal social welfare programs from millions and millions and millions and millions of Americans.
He campaigned here against Democratic Party candidates during the general elections campaigns in 2016 and 2018. He’s already announced his plans to campaign against the Democratic Party Presidential nominee in 2020. He’s had a chance to see President Trump and the enabling Republican Congressional caucuses in action, and he’s decided that campaigning against the only viable option to Trump and other Republicans is the way to go.
If Arthur wanted to push the Democratic Party and United States electorates to the left, he would refrain from campaigning for Republican party candidates during general election cycles by telling progressives to deny their votes for Democrats while he openly admits that he refuses to tell regressives that they should deny their votes for Trump and Republicans.
AG is a Ron Paul evangelist who thinks that Cliven Bundy was “…fucking right…” in his anti-government, white supremacist-enabling statements. He claims to believe that the Democratic Party is too centrist, all while holding positions which are, in whole, far, far, far to the right of the most conservative candidates for the Dem Party’s Presidential nomination, and far, far, far to the right of the most conservative member of the Democratic Congressional caucuses.
I’m sick of the hostility and dishonesty from this guy. Arthur’s record will be called out continually here. The community will be informed of his regressive record. He may decide to remain here, but he absolutely will not be allowed to destructively mislead the community as he continues to try to do.
To this neocentrist troll and its allies, all and everyone who opposes the equally neocentrist DNC as it now stands is a despicable enemy of “progress.” I have wasted too much time debunking this shit.
I won’t waste any more.
As I say below:
==
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
A group…or perhaps better, a cadre…of people on this site have tried everything in their power to discourage criticism of the Democratic Party as it stands today. They automatically downrate such posts and have endlessly attacked several posters as liars, fools, pro-Trump trolls and/or spreaders of Russian propaganda. When effectively rebutted, they simply ignore the rebuttal and repeat the same attacks. These McCarthyite tactics are intended to exhaust the patience of the attacked posters and discourage others from reading or posting similar material. It has worked on a few posters, who have simply given up. It has not worked with me. I initially answered their attacks with attempts at reason. After realizing that this was a total waste of time, I have pretty much stopped replying to them. My comments and articles on this site are my replies. Read what I have to say; consider what they have to say and how it is said, and then make up your own minds. Thank you-AG
==
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
That’s a 100% non-denial denial, right there. No one will make AG abandon his evangelism for the Ron Paul agenda. Pride does cause him to engage in honesty here from time to time, followed by retreats to utter bullshit with his “centrist” critiques.
He knows we have shared the receipts for his rotten, regressive record here, yet in this response Arthur attempts to mislead and demagogue yet again.
And he can’t even acknowledge that the community member who is recounting his record accurately is a human being. That’s the intent of his “…its…” nonsense.
Arthur is a human being. A very flawed human being, by the accounting of himself he provides here.
Is it true that you do not support unemployment insurance and/or civil rights protections?
No.
It is not true.
The only things that I do not support in this particular context are dishonesty in government and in politics.
If “unemployment insurance and/or civil rights protections” have been used to keep down…quite effectively, on the basis of the ongoing results of those supposed movements for the disadvantaged people at whom they were (also supposedly) aimed…then we must look at how and why they have failed, and exactly who it was that engineered that failing.
A “disadvantaged” workforce…artificially kept in place by racial and/or cultural markers combined with low-levels of educational opportunity which are enforced by gerrymandered voting borders…is a prime need of big corporate forces. It has been this way in the U.S. at least since slavery and the early disenfranchisement of women, non-property owning whites and those of religions other than those of the Protestant variety.
It is now carried on by other means…including so-called “unemployment” and “civil rights” protections.
Bet on it.
Answer me this:
Of what good are “civil rights” protections for the many members of shot-down and/or unjustly imprisoned black and hispanic populations of this country?
AG
P.S. I cannot immediately identify your position regarding the neocentrist, McCarthyite system that is so busily trying to troll this once progressive website into a kneejerk DNC mouthpiece, so I have answered you honestly.
Your response…if there is one…will tell the tale.
If you are honestly asking?
Thank you.
If you are not?
So it goes in Post-Truth America.
Got that? “”…unemployment insurance and/or civil rights protections” have been used to keep down…those supposed movements for the disadvantaged people…”. Hear the True Progressive Speak!
Additionally, let’s unpack this rancid stew.
Quoting from Arthur’s statements from the various diaries linked in his remarkable manifesto:
It is often said that you cannot legislate morality. I’ll go one step further. You cannot legislate evolution. It either happens or it doesn’t. How many millions of the roughly 325 million Americans (not counting however many millions of so-called “illegals” are here, most of whom work for people like you and me washing dishes and delivering food, etc. at wages so low that they that defy imagination) absolutely, positively resemble your ancestors and mine in their beliefs. Given the low tide 28% approval rate of people like Butch II when he was in office, it looks to me like fully 1/4 or more of U.S. residents are right back where my grandparents lived in terms of societal evolution. That’s pushing on 100 million people. Plus…they’re the ones who own most of the guns. Can we somehow “legislate” their obedience to what we consider higher socially evolved notions? On the evidence of the last 50+ years, the answer is a resounding “No!!!” Are they dying out? I sometimes wonder. Given the Trump phenomenon, I wonder more now than at any time in the past. So I say…give them their own damned country/countries and let’s see who wins that competition….
…What if, centerfielddj?
What if we had not fought that war? I don’t know for sure myself, but I believe that as the world moved on into the 20th century and industrialization, the south would have become a failed state. Hell, it might have even become a black state in time, or itself suffered insurrection and secession by majority black states. Wouldn’t that have been interesting!!!…
…I identify a huge problem going on in the U.S. today…a problem of scale, a problem of sheer size and complexity…and think that a move towards decentralized government would help to solve that problem…
…As far as dissolving the union…this country is now too big, too diverse culturally and too populous to be adequately governed by a centralized federal system. If one truly believes in rule by majority consensus, then decentralization is the only way that it is going to happen…
…Long term, what are (the prospects for gay Kentuckians) in that area of the country? Consider it. Publicly homosexual in an area where they are considered to be totally alien freaks by the majority white Christian populace? Please. Are their civil rights going to be “enforced” when people drive by their house and throw things at it? When their faces and names are published in the local fundamentalist press? When some hooligans…just as likely to be local cops as anything else…pull them into an alley as they are going to dinner and beat the shit out of them? This government cannot even enforce the “civil rights” of the soon-to-be-majority of darker-skinned citizens in areas like that or even in the biggest cities of this country, with DC being perhaps the worst offender of all. The rule of law means nothing if the majority of people in a given area do not believe in it. Not unless that area is under some sort of martial law.
I personally believe that this union in which so many of us seem to passionately believe should be broken up into smaller countries. Someone wants to live in a country where homosexuals are stoned to death? Great. Move to the U.S D.S…the United States of the Deep South…wallow in your ignorance surrounded by others like you and watch your system implode from sheer stupidity….
…I see it here all the time, in Hispanic areas and families. It’s one main reason why I got so involved in NYC latin music. Why is it like that? Because Hispanics are by and large not cursed with multiple generations of welfare poison is why. If the other races who have come here had been the beneficiaries…errrr, ahhhhh…victims of a welfare state, none of them would have escaped endless poverty either. Not the Italians not the Jews, not the Irish…nobody. You can still go to isolated sections of the NYC area and find the Irish/Jewish/Italian left-behind neighborhoods and the same welfare-produced gene sink results as well…
…We can’t go on letting Big Gov dictate to us. That way lies 1984. The left and right have valid meeting points, and this is one of the big ones. Let it go at your own peril…
…”Welfare” and other giveaways rather than jobs, honest work and adequate pay hurt whoever they touch in the long run…
… I caught the tail end of the surviving urban culture that resulted from that migration when I came up as a jazz musician in the pre-(so-called) civil rights ’60s…I lived and worked in black neighborhoods (Boston’s Roxbury, NYC’s Harlem, Atlantic City before its fatal casino infection and for a time in Indianapolis as well) that were very stable and very well balanced despite…or quite possibly as a result of…the rancid depredations of the racist white culture in general. The people bonded in mutual self-defense, and they bonded tight. There was a sense of order in those communities, a sense of mutual love and affection that was buttressed by strong familial bonds, strong church ties and an unofficial “local government” that took care of business its own way…
…And there’s that `welfare” thing again. As if it exists in some sort of magic world, unattached to the system in general. It allows the system to continue to discriminate, PM. “Who us?” the controllers say. “Why…looka here. We’re taking care of these poor, poor people!!!”…
…If an entire, thriving culture…the urban black culture of the ’30s, ’40s + ’50s…has been decimated and replaced by gang warfare, sorry excuses for schools, rancid projects and some middle class black suburban ghettoes…because that’s what most suburban black neighborhoods really are these days, white flight made them that way…how effective has the Civil Rights bill really been, Nick?
Sure, 10%…or even 20% or 30%…of the black population is living better than were their equivalents in the pre-“Civil Rights” days, but what about the 70% or 80% that’s still stuck in gang-infested, drug-infested ghettoes? What’s it done for them except trap them on yet another set of mean, dead-end streets? The state of urban America is a thousand times worse than it was in the ’40 s and ’50s. Murder rates are skyrocketing, the entire educational system is breaking down, the prison population is soaring and children are being shot in the street by other children.
It ain’t working, Nick.
Not by a long shot.
Things have certainly changed. They have regressed…
This is far from all the remarkable things Arthur had to say on these subjects in those diaries. When pressed, he has defended his extreme anti-Federal government views and warped history lessons frequently, as recently as this month. Hell, he’s essentially doing it right here.
You write:
I have extreme anti-crooked Federal government views, and until such time as I am convinced that there is a party that means to stop the almost total corporate control of this government, I will keep an open mind about possible solutions. All of them.
As far as warped history lessons go, the ones that we are taught in school and that “America’s the good guy!!!” bullshit that regularly emanates from the main political parties’ dominant politicians is as warped as it gets.
The U.S. has…since the first white settlers landed…been nothing more than a predatory beast feeding off of the darker races of this earth. It is finally seeing a group of people in the Democratic Party who understand this, talk openly about it and want to seriously change the centuries-long status quo. I call them The New Democrats.
Why?
Because that’s what they are.
The old Democrats…the DNC and its controllers…would like nothing more than to “Bernie Sanders/2016” them right out of contention, prop up yet another bearer of the old flag and continue into history. They would rather lose the election than win it with a revolutionarily new attitude.
You and the people like you are old news, centristfield. Maybe not quite yet, but your day is coming…or perhaps better, your day is going!!!
Will it happen by 2020?
Let us pray it so.
Meanwhile…go ahead and set your heels against the pull of the future. Continue to play your lying old backroom-style games. They get lamer by the day, and more and more people are beginning to see the limp.
AG
According to Arthur, the “pull of the future” is one where our Federal government will be disabled so that there will be few to no worker protections in many areas of the country, a future where Americans are freed from the tyranny of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and other welfare programs, a future where many African-Americans will be forcibly returned to the salad days of the “…thriving…urban black culture of the ’30s, ’40s + ’50s…” or, even more interestingly, face another half-decade or more of literal chattel slavery in an exciting alternative scenario where the Civil War and the 13th Amendment were avoided, a future where Americans are freed to respond to Americans who want to use their same-sex marriage rights by “…driv(ing) by their house and throw things at it…(and)…pull them into an alley as they are going to dinner and beat the shit out of them…” without civil rights laws which create specific protections for same-sex couples and provide extra punishments for those who violate those laws.
Who is acting on behalf of the “…predatory beast feeding off of the darker races of this earth…” here? Is this “…pull of the future…” articulated by Arthur a future which seeks “…to seriously change the centuries-long status quo…”?
This is the guy who wants to define where the Democratic Party should go. This is the guy who wants to pull this community into a bitter, divisive fight over the 2020 Party Presidential primary.
Centristfielddj writes:
I don’t want a fight, centristfield. In fact, I would be quite happy if the all of the DNC-allied dinosaurs just pulled up their stakes and found a nice tar pit into which they could disappear.
However, centristfielddj is the entity who “wants to define where the Democratic Party should go.” This is exactly what it and its controllers want to do…potentially, at the very least… to pull this community and by extension the entire Democratic Party into a bitter, divisive fight over the 2020 Democratic party presidential primary.
Make no mistake…as happened in 2016, the neocentrist, DNC-allied forces would be quite content to lose an election rather than give up their power in DC.
They’d be even more happy if they won…more power, of course…but the very last thing that they want to see is a popular uprising in the party, one that kicks them right out to pasture.
When are people like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer up for reelection?
Soon, I hope.
Can you imagine a landslide presidential victory for some Democrat straight out of left field…the real left field, not the one that is owned and operated by corporate interests…in the 2020 presidential election?
I can.
Can you imagine AOC-style primary challenges from the left against those types of DNC dinosaurs soon after?
Successful ones?
Again…I can, but I’m gifted with a good imagination.
We shall see.
Won’t we.
AG
You know very well when Pelosi and Schumer are up for re-election. The voters in her District weren’t persuaded by trash arguments against her like the ones you offered in extremely bad faith during the 2016 and 2018 general election campaigns.
You’ll have the opportunity to campaign against Schumer again in 2022. I recommend that you go to the office of a candidate who challenges Schumer from the real left, not the completely fraudulent rhetorical “left” you offer here. Go talk to the campaign director of that candidate and treat them to some of this regressive “BREAK UP THE U.S.!!!” lunacy of yours.
I don’t think their campaign staff will want your help. No, thanks. Big flag on that campaign volunteer application.
Arthur.
You live in New York City, or so you tell us. Did you go campaign for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? Or you just a big talk, no action fraud who jumped on her bandwagon after the election even though you bitterly oppose her entire policy platform?
There will be no effective Green New Deal without a vigorous Federal government and a set of progressive, well-enforced Federal taxes. You oppose these things.
Maybe you could stop lying and make an honest case for the extremely regressive policies you favor, instead of the weasel words you’re using on this thread to unsuccessfully disguise the fact that you oppose unemployment insurance and civil rights laws.
If you were simply honest about your goals, you would be more worthy of respect. Community members would still offer dissents to your old straight white male oligarchic agenda, but at least you would be conducting yourself honorably.