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I watched that Sanders speech. A lot of points echoed feelings over this side of the pond.

A number of people are responsible for a great many terrible things that have been allowed, and it seems like nobody will be held accountable, nobody will be made to suffer for the hardship the rest of us endure but for those affected the most.

Our President (who is basically a glorified ambassador, the Taoiseach would be considered the leader of this country) got paid a LOT more than your president, until very recently. The last Taoiseachs really fucked the country. Really, it was just one. And this man draws a yearly pension that approaches the salary of your president. A man who everyone knows fucked the country is paid a vast sum of money, annually, from the pockets of the very people he fucked over.

The inaction is disheartening. The greed is harrowing. And the future seems uncertain.

I don't understand your American democracy, you can vote for some right wing politicians, or you can vote for extreme right wing conservatives.. It's like I can only eat broccoli or cauliflower for my entire life..

What the hell are you eating broccoli or cauliflower for?

I only dine on Shark. Raw, fresh, still living shark.

I drink whisky out of sawed off rhino horns, white rhino that is.. Nothing racist about that..

Toonster wrote:I don't understand your American democracy, you can vote for some right wing politicians, or you can vote for extreme right wing conservatives.. It's like I can only eat broccoli or cauliflower for my entire life..

We have a small handful of good non-assholes in power.

The problem is Americans as much as it is the politicians. Democracy doesn't work when the populace is politically and historically illiterate. American voters don't know where to lay blame, and they can be swayed by cheap television ads. I think our left-wing politicians are pulled to the right because Americans won't vote for them otherwise. It's shitty, but it's better than the alternative.

Not to mention liberals went apeshit over Obama, and were shocked when it turned out he's a centrist-- when he was always a centrist.

As I've said before, of course they're all liars and crooks. They're allowed to be.

The American electorate is generally unsophisticated IMO. I think for the most part only a handful of people and informed enough to cast a legitimate vote, or they are uninterested in voting due to being jaded (I'm one of those) with the electoral process.

Beyond that; people who get their information from the mainstream are the least informed and probably the least qualified to be electing people to power; but are probably the most opinionated and the most compelled to vote and are therefore watering down the process.

I'm loathed to say that people shouldn't have the right to vote,....but I'm also not very trusting of the majority of the American electorate. At what point does it stop being about issues and start being about who has had the most face time on the TV.

There is also something to be said for the fear mongering that goes on. How many of those senators vote for the National Defense Authorization Act because they want to point to it and say "See,...I'm tough on terrorism,,,,you all are still afraid of terrorists right? Yeah,...keep me in office and I'll protect you from your worst nightmares".

These issues are compelling me to want to vote in the next congressional elections and if any of the people that continue to authorize torture, the suspension of Habeas Corpus or the rejection of Posse Comitatus; if they are from my district or state,...they will not be getting my vote.

Fun Fact: There are stupid people all over the world. We just happen to be more important

There are a lot of reasons why left wing thoughts and ideas have been marginalized in this country over the last hundred years, but it's not like there's some big mystery about it. It's in the history books. Assuming anyone can be bothered to read them

lack of a European-style class system/nobility/working class/peasantry, inapplicability of Marxist economics to real-world conditions, the pre-Marxian and Anglophilic/Eurodysphoric origins of American political philosophy...

Oh god, here we go.

dubkitty wrote:lack of a European-style class system/nobility/working class/peasantry, inapplicability of Marxist economics to real-world conditions, the pre-Marxian and Anglophilic/Eurodysphoric origins of American political philosophy...

I call shenanigans on your bolded statement, but the argument I'm presenting is rooted in semantics. I know where you're coming from.

There's no way to tell whether or not Marxism works in real-world conditions, the only "examples" that exist are totalitarian governments calling themselves Marxists. I can call myself LeBron James all day, doesn't make it true.
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I will say that the Communist Manifesto/Russian Revolution did a whole lot to keep the revolution from happening in America. There was a huge anarchist/marxist/lefty push around the turn of the century (1800's-1900's), and businesses quickly figured out that it was easier to pay workers a little extra money rather than bludgeon them to death.

If y'all haven't read Emma Goldman, don't know what the Haymarket riot is, and can't talk about the history of the AFL you don't really have a place talking about the "nonexistent left" in America. And I don't mean google'ing it. I mean reading real books.

I grew up in Chicago. i know about Emma Goldman, the Haymarket riots, the IWW, Joe Hill, and that whole schlematzl. i used to own the IWW song book. my first wife used to volunteer at the Emma Goldman Women's Health Care Center, OK? and a lot of previously uninformed folks are much more aware than they were before Obama of the Left's history, of "Rules for Radicals," and of various aspects of Leftism and Left strategy they weren't previously.

the conditions for "the revolution" have never existed in America, despite the fervent attempts of the turn-of-the-20th-century American Left to ignite same. i'm sorry, but that's a historical fact. to make a Rosa Luxemburg you had to have a Kaiser. the anarchists and IWW largely died out because anarchism seldom does well in the marketplace of ideas once examined; the Marxian Left fell to the Communist Party or went underground in academia and the more extreme of the unions (e.g. teachers, longshoremen), but has always remained a minority because the political philosophy and organization of the US is inherently center-right, rooted in suspicion of the centralized state and emphasis on the rights of the individual at the expense of state power. This directly conflicts with and indeed excludes Marxian Leftism, which whether it admits it or not inherently requires a totalitarian structure to administer its redistributive ideology. absent a miraculous sea change in human nature itself, someone has to decide what comes "from each" and goes "to each," and has to have the power to enforce that taking.

he needs Bachmann to keep the OWSies distracted while he cuts campaign-contribution deals with GE and Goldman Sachs.

Oh look, Prehistoric Forest.

Shit, I just realized that in just a couple years, we'll have teenagers who can only remember the U.S. in a time of war. I mean more than half my life we've been in either Iraq or Afghanistan, but there were like seven years in there before 9/11 and shit fell went all kinds of nuts.