Republican Legislator Spills the Beans

Why, they asked, did the GOP seem so in the thrall of its most extremist wing? The donors, banker types who occupy the upper reaches of Wall Street’s towers, couldn’t understand why the Republican Party—their party—seemed close to threatening the nation with a government shutdown, never mind a default if the debt ceiling isn’t raised later this month.

These non Tea-Partiers are not innocents, but equally culpable in transforming the GOP into a party that can’t govern and whose policies can’t be defended upon a sufficiently framed set of factually true premises. This idea that’s there’s a moderate GOP wing fighting the nuts is simply not true. Instead we have two extreme right-wing groups who have far more in common with each other than political groups and parties whose policies are promoted by the facts and experts.

Exhibit A would be Mitt Romney’s campaign relative to what the Tea Partiers demand. If you want to consider a contemporary analog to past Republican moderates like Ford, Rockefeller, Milliken, and Eisenhower, you can’t do better than point to President Barack Obama, the “enemy” despised by both of these GOP groups. In fact Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan governed in a manner far more similar to President Obama than what the Romney and Tea Party wings now demand.

This:

“Of course, not all of the country’s referendums are meant to promote a socialist state. For example, a majority of Swiss voters have voiced support for a referendum that would maintain the country’s conscription policy , which requires all men in the country aged 18-34 to complete a period of public service.” (source: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/switzerland-to-vote-on–2-800-monthly-%E2%80%98basic-income%E2%80%99-minimum-for-adults-181937885.html)

may seem OT, but I think it’s not.

Our federal legislative process is being whipsawed by the Teabaggists while their former “keepers” stand on the sidelines and moan about how it’s all gotten out of hand. The MSM, meanwhile pretends that the nonsense being pushed by Boehner and others in the GOP, blaming the PotUS and LIBERALS for causing the shutdown is somehow valid or true.

A large part of the problem is that news outlets are overwhelmingly controlled by those with no interest in advancing liberal or progressive initiatives. But, a more disturbing aspect, to me at least is that they seem to be hiring dumber people every year.

Whoever wrote that bit that I cut’n’pasted from the original Yahoo article is a fucking moron. He/she will no doubt be an executive editor someday, more’s the pity.

Short Nihilismus: democracy wouldn’t suck if it worked.

Quite true.

Nihilismus “…something like a single transferable vote system…”

That sounds like Redistribution! Socialism! Socialism!*

* SOCIALISM!!!

s/(Tea Party) –(Obama)/(Obama) – (Tea Party)/

One thing we learned from recent history.

1. Our economic and political systems are very fragile. This seems to be due to how complex they are and how much they rely on consenual reality systems. Most of our money is just 0’s and 1’s in computer data bases, for example.

We saw that with the USSR, which collapsed and suddenly.

We saw that with the Bush Catastrophe and Great Recession, which happened suddenly with the US leadership unaware of what was happening.

2. Which means the ignorants of the Tea Party are really playing chicken with the USA and its economy. And when chicken ends badly, two cars collide at high speed, killing their occupants. If this ends badly, one of those killed is going to be our economy, another our country.

raven:

You’re worrying too much.

Well, I hope so.

It could just be that I’m not worrying enough.

1. A lot of people took huge hits during the Bush Disaster. One of my friends almost lost their house. More than a few were unemployed for long periods of time. We managed to dodge those bullets by being proactive and a bit paranoid.

2. This time looks a lot worse. If the US goes down, there isn’t much anyone can do. If the dollar collapses, all our financial accounts are in…dollars.

Ravan – tme to invest in AUD?

Dingo

LOL.

I’ve been thinking about it. AUD = Australian Dollar, a strong currency that is beyond the reach of the US Tea Party.

I’m running up against the limits of my knowledge base here. I can change dollars for local currency at the airport and that is about it.

One of my friends, a very successful businesswoman got spooked by Bushco, and moved her small fortune to a Canadian bank about 10 years ago, in Canadian dollars. It turned out to be a smart move.

As I understand it there is a group lobbying for that in the U.S under the more comprehensible name “Instant Run Off”.

Technically, single transferable vote (STV) is a form of instant-runoff voting (IRV) that usually applies to multi-seat districts, resulting in proportional representation. Usually, when someone refers just to IRV, they are referring to an election that results in only a single winner.

IRV in the context of U.S. congressional elections would mean we would still have distinct districts (and thus still have the risk of gerrymandering). A voter would rank his preferred candidates on his ballot. If his most preferred candidate does not receive a majority, his vote would go to his next preferred candidate to see if that candidate can get a majority, and so on. It is “instant” in that there is not a whole separate runoff election day, as opposed to how Louisiana does it, or NYC mayoral primary races for that matter.

With IRV, third-parties might become more common, but only once the average voter becomes aware that they are no longer “wasting” their vote. It also might be hard for a third party do have enough of a showing in a particular district to win the seat, even if they represent 20% of the population nationwide.

STV in the context of U.S. congressional elections would mean that we would not be voting by district. A voter would rank her preferred candidate, and if her top candidate receives a certain threshold of votes, that candidate wins a seat in the Congress. If not, her vote transfers, instantly, to her next choice to see if that candidate meets the threshold. The result is that third parties would be represented proportionally in the Congress as they are in the general population. Congressional Representatives would be nationally elected, rather than by small gerrymandered districts. This is why I would prefer this option.

I think it’s a mistake to look at this issue on a right-left spectrum in any way. There are no significant number of moderate Republicans in the 21st century at all, and haven’t been for decades. The traditional/entrenched Republicans are no less ideologically driven and no less “conservative” (really, neoliberal/economic libertarian) in their politics than the Tea Party Republicans. What we are witnessing is the clash of two different interest groups operating at two different levels of the plutocracy, not any difference in the actual degree of authoritarianism and raw plutocratic self-interest exhibited by any of the players involved. (Religious dogmatism and patriarchy doesn’t enter into it at all, except insofar as it is exploited by both sides to their advantage whenever possible.)

On the one side, there are local-level powers that be — mostly mere multi-millionaires rather than billionaires — who hate it when the feds or minorities (or, in the post civil rights era, the feds supporting minority rights) interfere in their local empires of privilege and profitable exploitation of the underclasses in any way, which is analyzed in a clear and convincing fashion in this recent Salon article. The reason why so many Tea Partiers seem to echo the states’ rights rhetoric of the boll weevil Democrats of the 50s and 60s (Paging Rand Paul! Rand Paul to the very, very white courtesy phone!) is that they represent exactly the same interest group. (Seriously. Read the Salon article I linked to. It’s superb.)

On the other side are the big, big money plutocrats — the Wall Street types to whom Walden was speaking as a loyal lap-dog. These “Federalist” plutocrats like centralized power just fine when it lines their pockets with socialized investment risk paired with privatized profits (bank bailouts and such), corporate welfare, the extraordinarily profitable military-industrial complex and prison-industrial complex, and so on. Unlike the Tea Partiers, they are willing to compromise a little on maintaining a minimal welfare state so long as they get their cut: the ACA is ultimately good for insurance companies, though it’s not nearly as huge a giveaway as Bush’s Medicare Part D fiasco; pseudo-green energy initiatives like ethanol are terrific because they line the pockets of Con-Agra, Monsanto, et al; Social Security is fine as long as we get to privatize it, but otherwise it’s a horrible disaster that will eventually destroy our economy (because politicians who dare not raise taxes on the rich back to prior levels raid the SS coffers at every opportunity); and so on. The interests represented by the Tea Party don’t directly share in those profits, and any and all successful federal social welfare undermines their profitable race-to-the-bottom approach to drawing industry to their states and wringing maximum profit from existing industry by mimicking third-world working conditions as much as possible (hence the Tea Party hard-on for the ACA).

These two sides absolutely share authoritarian and plutocratic ideologies, and are both equally willing to exploit racism and sexism and homophobia in any way they think might advance their agenda one iota, but the specific elements of the plutocracy served and the policies that serve them best are different for the two groups, so their loyal servants in government have broken down into petty, childish infighting that might ultimately hurt all their interests (I hope).

Here is an activist organization that advocates alternatives to first past the post: FairVote.org | Home