andyx1205 wrote: Oops it was Scott Brown with the $13 mill, but for Warren to raise $6 mill is quite a lot (unfortunately in the system you have to raise a lot of money to run a campaign). IMO she'll beat Brown even if he has three times the cash.

I agree, she's the winner, hands down.

andyx1205 wrote:
Btw the next Canadian election is in Oct 2015.

It can be pushed off 'till 2016, though, am I right? Doesn't the PM have that year to call an election? He can do it early in the year or he can wait and do it in the middle of it or at the end of it.

andyx1205 wrote:
By that date, and perhaps rather by the 2016 elections America can have a progressive Congress if everything works out.

That "if" is gargantuan, and things rarely "work out" the way we'd like them to.

I don't have a clue what you're basing this speculation on. It seems to me that Citizens United alone will keep many conservatives in the Congress, they'll have the big bucks it takes to win elections. Tea Bagger sentiment is widespread and will keep D candidates in the moderate category, the party won't even choose to run any progressives if they can avoid it, although they might take chance here and there.

The D's have to win 25 seats to take the House. I think that's a do-able proposition, but not with a slate of progressive candidates.

The Senate? Whole other ballgame, but likely to remain constituted about as it is now, it's a very slow changing body in any case. I see a split of 58-42 for the D's, not quite a fillibuster-proof majority but closer to it than they've been in a long time.

andyx1205 wrote:
That's 3-4 years for America to get its act together. What has happened in that time-frame in America? In 1932, FDR won. Look at 4 years earlier, and Hoover won with almost 60% of the vote. That's a big change. Let me repeat, with the Republicans in at 1920, that's 8 years of a Republican President and then they still won with almost 60% in 1928, but four years later everything changed. Politics changed, and due to the hard work of grassroots and radical movements, America changed.

You neglected to mention the singlemost powerful cause of change in America in the 1930's, namely, the stock market collapse in 1929, which ushered in what's still the worst economic collapse in the history of the country, far and away the worst. It was a very big shocker and it left untold carnage in its wake. I lived through that time but of course was too young to get it before about 1936, but when I did get it, whoooiiieee! I couldn't believe how bad it was.

You can't just walk right past that and claim 1930's changes were "due to the hard work of grassroots and radical movements," because those grassroots and radical movements were energized by the Great Depression. They'd never gotten anything done in America up to that point, and then, like alsmost overnight, the crash of 29 opened the door to a golden opportunity to make change. My parents were involved in those movements. They are close to me. But without the Great Depression, they would have not blossomed and gained the stage the way they did.

Half of what FDR was doing involved standing the system back up on its feet and getting it going again, which took him six or seven years to get done and even some would say eight years. The New Deal was the other half of FDRs agenda and it would have been even more radical than it was had the Congress not been so timid.

andyx1205 wrote:
IMO the best contender for 2016 would be Elizabeth Warren, making her the first female President (provided that in 2012 and 2014 Democrats come out in large numbers to vote and put up a lot of fellow progressive candidates for office).

An awfully lot can happen between now and then.

andyx1205 wrote:
I very much doubt that after the next few years of Harper he will be re-elected, we will have a new PM most likely.

Anything is possible and he certainly sees himself as being a multi-term PM, a la Trudeau, so we'll have to see if he can make his dreams come true. I think the liklihood is that he'll hang on for another cycle.

andyx1205 wrote:
The NDP got almost 2 million more votes than the Liberals. I very much doubt the Liberals will make a come-back and retain the position of being one of the two large parties. Bob Rae is a centrist schmuck, in another words, he's Tory-lite.

But if that's what Canada wants ...

And they'll capture much of the youth vote with Justin Trudeau campaigning and probably running for a seat. And they do have a long history of success in Canadian politics to draw upon. Rae may be a schmuck but he's a capable politician, thoroughly experienced at the game.

The Liberals allowed themselves to be taken down a merry path by running the geek they ran, who had the charisma of a dead dog. He turned Canadians off left, right, and center, in droves, and the Liberals paif a heavy price for it, including most of those 2 million votes you mentioned. You can't run a geek and win. They won't repeat that mistake again.

andyx1205 wrote:
The NDP has Quebec on lock-down, the Bloc Quebecois is done for, and Quebec naturally has a social-democratic base and the Liberals will never ever be able to pick up on that. With the NDP gains in Quebec, there's really only two choices, the Tories or NDP. If Liberals win seats at the expense of NDP, at the end we'll still get the Tories in power, hence, a vote for the Liberals really is a vote for the Tories. Unfortunately that's how our political system works, since we don't have proportional representation, gaining seats is what matters, not percentage of vote. If the Tories lose seats, either the NDP or the Liberals will pick them up. If the Liberals pick them up, the Tories will still come out on top. Unless you're suggesting the Liberals will suddenly gain 2 million more voters next election, which considering that Quebec is out of the equation for them, it is nearly impossible.

I don't expect the NDP to win a majority government any time soon, but they do have a strong chance at forming the next minority government, being able to pass legislation with help of the Liberals.

Btw I hope the Green Party sits the fuck out (besides Elizabeth May who can retain her seat). I look down upon such hardcore idealists who put their own interests above the country, they took half a million votes (mostly from voter base of NDP with smaller from Liberals) and got only one seat. No offense intended to Elizabeth May, but because of such idealists America got stuck with George Bush in 2000 and Green votes would help the Tories (unfortunately in an unfair political system as ours, small parties such as the Green Party do more to help the status quo party, in this case, the Tories). To keep individuals like Bush and Harper out, people need to vote strategically. In the real world we have to make the best use of our current system in order to have a chance at reforming and creating a better system (it'll actually be in the interest of the Green Party to get the NDP in power since the Greens would benefit from PR reform for example).

I've tried 'till I'm blue in the face to convince the BC NDP to absorb the BC Green party, a merger that would position them to win provincial power. They'll have none of it, they won't even discuss it. The result is we have a conservative government, and BC NDPers make no apologies for it. Talk about a bunch of dopes.

Look, the kind of speculating that's gone on here is just about useless in terms of predicting the form and shape and consistency of government over the next several years. It's too complicated, there are too many variables, too many of them connected in odd criss-crossing patterns, with the potential for a lot of big and wholly unpredicted things to occur that can push things one way or another or in a direction we didn't even think of.

But generally, the trend in both countries has been toward more conservative sway and away from progressive sway for 30 years ... and to think its going to be redirected in any notable way is asking too much. It has to hit bottom first, and that's still a ways off, although I don't think that will come much later than in the 2020-2025 time frame. It has to hit the way the crash of 29 hit, right next to complete devasation.

Then we'll get change.

Fact-Man2 wrote:You can't just walk right past that and claim 1930's changes were "due to the hard work of grassroots and radical movements," because those grassroots and radical movements were energized by the Great Depression.

But that's analogous (although not quite as bad) to what we have now. We have a major economic crisis mobilising grassroots campaigns all over the world. Whether it will be enough, is the question. I'd imagine the biggest hurdle in the way, and the biggest difference between now and then, is that now we are up against huge and powerful corporations who pretty much control both the government and the media. That's a lot of inertia to overcome.

rEvolutionist wrote:

Fact-Man2 wrote:You can't just walk right past that and claim 1930's changes were "due to the hard work of grassroots and radical movements," because those grassroots and radical movements were energized by the Great Depression.

But that's analogous (although not quite as bad) to what we have now. We have a major economic crisis mobilising grassroots campaigns all over the world. Whether it will be enough, is the question. I'd imagine the biggest hurdle in the way, and the biggest difference between now and then, is that now we are up against huge and powerful corporations who pretty much control both the government and the media. That's a lot of inertia to overcome.

Well, indeed it is.

I'm not so sure that "We have a major economic crisis mobilising grassroots campaigns all over the world," as you assert. Economic conditions aren't real good in the West and of course people in the ME and in North Africa continue to endure endemic poverty as brought to them by feudal type leaders and dictatorial governments over the years.

But the uprisings we've seen in those regions seem to be less about poor economic conditions and poverty than they appear to be about dumping dictators and changing to more open regimes, and in the West we're not seeing much by way of grassroots radical organizing ... unless OWS is doing a lot more of this than meets the common eye or is being reported by the media. And there appears to be a paucity of this in the UK and in Europe.

No leaders have emerged in the West who might carry the banner of revolutionary change or even radical socioeconomic change. OWS appears leaderless, which seems to be by design. There is a good deal of dissatisfaction and discontent among American youth but there's no rallying point round which they might coalesce to form a broad movement, again short of OWS (which has been almost exclusively a youth movement). There seems to be a noticeable lack of traditional social radicalism. Nobody has sought to organize the unemployed, there have been no big marches in Washington or in London protesting the lousy economic conditions currently extant in the US and in the UK.

I don't think the economic hit that Americans and Brits have endured since 2007 has been hard enough or deeply felt enough to drive people into the streets en masse, and there's not been any clearly articulated or widely disseminated alternatives people could rally round and get behind.

Meanwhile, the overall political trends seem to be consistently moving to the right, with Harper winning a majority government in Canada last year and the US House beimng taken over by the Tea Baggers in the 2010 midterms.

This is not to say there haven't been some particular issues round which the traditional environmental movement has rallied, there have indeed been a few of these, mountaintop coal mining, fracking for gas, and TransCanad's XL pipleline to name three in the US and the Enbridge pipeline in Canada. But these aren't social reform actions, they are battles aimed at preserving what little remains of the biosphere's integrity and its ongoing viability.

The economic hit Americans suffered from the crash of 1929 was far more severe than anything we've seen over the past three or four years; there were no safety net provisions in place in those days whereas today there are, including unemployment insurance, food stamps, and Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security. In the early and mid-1930's we saw soup lines, today not so much.

Americans have shown a good deal of resiliency in the face of the economic downturn. I thought we'd see a lot more tent cities by now than we have. Youth have moved back home to live with their parents; families have shared the burdens, communities have energized food banks and shelters for the homeless; people have helped one another.

Taken together, this is why I don't see any big social transformations taking place over the coming decade, although I do see very big potential for such to occur in the following decade, 2020-2030 because that will be a time when the consequences of climate change will really begin to hit hard and push economies to the brink.

Of course anything is possible and I'd not be making any bets on any of this. It's more just musing than it is even informed speculation, and it all needs to be taken with a goodly dose of salt.

The racism in this thread is horrifying! Seriously, you guys need to stop being racist against corporations, they're people too, they're a group, and discrimination against a group is called racism or prejudice!

On another note..

http://www.alternet.org/investigations/ ... ign_cash_/


Thanks to Citizens United, Multinational Mega Lobbyist Firm Salivates Over $4 Billion in Campaign Cash
The WPP Group is perhaps the most important lobbying corporation you've never heard of.

Tbh I've never heard of the WPP either.

andyx1205 wrote:The racism in this thread is horrifying! Seriously, you guys need to stop being racist against corporations, they're people too, they're a group, and discrimination against a group is called racism or prejudice!

On another note..

http://www.alternet.org/investigations/ ... ign_cash_/

Thanks to Citizens United, Multinational Mega Lobbyist Firm Salivates Over $4 Billion in Campaign Cash
The WPP Group is perhaps the most important lobbying corporation you've never heard of.

Tbh I've never heard of the WPP either.

The Koch Brothers announced today they will be giving Romney $100 million for his upcoming campaign against Obama, and wall street is apparently switching up its donating from Obama to Romney.

We'll get the best president money can buy.

Tangerine Dream wrote:

Ha ha because Obama is responsible for everything ha ha right.

I had my own reservations John, and I was curious if anyone here would see them. If we had half the number of homeless (which should be a good thing, right?) the graphic would show 48 houses per homeless. The connection suggested is not a solution.

At the site I found the graphic I asked what happened to the other 23 people? I am more concerned about the homeless regardless of housing inventory. As I think about the homeless I know, and I actually know a good number one of whom is my wife's cousin, I really don't think they need a house yet. They need medical help. The cousin is a very sick alcoholic. One of 5 kids the others are all in treatment and have all begged him to get help but he is almost unemployable due to his drinking and refuses. He would trash a house if you gave it to him, he needs other people around him 24/7 to help him cope. Simple daily chores would simply get ignored.

But I still like the graphic.

One of the selling points of free market capitalism is that is distributes resources well, unlikely that nasty central planning which caused millions of Chinese to die of starvation.

The graphic offers a chilling refutation of this apparent good point. There's thousands of houses sitting empty because the banks foreclosed on them, evicted the families living there and are now unable to sell.


John writes that life doesn't give you anything for free. This is actually wrong, the current system distributes economic rewards more based on ownership than hard work.
An example might be someone who inherited lots of prime real estate, they just need to employ a property manager, sit back and watch the rent roll in.

Jakov wrote:One of the selling points of free market capitalism is that is distributes resources well, unlikely that nasty central planning which caused millions of Chinese to die of starvation.

"Well" doesn't mean "perfect", and it doesn't mean there aren't problems.

I stumbled across legislation that was signed into law in early March of this year that is likely to have some impact on the protests if and when they get cranked up this year.

It's called the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011. There's an article on the ACLU's website that goes into some analysis of it.

I do not recall much media attention regarding this bill; it must have flown under the radar.

I read about that at Daily Kos. I hate to sound extremist but if this scrap does not get resolved peacefully it will end in bloodshed. A lot of it. I think the Constitution is pretty clear it intended to put power in the hands of the people, and keep government in line. Legislation like this is just cruising for a bruising. What a mess.

FACT-MAN-2 wrote:
We'll get the best president money can buy.

Is that any different than 2008?