Dems are on the wrong side of the bailouts that favor wealth and power at taxpayer expense — privatizing gain and socializing loss.

The Dems will pay dearly for Wall Street contributions when things turn out badly, as they inevitably will since the problem is only being papered over. Then it's going to seem like the GOP was right in opposing the bailouts.

and the patient will die. The US will eventually slip to a lower level of standard of living, and people will chisel each other in little games while a very small group of people live very well. Others will fight to get into that small group, and support the system as long as there is that chance.

Better luck next life, and thank you for playing.

he US will eventually slip to a lower level of standard of living

How low can you go? Some people, e.g., Karl Denninger, are speculating that the US is possibly headed for parity with the Third World in a worst case scenario. Meanwhile, the expectation of many is that the economy will return to the bubble highs, or at least thereabouts. The reality will likely be somewhere in between, but that is a big in-between.

Some will be in the "Eastern Europe" standard. Parts in Western Europe. America will have wider variation.

What's the prescription?

The problem is that the American people have lost their way. The technology of manipulation and control is now in place and it will be virtually impossible to extricate the culture from it lacking a monumental change in collective consciousness. That is not impossible, since powerful technologies have been developed to change collective consciousness.

Actually, I did my MA thesis on this in 1972. It was entitled, Revolution or Evolution? — Toward a Theory of Social Change. Incidentally, I was warned by my department that this choice of subject might affect my future employability. I took an "alternative" course anyway, so it did not turn out to be an issue.

It's the public. It still wants fire and forget politics.

folks choose fire over politics since video games and movies promote that choice. hence, the way technology is used is very clever.

the movie "the dark knight" was viewed, by some, as a glorification of bush's philosophies and, as we know, the movie was very popular.

so one of the uses of technology is to plant seeds of hate.

There were other ways this could have gone, but people chose to react based on teh gut and the blink.

The rest was just fitting together the package.

well first, i say we be pro-Reason advocates.

consider the dying print industry, who suffers most. the whole dumbing down wave was quite conscious and needs great public outcry. forget the right: playboy, mad, rolling stone, psychology today etc, even wired (whom in their latest issue mentioned the dying print industry as an aside), have over the years deliberately lowered their levels of sophistication -mad even spoke upfront about it the issue they reluctantly did so. as if they needed to duck, and not stand out against the growing 1984/mccarthyesque background. true, culture is not our friend, especially our own, but we need to hedge it's reluctant antipathy towards us. and yes, the right then, we do need to support earnest and benevolent voices all over even if we disagree and honor our reasonable opposition such as ron paul, etc. castigating the loons is pointless and futile, but the assault on reason itself must be underscored like al gore at least did with his book, the assault on reason.

if we need select focal issues, first thing first, i say.

From the '40s through the '60s, liberals could still make some progress.

LBJ was the last really New Deal president, who sought to complete the FDR legacy, and had a Democratic Congress. Herbert Humphrey was the last progressive Dem candidate. His loss to Nixon ended the forward thrust of the New Deal, but it would take the GOP some time to reverse the course of the country, since the momentum was so great.

New Deal Democrats were in power essentially until Reagan. Nixon was actually fairly liberal in many ways, since that was still the prevailing mood of the country. Significantly, the Congress was able to oust Nixon but not W, whose crimes were far more egregious.

The New Deal Dems were not finally defeated and turned out until the Gingrich revolution gave the GOP the presidency and Congress. Bill Clinton's DNC hammered the final nails in the coffin of the New Deal when they triangulated. Obama is stacking up to be Clinton II in this regard.

So far, Obama is not talking cramming anything down on the wealthy and powerful, and he is instead enabling the claw backs, while throwing some bones to the base. There is no evidence yet of a new "fair deal."

who's really benefitting from social programs that are run by private companies for a profit?
I prefer the VA model, myself.

simply because it is hard to divide normal first year problems that all Presidents have, from real failures of vision.

To have failure of vision, one must have put forward a vision. One of my principal criticisms of the Dems is that they have not put forward a coherent vision for where they want to take America since the collapse of the New Deal vision and its replacement by Reaganism.

Obama spoke about vision — hope, change — but he never actually articulated a vision that established a criterion against which his success could be measured. He stated certain policies in reaction to Bush, but there's no coherent vision.

This is consistent with Stirling's claim that Obama is a thinly disguised Reaganite, a "compassionate conservative" continuing in that model of governing based on Chicago School political economy.

good point!

The New Humanity

There's no law saying that the US needs to be the richest nation in the world, or that life needs to be awful if it isn't. In fact, after one too many foul ups of the Village system, it might be a great deal better.

you either return to the US thankful to be an American, or the rose colored glasses come off when you realize that Americans are selling their birthright for a bowl of porridge. It is very simple to live very well on very little once you see how the rest of the world does it.

Right now one can live comfortably in the U.S. on relatively little money -- as long as one doesn't have children who can get sick and who need education, and one doesn't get sick oneself, and one is able to find an income source in a low-cost, probably rural area . . . . And so on.

One needs an income in the upper quintile of income distribution to have the life portrayed in car commercials and assumed in MSM op-ed economic columns, complete with medical/dental care, children at private schools where they make the contacts that will keep them in the right class, maid service/lawn service to take care of the McMansion that one convinces oneself is really a Mansion. . . .

What we've lost is a vision of life that has the security Roosevelt defined in the New Deal and LBJ in the Great Society for everybody, without the material acquisitiveness that has taken over Americans. To say, "the whole society can have health care but it may mean you won't get a 50-inch HDTV" has simply become "we can't afford health care for everyone." Notice that the government went into the business of subsidizing TV converter boxes more easily than subsidizing children's medical services.

The toxic propaganda that equates "what we can afford" with unbridled acquisitiveness just makes the impoverishment of the country easier. Social security in its broad sense has a moral argument for it. Greed doesn't.

As you say, maybe further Village excesses will start bringing us around.

Absolutly demolished Das Kapital

Ford admirably saw that "profit-sharing" (his word) increases demand. However, he was vehemently anti-union, too. He also held a paternalistic (authoritarian) view of management. However, he was eventually forced to back off intervening in employees' lives.

Wikipedia

editted to add: on second thought, I think I misread your post. my apologies. but I'm going to let it stand, because I think people misunderstand Ford as well

your link

The wage was offered to employees who had worked at the company for six months or more, and, importantly, conducted their lives in a manner of which Ford's "Social Department" approved. They frowned on heavy drinking, gambling, and what we today would call "deadbeat dads". The Social Department used 50 investigators, plus support staff, to maintain employee standards; a large percentage of workers were able to qualify for this "profit-sharing."

Ford's incursion into his employees' private lives was highly controversial, and he soon backed off from the most intrusive aspects; by the time he wrote his 1922 memoir, he spoke of the Social Department and of the private conditions for profit-sharing in the past tense, and admitted that "paternalism has no place in industry. Welfare work that consists in prying into employees' private concerns is out of date. Men need counsel and men need help, oftentimes special help; and all this ought to be rendered for decency's sake. But the broad workable plan of investment and participation will do more to solidify industry and strengthen organization than will any social work on the outside. Without changing the principle we have changed the method of payment."

do you know he was sued by his stockholders, the Dodge Bros, for paying his employees too much? do you know he then bought out all the remaining shareholders? Ford was a complete idealist trying to better his business and society. not always correctly, but the best he knew how.

how can you argue w/ his dictum "History is bunk" when you've watched it being written in real time re: the Iraq war? he knew that the victors write the history. he also knew the role of financiers, they're parasites. you know that too.

I grew up about a mile from his farm, (which remained a park until recently when it became a shopping mall) I played along the leveed banks of the Rouge River, we'd walk along the shore past the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, right up to his old mansion. The grounds were bequeathed to the University of Michigan, and a large tract was set aside as a bird sanctuary. All open to the public.
I can't even begin to tell you how I've personally benefitted from the things he left behind to posterity, besides well paying jobs.
Henry Ford was folk hero in his time, History has tried to change the story.
http://www.willamette.edu/~fthompso/MgmtCon/Henry_Ford.html

Good? yes. Ford did more for the people of this planet than karl marx and his followers. Lenin & Stalin.

"He also held a paternalistic (authoritarian) view of management." True. So did Patterson (NCR) & Tom Watson (IBM). Common for the time.

Let's compare the motor industry with the Communist economies, over the same period...

as they seem to share the same fate. Henry Ford must be rolling in his grave.
actually it's kind of a ridiculous argument. the decline and collapse of the USSR and the decline of American living standards seem to coincide, dontcha think? Our collapse is just taking longer.
perhaps, I don't understand your comment or it was directed towards someone else or something else?

US and USSR.
Do you think the cost of wanting to be superpower eventually brings a country down? Is this a normal course?

Beyond Afghanistan there are many similarities: high level corruption, incompetence, dogmatic ideological beliefs, overblown militaries, collapsing infrastructures, dysfunctional monopolistic industries (including Ford), a monolithic press, an inbred political class, ubris, cultural isolation of the general population...

interesting!

England, Spain, Rome, Ottomans, Mayans. I don't know, I'm not a historian, just a cook.
but my guess would be that resistance to change when the old resources are running out, (that's when the money gets made, you charge more for scarce items, hence resistance), and your conquered territories turn against you for sqeezing them too hard; these could well signal the beginning of the end for empires.
Institutions need to evolve, they can't be static, it's against the laws of nature.
you could ask Stirling, he's smart. and he's got some ideas about how to evolute this society, or should I say, revolute? ;>

I believe there are some conspiracy theorists that believe the Russian revolution was a banker's plot to steal everything from the Romanov's, as they were seriously powerful at the time. but ya gotta bring the people along, which Lenin & Stalin knew how to do.

this is from the American Jewish Committee's Archives, but I have no idea what the actual source is:
http://ajcarchives.net/AJC_DATA/Files/THR-37.PDF

all I know is history is written by the victors