The American Prospect: Christopher Ketcham: 'U.S. Out of Vermont'

Source:The American Prospect- Is there such a thing as Federalists, in the Socialist Republic of Vermont:

“Last September, about 60 Vermonters met in the chambers of the house of representatives in Montpelier to celebrate the state’s “independence spirit” and to discuss the goals of “environmental sustainability, economic justice, and Vermont self–determination.” The speaker of the house had given up the space free of charge for the one-day conference. First at the podium was a Princeton-educated yak farmer and professor of journalism named Rob Williams, one of the organizers of the event, who at 9 A.M. opened the proceedings by acknowledging what he called “some unpleasant and hard truths.” Amid the twin global crises of peak oil and climate change, the United States was “an out-of-control empire.” It was “unresponsive to the needs, concerns, and desires of ordinary citizens.”

Williams, who wore a T-shirt that said “U.S. Out of Vermont,” did not advocate revolution. He was looking for a divorce. He wanted Vermont to secede. “Nonviolent secession,” he said, “the detaching from empire and exercising our rights to independence, a deeply American right first expressed in the Declaration of Independence, is a right that demands re-exploration today.” Williams noted that Vermont is one of only three states, along with Texas and Hawaii, that ever existed as an independent republic-in Vermont’s case, from 1777 to 1791-and that as “a national leader on progressive political issues,” the state was “uniquely poised to lead this national conversation on self-determination.”

The murmuring response from the crowd suggested they’d heard it before. Williams and his fellow travelers-who constituted not quite a movement, he said, but more “a network of critical observers”-had been calling for separation from the U.S. since 2003. They had gathered in the ornate rooms of the state house to spread the word in 2005 and again in 2008 and now in 2012. Vermont had not yet separated, but the secessionists who were calling for a “Second Vermont Republic” had gained notoriety, and some small influence, across the state.”

Source:The American Prospect

What I respect about Vermont is that even though they are basically the Socialist Republic or State of Vermont (and I’m not as far to the left of them on economic policy, but I probably tend to agree with Vermonters on social issues) is that they represent socialism in it’s best form. A democratic form in the sense that they aren’t trying to run people’s personal lives. And they believe in a good deal of personal freedom, even economic freedom. That is they aren’t trying to takeover industries with the state and have the state run them, but that they believe in a generous welfare state or safety net. Combined with economic and personal freedom. But the perhaps the thing I respect about them the most is that they are Federalists in a leftist sense: “We like socialism, but we don’t want it coming from the Federal Government. We can govern ourselves.”

Vermont is the roadmap for national leftist democrats in other states in their quest (or fantasy) to transform America into a social democracy, a socialist-federalist roadmap. Which means:

a high deal of personal freedom as long as you aren’t hurting innocent people with what you are doing.

A high deal of economic freedom with things like property rights, you just have to pay high taxes on them to finance a generous welfare state. But that the State of Vermont would be doing these things for Vermonters, not Uncle Sam with its top-down, Washington knows best approach. And they also aren’t going to try to force Vermonters to live a certain way even for their own good. And give Vermonters the ability to make decisions and take risks with their own lives.

Social Democrats in America having been trying to transform America into a social democracy at least since the New Deal era. Thinking that centralize planning and control at the Federal level works in these European countries that means it will automatically work here as well. And that Americans will accept it even if they didn’t vote for it. What they don’t understand is that America is simply a hell of a lot bigger and more decentralize and more individualistic. And that top-down tends to not very popular, but gradually moving state by state like in Vermont, could accomplish what leftist democrats have been wanting all along, which is basically a social democracy in America. 

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The Nation: Rick Perlstein: ‘Why a Democratic Majority Is Not Demographic Inevitability’

Source:The Nation- "Protestors rally against SB1070 immigration bill in Arizona in 2010. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin.)" Also from The Nation Magazine.

“In February, I wrote the first part in a promised series about why today’s political conventional wisdom—that, as Jonathan Chait put it “conservative America will soon come to be dominated, in a semi-permanent fashion, by an ascendant Democratic coalition hostile to its outlook and interests”—may be premature. I cleared the decks by pointing to all those other moments—in 1964, 1972, 1974 (and, I didn’t note, 1992)—when equally confident prognostications of permanent Democratic majorities came a cropper. This time, I take on the most conspicuous this-time-it’s-going-to-be different argument: that the white vote in presidential elections has gone from almost 90 percent in 1980 to about 70 percent in 2012; that there are 24 million Hispanics currently eligible to vote and there will be 40 million by 2030; and that only 27 percent of Hispanic voters chose Mitt Romney for president (chart here)—and so, abracadabra, Democrats Über Alles!

Now, it might hard for us to wrap our minds around a different way of seeing things in these days of Joe Arpaeio and Jan Brewer—and Susana Martinez, the Latina governor of New Mexico who promises to repeal her state’s law allowing undocumented immigrants to get driver’s licenses even though her own grandparents were undocumented immigrants. But, taking the long view—and isn’t that the whole point of this exercise?—it has to be acknowledged: party identities aren’t passed on through the genes. Blocs of “natural Democrats” have become natural Republicans before. Indeed, in at least one instance, it happened with shocking rapidity. As I noted last time, in the 1960s, droves of white Democrat ethnics—Italians, Eastern Europeans, the Irish—started voting Republican in a backlash against the Democrats’ continued embrace of civil rights in the wake of a failed open housing bill and the urban riots. Only an eye-blink earlier, they had been considered the soul of the New Deal coalition.”

Source:The Nation

The worst mistake that you can make in American politics is to assume that anything is permanent especially when you are ahead. Or to relax when you are ahead and not look to continue to improve and think you’ve reached the mountaintop and will never  be knocked off. The second biggest mistake is to assume your opponents are dead when they are down and you’ll be in power forever. And I have some examples of that.

In 1964 the Republican Party led by Barry Goldwater failed to even get 40% of the popular vote for President which is a hard thing to do in a two-man Presidential race. And Democrats added to their landslide majorities in Congress (House and Senate) leaving Congressional Republicans with around 145 seats in the House and thirty-two in the Senate. Congressional Republicans bounced back by 1966 and won back a lot of seats in both the House and Senate and thanks to Richard Nixon won back the White House in 1968.

The smart political play when you are up is to continue to drive forward and climb the hill even if you are already at the top. You find a bigger hill or mountain try to climb up that as well by building your own party. Understand why you have the power that you currently have and the new voters you picked up and why you are out-of-power in places where you can win back.

And I’m thinking of the U.S. House of Representatives where Republicans are still in charge there and at the state level where Republicans currently hold 30-50 Governorships and a solid majority of both legislatures and legislative members even in places like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. All Democratic states and in swing states like Florida and Virginia that both voted to reelect President Obama.

We now live in a liberal democratic country at least as far as social issues are concern. With a solid majority of Americans who believe in a good deal of personal freedom with government not interfering in our personal lives. Gay marriage and marijuana are perfect examples of that and something Liberal

Democrats need to capitalize on the support for more personal freedom in America, but a social liberal message alone won’t be enough to win back the U.S. House and states like Virginia, Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin ,all states where Democrats should do well there especially with our new voters.

Democrats are going to need a center-left, progressive economic message as well that’s about opportunity, freedom and responsibility and expanding those things to Americans who currently don’t have them for the Democratic Party to do as well as it can and should.

I’m happy that President Obama was reelected and reelected in an electoral landslide and that Senate Democrats not only held their majority, but added to it. But we still have plenty of work to do like taking back the U.S. House and giving the Democrats complete control of Congress again and winning back some state houses and legislatures so there aren’t as many Republican looking House districts in Democratic leaning states. Time to be happy, but never be completely satisfied. 

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Salon Magazine: David Sirota: 'How to Turn a State Liberal'

Source:Salon Magazine- Colorado Governor David Hickenlooper.

“As Colorado goes, so goes the nation. With the culture and demographics of the Intermountain West so rapidly changing, this motto about my home state has become conventional wisdom in national electoral politics, and for good reason. After all, the square state is the capital of the so-called Rocky Mountain Empire, a region that is fast becoming the political equivalent of a test market for the whole country. And if it is true that the way Colorado goes is the way the nation as a whole goes, then America better get ready for some extremely large changes.

Part of Colorado’s story of change comes from the statehouse where Democrats control both the governor’s office and both chambers of the Legislature. But as much of the story comes from outside the Capitol, where organic grass-roots uprisings are obliterating old political assumptions.

For decades, this was a state whose electoral topography was reliable Republican and whose politics was dominated by an unholy coalition of cultural conservatives and oil and gas interests. In the 1980s and 1990s, it became the national conservative movement in a microcosmic petri dish, passing socially conservative constitutional amendments and a so-called Taxpayer Bill of Rights aimed at pulverizing the public sector.”

From Salon Magazine

I have this wild notion that David Sirota’s notion of what liberal and liberalism are, is a lot different than what mine are. Perhaps that’s because he writes for Salon Magazine, which is made of up New-Left columnists, people who are closeted Socialists, but in some cases are self-described Democratic Socialists. So maybe what I should talk about here is how to turn a state Democratic, especially Center-Left Democratic and make it more progressive, not socialist.

It’s changing demographics, not just ethnically and racially, but culturally and regionally, that’s reshaping the Democratic and Republican parties in America. The country, especially the West like Colorado, is becoming more urban and suburban. While you have a Republican Party that’s becoming more rural, Anglo-Saxon, more Protestant, especially fundamentalist Protestant, older, more male, more blue-collar.

While the Democratic Party has been reaching out to Latino-Americans since the 1990s, at least, you have a Republican Party with a strong faction in it calling those Americans Un-American and invaders. So we’re seeing more Latinos move to the Democratic Party, from the Republican Party, because they feel more welcome in the Democratic Party.

I’m not sure the country is changing so much ideologically, even though we’re seeing a higher percentage of Americans support more personal freedom as it relates to same-sex-marriage, marijuana, gambling, the right to privacy in general, as well as free speech.

I think the real changes have to do with racial, ethnic, and regional demographics, with one party meaning the Democratic Party embracing the New America, while the Republican Party is still trying to take us back to the 1950s culturally, racially, and ethnically.

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AlterNet: Chris Hedges: 'Gulag Nation USA'

Source:AlterNet- columnist Chris Hedges.

"If, as Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons” then we are a nation of barbarians. Our vast network of federal and state prisons, with some 2.3 million inmates, rivals the gulags of totalitarian states. Once you disappear behind prison walls you become prey. Rape. Torture. Beatings. Prolonged isolation. Sensory deprivation. Racial profiling. Chain gangs. Forced labor. Rancid food. Children imprisoned as adults. Prisoners forced to take medications to induce lethargy. Inadequate heating and ventilation. Poor health care. Draconian sentences for nonviolent crimes. Endemic violence.

Bonnie Kerness and Ojore Lutalo, both of whom I met in Newark, N.J., a few days ago at the office of American Friends Service Committee Prison Watch, have fought longer and harder than perhaps any others in the country against the expanding abuse of prisoners, especially the use of solitary confinement. Lutalo, once a member of the Black Liberation Army, an offshoot of the Black Panthers, first wrote Kerness in 1986 while he was a prisoner at Trenton State Prison, now called New Jersey State Prison. He described to her the bleak and degrading world of solitary confinement, the world of the prisoners like him held in the so-called management control unit, which he called “a prison within a prison.” Before being released in 2009, Lutalo was in the management control unit for 22 of the 28 years he served for the second of two convictions—the first for a bank robbery and the second for a gun battle with a drug dealer. He kept his sanity, he told me, by following a strict regime of exercising in his tiny cell, writing, meditating and tearing up newspapers to make collages that portrayed his prison conditions."

From the AlterNet 

Prisons are for to protect the innocent from people who've hurt them and would do it again, intentionally or unintentionally. The original punishment for being in prison is the lost of freedom and going through strict security requirements, like keeping weapons out of the prison. But prisons aren't supposed to be torture chambers especially in a liberal democracy and even for people who are serving life in prison. But there to keep criminals behind bars until they've paid their debt and society, as well as showing they can be successful legally once they are out of prison. Prisons should be a productive place for the staff, the inmates where they can benefit from their time behind bars, that benefits society, as well but prisons most importantly should benefit the people who pay for them.

So a productive prison system would be  a system where people enter as criminals but leave as people with the skills to succeed successfully on the outside. And now have given up their criminal careers because they simply no longer need to be criminals in order to survive and no longer want to hurt people.

For prisons to be successful, it means having rules that protects the staff as well as inmates and sanctions for inmates as well as staff for when they break the rules. But not torture, but you broke a rule and there's a price to pay for that but we aren't going to do anything to you to make you worst than you already are. That even includes solitary confinement for inmates who attack other inmates and staff. But isolation should be there to make those inmates better, not to torture them and make them harder to deal with.

So in a humane prison, inmates are following the rules, making good use of their time by educating themselves and using those skills to get a good job while in prison but doing a good job in prison. Contributing to their cost of living and even to their victims and family and once they leave prison they now have the skills to succeed on the outside.

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Laura Flanders: ‘A Cure for Capitalism? Putting the Social Back in Socialism: Rick Wolff’

Source:Laura Flanders- Socialist Economist and Professor Richard Wolff.

“Employment’s up, wealth’s up, but the benefits of both are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few. Welcome to capitalism, says GRITtv regular, Richard Wolff who suggests some alternatives, including “worker self-directed enterprises” if we want to democratize the economy, and US society.

GRITtv regular, Richard Wolff is the author of Capitalism Hits the Fan (Olive Branch Press, 2009) and, most recently, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism (Haymarket Books, 2012).”

From Laura Flanders 

I don’t get the idea that Richard Woolf is either a Communist, Marxist, or even somewhere in between where he would combine Marxist (meaning state-ownership of the economy) with a democratic political system.

Professor Wolff’s alternative to private enterprise and liberal democracy seems to be workers co-ownership, where private businesses would be owned by the workers. Not by stockholders or any particular individual or a board of directors.

As a Liberal, (meaning a real Liberal) I’m as pro-choice as any individual that you’ll ever meet and have no issues with private individuals getting together and starting co-ops on their own and making that decision on their own. I just don’t see how you do that nationally, especially federally and forcing every private company in America, including small private businesses, to become co-ops.

And then you have the other problem with how forcing every private company in America to become a co-op and what that would do to individualism, creativity, and competition, the things that not just the American economy has always thrived on, but needs to be successful, but where very other developed country in the world thrives on and needs to be successful as well.

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LWF: Noam Chomsky- The Purpose of Education

Source:LWF- Professor Noam Chomsky. 

“Noam Chomsky discusses the purpose of education, impact of technology, whether education should be perceived as a cost or an investment and the value of standardised assessment.

Presented at the Learning Without Frontiers Conference – Jan 25th 2012- London (LWF 12)”

Source:LWF

Source:LWF- MIT Professor Noam Chomsky.

The purpose of education is for people to learn what they need to know in order to be successful in life. Not teach them what to think, but how to think and how to learn so they can make the best out of all available important information out there.

What any successful democracy needs to be successful are people being able to learn and think for themselves, especially in a liberal democracy where information is more critical (I would argue) because we have more freedom to make our own decisions. Instead of living in a social democracy where more is expected from the central government to do for us.

The opposite of an educated, free society is a developing country, where there are simply not enough quality schools and educators to go around. And as a result you don’t have the educated workforce and consumer class needed to make your county a good investment. And as a result investors stay out of your country. Or an authoritarian state where the central government decides for everyone who lives there what people should know and what they should think. And for anyone who goes against that they are subjected to government sanctions.

A developed free society is an educated society. A society where people choose to live and stay, because it has the freedom and economic opportunity that people want and need to live well. And that starts first with parenting and then quality education. 

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The American Prospect: Robert Kuttner: 'When Public Is Better'

Source:Economic Policy Institute fellow Robert Kuttner.

"Long before we thought of founding The American Prospect in 1989, I came to know Paul Starr through a prescient article titled "Passive Intervention." The piece was published in 1979, in a now-defunct journal, Working Papers for a New Society.

As Paul and his co-author, Gøsta Esping-Andersen, observed, the American welfare state is built on terrible, even disabling compromises. Progressives often lack the votes to pass legislation to deliver public benefits directly. So they either create tax incentives or bribe the private sector to do the job, thus inflating a bloated system. "The problem is not too much government activism," they wrote, "but too much passivity."

Their two emblematic examples were housing and health care. In housing, tax advantages became an inflation hedge for the affluent and drove up prices. Low-income homeownership programs, run through the private sector, had huge default rates. In health care, the political compromises necessary to enact Medicare excluded serious cost containment. When they wrote this, health care consumed 9 percent of GDP compared to 17 percent today. The subprime mortgage scandal was decades in the future.

After 34 years, the same dynamics are far worse. In the run-up to the financial collapse, private securitization of subprime mortgages pretended to serve the social objective of increasing low-income homeownership. Nobody fully understood the risks-not the brokers who originated the loans, or the banks that sliced them into bonds, or the credit-rating companies that blessed them, and certainly not the regulators who feigned oversight. In the aftermath of the collapse, government now gives "incentive payments" to the very banks that created the mess, bribing them to modify mortgages in the hope of reducing foreclosures. This privatized program is a byzantine mess and a policy failure.

Better to have a public institution, such as the Roosevelt-era Home Owners' Loan Corporation, serve the public goal of refinancing homes directly. The HOLC was simplicity and transparency itself. As was the original public Fannie Mae. Both programs sold Treasury bonds to create credit for homeowners. No private players took a cut or generated extra cost and risk, and there were no scandals.

Passive intervention-serving public goals by making them lucrative private profit centers-not only increases costs; it increases complexity, which in turn invites inflation, confusion, and corruption. Though private abuse is responsible, government as sponsor gets the political blame.

Depending on how vigilant the government is, the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") could be a partial step to universal insurance-or another epic passive intervention. Rather than having government provide coverage directly, as Medicare does, the ACA requires people to purchase private insurance, subsidized for less affluent people and regulated by government.

But the more indirect the government involvement, the more it invites gaming. The press has been full of stories of big companies trying to break into units of fewer than 50 employees to evade the law's threshold requirements and employers shifting full-time workers covered by the ACA to part-timers who are not. In Massachusetts, where the model for Obamacare was invented, the state tolerates employer-provided plans that leave consumers on the hook for a huge share of medical bills.

Over time, public Medicare has become far better than private plans at lowering costs. However the ACA is not a public program but a fragmented private insurance pool. In principle, the ACA allows the new state "health exchanges" to exert bargaining power over private plans, but they may also merely list and certify private insurance products. So this hybrid could add yet another layer, with little effect on cost.

Complexity invites more complexity. Foundations and industry groups have launched a $100 million nonprofit called Enroll-America.org to sign up uninsured people-who have every reason to be confused. Money is wasted explaining how to enroll in a bewildering system that could have been simple and automatic had it been public social insurance. The multiple moving parts also facilitate Republican mischief at every stage. As consumers grow frustrated with the complexity, cost, and incomplete coverage, guess who will take the blame?

The privatized drug insurance that trades on Medicare's good name (Medicare Part D) is yet another example of the inefficiency of passive intervention. Direct, public prescription coverage would provide more benefit at less cost, by excluding industry middlemen. One could add the inefficiencies and corruption of privatized prisons and halfway houses, or for-profit voucher schools that do worse than their public counterparts.

Government, of course, should not run everything. But when it comes to social outlays, simpler is better, and simpler usually means direct government provision. Alas, government is in such low repute nowadays that legislatively, passive intervention is all liberals can get. For instance, President Obama, in proposing universal pre-kindergarten, did not dare suggest simply extending public education to three- and four-year-olds. The best we can expect is a patchwork of church-basement programs and for-profit preschool franchises.

It's time-long past time-for progressives to call out the inefficiencies of private provision of public goods and make a clear-throated defense of government. Otherwise, our government will keep taking the fall for the failures of private profiteers." 

From The American Prospect