The Definition of Insanity

The System is broken.

It has been broken for quite some time and during that quite some time, just about everything within the political conventional wisdom has tried to attempt to fix it. Just about everything has been tried to fix it for the Ruling Class and for some reason, stuff like deregulating how you can rob people on Wall St and allowing the Ruling Class to pay little or no taxes does seem to work….for them. Making the system work better for the rich that comprise 1% of the population seems to be fairly easy.

You just shift the burden on to the poor and middle class and everyone is happy. The government is happy because the rich stop hassling them, and the rich are happy because they get richer.

So that quick and easy fix only leaves only 99% of people unhappy, which is where we are now.

With 99% of The People (factoring in margin of error) ready to throw the bums who can’t govern effectively for 99% of The People out of office.

Yes that’s right, not only can the modern Republican not effectively govern the country for 99% of the people, the last few years have shown that the Democrats can’t either. And the last year of a Dem in the WH, the Dems with 60 seats and a huge majority in the House has proven beyond a shadow of the doubt one simple fact.

Under the current broken system, America is ungovernable. And an ungovernable country is in a state of chaos…..and decline.

A fact which the two Partys simply cannot afford to acknowledge. Until they are forced to.

Which will happen in a year, when The People throw yet another batch of Pols out of office and elect a new batch…..who will also not be able to govern the country….and who will then be promptly thrown out of office, and a new batch of incompetents with no imagination or solutions will be voted in. Rinse. Repeat.

The winner of this game will be the Party or Pol who comes up with something new.

Not the same old going down the rehashed CW laundry list of already failed solutions….like spending freezes….that the Pols go down. That they go down not because they think they will work, but because they think The People will “buy it.”

Again.

You can argue all you want over the latest brand of constantly repeated idiocy from DC.

Or you can put your energy into creating something new. Into finding new solutions to the problems. And there is only one set of new ideas out there. Only one range of solutions that have never been tried…. and thus have never failed …..as all the other ideas we are now fated to repeating as the Obama Admin thrashes around in an attempt to keep it’s job have failed. Repeatedly. Over and Over again.

But,

The new set of ideas come from the set of people who actually HAVE ideas, instead of the retread solutions that have failed so many times they now lead to hysteria when they are proposed again.

The Ideas of the Left.

The Definition of Insanity is doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results. It is a cycle we are trapped in, solely because they Powers That Be are deathly afraid of trying anything new. Even though the old conventional ideas have been tried and have failed over and over.

No wonder everyone is insane.

When will it stop? Only when we are desperate enough apparently. Only when the cries of the 99% of The People rise too high to be ignored and the Pols finally figure it out and out of desperation, look for something new. Something that hasn’t been tried. Something that I like to call……doing the right thing for The People. Which when stripped of it’s mystery will be revealed to be what the Left has been suggesting all along.

The first Party or Pol that stumbles on to this apparently elusive concept wins.

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  1. Photobucket

  2. with a clue.

  3. The message of the 2008 election was not delivered.  I voted for Obama not to get this kind of shit.  I expected with my vote was the understanding it was a mandate to deliver meaningful measurable positive change.

    The benefit and support Obama supporters wanted was delivered – in November 2008.  Now it’s time to pay up.

    So, instead of whining and bitching and kvetching about how your chosen one(s) are being unfairly attacked, get behind some very simple things (things, not people) to be done which would actually ARM your chosen people by divesting them of excuses and temptations for not only not doing things, but too seldom doing the right things.

    End the filibuster.  Regardless of our differences as wild eyed radical AK-47 toting lefties and “pragmatic” change-takes-a-generation Obama supporters, can we get behind this one thing?  END THE EXCESSES OF THE CURRENT FILIBUSTER RULES.

    And demand corporations out of our politicians pants.  Again, can we agree on that much at least?  PASS LAWS THAT END THE CORPORATIONS’ STRANGLEHOLD ON WASHINGTON.

    Of course, the second is going to take the first.

    If no other two things can be done, that would be enough to make practical, sensible change possible … not just change but measurable change that takes less than a fricking human lifetime — because we radical lefties aren’t interested in change you can only perceive in the same manner as plants growing before your very eyes.

    If moderate progressives and the left cannot unite behind these two basic concepts, then I have to question the integrity of anyone who disagrees.  You cannot promise change, hide behind the filibuster, not try to do anything about the filibuster or the corporations owning us, and pretending “change takes time”.  This isn’t the change we were promised.  It’s not just the lack of progress, it’s the trajectory.

  4. in my head… when reading a post or an article, thinking Oh yeah that’s IT! okay then! Then I go on to review comments and they’re all pooh-poohing it. I forget sometimes how … so much that seems so blatantly obvious to me … is still in a Huge Battle Zone. I just dont know what’s wrong with people. ;-/

    Great post, buhdy. Mix in some common sense and we’ll have this mess cleaned up in no time!

    Photobucket

    • chefTDP on January 26, 2010 at 23:39

    and great diary, thank you! 😀

  5. Abandon politics.

    Since they’re not going to change, they’re always going to be insane. Let’s turn down the perennial invitation to be insane with them.

    When longshoremen refuse to move war materiel, when workers in Argentina take control of the factories, when high-school students in Israel refuse to serve in the military, when women in Britain block the entrances to a Trident base, when protesters from around the world mass on the Egyptian border to lead a freedom march into Gaza, when Gandhi made salt and wool in India, when ordinary people boycotted the buses and sat in at the lunch counters, when Code Pink delivers supplies to Gaza, people are no longer recognizing the state. They are saying it is irrelevant to human freedom, that direct action is the road to democracy.

    Until people organize themselves and take control, civilization will always be run by proxy, and the proxy will always let us down.

    Now from some people who can say it much better than I can:

    In the United States, the political system is a very marginal affair. There are two parties, so-called, but they’re really factions of the same party, the Business Party. Both represent some range of business interests. In fact, they can change their positions 180 degrees, and nobody even notices. In the 1984 election, for example, there was actually an issue, which often there isn’t. The issue was Keynesian growth versus fiscal conservatism. The Republicans were the party of Keynesian growth: big spending, deficits, and so on. The Democrats were the party of fiscal conservatism: watch the money supply, worry about the deficits, et cetera. Now, I didn’t see a single comment pointing out that the two parties had completely reversed their traditional positions. Traditionally, the Democrats are the party of Keynesian growth, and the Republicans the party of fiscal conservatism. So doesn’t it strike you that something must have happened? Well, actually, it makes sense. Both parties are essentially the same party. The only question is how coalitions of investors have shifted around on tactical issues now and then. As they do, the parties shift to opposite positions, within a narrow spectrum.

    –Noam Chomsky, Interview by Adam Jones, February 20, 1990

    The consistent anarchist, then, should be a socialist, but a socialist of a particular sort. He will not only oppose alienated and specialized labor and look forward to the appropriation of capital by the whole body of workers, but he will also insist that this appropriation be direct, not exercised by some elite force acting in the name of the proletariat. –Noam Chomsky, In Daniel Guérin, Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, 1970

    I mean, what’s the elections? You know, two guys, same background, wealth, political influence, went to the same elite university, joined the same secret society where you’re trained to be a ruler – they both can run because they’re financed by the same corporate institutions. At the Democratic Convention, Barack Obama said, ‘only in this country, only in America, could someone like me appear here.’ Well, in some other countries, people much poorer than him would not only talk at the convention – they’d be elected president. Take Lula. The president of Brazil is a guy with a peasant background, a union organizer, never went to school, he’s the president of the second-biggest country in the hemisphere. Only in America? I mean, there they actually have elections where you can choose somebody from your own ranks. With different policies. That’s inconceivable in the United States.   –Noam Chomsky, Interview by Wallace Shawn, October 19, 2004

    Personally I’m in favor of democracy, which means that the central institutions in the society have to be under popular control. Now, under capitalism we can’t have democracy by definition. Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control. Thus, a corporation or an industry is, if we were to think of it in political terms, fascist; that is, it has tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level — there’s a little bargaining, a little give and take, but the line of authority is perfectly straightforward. Just as I’m opposed to political fascism, I’m opposed to economic fascism. I think that until major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it’s pointless to talk about democracy. –Noam Chomsky, Business Today, May 1973

    Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners. –Edward Abbey, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis en Deserto): Notes from a Secret Journal, 1990)

    . . . anarchism can be conceived as a kind of voluntary socialism, that is, as libertarian socialist or anarcho-syndicalist or communist anarchist, in the tradition of, say, Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin and others. They had in mind a highly organized form of society, but a society that was organized on the basis of organic units, organic communities. And generally, they meant by that the workplace and the neighborhood, and from those two basic units there could derive through federal arrangements a highly integrated kind of social organization which might be national or even international in scope. And these decisions could be made over a substantial range, but by delegates who are always part of the organic community from which they come, to which they return, and in which, in fact, they live.

    Representative democracy, as in, say, the United States or Great Britain, would be criticized by an anarchist of this school on two grounds. First of all because there is a monopoly of power centralized in the state, and secondly — and critically — because the representative democracy is limited to the political sphere and in no serious way encroaches on the economic sphere. Anarchists of this tradition have always held that democratic control of one’s productive life is at the core of any serious human liberation, or, for that matter, of any significant democratic practice. That is, as long as individuals are compelled to rent themselves on the market to those who are willing to hire them, as long as their role in production is simply that of ancillary tools, then there are striking elements of coercion and oppression that make talk of democracy very limited, if even meaningful. –Noam Chomsky, The Jay Interview, July 25, 1976

    The ideally non-violent state will be an ordered anarchy. That State is the best governed which is governed the least. –Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, in Gandhi’s Wisdom Box (1942), edited by Dewan Ram Parkash, p. 67 also in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 79 (PDF), p. 122

    Laws: We know what they are, and what they are worth! They are spider webs for the rich and mighty, steel chains for the poor and weak, fishing nets in the hands of government. –Pierre Joseph Proudhon

    There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another. This conception is a potent menace to social regeneration. –Emma Goldman

    No longer riding on the merry-go-round

    I just had to let it go.

    –John Lennon

  6. To select out a few items from a previous comment:

    The System Is Broken

    Forbes, Robert Lenzner, 01.16.09

    Political System Absolutely Broken

    California Farmer, FrankHoldmeyer, Jan 11, 2010

    Spitzer: Banking System is Broken

    CBS News, 01/11/10

    From Forbes to farmers to philanderers, “is broken” gets applied to almost everything.  On the one hand, you could say the notion has become so banal as to become meaningless.  But that it’s so pervasive — there’s something happening here, what it is ain’t completely clear, there’s a man with a gun over there …

    No, it’s that the system is having a legitimacy crisis.  I think we need to let it sink in in a new way.  Sink in, you say?  We’re radicals, we’re revolutionaries, of course the system is illegitimate.

    Well, yes, of course.  But what I’m getting at is that, because we’ve known it all along, that can actually blind us to the fact that this is seeping into the American people as never before.  Left, right and center.  This doesn’t mean by itself that the American people are becoming revolutionaries, or even moving left, en toto.

    To be sure, some are moving left.  Others are moving right.  But I think we’re all adrift, the moorings are cut.  Events, including world events, are moving out of control, and thins are happening at their own pace, not by our leisurely timetable.

    As you might guess, I’m not saying Yipes, let’s do something big and dramatic.  Since I’m neither big nor dramatic, that’s just theater.  But I am saying do small things with some sense of immediacy.

    We’ve gone dry, collectively, with no mass movement sweeping events along.  But the motion is stirring, and now that will start dictating to us.

  7. that there are some solutions which have already been tried and have proved their value:

    (1) the Glass-Steagall Act worked very well before it was gutted.

    (2) progressive taxation.  IIRC, tax rates for the richest Americans, when Eisenhower was in the presidency, were around 90%.

    (3) regulate the shit out of big business.

    (4) enact tariffs against all goods that can be produced here (even if the companies producing them are U.S.-based).  “Free” trade is extremely costly to the bottom line of the middle & working classes.

    And oh, yeah, stop union-busting.

    Even small steps to get back to the policies that enabled a very strong middle class would help turn the situation around.

    Unfortunately, I don’t see the political will for it, at all.

  8. will stay enslaved to their masters. Politics will follow the people only when they understand their history. The myth is very difficult to reject, especially when it is the

    intent of the oligarchs to sustain it at all costs.

    Oh, Look what we found. The New World. Aren’t we special. We took it and founded a great Democracy. See above

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