The only political way out of this economic servitude is another demagogue on the level of Huey Long to arise.

The 1930s bred a few such: men who could appeal to both rural, socially conservative voters and urban liberals alike.

With FDR we had a charismatic leader who used the government’s power to partially curb the business sector. And then 30 years later we got LBJ who more or less allied with the business sector, but used the government’s power to aid minorities, increase education, enact medicare, and so forth (“the Great 89th’s” legislative history).

With Obama’s campaign rhetoric, we thought we were going to get a little of both men. Tragically, so far, we are getting neither. Which is too bad, since he has charisma in plenty and has the makings of a great popular leader…

Alas he lacks the ruthlessness and the basic simplistic reductionism that the great demagogues could use so effectively. And it is increasingly argued that he never did intend to shake things up too much. He maybe sees himself more as a healer of a badly divided polity. Such a role automatically limits his partisanship.

So we are kinda stuck. By the late twentieth century, a worker’s paradise of a sort here developed in the United States: an economic climate salubrious enough to dull political upheaval based on perceived class inequalities. People had enough material goods to have a stake in sustaining the economic system that had given them their big-screen tvs and suvs and no real incentive in overthrowing it. Further, 100 years of vicious business/govt-based repression had purged all effective revolutionary institutional counterweights, even to de-naturing the labor movement. The major parties give the public the illusion of freedom based on the so-called hot button social issues like gun control, gay marriage, abortion, etc. In this social arena alone, we still have the semblance of a democracy.

But in terms of fundamental modifications of the economic infrastructure, there is absolutely no democracy. We have no power, even with a mass popular outcry, to effect substantive change. This health care reform debate and progress should open everyone’s eyes to that sorry reality. Senators will simply ignore their constituencies on issues of major infrastructure change.

It is painfully obvious that neither you nor Marcy are historians or economists perhaps even lacking a basic literacy in either field. I don’t disagree with your thesis that corporate power is encroaching on our lives and frankly limiting our freedoms but to use a term like neo-feudalism only shows me that you are ignorant of medieval society (in feudalism rights and privileges were based on reciprocity extending up and down a hierarchical society) and that you are blissfully unaware of the origins of term neo-feudalism.

The term was first used by George Reisman, an economist of the Austrian school who taught at Pepperdine, writing in the conservative weekly Human Events (it was Reagan’s favorite magazine) in 1961 to attack John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society. In Reisman’s essay neo-feudalism is the growth of a paternalistic liberal state that aimed to create a cradle to grave socialism. So you are actually pushing a term that was coined by a member of the Ludwig van Mises/Frederich von Hayek/Milton Friedman school of economic thought to disparage the left.

Its use as a pejorative term was silly then and it is silly now. Please stop bantering around terms that you don’t fully understand because frankly you are embarrassing not just yourselves but the progressive left as a whole. You think you are being clever but quite the opposite, you are demonstrating a profound ignorance. Have you even read Hayek’s Road to Serfdom? I might suggest reading the object of your disdain before you mimic it.

The only thing that will save us is common purpose for the good of all, executed with grace, humility and wisdom. If we fail to recognize our humanity we fail utterly.

Burnie-retired asshole.

Flame me all you want, but working in this system does nothing, accomplishes nothing. This health care bill is shit packed in a pink box. We really should just say no, they cannot come for all of us

Yes I am mad, mad at you, mad at me, that we permit this madness to continue. But my direct experience informs me that calling these lying sacks does not help. You are fighting money and the way you fight that is organized resistance from without. They own the system, now more than ever. Put it in the papers in a way that speaks to people. They don’t like liberal elitists, which is how you are perceived so the language must address that.

No I am no troll. El Duende. Although I do have the distinct possibility of living under a bridge in the near future. I refuse to identify with any party. Remember, you are a member of the greatest party on earth, the human race and we are all connected and very, very powerful. They truly fear us you know, they think we are sleeping and pray we continue. Wake up, it is a sunny day if you want it to be. Make them join us, don’t join them.

Burnie-semi retired asshole.

One day, I took her to the local Walgreen’s to pick up her medicine. After she came back out of the store, we talked for a little bit. The talk turned to healthcare, and I was amazed to learn that the medicine she just bought cost her two hundred dollars! This is a woman who is covered by insurance. Now I hear that older people like my mother could pay as much as 3x the amount a younger person would pay.

How does that work? Where are senior citizens like my mother going to come up with that kind of cash? I also have a question about co-payments and deductables. In all the talk about killing or keeping bills, no one has answered (to my satisfaction at least), what’s to keep the insurance companies from raising the co-pays and deductables? I haven’t heard or seen anything in the bill that would prevent unfair raises. I have other questions, but answering these would be a start, thanks.

The flaw was in the regulation, not in the market itself.

But the government was for sale, so the government went to the highest bidders, best and highest use and all, and they rigged the game so that they always win.