"It's been OK to marginalize blacks and Amerinds and other minority groups. We will see how it goes when the middle class is marginalized." - George Markley

The middle class is already being marginalized. Last month, Sen. Max Baucus of Montana convened a panel of the anointed from the private health care industry - hospitals, doctors, HMOs, insurance companies - to discuss health care reform before the Senate Finance Committee. When a number of people, including doctors and nurses, rose to protest that single payer national health care advocates had been excluded from the discussion, Sen. Baucus had them arrested. At the time, a half-dozen polls showed that a publicly financed, privately delivered health care system was favored by a majority of the electorate. Nothing more clearly demonstrates that our legislators represent, not the people who voted them into office, but the corporate interests who finance their election campaigns.

We exchanged social benefits like Norway enjoys to play fantasy democracy by believing the nonsense that we could affect progressive change within the Democratic Party. For generations, the Democratic Party has successfully prevented the development of a viable progressive third party in the US. In the book "The Democrats: a Critical History", author Lance Selfa consistently demonstrates that this is in fact the Dems role in American politics. Why is this the case? Because we have a one party state, the business or capitalist party with two factions: Democrats and Republicans. Both factions serve the interests of the elite class - not the interests of the majority. The few progressive changes that we were able to achieve, did not come from the Democrats, they came from massive social movements not connected to party politics. The influence of the social movements in the '30's and '60's atrophied when movement leaders were lured into the Democratic Party in the 1940's and 1970's.

The Democratic Party has sold us out every time, and will again now and in the future with "hope", "change" and "yes we can" Barack Obama. The Democrats are not, and have never been, on our side.

I admire the accomplishments of the people of Norway. I also admire the fierce individualism of freedom-loving Americans. I wish to remind those who would idealize Norwegian politics that prior to the economic meltdown in the Fall of 2008, the Norwegian conservative politicians were singing Bush's praises and praising the global economy, completely oblivious of their own good fortune due to excellent management of their oil resources.

What can we learn from them? We could learn that preserving the environment and harvesting our own oil and natural gas are not incompatible if both are owned and regulated by our own government. We have to stop treating our minerals and forests as though they belong to property owners. We have to preempt greed.

We could learn that our workers are our best and most scarce resource and that a thriving economy requires that workers at all levels are able to secure a decent living wage, health care, housing, and safe working conditions. We could learn that we gain happy citizens with high self-esteem when we pay for their education and university costs. We could learn that we retain our own highly trained professionals when we do not burden them with debts in communities that have no employment opportunities for them.

Nice post!! All of the arguments we hear over and over again are turned to mush when confronted with the simple evidence that others have already demonstrated that it is indeed possible to do things right.

Aside from and beyond the "S" word is the commonly held believe in America that government is inefficient incompetent and untrustworthy. And most folks are perfectly incapable of discerning how there is a distinct difference between government as it should be versus government as it is. Too many think less government is better government, and they are blind to the concept of government as a guardian and promoter of the common good, as the principal agent to provide equitable relief from abuses of power and to provide benevolent wise and moral leadership for posterity.

Certainly, given the current culture in Washington, how could we begin to trust anything "they" devise to have absolute integrity. No matter what the schema, someone somewhere will unduly benefit from the redistribution of our tax dollars into their private coffers. It is quite simply The American Way - that is capitalism and the rationalization of private profit before the general welfare.

I have always been a believer in our Constitution and of the conviction that by its virtue we the people could affect the course of our nation. In any event I believed it assured us the right and means to effect a lawful revolution, by which we the people could restore the integrity of our good nation. That's what I believe Amendment X ultimately guarantees. It's just too bad so few folks can perceive that and rally around it. I believe it is the one and only thing we can actually hang our hat on, and use to bring about real change.

But yes, for the "S" phobes out there, and there are way too many of you, Norway offers (as do some others) the proof that your fears are unfounded. And their perspective offers you proof of what happens to the man that steps into the wolves den that is Washington. I just hope some of you other folks here start to understand that it isn't Obama near as much as it is the machinery that dominates the American political landscape, of which you yourself do play a part, whether on purpose or not.

It seems to me that the left right divide is meaningless as the politicos have allegiance only to money and the folks who got the goods on them. That is why USA politics looks so hopelessly fucked from anywhere else on the planet.

Sophie Scholl-The Final Days

Years of institutionalized anti-socialist propaganda are a proven success for the US conservative beast.

when are they going to stop killing whales?

Let's face this: 0's conservative in the US, too.

In the US, the president and the legislature, together, are most always to the right of the electorate on most issues. And the electorate is almost always to the right of the population as a whole.

This is not a question of going far enough or not far enough. Obama is going in the wrong direction.

We live in a golden cage.

"...in Norway even conservatives would say the Democrats and Obama don't go nearly far enough."

In America a lot of Progressives _know_ that Obama doesn't go far enough.

I've been harrassing Ron Wyden for weeks on the health care issue. The idiot _still_ thinks that what Americans _want_ is mandatory insurance, despite polls that are calling for the "public option", which wouldn't go far enough toward Single-payer. Jeff Merkley, being new to the Senate, isn't pushing Single-payer, but says he'd "vote for it if it ever gets to the Senate floor". Fat chance of that happening, with most Senators not having any balls.

Guess I need to find my old passport, get a new one, and figure out if there's a country with more progressive thinking that I might want to visit ... permanently. My great-grandparents came from Sweden in the 1850s-1860s; maybe they'd take me back as an ex-patriot.

~EggZactly~

Democrats are the new Republicans, and Republicans are just plain hypocritical fascists.

Norway has a system of government that reflects and is a microcosm of its own people, unlike the US.

From Wikipedia:

"Norway elects its legislature on a national level. The parliament, the Storting (or Stortinget by Norwegian grammar), has 169 members elected for a four year term (during which it may not be dissolved) by the proportional representation in multi-seat constituencies. The Storting is for legislative cases divided into the Lagting (1/4 of its members) and the Odelsting (3/4)."

"Norway has a multi-party system, with numerous parties in which no one party often has a chance of gaining power alone, and parties must work with each other to form coalition governments and/or minority cabinets."

Search wikipedia for "Elections_in_Norway".

They don't allow private money to influence elections either. Most modern democracies don't.

If we had such a system, in short order, US policies would come to reflect the will of the people. The Preamble of our second and current Constitution is on the progressive side of this issue. The rest of the Constitution is antiquated in many ways and needs amending. For example Norway has had over five national referendums on important issues. How many has the USA had? Zip! The Constitution doesn't allow for a national vote on any question or issue. Not even voting for our president.

We've got to connect the dots between a corporate totalitarian system and the flaws in the Constitution which allows such a system to prevent democracy. There is no better measure of a nation's governance than the gap or lack of a gap between public opinion and public policy. (Do a search for "progressive majority" and find out for yourself if you don't know.)

Obama is a right-winger because corporate interests gave him the majority of the $580 million he needed to win his election. He owes them, and needs them to get reelected. The entire spectrum is right wing because the system is controlled by big money and the two-party system excludes its greatest threat: progressives.

Our goal should be to have a progressive, constitutional revolution.

I've been traveling and dwelling in Norway for varying length intervals of time since the mid sixties. I've watched the country's social order change and evolve over that period. I've learned too much about that society to go into here. It's has a curious mix of capitalism and socialism in comparison to other European nations. The Norwegians possess a strong inclination toward capitalism but their collective behavior also demonstrates a strong commitment to social responsibility which is translated into state managed socialist practices. With respect to all the nations in Europe, Norway is one of the more conservative ones.

Having lived in and traveled extensively in other parts of Europe, I can say with certainty that, what is considered centrist or left of center in matters cultural, political, economic, and social here in the US is or would be considered far to the right by the vast majority of the inhabitants of all the European nations. If Obama displayed behaviors that they would consider centrist of leftist, he would not be president of the US. It has to do with an enormous cultural difference between the US on the one hand and the Central and Western European nations on the other.

To highlight this, I'll mention that I was listening to David Garland on WNYC this evening and he spoke of the discovery somewhere in Germany of a flute that was almost completely in tact an has been estimated to be about 35 thousand years old. I believe that the man or woman on the street of any European country would find both the discovery to be quite interesting and also not even be inclined to question the validity of the instrument's dating, and this by a ratio of better than 10 to one. In the US I suspect that a similar sampling of opinions would have a significant minority of those told of this archaeological find questioning the validity of this dating, given that their belief systems conceive of the world to be only 6 thousand or so years old.

I worked for six months on the Norwegian bulk carrier 'MS Jane Stove" in 1962. I must admit that they were some of the happiest times of my life. They had a highly developed sense of egalitarianism. No one used the term 'socialist' in those days. They had a great work ethic. All worked together and everyone was happy to do his or her job. (Yes, there were women crew, even then).

Had it not been for the Cuban missile crisis that October-November, I might have sought Norwegian citizenship. I did see ICBM's on the way to Cuba on Soviet Bloc ships at that time and experienced a fatal feeling of patriotism and joined the US Navy. It didn't take me very long to realize what a pile of horse shit American politics was and is.

I hope to see more writers tackle an point noted in this article: "I was struck again... by how different the political spectrum is in Norway from your country. Here, Obama would be on the right wing."

Today's Progressives certainly have their hearts in the right place, but I think the problem is that they don't understand just how much power they actually have, if they'd only organize and try. I don't think they grasp how people are linked by social, economic and political issues, so punitive policies that impact those at the bottom will have a negative impact on nearly everyone else. When a powerless segment of the population is scapegoated and exploited, the trend inevitably moves on to the next economic segment. When we remain silent when people are denied their fundamental legal and human rights simply because they're poor, it puts these rights in jeopardy for everyone else.

Our progressive media doesn't always "get it" when it comes to how the mistreatment of any segment of the population ultimately effects everyone else. Or maybe they're just disinterested. For example, an issue that has largely been ignored is welfare "reform." We're generally ignorant about poverty here in the US. How many progressives know that some of these "reform" policies are actually in violation of international human rights standards, per the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Or that these policies were enacted, ironically, around the time that we were all celebrating the anniversary of the Declaration? How many care?

It puzzles me that we've ignored the impact of these policies on all of the working class. Workfare, in a nutshell, is a pool of mandatory labor that can be paid subminimum wages, that has virtually no workers' rights and protections, and that has increasingly been used as replacement labor. It's a Third World workforce that spares corporations the cost of moving jobs to foreign countries. Want to organize a union? Strike for better wages? Don't -- you can be replaced with workfare labor by morning, at a fraction of your wages. With each wave of layoffs, more people end up as workfare labor, themselves. Put all together, welfare reform has been a tool for suppressing wages and keeping workers "compliant." The money taken out of human needs funding has gone toward helping to cover the costs of "tax relief" for the rich/corporations since the Reagan years. We can see the results all around us today.

Those who learned about social/economic injustice the hard way have tried to prod the progressive community into action, but we're talking about a generation who have been inundated with the Reagan doctrine. We need a progressive media that can connect the dots, filling people in on those issues that are disregarded by the mainstream media.