That's why I reasearch before I buy,,, I now drive a Toyota, made in America instead of a Ford "Mexico" or GM Canada/China I sure do miss Hersheys Choclate though, but not from Mexico!! >^^<

wantrealdemocracy wrote:

My advice is to never vote for a Democrat or a Republican. NEVER! I really don't think we can do anything by voting but give the bastards some phoney legitimacy.

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My Reply:

wantrealdemocracy,

In a real democracy you and everyone else who votes must be free to express their opinions accurately and to exercise real power when they cast their vote at the ballot.box.

In your case this means that you should be able to express your dissent and opposition to both the Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate on the ballot, while you express your consent and support for any other candidate on the ballot including write-in candidates according to your own choice.

Participation in elections should not require that voters support any of the candidates on the ballot. Requiring voters to support some candidate on the ballot in order to participate in the election forces voters to give as you have expressed it "the bastards some phoney legitimacy," and makes it impossible to actually determine whether or not any of the candidates on the ballot have received the freely given consent of the governed. But simply adding a "None of the Above" option to Plurality Voting does not give voters the power they deserve.

While never voting for Democrats or Republicans again may be a good idea, the freedom to actually vote against both Democrats and Republicans individually and directly while you support other candidates of your choice on the ballot is the only way you and other voters will have the power that you deserve in a democracy.

This means replacing Plurality Voting with a voting procedure based upon each voter's expressions of consent and support or dissent and opposition for or against each and any or all of the candidates on an election ballot.

There are two such voting procedures which provide this sort of power, Yes No 'Maybe So' Voting and Category Scale Power Voting.

If you want real democracy, you have to fight for it. Among other things that means replacing Plurality Voting with Yes No 'Maybe So' Voting or Category Scale Power Voting.

Here is what your 2008 Presidential ballot might have look like given your opinions of Democrats and Republican today.

Category Scale Power Voting (CSPV)

Example Ballot: An Obama-wise person's 2008 CSPV ballot.

2008 Presidential Election

Candidate     Most Oppose  Oppose  No Comment  Support  Most Support
Barack Obama      X
John McCain         X
Ralph Nader                                                                               X
Cynthia McKinney                                                       X
Bob Barr               X
Chuck Baldwin                                          X

jawhite,

I did a quick search of the web regarding "Labor Day" and "protest" and "Labor Day" and "rally"

The first search mostly led to various links to Robert Reich article.

The second search turned up the following from the September page of the Event Calendar of a group called Peaceful Uprising.

URL: www.peacefuluprising.org/

Calendar URL: www.peacefuluprising.org/uprising-calendar

Stand Up and Be Counted Labor Day Rally (Direct Action Opportunity)

September 5, 2011 12:00 pm - 5:00 pm5 Hours

We are a grassroots, multi-partisan group that stands against the corporate takeover of our government. We will meet at the Jefferson Memorial at noon on September 5th.

Those of us who believe that working Americans deserve a voice in our government need to stand up. Let's do it, September 5th. We may not have all the wealth, but we do have the numbers. Stand Up! We the People, not the corporations! We are asking congress to eliminate tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% of Americans and to close corporate tax loopholes. No more corporate welfare!

Location
View Map
Jefferson Memorial
Washington DC,

Contact Information
Donna Shelton (donnashelton07@aol.com)

jawhite,

I would like to suggest that you also consider the protest taking place in Freedom Square in Washington, D.C. beginning October 6, 2011, which I expect will be larger.

URL: http://october2011.org/welcome

Robert Reich might have said that we should protest on May 1st when most of the rest of the world celebrates Labor Day as well as on the first Monday in September when Labor Day is "celebrated" in the United States.

May 1st is also known as International Workers Day or May Day.

My favorite irony is the fact that one of the most politically right-wing states in the U.S. (Alabama) opted to put an outspoken member of the Socialist Party of America ... and a Wobby supporter ... and an anti-war activist ... in the honored position of representing their state on the state quarter (Helen Keller).

Like Labor Day and MLK, the Helen Keller persona has been sanitized into a grade-school caricature of 'The Good Little Blind Girl' .. so much so that the issues Keller addressed most passionately when she spoke in public have largely been scrubbed away from the public consciousness. That's the only way to explain Alabama's curious choice. Unless they were angling for a chance to host the next Socialist Party Convention in Birmingham ;-)

Ricardohead, I've never seen Reich in the protests I've attended, including in DC. I've never seen Reich involved in the progressive media organizations that I support. I've never seen Reich involved in the non-mainstream political campaigns I've been involved in. Who are you to judge what activities Common Dream posters are involved in?

As far as Reich, the issue isn't whether he is "left enough", the problem is he is locked to the Democratic Party so much though that when he presents problems and solutions he either unjustly gives the Republicans all the blame when Democrats are complicit, or falsely holds out that Obama and the Democrats just need a nudge to fix things when they willfully ignore the will of the their own base. He never addresses the corruption of the duopolistic system that he lives in and enriches himself in. My guess is that if he did so, he'd get kicked off the Sunday morning political talk shows, but so what, he needs to challenge the system. Just being involved isn't enough, as Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner are "involved" all over the place and all the time and could be called energizer bunnies also. As far as whether his videos are sometimes funny, that is irrelevant.

Ricardohead (in reply to PuffinThrush) wrote:

Robert Reich IS more involved than you and most of his detractors. He's a professor, and a writer, and a polemicist, and he's kind of like the energizer bunny: all over the place, all the time, making political and economic points. His short articles picked up by CD are hard-hitting and effective, and his videos are pointed and sometimes funny. If his politics are not 'Left' enough for you-that's fine, but you can't deny his commitment or his involvement.

- - - - -

Ricardohead (in reply to Progressive101) wrote:

Judging people is pretty much what goes on, on CD, most of the time. So feel free to 'judge', or comment on, or whatever, about Richard Reich [sic], and I can comment on you, or you on me. Better yet, why not support Reich when he makes a statement you can support (surely there are some), and I'll support you when you're in DC doing a demo, and you can support me when I'm in the street yelling at the local Bofa branch. By the way, I hope you've been following the gradual leftwards movement of Reich & Krugman. Sometimes they almost sound like radicals, and that's a good thing. Humor is never irrelevant.

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My Reply:

Ricardohead,

Clearly, I know more about Robert Reich than you know about me. That’s not surprising, of course.

Sure, Robert Reich was a professor at Brandeis University and is now a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. But as far as I can tell, Robert Reich is mostly a celebrity politician / pundit.

I have no opinion about Robert Reich’s work as a professor, because I have never actually seen him perform as one. However, I suspect Robert Reich’s lectures, if he actually gives any, have about as much depth as his writing and his politics.

I remember when Robert Reich ran for the Democratic nomination for Governor of Massachusetts. Warren Tolman (a Democratic Party candidate) and Jill Stein (the Green Rainbow Party candidate) were the only candidates who ran as Clean Elections candidates.

Warren Tolman even brought a civil law suit to force the Democrat dominated legislature to fund the mandate of the Clean Elections law and won when the case reached the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, although that did not make a whole lot of difference. Robert Reich, of course, had nothing to say about any of this.

I made a modest donation to the Warren Tolman and Jill Stein campaigns. I voted for Jill Stein in the general election. I did not vote in the Democratic Party primary, because I was registered as a Green Rainbow Party member. Robert Reich, Warren Tolman, and the other Democrats lost to Shannon O’Brien, who was a lousy candidate, who in turn lost to Mitt Romney. The rest as they say is history.

While I have in fact criticized Robert Reich in this thread, I usually don’t spend much time criticizing Robert Reich or any of the other authors of articles published here by Common Dreams.

In fact I am much more likely to defend authors published here than criticize them. Sometimes I have criticized authors who I have also defended, but I am far more likely to comment on the substance of the articles or discuss issues with other people who comment here than comment on the authors themselves, I figure people can figure out for themselves whether or not so and so is a “shill” for the nuclear power industry or the Democratic Party or whatever.

As a consequence I wouldn’t call myself any author’s detractor. I am more likely to criticize individual politicians than authors. But I don’t even do much of that.

Yes, I have noticed with mild interest Robert Reich’s and Paul Krugman’s rather modest leftward movement.

Sometimes I find Robert Reich’s articles are informative and interesting in some way. But sometimes Robert Reich’s articles are only informative about the content and tenor of Robert Reich’s own opinions or recent thoughts. I suppose that is still worth something, somehow. But I am not always sure what.

Being “all over the place, all the time, making political and economic points” is what Robert Reich does.

But in my opinion even when Robert Reich says or writes something insightful, he generally also misses something essential.

As a consequence I am not particularly impressed by Robert Reich.

For all of Robert Reich’s busyness I don’t think Robert Reich really does all that much.

This article is a case in point.

And yes, given the seriousness of the economic and political circumstances, if Robert Reich is going to make last minute recommendations to workers to protest on Labor Day, then I think Robert Reich ought to actually get out and do something for a change, rather than just pontificate as a pundit.

So, despite what you say I can or cannot do, I do deny Robert Reich's commitment and involvement.

But I do agree with you, that humor isn’t irrelevant, even when that humor isn’t even particularly funny.

Silliness isn’t necessarily funny, especially when it is out of place and missing a sarcastic twist.

Robert Reich’s sense of humor definitely tends toward the silly sort of silly. I suppose that plays better on mainstream media.

I prefer both humor and commentary that has more substance than what is typically offered by Robert Reich.

I also prefer pundits who are not apologists for any political party.

Not that it should matter to you or anyone else what I prefer when it comes to humor, commentary, or pundits.

I stand corrected. If you've been posting on CD as long as I have, you would know that I was referring to conservatives.

Seemed right on the mark to me!! I work with too many drones who will work for free just to say they have a job! Makes me sick! That and my Collborationist union, SEIU I lose money every year, it really pays to have a union! :( >^^<

Sorry grump. I meant workers who vote for conservatives against their own best interests. I like beer a lot too, but that's a stereotype.

dave gresham,

I certainly sympathize with you.

Most of my adult life my registered political party affliation was "non-enrolled" (i.e.independent). In my opinion the major political parties have always done more to limit and control the choices on the ballot and the debate about issues than anything else.

From what I've seen of politics I'd say that politics is more likely to work well without official political parties at the local level. Everything about politics seems much more difficult as the numbers of people and the geographic distances increase.

In theory political parties when they are democratically governed could serve a useful political purpose in a democracy when the community or society is larger. Unfortunately. the way that the two major political parties which are largely controlled by wealthy people and large corporations are used to contol governments, I still consider them a menace to democracy.

It was the actions of Democrats after the 2000 presidential election that finally got me to give up my "non-enrolled" status and register as a Green.

Your conversation with your state representative reminds me of a conversation I had with Barry Commoner sometime in the fall of 1983 I believe it was, before he spoke to a CPPAX (Citizens for Participation in Political Action) audience.

Barry Commoner had run in the 1980 presidential election as the nominee of the Citizens Party and I had attempted to contact him even before I knew he was scheduled to talk to the CPPAX audience. But my attempt at "conversation" prior to his speech was about voting procedures not about political parties. Given what Commoner had to say in his speech I found his reaction to me simply mind boggling and bizarre. But these days the agendas of politicians, or people assuming the role of a politician like Barry Commoner, just don't surprise me so much anymore.

GAETYWAHOBP, if you buy neo-liberal cant against "protectionism," then you've drunk the koolaid and don't understand the historical difference between classical comparative free trade and neo-liberal absolute advantage "free trade."

You say: "the idea we can trade across borders as freely as we trade across town is sound" and you add no qualifiers. That is more of a feeble, deliberately vague generalization than an argument. Even from a traditional American conservative viewpoint (because a 110 years ago authentic American conservatives were pro- selective tariff and pro-"protectionism" in general), no great industrial nation ever achieved economic greatness by throwing its borders open to unqualified foreign competition against its domestic and export markets--let alone by offshoring too much of its manufacturing capacity at the expense of its own working-class.

From a contemporary populist progressive perspective, absolute advantage "free trade" is a direct sustained frontal assault on labor unions and the working-class that has combined with regressive tax policy to rapidly generated income disparity levels not seen in this country since the Gilded Age.

The CIA now calculates (via the GINI coefficient) that the U.S. has income disparity rivaling Uganda and approaching Rwanda. We are now 64th among nations--far behind any other major industrialized nation.

Without globally enforceable and enforced labor and environmental protections the present "free trade" regime will always be a global race to the bottom in wages, working conditions and unsustainable environmental plundering--ALL of which has been accelerated for 17 years now thanks to that regime.

You also ignore the fact that the present "free trade" regime is run by the US, EU and WTO as a system heavily imbalanced against traditional and especially indigenous subsistence farmers and fishermen (who'd existed for hundreds and sometimes thousands of years in many affected countries until the era of Clinton, Bush II and Obysmal that is loaded with absolute advantage "free trade" government subsidies--especially for various US and EU agricultural (including genetically modified) products that are routinely dumped on Third World countries.

That dumping is DESIGNED to crush domestic agricultural markets and drive millions of family farmers and fisherman off the land and into the global rat race for insufficient numbers of industrialized and service wage jobs. Then their land, minerals and water rights are routinely privatized and diverted into industrial or toll-based usage when for centuries previously many if not most of those resources were shared as resource commons. This process, too, accelerates unsustainable plundering of the environment that is destructive of the biosphere.

Look Dave, I know all those fantastic "free trade" dividends from foreign labor sure must be swell. Hell, plenty of bourgeois upper-middle-class and remnant middle-class Amurkan pwogwessives cling to them like the Mother of God's sacred tit. Too many of them depend on them for what's left of their retirement. But the price they exact is TOO F@#KING HIGH. They've become a crutch to you people that helps paralyze you into passivity as this country sinks deeper into overt fascism.

Present notions of "free trade" require a globally democratic, green revolution every bit as much as the rest of this morally squalid, narcissistic, Wall Street casino-stacked, hierarchically calcified, top-down class warfare crutched, over-extended John Wayne global samurai Police State empire.