JDPriestly
JDPriestly's JournalLookin' good.
Iowa cities by population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_Iowa_cities_by_population
What do you mean by "rackety"?
What is intolerant or too extreme about Bernie?
And what "leftward movement" over the past 9 years are you talking about?
Except in the area of gay marriage and detente with Cuba and Iran (maybe???), I don't think we have made much "leftward" progress at all in the last 9 years.
Economically, the disparity in wealth is greater than since 1929.
So is the tax unfairness if you include the sales and property taxes that all poor people and the middle class pay. We pay a higher percentage of our income in taxes than do many very wealthy people I would wager.
African-Americans face police brutality, and we have all been made aware of it, but virtually nothing is being done to end it. In fact, when it comes to voting rights, African-Americans ARE WORSE OFF THAN THEY WERE TEN YEARS AGO.
Unions are weaker than in several generations.
We just missed the bullet on Social Security and it is constantly under attack.
Health care costs, especially the costs of pharmaceuticals, are on the steep rise.
Republicans are so cheap they will push poisoned water on school children in Flint, Michigan. They also want to increase the privatization and for-profitization of healthcare and thus make it inaccessible to the poor and many in the middle class.
Education policy, what with student loans and charter schools, is moving far to the right and higher education risks becoming the province of the intellectual and financial elites.
What in the world are you talking about when you speak of "leftward" progress in the last 9 years?
The fact that the House inevitably falls rightward to the point that pulling it even upright is pretty much viewed as impossible is nearly proof that "leftward" is not the direction in which our country has been moved by the acquiescence of the leadership of the Democratic Party, the failure of most Democrats to dare to speak up for the ideals that have traditionally been held high by Democrats.
Moving to the "middle" or "leftward" with Hillary and her corporate donors really means moving to the right, accommodating Republican craziness, and that is not what we need. Not at all.
If we want to win independents and others, we have to move left. We have to inspire them, give them hope. And left is where, as you admit, Bernie plans to take us.
Bernie presents the leftward option.
Hillary, on the other hand, presents the option of more acquiescence, more fear of the right, more corporate coziness, more disparity in wealth (unchecked), more lies about who is paying taxes, more disparity in educational opportunity, more land grabbing by the super-rich, more and more and more telling the middle class it should be just happy to survive while that tiny percentage on top take and take and take and thrive.
I do not see how Hillary can give voters any dream, any hope, any ideals, any goals, any values to vote for. Not with her current views.
Bernie will inspire lots of people who don't usually bother to vote to come out and take part.
Will Bernie be able to achieve all the goals he has set before us? Absolutely not by himself. And with our help?
Maybe. But most likely not. We are all realistic enough to know that being president does not give one person the ability to simply remake reality. That is not what we expect of Bernie.
What we expect of Bernie is that he show us the way, what can be done, pointing honestly to the hurdles in front of us, and inspiring US to jump them, to elect representatives and senators to Congress who will help us jump them.
At least with Bernie we are sharing a dream, and that is a good thing. With Hillary, there is just a boring recitation of very limited goals. Not much there at all.
Compare that to the great leaders of our past.
When Jefferson and Adams and Franklin and all of our Founding Fathers first shared their dreams, when Martin Luther King and Franklin D. Roosevelt shared theirs, the dreams seemed unattainable.
But their dreams, their unrealistic-at-the-time dreams, gave courage to others who began slowly to implement and work together to gradually realize those dreams.
Think how far we have come. Think how far we have to go, how much greater we can be if we dare as the great leaders of our history did.
In theory, we have universal suffrage (hard as the Republicans try to limit and deny it). In theory, we are allowed to have unions. We can work together to make universal suffrage and union rights reality.
We can work together to have universal healthcare as a human right (just as they do across Europe and in many other countries like Cuba).
We can work together to get big money out of our elections.
We can work together to save our environment, to reduce pollution and the poisoning of our water, air and the warming of our planet.
We can work together to better unite our country.
We can work together toward better income and tax fairness.
We can work together to reform our justice system from the local police to the Supreme Court.
We can work together to find a way to make state schools tuition-free.
We can work together to further expand the limits of our technologies.
We can do these things.
We can accomplish Bernie's dreams.
It's just a matter of will, and more and more people are willing.
Don't get mired in the negativity of the "we can't" of the Hillary campaign. This is precisely the mistake that Hillary made in 2008. And here we go again. Too limited. Schoolmarmish limited.
But that is Hillary's fate. If you accept the money from the folks who want to put the brakes on human progress, on those whose first priority is protecting what's "theirs" from the dreams of those who don't have quite so much, then you dare not dream beyond the present reality.
But always, it is those who dare to dream beyond the limited reality of the day who create progress, who move leftward, forward and into the future.
Hillary offers what she considers to be a "safe" alternative. In fact, it is regressive, a move into the illusion of a safer, slower past that never existed. Never, ever. Hillary's "safe" and "conservative" political philosophy will never succeed. Reality is moving quickly and leaving Hillary behind.
Bernie Sanders is the man of the moment, the man who, like Adams, like Jefferson and Madison, like Lincoln, like the Roosevelts (including Teddy who cleaned up the government of his time and Eleanor) were limited by their present reality, but who saw as he sees the future and knew as he knows the dreams and ideas that the future demands.
Feel the Bern!
How did FDR get it? He investigated what was going on on Wall Street and prosecuted and
embarrassed the worst offenders.
He spoke directly to the people with humility but also with bold proposals.
Through the force of his personality and because of the desperation of the people and their willingness to support him, he won majorities at times in the houses of Congress.
He backed down the Supreme Court.
He had the utter support of the people of the United States.
Conservatives like to diminish and degrade FDR's accomplishments. But my mother who died not long ago in the full presence of her mind spoke of FDR often. She was a teenager and a young woman during his presidency. She remembered the misery. She remembered the wonderful inspiration that FDR was and the gifts of hope and opportunity that FDR shared with poor Americans.
We now and my mother included wish that FDR had done even more than he did for race relations and for the African-Americans especially in the South, but at least he advocated for, taught, values that later translated into readiness for a movement to support equal rights for all.
No president, no person, is perfect. We all try to achieve what we can to help our country improve during our lives. But FDR was a model for all of us to follow in that respect.
And one thing FDR did as did Martin Luther King was to share his dreams of equality and abundance for all Americans.
Bernie Sanders dares to share those same dreams with us. We need to grasp this opportunity and support Bernie as he seeks to realize those dreams.
No. Bernie will not, and especially not alone, achieve everything he proposes. Not every dream will come true in the next eight years, not every program will proceed smoothly. At 72, I know the reality of life.
But if we do not, as a nation, dare to dream -- of economic progress that we can share, of equality, of a better justice system (ours is close to medieval in my opinion), of universal healthcare, of better education, more affordable higher education, a more equitable sharing of the benefits of new technologies, more trust between government and the people, a fairer distribution of wealth, more investment in our commons as well as a better sharing of responsibility for the common good, we will cease at some point to be one nation.
As we see at Malheur, the Republican way and to some extent the moderate Democratic way leads to division, to relinquishment of the commons to a few greedy individuals and, who knows, quite possibly eventually to a sort of feudal kind of economy in which very few of us are the owners and the rest of us do their bidding.
Bernie is the one candidate with a real understanding and appreciation for the idealism that can make our country great again.
We should not settle for less than Bernie and his dreams.
If we settle for less, if we go with Hillary's very limited proposals, we will end up with far, far less and maybe over time even a more divided country.
We need high ideals and the dreams that go with them to stay united. We need to know that we are working together to achieve those ideals.
Feel the Bern!
I am 72. I have had an amazing life. Just unbelievable.
And I never, ever say "never."
I was 9 and in the fifth grade. My teacher presented a little homemade model of the Parthenon and told us that was the birthplace of democracy. Now I was a poor kid living in the Midwest in the early 1950s. But I said to myself right then and there, "I'm going to go there and see that Parthenon." And close to 15 years later, that is precisely what I did. It was thanks to the man I married. But what I said I would do, I did.
That is only one amazing example from my life. Be positive in your thoughts and actions.
If you never dare to want something that everyone says is impossible, you probably won't get it or do it or have it. You have to keep focused on your cosmic wish list.
It isn't magic. I just don't know what it is. But if you, from the get-go say "That is impossible. We can never do that. Forget it," you will never get what you know is right for you and for the country.
One of the things I greatly dislike about Hillary and her campaign is the negativity of it and of her supporters.
We are the country of people who achieve the impossible.
Of course, Bernie can get Congress to enact the legislation he wants if we strongly support his request for it, his campaign for it. Of course, we can.
Remember the Obama slogan: "Yes, we can."
That's what I believe about Sanders. Yes, we can.
In this you are right. It isn't "Yes, he can."
Rather it is "Yes. We can."
I like the fact that Bernie is so determined and so positive in his belief that he will achieve what is right for America.
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Member since: Sat Dec 6, 2003, 05:15 AMNumber of posts: 57,936
