Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
The Privileged
The Democratic Party, in my frigging opinion, has swung too far to the right -- in the interests of War Inc -- and too far toward "Corporate rights are civil rights" -- in the interest of Wall Street.
This drift to the Right distresses me, a Democratic Party member since I was asked to declare in some primary in Michigan or Illinois over the past 40 years. You see, at heart, a Democrat believes all people are created equal. From what I've seen, certain Democrats have more privileges than others. I'm not talking superdelegates; but the superwealthy.
Question for you, Dear Reader:
[font size="4"][font color="green"]Has the Democratic Party swung too far to the Right -- toward Corporate/State/Military power?[/font color][/font size]
| 42 votes, 1 pass | Time left: Unlimited | |
| Yes, DEMs are now too far to the Right. | |
39 (93%) |
|
| No, DEMs not at all to the Right. | |
1 (2%) |
|
| No, DEMs not far enough to the Right. | |
0 (0%) |
|
| DEMs are ''just right" in the Center. | |
0 (0%) |
|
| No, DEMs too far to the Left. | |
0 (0%) |
|
| Not sure what the Right, Center or Left are. | |
0 (0%) |
|
| Other -- or Open Ended Mike for Blah Blah Blah. | |
2 (5%) |
|
| 1 DU member did not wish to select any of the options provided. | |
| Show usernames
Disclaimer: This is an Internet poll |
|
34 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
And why should our Party pander to their sorry asses? Oh, I forgot for a second:
Influence & Lobbying
The primary goal of much of the money that flows through U.S. politics is this: Influence. Corporations and industry groups, labor unions, single-issue organizations - together, they spend billions of dollars each year to gain access to decision-makers in government, all in an attempt to influence their thinking.
Use these resources in OpenSecrets.org's Influence & Lobbying section, which are also found at the left, to learn more about Washington's influence industry and its most powerful players.
Interest Groups
Just about any interest group you can think of has a presence in Washington-and spends money to maintain that presence. Here we've totaled all the campaign contributions over the years from more than 100 interest groups, so that you can see patterns that might have affected policies with an impact on your life. We also track how much interest groups have been spending on lobbying, which is the other side of the influence coin.
Lobbying
Professional advocates make big bucks to lobby members of Congress and government officials on the issues their clients care about. But the money that industries, companies, unions and issue groups spend on lobbying is often just a drop in the bucket compared to what they can reap in return if their lobbyists are successful. Here you can see who spends what on federal lobbying and where they focus their resources.
Revolving Door
You've heard it before - it's not what you know, it's who you know. In our nation's capital, success comes with a combination of knowledge and personal connections. This database tracks thousands of individuals who've spun through Washington's "revolving door", employing professional relationships and know-how accumulated through public service to advance the goals of their private employers.
PACs
In a campaign finance system where all the money originates from individuals, political action committees, or PACs, control the most "corporate" of money. Controlled by companies, trade associations, unions, issue groups and even politicians (a subset called "leadership PACs"
, these committees pool contributions from individuals and distribute them to candidates, political parties and other PACs. PACs can also spend money independently on political activities, including advertising and other efforts to support or oppose candidates in an election.
Organizations
Influence in Washington is created from many ingredients. Here we give you at-a-glance profiles of the political donations, outside spending and lobbying expenditures of more than 20,000 labor unions, corporations and trade groups, as well as the number of lawmakers who have personally invested in them. More detailed profiles are available for the 150 or so biggest all-time contributors since 1989.
527s
For the longest time, campaign ads were almost exclusively produced by candidates and political parties, but in recent years outside issue groups have been getting in on the action. They often operate as so-called 527 committees (taking their name from the relevant section of the IRS tax code). Sometimes mysteriously named, these advocacy groups frequently have ties to labor, big business and super-wealthy individuals. Unlike political committees, they can accept unlimited contributions from just about anyone, and they deploy that money in various ways to influence elections. Keep an eye on these shadowy groups here.
SOURCE w/Links to all the sinners:
https://www.opensecrets.org/influence/
The primary goal of much of the money that flows through U.S. politics is this: Influence. Corporations and industry groups, labor unions, single-issue organizations - together, they spend billions of dollars each year to gain access to decision-makers in government, all in an attempt to influence their thinking.
Use these resources in OpenSecrets.org's Influence & Lobbying section, which are also found at the left, to learn more about Washington's influence industry and its most powerful players.
Interest Groups
Just about any interest group you can think of has a presence in Washington-and spends money to maintain that presence. Here we've totaled all the campaign contributions over the years from more than 100 interest groups, so that you can see patterns that might have affected policies with an impact on your life. We also track how much interest groups have been spending on lobbying, which is the other side of the influence coin.
Lobbying
Professional advocates make big bucks to lobby members of Congress and government officials on the issues their clients care about. But the money that industries, companies, unions and issue groups spend on lobbying is often just a drop in the bucket compared to what they can reap in return if their lobbyists are successful. Here you can see who spends what on federal lobbying and where they focus their resources.
Revolving Door
You've heard it before - it's not what you know, it's who you know. In our nation's capital, success comes with a combination of knowledge and personal connections. This database tracks thousands of individuals who've spun through Washington's "revolving door", employing professional relationships and know-how accumulated through public service to advance the goals of their private employers.
PACs
In a campaign finance system where all the money originates from individuals, political action committees, or PACs, control the most "corporate" of money. Controlled by companies, trade associations, unions, issue groups and even politicians (a subset called "leadership PACs"
, these committees pool contributions from individuals and distribute them to candidates, political parties and other PACs. PACs can also spend money independently on political activities, including advertising and other efforts to support or oppose candidates in an election.
Organizations
Influence in Washington is created from many ingredients. Here we give you at-a-glance profiles of the political donations, outside spending and lobbying expenditures of more than 20,000 labor unions, corporations and trade groups, as well as the number of lawmakers who have personally invested in them. More detailed profiles are available for the 150 or so biggest all-time contributors since 1989.
527s
For the longest time, campaign ads were almost exclusively produced by candidates and political parties, but in recent years outside issue groups have been getting in on the action. They often operate as so-called 527 committees (taking their name from the relevant section of the IRS tax code). Sometimes mysteriously named, these advocacy groups frequently have ties to labor, big business and super-wealthy individuals. Unlike political committees, they can accept unlimited contributions from just about anyone, and they deploy that money in various ways to influence elections. Keep an eye on these shadowy groups here.
SOURCE w/Links to all the sinners:
https://www.opensecrets.org/influence/
FIRE (Finance/Insurance/Real Estate) "gave" $245 million (about 2:1 to pukes) in the last year.
Old news to you, H2OMan. Near-zero on CIABCNNBCBSFoxNoiseNutworks about any of that.
"Some people call you the 'Elites.' I call you, 'My Base.'"
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/bush-and-gore-do-new-york/
It represents Democratic Party leadership and elected officials, not the base, per the person who made it. I wholly agree.
The author was a Chicago Boy helping implement the scam for Pinochet:
President Clinton and the Chilean Model.
By José Piñera
Midnight at the House of Good and Evil
"It is 12:30 at night, and Bill Clinton asks me and Dottie: 'What do you know about the Chilean social-security system?'” recounted Richard Lamm, the three-term former governor of Colorado. It was March 1995, and Lamm and his wife were staying that weekend in the Lincoln Bedroom of the White House.
I read about this surprising midnight conversation in an article by Jonathan Alter (Newsweek, May 13, 1996), as I was waiting at Dulles International Airport for a flight to Europe. The article also said that early the next morning, before he left to go jogging, President Bill Clinton arranged for a special report about the Chilean reform produced by his staff to be slipped under Lamm's door.
That news piqued my interest, so as soon as I came back to the United States, I went to visit Richard Lamm. I wanted to know the exact circumstances in which the president of the world’s superpower engages a fellow former governor in a Saturday night exchange about the system I had implemented 15 years earlier.
Lamn and I shared a coffee on the terrace of his house in Denver. He not only was the most genial host to this curious Chilean, but he also proved to be deeply motivated by the issues surrounding aging and the future of America. So we had an engaging conversation. At the conclusion, I ventured to ask him for a copy of the report that Clinton had given him. He agreed to give it to me on the condition that I do not make it public while Clinton was president. He also gave me a copy of the handwritten note on White House stationery, dated 3-21-95, which accompanied the report slipped under his door. It read:
Dick,
Sorry I missed you this morning.
It was great to have you and Dottie here.
Here's the stuff on Chile I mentioned.
Best,
Bill.
Three months before that Clinton-Lamm conversation about the Chilean system, I had a long lunch in Santiago with journalist Joe Klein of Newsweek magazine. A few weeks afterwards, he wrote a compelling article entitled,[font color="green"] "If Chile can do it...couldn´t North America privatize its social-security system?" [/font color]He concluded by stating that "the Chilean system is perhaps the first significant social-policy idea to emanate from the Southern Hemisphere." (Newsweek, December 12, 1994).
I have reasons to think that probably this piece got Clinton’s attention and, given his passion for policy issues, he became a quasi expert on Chile’s Social Security reform. Clinton was familiar with Klein, as the journalist covered the 1992 presidential race and went on anonymously to write the bestseller Primary Colors, a thinly-veiled account of Clinton’s campaign.
“The mother of all reforms”
While studying for a Masters and a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard University, I became enamored with America’s unique experiment in liberty and limited government. In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville wrote the first volume of Democracy in America hoping that many of the salutary aspects of American society might be exported to his native France. I dreamed with exporting them to my native Chile.
So, upon finishing my Ph.D. in 1974 and while fully enjoying my position as a Teaching Fellow at Harvard University and a professor at Boston University, I took on the most difficult decision in my life: to go back to help my country rebuild its destroyed economy and democracy along the lines of the principles and institutions created in America by the Founding Fathers. Soon after I became Secretary of Labor and Social Security, and in 1980 I was able to create a fully funded system of personal retirement accounts. Historian Niall Ferguson has stated that this reform was “the most profound challenge to the welfare state in a generation. Thatcher and Reagan came later. The backlash against welfare started in Chile.”
But while de Tocqueville’s 1835 treatment contained largely effusive praise of American government, the second volume of Democracy in America, published five years later, strikes a more cautionary tone. He warned that “the American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.” In fact at some point during the 20th century, the culture of self reliance and individual responsibility that had made America a great and free nation was diluted by the creation of [font color="green"] “an Entitlement State,”[/font color] reminiscent of the increasingly failed European welfare state. What America needed was a return to basics, to the founding tenets of limited government and personal responsibility.
[font color="green"]In a way, the principles America helped export so successfully to Chile through a group of free market economists needed to be reaffirmed through an emblematic reform. I felt that the Chilean solution to the impending Social Security crisis could be applied in the USA.[/font color]
CONTINUED...
http://www.josepinera.org/articles/articles_clinton_chilean_model.htm
"Yeah, see. Coincidence."
Just seems that way.
How Bankers Help Drug Traffickers and Terrorists!
by New York Times, via http://www.cryptogon.com/
LAST month, HSBC admitted in court pleadings that it had allowed big Mexican and Colombian drug cartels to launder at least $881 million. The bank also admitted to using various schemes to move hundreds of millions of dollars to nations subject to trade sanctions, including Iran, Cuba and Sudan, in violation of the Trading With the Enemy Act. “On at least one occasion,” according to a statement by Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer, “HSBC instructed a bank in Iran on how to format payment messages so that the transactions would not be blocked or rejected by the United States.”
–
Those were some of the transgressions uncovered during a two-year investigation led by the Justice and Treasury Departments and acknowledged by HSBC in a settlement, known as a deferred prosecution agreement, that was filed in a federal court in December. Not a single executive was charged with a crime. Instead, the bank paid $1.9 billion in fines and forfeitures — or roughly 10 percent of the pretax profits it earned in just 2010, one of the more than five years during which it admitted to criminal conduct.
https://socioecohistory.wordpress.com/2013/01/08/ny-times-how-bankers-help-drug-traffickers-and-terrorists/
Yeah, see.
Feb. 28, 2008:
Know your BFEE: They Looted Your Nation’s S&Ls for Power and Profit
Then, after the Bankstershitstorm in September 21, 2008, I asked them who stole it to put it back:
Know your BFEE: Phil Gramm, the Meyer Lansky of the War Party, Set-Up the Biggest Bank Heist Ever.
What's weird is how, rather than the jail cell he so richly deserved, Phil Gramm ended up as Vice Chairman of UBS -- the Swiss Bank that received about $59 Billion with a Billion in TARP funds -- from where Gramm hired Bill Clinton, who signed into law the repeal of Glass Steagall. Since then, they've also brought in George W Bush to specialize in Wealth Management:
http://financialservicesinc.ubs.com/revitalizingamerica/SenatorPhilGramm.html
So, no. I do not favor run amok capitalism. At all.
People want what Democrats have stood for since FDR: Justice. Equality. Progress. Economic Fairness. Peace and Prosperity for All.
Something happened after Carter: The greedheads perverted Washington. Take the Safari Club, one example of off-the-books spooks. People who care about democracy at CIABCNNBCBSFakeNewsNutworks never seem to ever ask:
"How do Wall Street, oil companies and the shadow government agencies like the CIA and NSA really shape the global political order?"
The Deep State Plots The 1980 Defeat Of Jimmy Carter
By Peter Dale Scott
WhoWhatWhy.com on Nov 2, 2014
The Safari Club was an alliance between national intelligence agencies that wished to compensate for the CIA’s retrenchment in the wake of President Carter’s election and Senator Church’s post-Watergate reforms. As former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Faisal once told Georgetown University alumni,
In 1976, after the Watergate matters took place here, your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. It could not do anything. It could not send spies, it could not write reports, and it could not pay money. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting Communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran. (1)
After Carter was elected, the Safari Club allied itself with Richard Helms and Theodore Shackley against the more restrained intelligence policies of Jimmy Carter, according to Joseph Trento. In Trento’s account, the dismissal by William Colby in 1974 of CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton,
combined with Watergate, is what prompted the Safari Club to start working with (former DCI Richard) Helms (then U.S. Ambassador to Iran) and his most trusted operatives outside of Congressional and even Agency purview. James Angleton said before his death that “Shackley and Helms … began working with outsiders like Adham and Saudi Arabia. The traditional CIA answering to the president was an empty vessel having little more than technical capability.”(2)
Trento adds that “The Safari Club needed a network of banks to finance its intelligence operations. With the official blessing of George Bush as the head of the CIA, Adham transformed . . . the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), into a worldwide money-laundering machine.”(3) Trento claims also that the Safari Club then was able to work with some of the controversial CIA operators who had been forced out of the CIA by Turner, and that this was coordinated by Theodore Shackley:
Shackley, who still had ambitions to become DCI, believed that without his many sources and operatives like (Edwin) Wilson, the Safari Club—operating with (former DCI Richard) Helms in charge in Tehran—would be ineffective. . . . Unless Shackley took direct action to complete the privatization of intelligence operations soon, the Safari Club would not have a conduit to (CIA) resources. The solution: create a totally private intelligence network using CIA assets until President Carter could be replaced. (4)
During the 1980 election campaign each party accused the other of plotting an October Surprise to elect their candidate. Subsequently other journalists, notably Robert Parry, accused CIA veterans on the Reagan campaign, along with Shackley, of an arguably treasonable but successful plot with Iranians to delay return of the U.S. hostages until Reagan took office in January 1981. (5)
SNIP...
The oil majors’ manipulation of domestic oil prices, combined with Carter’s failure to bring the hostages home, combined to cause the first defeat for an elected president running for reelection, since that of Herbert Hoover in 1932.
CONTINUED...
http://whowhatwhy.com/2014/11/02/the-deep-state-plots-the-1980-defeat-of-jimmy-carter/
I like to ask the Greedhead Warmongers I meet in life and on DU: Just how are those wars without end for profits without cease going these days? I explain how the big bucks they generate are coming in like gangbusters. Of course, the nice corporations are more than happy to plow Washington with whatever they need to be patriotic and what.
So, for people like us, 47of74, interested in what Democracy is all about: We are SOL. Nowadays, unless one has the means cough cash, one has little or zero voice in Democracy.