2011-09-28

Lights turning on in the U.S. again?

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by Neil Godfrey

It’s great to read good news from the U.S.A. again. All the inspiring stuff has been coming out of south-east Asia, the Middle East, north Africa, Latin America, southern Europe. And now in the wake of the Occupy Wall Street and its sister movements I read of Elizabeth Warren, a voice of reason amid the madness, saying the obvious in a way that it needs to be communicated. Australia’s richest man, now dead, boasted that the one dollar he paid as tax was quite justified because it was he who was the one giving everyone else their jobs and incomes! Few at the time were able to reach the public media with the obvious retort that that blind arrogance deserved and that Elizabeth Warren is now saying according to the linked Al Jazeera opinion piece:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear:

You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.

I read one sarcastic piece about the Wall Street demonstrators but many conservative-minded people fail to understand what even small protest actions can often do. They don’t bring the targets they are opposing down to their knees. But they do often spark the publicity, the attention, and initiate the public-discussion and awareness that does eventually mount the pressure to effect the change.

It’s great to see activism and clearly understood outspokenness in the U.S. once again. The U.S. has been under a very dark shadow for too many years now and all the wonderful lights have been burning elsewhere all this time. I find it very encouraging to see some flickering sparks once again from a region that has had very little good news for so long now.

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Neil Godfrey

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14 thoughts on “Lights turning on in the U.S. again?”

  1. It looks to me like the Democrats will go down in a massive defeat in November 2012. The Republicans will win the Presidency, the Senate and House, and then the next several Supreme Court judges during the following eight years will be appointed by the Republicans.

    1. If that be the case, then the lights in the US will go out… forever, due to the fact that the Republican Party has been hijacked by religious extremists, and those extremists have been hijacked by their extremists.

  2. Well, I doubt if very many folks other than citizens of Massachusetts, or die-hard liberals elsewhere, are even aware of what Elizabeth Warren said or even who she is. The Republican Party has become so extremist and backward that it pulls the Democrats to the right in hope of capturing the center. Hence, the Affordable Health for America Act that President Obama managed to get passed does not even include a public option. It is staunchly opposed by members of what is called the Tea Party, a substantial portion of whom are Evangelicals who support religious politicians like Sara Palin, Michelle Bachman, and Rick Perry. Their politics inspired a recent opinion piece in the New York Times titled Why the Antichrist Matters in [American] Politics. It is bad enough that in the American Bible Belt about a third of the people believe Obama is a Muslim and that he wasn’t born in the USA, but, in addition, some of those people sincerely believe Obama is the Antichrist! Sigh.

    1. According to the Rasmussen opinion poll, about 56% of likely voters want to repeal ObamaCare and about 36% oppose repeal. Those numbers have been quite steady since March 2010, except that the numbers opposing repeal have declined gradually from 42% to 36%.

      http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/healthcare/health_care_law

      These numbers for and against repeal are not explained very well by talk about the Tea Party, Evangelicals and the Bible Belt.

      1. The wording of that report was:

        The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 56% of Likely U.S. Voters at least somewhat favor repeal of the health care law,…

        What the report avoids discussing is that a proportion of those who somewhat favor repeal are those who wanted a public option. Most of those, of course, would be liberal Democrats, not people who are likely to vote for a Republican presidential candidate. The Republican health care viewpoint was discussed by Jonathan Zassloff: Why Do Republicans Hate the Affordable Care Act So Much? And What IS Health Insurance, Anyway?

        1. I didn’t see anywhere in the article about opposition to ObamaCare being caused particularly by Tea Partiers, Evangelicals and the Bible Belt. It seems to me that many people oppose ObamaCare for many, diffuse reasons. A majority of likely voters opposes ObamaCare. Opposition is not some fringe opinion.

  3. In a Washington Post article by E. J. Dionne titled Why conservatives hate Warren Buffett views akin to those of Elizabeth Warren are expressed:

    Advocates of higher taxes on the wealthy do not want to “punish” the successful. Buffett and Doug Edwards, a millionaire who asked Obama at a recent town hall event in California to raise his taxes, are saying that none of us succeeds solely because of personal effort. We are all lucky to have been born in — or, for immigrants, admitted to — a country where the rule of law is strong, where property is safe, where a vast infrastructure has been built over generations, where our colleges and universities are the envy of the world, and where government protects our liberties.

      1. I have not read Barack Obama’s books, but I see no reason to doubt that he is a capable writer, given his educational background and speaking ability. I looked at the Wikipedia page for Dreams from My Father and find no mention of an authorship controversy. More to the point, Mitt Romney’s net worth is $202 million, while Barack Obama’s is 5% of that. The Bush taxcuts for people like Mitt Romney and Barack Obama were immoral; Barack Obama wishes to correct that wrong by asking the extremely rich to pay their fair share of taxes. Mitt Romney and other Republicans stand in opposition to this.

        1. As if Romney or Obama were even affected by the Bush taxcuts. I mean, come on. Guys that high on the polical ladder don’t even pay taxes. They might “file” them, but just like Geitner, they don’t “pay” them.

        2. “Barack Obama wishes to correct that wrong by asking the extremely rich to pay their fair share of taxes.” — Why doesn’t he start with Geitner? If he just got his own cabinet to pay their taxes, we could probably pay off the whole debt.

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