Quadsville

I've never heard a democrat say the war was going great, progress was being made. Wonder why?

Thank you for taking the time to go over there and visit. :)

Welcome aboard, Phil.

Thank you for reporting on your trip. Yours is an important contribution.

How is it that people who drive around with bumper stickers that read "War is Not the Answer" aren't the least bit embarrassed to be seen as ignorant and stupid in public?

As most of us slightly educated to the facts of recorded history can realize, there are many occasions when war was exactly the right answer.

Perhaps we should be electing people to represent American workers instead of representatives for corporations and their war profiteering.
American troops have no business being in Iraq, and as a representative of this district your primary work and focus should be on getting them out now and making sure that Bush is handed over to the International court to stand trial for his unlawful invasion of that country.
Your support of the troops, while avoiding bringing to justice the perpetrators of this crime shows that your brand of patriotism is indeed the last refuge of a scoundrel and an imposter.

Thank you Mr. Hare. I appreciate you taking the time to give us some first hand news about our effort in Iraq. I couldn't agree with you more when you said, "Our troops won the war. It is time for the Iraqi government to win the peace."

Welcome Representative Hare and thank you for your kind words about our brave troops. However, there IS progress in Iraq. If I'm not mistaken the oil is flowing well and the economy isn't too bad. I would love, also, to see Democrats tell the story in a non-partisan manner. The surge has had more than "some" tactical success, I believe that is a fact. It is because of those incredible troops and many good folks in command that Iraq is having a good turn.

Great, now how about getting on the phone & telling Pelosi you want to go back to work NOW & address energy/economic/immigration issues that shouldn't be left swaying in the breeze until next year.

Crumpy: "War is Not the Answer" was an opinion expressed at the beginning of this disaster. The fact that things have now improved after 5.5 years does not make that original position "ignorant and stupid." Nor is that statement a statement about all situations throughout all history - it was a statement at a time when Cheney et al thought we'd clean this all up and be home by Labor Day having been welcomed in Bagdad like liberators with happy Iraqis waving American flags; at a time when we needed to focus on Afghanistan where Qada was based, not Iraq where they were not even operational until after we brought the place to chaos.

Yes, things are going well. Does the end justify the means? Does the fact that this many years later we may have enough semblance of order to begin to draw down troops mean that this was a just war, the 'right' war for that moment?

There is bludgeoning government employment in Iraq - about 35% of the workforce - and the private sector is not growing so well - that will be an issue.

Are things better - absolutely - at long last. Does that make the war 'right' - not in my opinion.

I saw a wonderful picture the other day in the paper. Families were going on picnics again in Iraq. Kids are swimming at the local swimming pool.

The Iraqi government will need our support for a long time.

I agree with Anon...lets stop playing politics at home and get busy. If someone is afraid to be put on record during a vote, maybe they shouldn't be a congress person.

The trick folks is to bring the troops home without telling the radical terrorists when they are leaving. One day they will wake up and see that they live in a better world than bin Laden told them about.

Factually, the iraqi economy is in shambles (as noted by AMH).

The only job growth they have is in government (Hmmm...similar to the US. bush apparently succeeded in exporting his "CEO" capabilities over there as well.)


"Iraq’s private sector, particularly its small non-oil economy, “has so far failed to flourish as its American patrons had hoped.” As a result, the Iraqi government “has been sustaining the economy the way it always has: by putting citizens on its payroll."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/11/world/middleeast/11baghdad.html?hp

Kudos to you Congressman Hare. Bring our troops home from iraq.

Mr Renko, what, in your opinion, is the Number 1 issue facing Americans today? And maybe a "brief" why?
Just nosey, since always you seem aimed like a dagger at the GOP & anything the GOP is/has done over the last few decades.
Were you, by any chance, once an air traffic controller?

Heh. Good one, but no.

My #1 issue is the economy, as everything follows from that. If you look at the underlying fundamentals, stating that it's on the razor's edge of a cliff isn't hyperbole, imo. Links available, should you be interested.

Recall the concern over long-term capitol mgmt during Clinton's yrs. We're dozens of times worse of presently. Imagine you max out your credit cards; then get another set and max them out to pay of the first ones. Multiply this times 10-20 cycles...and that's where were at.

And now the FedRes and Treas have taken vast chunks of that and Federally guaranteed their value.

If anyone's got any idea of how to unwind this and the effects of 10's of trillions in imaginary wealth going "poof", I haven't come across them yet.

Additionally, the fact that we're borrowing 2 billion-day....700billion-yr......b/c of "no new taxes" gibberish is beyond comprehension. And has had an incredibly corrosive effect on the nat'n's infrastructure and budget priorities.

After that, I'd say iraq, health-care, jobs, in that order. (all of this assumes that the fed regulatory/oversight switches back to doing providing their intended functions......something that won't ever happen in a mccain admin, imo).

Mike,

A good book on the economy and how it's not working out for the avg worker is:

The Big Squeeze, by Steven Greenhouse:

...takes fresh, probing, and often shocking look at the stresses and strains faced by tens of millions of American workers as wages have stagnated, health and pension benefits have grown stingier, and job security has shriveled.

Going behind the scenes, Greenhouse tells the stories of software engineers in Seattle, hotel housekeepers in Chicago, call center workers in New York, and janitors in Houston, as he explores why, in the world’s most affluent nation, so many corporations are intent on squeezing their workers dry.
We meet all kinds of workers: white collar and blue collar, high tech and low tech, middle income and low income; employees who stock shelves during a hurricane while locked inside their store, get fired after suffering debilitating injuries on the job, face egregious sexual harassment, and get laid off when their companies move high-tech operations abroad. We also meet young workers having a hard time starting out and seventy-year-old workers with too little money saved up to retire.

The book explains how economic, business, political, and social trends—among them globalization, the influx of immigrants, and the Wal-Mart effect—have fueled the squeeze.
We see how the social contract between employers and employees, guaranteeing steady work and good pensions, has eroded over the last three decades, damaged by massive layoffs of factory and office workers and Wall Street’s demands for ever-higher profits.
In short, the post–World War II social contract that helped build the world’s largest and most prosperous middle class has been replaced by a startling contradiction: corporate profits, economic growth, and worker productivity have grown strongly while worker pay has languished and Americans face ever-greater pressures to work harder and longer.

Greenhouse also examines companies that are generous to their workers and can serve as models for all of corporate America: Costco, Patagonia, and the casino-hotels of Las Vegas among them. Finally, he presents a series of pragmatic, ready-to-be-implemented suggestions on what government, business, and labor should do to alleviate the squeeze.

A balanced, consistently revealing exploration of a major American crisis.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1400044898?tag=firedoglake-20&camp=0&creative=0&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=1400044898&adid=062T3N29VQAM75HYWAPG&

OK, not to be argumentative, but why don't you spend more time addressing current economic concerns & possible ways to handle them, instead of so much time on who's to blame for everything? Assigning blame is the duty of the judiciary, & history, IMO. I much prefer to deal in the here & now, + maybe the immediate future, & I don't mind giving thought to long range stuff so long as it's an adjunct to more immediate things.
IMO, assigning blame is the lazy way out, just click & point. And even knowing won't improve anyones lot, nor guarantee things will be different "next" time.
BTW, I am an average worker, just one who pays more attention than average. I'm in the trenches & see every day how stuff doesn't work, so reading about it would be adding salt to the wounds, IMO.
BTW, the casinos in Vegas hire thousands of illegal immigrants at below union wages. I wouldn't, personally, hold them up as a positive example of anything in America.
I notice you speak of retail establishments as your "good" examples. I believe the decline of manufacturing is the death knell of American economy. Retail, & service employment in general, is only strong when the economy is strong. As our middle class declines, that sector will also.

Renko doesn't offer viable solutions and he only reads one side of an issue and then rants.

Mike, you're rarely argumentative, imo.

The retail examples from his book were highlighting a few companies that are generous to their workers.

I agree w/ you that mfring was, and still is, the bedrock of an economy. That's where value is added, at numerous levels. As you note: retail adds no value whatsoever.

My sol'n's are almost a means of triage, at this point. So much mfring's gone overseas, and the wage/benefit gaps are so massive that it's hard to see how to regenerate much of what's been lost.

Even if a magic wand could be waved tomorrow and every job was unionized, the size of the economic pie that's left will mean there isn't that much to be distributed. Every little bit helps, though.

Particularly since 80% of all jobs are still hourly; and union shops have @ 30% higher wages/benefits.

The first step, though, is ending the long-standing crusade against unionization. The NLRB, for example, has long been used to actually marginalize and penalize unionization drives.....via lax enforcement and toleration of rampant anti-union practices.

Further, the govn's laughably transparent intercession w/ "cooling off" periods only further disenfranchise unions: I'm sure those workers have no need to cool off, as they live daily under their contracts and are usually acutely aware of their burdens and limitations.

And the only way to achieve this is to elect to the WH someone who will NOT staff the NLRB w/ anti-union hacks; along w/ staffing the DOJ w/ appointees who will actually enforce the laws.

(You're probably aware that the bush WH arbitrarily dismissed 5000 whistleblower complaints when they finally appointed a new head to that office. If you weren't, I've got the links. Things like this must cease as well).

I don't see the gop having any commitment or integrity over these processes. In fact, this admin has probably been the worst for labor...ever; moreso than even reagan.

Just another reason to vote a Dem into the WH this fall, imo.

Mike,

it's not easy coming up w/ comprehensive sol'n's; the laundry list of problems is looong:

"To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, are you better off than you were 25 years ago?

The media doesn't even ask this question, but if it did here are just a few of things it would discover, much of it easily retrievable from its own clip files:

- "The traditional pension, an employee benefit that was widely available until the early 1980's has been vanishing from the American workplace ever since. More than two-thirds of older households - those headed by people 47 to 64 - had someone earning a pension in 1983. By 2001, fewer than half did" - New York Times

- In the 1980s about two-thirds of corporations included health care benefits with their pensions. Today only about a third do.

- In April 2004, the nation's trade gap hit a record $48 billion, precisely the sort of thing extreme capitalism, free trade, and globalization was supposed to prevent.

- The top one percent's share of household wealth had dropped from 1929 to 1981 from 44% to 27%. By 1998 it was back up to 39%.

- "The Congressional Budget Office says the income gap in the United States is now the widest in 75 years. While the richest one percent of the U.S. population saw its financial wealth grow 109 percent from 1983 to 2001, the bottom two-fifths watched as its wealth fell 46 percent" - CBS

- "[Edward N. Wolff, an economist at New York University] found that the average net worth of an older household grew 44 percent, adjusted for inflation, from 1983 to 2001, to $673,000. But much of that growth was in the accounts of the richest households, which pushed the averages up. When Mr. Wolff looked at the net worth of the median older household - the one at the midpoint of the economic ladder, a better indicator of what is typical - the picture changed. That figure declined by 2.2 percent, or $4,000, during the period, to $199,900.
For a generation to emerge from two bullish decades with less wealth than its parents had 'is remarkable,' Mr. Wolff said. Based on economic growth and market returns over those 18 years, he said, their wealth "should be up around 30 or 40 percent." - New York Times

- Meanwhile, for households of all ages, between 1983 and 1998 the average household net worth of the poorest 40% in the U.S. declined 76%.

- "The biggest indicator of a healthy society - average life expectancy - dropped. People in the U.S. now don't live even as long as people in Costa Rica. Meanwhile the U.S. infant mortality rate has risen, so much so Cuba has a better success rate of bringing healthy children into the world." - CBS

- In 1983, 50 corporations controlled most of the news media in America. By 2002, six corporations did.

- Between 1981 and 1997, children 3-12 spent 25% less time playing, an hour less a week eating meals, one-half hour less a week sitting and talking with someone at home.

- The number of Americans without health insurance climbed 33 percent during the 1990's, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

- Farmers in 1999 were getting 36% less for their products in real dollars than in 1984.

- In 1980 there were less than 500,000 people in prison in the U.S. By 2000 there were two million. In 1980, 8% of the prisoners were there for drug offenses; by 1998, 28% were.

- Ninety percent of young white male workers are now doing worse than they would have 20 years ago. Adjusted for inflation, the income of a recent male high school graduate declined 28% between 1973 and 1997.

- Wages for the bottom 10% of all wage earners fell by 9.3% between 1979 and 1999

- Median student-loan debt, 1977: $2,000. 1997: $15,000

- Ratio of executive pay to that of a factory worker in 1980: 42 to 1. Ratio of executive pay to that of a factory worker in 1998: 419 to 1. Annual pay of a factory worker if it had kept pace with executive salaries: $110,000

- In 1977, the disclosed wealth of the top ten senators was $133 million. In 2001 it was $1.83 billion.

- In 1982, U.S. foreign debt was less than 5% of GDP; by 2002 it was almost 25%

- Between 1973 and 2001, the incomes of the poorest 20% went up 14%, that of the 20% in the middle went up 19%, but the richest 5% went up 87%.

- The real value of the minimum wage peaked in 1969 at over $7 an hour. Its real value is now at $5 an hour.

- Eighty-six percent of stock market gains between 1989 and 1997 flowed to the top ten percent of households while 42 percent went to the most well-to-do one percent.

- In 1998 the top-earning one percent had as much income as the 100 million Americans with the lowest earnings.

- Two-thirds of American households headed by a person between the ages of 47 and 64 in 1998 had the same pension wealth or less in real dollars than they did in 1983. Almost 20% of all near-retiree households could expect to retire in poverty.

- 1973 to 1995 was the only time in American history that real earnings declined.

- By the turn of the century poor black families were working 190 hours more a year - and poor white families 22 hours more -- than in 1979 for roughly the same pay.

- The two richest men in America -- Bill Gates and Warren Buffet -- own more assets than the bottom 45% of the country.


o

Economic deterioration is not the only damage done by a quarter century of extreme capitalism. Money, after all, is just another form of power, the type you can carry around in your pocket. Once you accept the idea that power in one form is its own justification, there is nothing to stop the principle from extending to every aspect of life. The elements of extreme capitalism - including winner take all, damn the damage, zero tolerance for those who can't make you richer, contempt for activities without monetary profit, disrespect for the less fortunate - spread like a virus to our communities, our schools, our police departments, and our foreign policy.

Here is only a partial list of the other pain that resulted:

- Anti-trust laws, once considered the great mediator of commercial excess, have been steadily eroded.

- Organized labor has become a mere shadow of its former self; the rights of workers are damaged in ways that would have caused national turmoil had they been attempted when America was still a social democracy.

- Between 1980 and 2000, the U.S. per capita spending on schools increased 32%. The per capita spending on prisons grew 189%

- California built 21 prisons between 1980 and 1998; it built just one college.

- From the inauguration of a full-scale war on drugs in 1985 to 1998, the number of deaths per 100,000 for drug-induced causes almost doubled. In other words, having a drug war proved twice as deadly as not having one.

- Employers have become notoriously less loyal to their workers forcing an increasing number to become economic nomads. This not only creates burdens for the individual but disrupts the stability of communities.

- Despite the endless talk of free markets, those doing the talking have jammed Washington with thousands of additional lobbyists whose job it is to make damn sure that such free markets don't exist.

- As media has become increasingly monopolized, the cultural choices of Americans have become more limited as have the possibilities for artists who might supply those choices. It is not an accident that America has produced so little significant art, music, or theater since 1980; extreme capitalism has no interest in it.

- There has been a massive shift towards the language of capitalism in all aspects of our conversation and speech, making our words more clichéd, less meaningful, less enjoyable, and less human. To an extraordinary degree we now speak to each as salesmen rather than as fellow citizens. This makes for a pretty seedy culture, full of insincerity and deceit while short on cooperation, individual creativity and shared goals.

- The age of Social Security coverage is rising as the public is being taught not to expect that either Social Security or Medicare will continue to serve as they do at present.

- There has been a dramatic increase in homelessness.

- Efforts to control individual rebellions against the banal and life-draining culture of extreme capitalism have produced increasingly authoritarian, militaristic and punitive tactics such as the war on drugs, zero tolerance, and the conversion of public schools into quasi-detention centers. We drug our students for daring to be restless, the very students who, in another time, would have become the creators, the thinkers and the wise that a society so badly needs.

- Advertising has invaded every aspect of our life making existence increasingly one long commercial.

- Our environment has steadily and dangerously deteriorated, but extreme capitalism has taught us not to care and so we approach crises like an oil shortage critically unprepared.

- Medicine has been converted from a public service to a corporate exploitive enterprise.

- The number of laws in our society has exploded, bearing little relationship to population growth, cultural complexity or any other rational factor. The number of lawyers have grown with it; in Washington there are nearly seven times as many attorneys as three decades ago. It now takes longer, requires more paper, and stirs up more intimations of liability to do almost anything worthwhile than it once did. While our rhetoric overflows with phrases like "entrepreneurship" and "risk-taking," the average enterprise of any magnitude is actually characterized by cringing caution with carefully constructed emergency exits leading from every corner of chance.

- Our public school system has steadily declined, all the more so as corporate and bureaucratic principles are laid on top of on the very non-corporate business of teaching.

- We increasingly use corporatized prisons without adequate public supervision and prison slave labor to serve corporate interests.

- Our voting turnout has declined.

- Corruption, both corporate and political, has increased to the point that it is no longer deviation but an assumed part of our culture. We all live in a Mafia neighborhood now.

- Employing the techniques and goals of corporate monopolization to our foreign policy we have become more hated and fearful than at any time in our history. We have reacted with a spiral of panicked and brutal responses that have simply made things we worse.

- We have lost interest in our Constitution and democratic ideals and have made our government serve first and mainly the interests of our largest corporations. There is a technical name for this: it is called corporatism or fascism.

None of this has made us happier, wealthier, healthier, safer or better custodians of this land to pass on our children. We lack glory, gladness, grace and decency, having traded them in for tricks, treachery and greed.

This is the bottom line of extreme capitalism. but placated by Prozac, persuaded by prevarication and pacified by prohibition, we ignore our drift towards the mean and the brutish and continue to accept the lie that we are the better for it."

[Some of the stats come from an article written by Sam Smith for Tompaine.com]

And this was from 04.