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raydawg

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OMG......Berkeley gets it right
08/03/16 at 15:51:26

What a good observation:

THE REAL RECKONING

By Robert Reich
August 03, 2016

In her speech accepting the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton said the nation was at “a moment of reckoning.”

She’s right, but the reckoning is not simply the choice voters face this fall between her and Donald Trump. The real reckoning is larger and it will extend beyond Election Day.

Yet Washington insiders expect a return to politics as usual.

I’m already hearing Republicans dismiss Donald Trump as a weird aberration. “Ordinarily, Trump wouldn’t have stood a chance,” a Republican operative told me. “He won because he didn’t have a clear opponent until the very end. And Cruz is almost as crazy as Trump.”

I get a similar story from Democrats trying to explain Bernie Sanders. “His campaign was a freak,” a longtime Democratic adviser told me. “Hillary will be elected and then Washington will go on as if nothing happened.”

They want to return to business as usual because many of them make their bread on that business – working for big corporations, Wall Street, or wealthy individuals as political consultants, lobbyists, corporate lawyers, government-relations specialists, public-relations specialists, trade association staff, and paid experts.

But Donald Trump isn’t just an aberration and Bernie Sanders wasn’t just a flash in the pan. Both, in very different ways, reflect a crisis in our political economy.

In a Gallup poll taken in mid-July, before the conventions, 82 percent said America was on the wrong track. In an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll just before that, 56 percent said they preferred a candidate who would bring sweeping changes to the way the government functioned, no matter how unpredictable those changes might be.

The major issue the public is reacting to isn’t terrorism or racism. We didn’t see these numbers after 9/11. We didn’t even get these sorts of responses in the late 1960s, when American cities were torn by riots and when the Vietnam War was raging.

It’s the rigging of our economy – the increasingly tight nexus between wealth and political power. Big money has been buying political clout to get laws and regulations that make big money even bigger.

As Hillary Clinton said in her acceptance speech, “I believe that our economy isn’t working the way it should because our democracy isn’t working the way it should.”

She’s correct, but she didn’t finish the logic. Democracy is not working the way it should because it’s being corrupted by big money. That big money is altering the rules of the game to generate even bigger money.

Americans now pay more for pharmaceuticals than the citizens of any other advanced nation because Big Pharma is setting the rules – extending the life of drug patents, prohibiting Medicare from using its bargaining power to get lower drug prices, and blocking consumers from buying cheaper drugs from Canada.

We pay more for Internet service, health insurance, airline tickets, and banking services because the increasing market power of key players in these industries lets them raise prices. Antitrust enforcement has been systematically weakened.

The biggest Wall Street banks continue to reap the financial benefits of being too big to fail. Hedge-fund partners make bundles from confidential information, trading on which used to be illegal.

CEOs cash in their stock options and grants just when they pump up the value of their company’s stocks with buybacks. It’s allowed because laws and regulations have been loosened.

Trade agreements are now designed to protect the intellectual property and foreign assets of giant corporations, but nothing is done to protect the incomes of Americans who lose their jobs to foreign competition.

This is business as usual in Washington.

Hillary Clinton has a long list of good proposals for helping average working people, but none of them is going anywhere if Washington stays the same and the economic game remains rigged.

Instead, Americans will become even more angry and cynical.

That’s the real reckoning – hers and ours.

Donald Trump didn’t come from nowhere. He is the loudest and clearest warning shot across the bow of the current American political economic system.

Hopefully he’ll lose in November. But unless that warning is heeded, the dark anger that has produced him will produce another homegrown demagogue, possibly far worse.

Robert B. Reich is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration

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“The biggest big business in America is not steel, automobiles, or television. It is the manufacture, refinement and distribution of anxiety.”—Eric Sevareid (1964)

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justin_o_guy2 Serious Thumper Offline What happened? Posts: 55279 East Texas, 1/2 dallas/la.	Re: OMG......Berkeley gets it right Reply #1 - 08/03/16 at 16:06:55 “Hillary will be elected and then Washington will go on as if nothing happened. Kinda like what happens when an imbecile runs headlong into the truth. They get up, dust off and go on as if nothing happened.
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Re: OMG......Berkeley gets it right
Reply #2 - 08/03/16 at 16:21:54

The Clintons have gladly taken this money from Saudi Arabia, despite the fact that Clinton herself admitted in a 2009 memo exposed by WikiLeaks that the Saudis were funding terrorism. The Saudi funding of terrorism was also highlighted in the recently released “28 pages” about the 9/11 attack that occurred while Clinton was the senator from New York State. Hillary Clinton has refused to comment on the 28 Pages.

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The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.- Edmund Burke.

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pg Serious Thumper Offline Posts: 5274 In Transit	Re: OMG......Berkeley gets it right Reply #3 - 08/03/16 at 17:32:15 Sure he will support Bill, they were both Rhodes Scholars together. Bill also appointed him to several high profile positions. Best regards,
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oldNslow Serious Thumper Offline SuzukiSavage.com Rocks! Posts: 2713 Rochester, NY Gender:	Re: OMG......Berkeley gets it right Reply #4 - 08/03/16 at 19:18:07 Quote: Hillary Clinton has a long list of good proposals for helping average working people, care to share that "long list" with us Mr. Reich?. I sure haven't seen it. Matter of fact all I've seen/heard is a whole lotta bullsh*t from that direction.
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raydawg

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Re: OMG......Berkeley gets it right
Reply #5 - 08/04/16 at 04:48:38

Gee, I guess you guys use different glasses than me....

Yes, I know the little guy was in with the Clinton's, YET, he can still look at things objectively, as this article examples.

Yes, he supports Hillary, but unlike Bot who post the republicans are dinosaurs, this man sees what is transpiring in politics as a vote against the same old system, which Hillary excels at....

And he warns his own party, unlike Bot, to take it serious.
This is not an affirmation of her, just like Obama, who once seated went on to lose more seats for his party ever....
That folks is NOT affirmation, no matter how Bot spins it, those are factual results, not spin!

The only problem for the "right" is they put their money on the wrong horse....
They rejected the same old bush ponies, etc, yet placed their bet on a horse that lacks any stamina to finish a race he starts Grin

The tea party was the first salvo leveled against it, not affirmation of the status quo.
The bush party has blood on its hands if Hillary wins, WHICH I believe they would rather have, than Trump.
I base this not so much on Trump himself, which to me is enuff anyways Kiss

But because they DO understand that it's a vote against them and the power structure that allows them to prosper, which is what Robert Reich is talking about, except he assigns that to both parties.

As I said before, the old system is under attacks, on both flanks, as it should be. I am not even sure if the two party system can stand against it, eventually yielding to new players.....
How about the Chicano party, or gay party, well?

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“The biggest big business in America is not steel, automobiles, or television. It is the manufacture, refinement and distribution of anxiety.”—Eric Sevareid (1964)

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oldNslow

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Re: OMG......Berkeley gets it right
Reply #6 - 08/04/16 at 06:35:14

Quote:

Yes, he supports Hillary,

Quote:

As I said before, the old system is under attacks

Not from Hillary it isn't. She is an integral part of the old .corrupt, criminal enterprise that Reich is supposedly criticizing, If he sees her as an agent of change then he is badly confused. Or, more likely I think, he's just being disingenuous.

You know. The old "Baffle 'em with bullsh*t" trick.

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justin_o_guy2 Serious Thumper Offline What happened? Posts: 55279 East Texas, 1/2 dallas/la.	Re: OMG......Berkeley gets it right Reply #7 - 08/04/16 at 06:52:57 It's the Neocons who have run over to the dem camp. That should be enough to wake up the Hillary supporters.
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raydawg

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Re: OMG......Berkeley gets it right
Reply #8 - 08/04/16 at 08:13:40

oldNslow wrote on 08/04/16 at 06:35:14:

Quote:

Yes, he supports Hillary,

Quote:

As I said before, the old system is under attacks

Not from Hillary it isn't. She is an integral part of the old .corrupt, criminal enterprise that Reich is supposedly criticizing, If he sees her as an agent of change then he is badly confused. Or, more likely I think, he's just being disingenuous.

You know. The old "Baffle 'em with bullsh*t" trick.

Yes, that is part of it, but, eventually you paint
yourself into a corner.
Look, Obama ran on hope and change, right.
Read that as if Trump is saying that, except saying it as we need to change the current policies/administration of the republicans, which was Obama's intent, Trump is saying the same thing with make it great again, attacking the current system, administration.
Obama is a failure, his policies a failure, the votes after he won said so, even tho he won reelection his party suffered great cost.
People thought hope and change meant lets hope we can change all this crap around, EXCEPT.....
Obama didn't mean that for ALL, only those who agreed with him, Sosa we see, nothing changed, just shifted our focus to the other hand that was robbing us blind....

I think Robert is right on realizing this wave of discontent is greater than the old party first demogougery that people devour, WHICH appears they are fast becoming the obvious intolerant ones...

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“The biggest big business in America is not steel, automobiles, or television. It is the manufacture, refinement and distribution of anxiety.”—Eric Sevareid (1964)

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oldNslow

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Re: OMG......Berkeley gets it right
Reply #9 - 08/04/16 at 08:49:29

Quote:

eventually you paint
yourself into a corner.

I'm not the one with the paintbrush, Reich is. He gets paid to pontificate, so that's what he does.
Or, to dredge up another old cliche, I don't have a dog in this fight. I think both of the choices suck. Reich however has picked the bit*ch he's backing. In spite of his whining about the horrible mess we are in and how pissed off people are about it, he is solidly on the side of things remaining the same.

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justin_o_guy2 Serious Thumper Offline What happened? Posts: 55279 East Texas, 1/2 dallas/la.	Re: OMG......Berkeley gets it right Reply #10 - 08/04/16 at 10:14:45 t, he is solidly on the side of things remaining the same. I understand that from the D.C.occupiers, war profiteers, neocons, and the traitors who enrich themselves on the blood of the People, but for the average person to support what's Obviously Not in the best interest of America is mind boggling.
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