On Friday, 2 September 2016 3:02:06 PM AEST Rick Moen via luv-talk wrote:
Quoting russell@coker.com.au (russell@coker.com.au):
It seems to be usually about liberty for the powerful people to oppress others and almost never about liberty for the less powerful people to not be oppressed. An example is the discussions about freedom for business owners to discriminate against some customers.
No, as I said, AFAIK it's in USA discourse just a political football, meaning almost anything at all depending on the whim of the speaker. It's effectively duckspeak, hence functionally a useless term.
You could say the same about most political terms. If you were to rule out all words that could be considered to be political footballs then it would be impossible to have a discussion about politics.
Both the main parties are stumping for the rich quite effectively.
Sure.
True electoral reform will require getting the money out of politics, which means meaningful public financing for (at least) national-office campaigns and overturning of the very harmful 2009 US Supreme Court decision Citizens United, Appellant v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310, in which the five-member corporatist majority banned the rest of the Federal government from restricting so-called independent political expenditures by corporations, citing 1st Amendment freedom of speech.
Getting money out of politics is like trying to prevent politicians from lying. It's a good aim to work towords but it's not an objective you are likely to achieve.
There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party... and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt – until recently... and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.
There now _is_ a difference between the parties even to someone of the late Mr. Vidal's jaundiced eyes -- on account of the bizarre eruptions among the Republicans, and signs of the left wing of the Democratic Party reviving some power at the same time. Perhaps I will post some speculations on those matters here soon.
Having a stated aim of an organisation matters. The Democratic party claims to be a left-wing party and attracts left-wing voters. Translating that into support for right-wing financial policy is always going to be a battle for them. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/