"What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists, is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents."
Robert F Kennedy
The Republican leadership are extremists, accusing the Democratic Party of both doing nothing for the American people and leading America into economic destruction and "Socialism." Obstructing every legislative initiative, using inflammatory rhetoric, lies and smears to undermine the President, his Administration, and both houses of Congress.
Democrats on the other hand cannot be accused of obstructionism, only myopia and thinking constrained by the paradigm of "free market solutions", "public/private partnership" and "efficient government." We think in the Republican paradigm and then pretend incrementalist fixes are Democratic solutions.
Equal pay for equal work, good legislation to fix a specific problem; however, good working conditions, safe workplaces and a living wage, the right to organize in the workplace without management retaliation, NO, too radical, not "free market".
Credit card reform, long overdue, is window dressing without stronger regulation and more importantly a cap on interest rates. To add insult to injury the provisions in the law that could have immediately helped consumers, were deferred, allowing the credit card companies, in the interim, to preemptively cut credit limits, cancel cards and jack up interest rates and fees.
Healthcare reform may or may not be passed, and we can argue the merits of the existing bills, proposed reconciliation fixes etc... What we cannot argue is, in its current form, it's a "market based" approach to healthcare which will perpetuate the upstreaming of middle class and working class money into the pockets of healthcare businesses without significantly improving affordability or the quality of the resultant available medical care.
Tax policy, economic policy and jobs policy, are all being approached as if America had a magnificent experience economically over the past thirty years. An era when the Republicans and the "conservadems" created legislation that gave incentives to corporations to export heavy industry, then light industry and now service jobs overseas. While allowing multinational corporations to crush unions, avoid workplace safety regulation, avoid environmental regulation, export both jobs and tax revenues as Democrats say: "you can't stand in the way of progress and globalization," while assenting to the US policies/paradigm that creates what you "can't stand in the way of".
Domestic "Right to Work" laws are being supported by Ben Nelson, right now, that's a Democratic position? We have abandoned labor, we have abandoned the "working class", we have failed to fight the "class war" the Republicans declared in 1980 and they are winning by default.
"Free Market" economic/cultural positions and beliefs are the manacles holding us back from succeeding and they aren't made of steel, they are as easy to break as a strand of cooked spaghetti. Even Alan Greenspan has stated that his beliefs were incorrect, why are we perpetuating the stale, failed paradigm of the "free market"? The "free market" is not going to create jobs immediately. The "free marketeers" are going to continue to fight real regulation and reform and as long as we continue to believe we can fight them without new ideas, new strategies and new tactics, we lose.
Krugman, Stiglitz, Reich, Galbraith, Volker (even Paul Volker...) have called for better regulation, resizing the financial markets and institutions, and creating separate consumer and soundness regulation, and we are letting these ideas die. All these economists ( except Volker, of course...) have called for stronger fiscal stimulus and direct government investment in job creation and industrial policy. Where are the programs necessary to accomplish this?
We must as a Party break out of our spaghetti manacles and think anew about our policies and programs or we will fail, and in so doing, pass this country over to another period of "free market" chicanery, special interest manipulation and decline.
"There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?"
Robert F Kennedy