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TechDirt reports
Larry Lessig Dumps His Promise To Resign The Presidency In An Attempt To Get People To Take His Campaign Seriously
We've written a few times about Larry Lessig's somewhat wacky campaign for President, which was premised on the idea that it was a "referendum" campaign, where his entire focus would be to push Congress into putting in place serious campaign finance reform and then resigning from the Presidency. As we noted, the whole thing was a bit of a gimmick. And apparently that gimmick hasn't been working too well.
Earlier this month, Lessig noted that he was being shut out from the Democratic debates, despite being a Democrat running for President and polling roughly on par with a few of the other nobodies in the campaign. The problem is that the Democratic National Committee apparently chose to ignore the campaign and because it refused to officially "welcome" him to the campaign, pollsters aren't including him and thus he didn't have enough polling data to be invited to the debate.
[...] Late on Friday (not exactly the best time to announce anything but bad news...) Lessig announced that he's dropping the promise to resign, because while it may have gotten some attention as an initial gimmick, it was also dragging him down (including potentially keeping him out of the debates).
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 24 2015, @03:28PM
They both appear to hate what the Tea Partiers / Republican obstructionists have done to the Right Wing party but they are both Blue Dogs who still think like Goldwater-era Republicans.
We wouldn't want Republican obstructionists to get in the way of the political machines, would we? You know, if a candidate like Bernie Sanders wasn't going to be a total disaster, completely ignoring the economic and political lessons of the past century, there might be some common ground between the Tea Party people and the various marginalized groups on the Democrat side who also happen to prefer freedom to tyranny.
And I'd have more respect for Lincoln Chafee, if he weren't defending [facebook.com] the currently defunct Ex-Im Bank [reason.com].
Tea Party Republicans trying to kill Ex-Im Bank are killing good American jobs. The Bank's been helping companies and workers since 1934
I googled for his name and "tea party" and that was the first hit. I guess Boeing's money (they got something like half the money that the Ex-Im Bank doled out when it was active) speaks louder.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 24 2015, @07:34PM
ignoring the economic and political lessons of the past century
Only going back 1 century gets us one big success (Democrat interventionist FDR and The New Deal).
If we don't cherrypick the data and instead look at the -entire- history of boom-and-bust Capitalism, we get a recession|slump|slowdown (pick the term you like best--theres a wad of them) at least every 7 years and a complete collapse (depression) about every 80 years--as we are in now with over 20 percent of USAians unable to get a fulltime job at a living wage.
FDR's advisor was John Maynard Keynes who got the president to put 15 million USAians on the **public** payroll, rebuilding or constructing **public** infrastructure when 25 percent of USAians were unemployed.
One wonders how much faster|longer-lasting that recovery would have been if FDR had noted how flawed Capitalism is and had not saved it but had instead replaced it with a -FULL- system of collective ownership of the means of production aka Socialism.
the currently defunct Ex-Im Bank
(reason.com may be less awful if you download their stylesheet but, with just HTML, that site is irritating--particularly with you not indexing the URL to where the content begins.)
WRT banks, USA had a great thing going until that nitwit Neoliberal (way before the term was coined) Andrew Jackson decided to kill it. [wikipedia.org]
Lather, rinse, repeat for the "Federal" Reserve (a cartel of 12 private banks).
Private bankers suck.
Wanna see banking done right today? Check out the (public) Bank of North Dakota.
-- gewg_
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 24 2015, @07:55PM
Only going back 1 century gets us one big success (Democrat interventionist FDR and The New Deal).
The double dip recession of 1936-1937.
FDR's advisor was John Maynard Keynes who got the president to put 15 million USAians on the **public** payroll, rebuilding or constructing **public** infrastructure when 25 percent of USAians were unemployed.
And yet, we didn't have actual economic improvement till they started destroying FDR's state-enforced oligopolies around the beginning of the Second World War. Keynesian economics never has had a success story to point to. It's all like tiger repellent rock stories like this one. There was a recession, we spent a bunch of money, and recession stopped. Therefore, our Keynesian spending must have done it. The only problem is that recessions and recoveries happen anyway, while double dip recessions don't always happen.
One wonders how much faster|longer-lasting that recovery would have been if FDR had noted how flawed Capitalism is and had not saved it but had instead replaced it with a -FULL- system of collective ownership of the means of production aka Socialism.
If we had done that and hadn't reverted the system to capitalism by now, the Great Depression would still be with us. There isn't a mechanism by which the economy could improve under your scenario.
(reason.com may be less awful if you download their stylesheet but, with just HTML, that site is irritating--particularly with you not indexing the URL to where the content begins.)
It's not my website and hence, not my call where the URL starts.
WRT banks, USA had a great thing going until that nitwit Neoliberal (way before the term was coined) Andrew Jackson decided to kill it.
All you show here is how bankrupt a term, neo-liberal is. He was no more a neo-liberal than you are.
Lather, rinse, repeat for the "Federal" Reserve (a cartel of 12 private banks).
Private bankers suck.
Andrew Jackson would have agreed with you. That's why he destroyed the Second Bank of the US. Those who don't understand history are doomed to repeat it.
Wanna see banking done right today? Check out the (public) Bank of North Dakota.
I'll check it out.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 24 2015, @09:29PM
The double dip recession of 1936-1937
[...]we didn't have actual economic improvement
There was no "double" about it.
...and to have a recession, you need to have a recovery, so your dishonesty and double-talk implode on themselves.
Yeah, after 4 years of recovery, FDR foolishly listened to the Neoliberal jackals on Wall Street, loosened up on his methods, and the economy began to tank again.
The lesson to take away from this is that a lot of Capitalists are idiots.
the Great Depression would still be with us
It must cost a lot to live in that kind of isolation from reality.
not my call where the URL starts
Actually, in most cases, it is.
It's called "accessibility". You should look into that.
(The pages that are not constructed by chimps are fully-compliant with the Americans With Disabilities Act [google.com] and make it dirt simple.) [google.com]
N.B. There are some web guys|sites who give you a link at the very top of the page (good so far)--but the damned thing doesn't do what it promises.
Again: chimps (who don't even check their work).
I typically index all of my links to the significant portion of the page.
I recommend the SeaMonkey Navigator browser.
It allows you to mark text, right-click, and choose to see the source code of that bit.
(Look for _id= or _name= with a whitespace in place of the underscore.)
-- gewg_
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday October 25 2015, @01:52PM
...and to have a recession, you need to have a recovery, so your dishonesty and double-talk implode on themselves.
In order for there to be dishonesty there has to be a falsehood. The double dip recession is a matter of fact. You can see it both in a drop in GDP and jump in unemployment in the years in question. And it happened after FDR assumed power and started implementing some of his dumber stuff in 1935.
not my call where the URL starts
Actually, in most cases, it is.
Don't buy it. You mention a bunch of stuff that is the responsibility of whoever sets up that site. I'm just a reader dumping the URL they gave me. But yes, I do wish sometimes that site didn't have so much weird crap on it.
I recommend the SeaMonkey Navigator browser.
If it doesn't have an option to display webpages as they're interested to be viewed, then maybe it's not that good a web browser after all.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday October 25 2015, @03:13PM