The new progressive era will need a fresh and gutsy generation of candidates to seek election victories not through wealthy campaign financiers but through free social media. A new generation of politicians will prove that they can win on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and blog sites, rather than with corporate-financed TV ads. By lowering the cost of political campaigning, the free social media can liberate Washington from the current state of endemic corruption.
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Those who think that the cold weather will end the protests should think again. A new generation of leaders is just getting started. The new progressive age has begun.
Jeffery D. Sachs
Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University
November 13, 2011
The New Progressive Movement
[As SebastianSH said, “This is a lot of crap.” First off, our current economic situation is not due to insufficient “progressive politics” (actually Marxism is very old and hence regressive, Libertarianism would better be called “progressive” and/or “liberal” but left-speak requires that words be redefined to suit their purposes). It is the result of progressive politics.
Second, “social media” and the Internet in general tends shine the light of truth and the progressive rats and sidewalk scum wither in that light.
Third, the corruption in Washington is because Washington has the power to pick winners and losers. As long as the power exists there will be people and companies who find it necessary to see that power is exercised in their favor or at least not used against them. It will only be by the elimination of that power, as the Constitution was intended and written, that the corruption will fade.
What Jeffery D. Sachs advocates will only make the problems worse. Just read New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America to get a clue. But even if given motivation with a clue-by-four Sachs will probably always remain clueless.—Joe]
Yesterday’s demise of the “occupy” encampment, and maybe the movement itself, in Stumptown, OR tells me that the weather will have a LOT to do with participation. The other thing that tells me that the movement will die off this winter is 25 years of copping on the mean streets (and rivers), where I had a chance to see what those who CAN hack it outdoors in a NW winter are made of. They are made of stuff that doesn’t brook the stupidity of the Movement. There are few homeless “diehards” in the movement. Those that came by for the free food and a chance to rape the women there aren’t the enduring kind. They’re the kind that pack the shelters every night.