Various aspects of climate change, “global warming,” environmental degradation, etc. have been referred to as “causes” of many of society’s problems when, in reality, they are results of a far more important phenomenon, the huge, unsustainable and growing current human population, the prime cause of the
other causes. The technical methods of alleviating the growing short-comings of our life-giving environments will be obsolete by the time they are implemented… outstripped by the size of the population.

You might find the views of Eric Pianka interesting and edifying:

http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~varanus/Vanishing.Book.text.pdf

http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~varanus/Everybody.html

http://www.zo.utexas.edu/courses/bio213/why.html

http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~varanus/

http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~varanus/Controversy.html

The otherwise perhaps flawed domestic policies of China may not be to our liking, but their “one child” per parents should have our blessing and be adopted by the rest of the world as soon and completely as possible. It is nothing less than mandatory. It is the fastest (60 years), the cheapest (zero cost), the most easily participated (no one need do anything – merely do not have a second child) method with essentially no counter-acting side effects.This action obviates the need for all the programs now being touted and it will put the world back to the number of people, resulting from millions of years of linear growth, which existed about 250 years ago, when it was hardly under populated, but it was before the ruinous logarithmic growth that has occurred since. As Dennis Meadows said:”Any environmental issue that doesn’t list overpopulation as the main problem is a lost cause.” Or, as this line on the stationery of The Committee of Concerned Scientists states:”If we do not solve our overpopulation problem ourselves, sagely and humanely, the problem will be solved for us by Nature, efficiently and savagely.”

Cheers

Potter: So what did you accomplish? I don’t understand either one of your rationales.

Potter, I don’t disagree with your outrage over what I did. But what I did was of no consequence (given our absurd electoral system), simply because I voted in Massachusetts. I made a very self-conscious decision when I chose to select Nader.

I also agree about the Constitution: I’ve been thinking about a fundamental re-writing of the Constitution since before 2000. My thoughts: institute the Borda count voting system, use a computer to create districts (or better – everyone is randomly placed in a “virtual district” which you never leave for national elections), language that specifically states that civil liberties cannot be trumped for security, and language that specifically calls high school education and healthcare human rights. Since then, I’ve added the call for a national holiday on election day every two years, for national elections. And i keep going back and forth on a Parliamentary system.

Okay… Knowing what I know now, I accomplished nothing. But how could I know that then? Don’t answer that… First, my rationale…

The rationale behind this choice had a long-term objective, with no short-term fallout (because I was voting in MA). Not knowing what the results would be, except that there were approximately five-ten safe states (in either direction), I believed that voting for Nader would get the Greens above the threshold needed for government financing in national campaigns. This would help begin to create a viable third party which represented leftist ideals. With a real left-wing, the Democrats could (as they had been for thirty years) continue moving right towards the center, representing a sensible way to govern. That would marginalize the Republican Party who had a philsophy of starting from the right.

Let me be clear: when I spoke with ANYONE, I strongly supported Mr. Gore and spoke in his favor. I wrote letters to editors, bought magnets and stickers, etc, etc. If I lived in Florida, Michigan, Ohio, or even New Jersey, I would not even have thought about voting for Nader. In Massachusetts, I was using my vote to try and push the US toward a three-party system. And my vote for Gore would have been less significant than my vote for the system.

Potter: The question I have for both of you is do you not think your vote for president is important enough to vote for someone who would be the best president? Did you not see who Bush was? Did you buy Nader’s bit about there being no difference. Even if there is little difference between the parties ( which I do not agree about) how about the difference between the candidates? No difference? it could not have been plainer.

I agree completely.

I said it then, and I say it now: Bush is a very dangerous person. He has never been held responsible for his own actions (personal or public) and he kept as his closest confidantes people who were the thugs behind Nixon’s CREEP. he wanted power without understanding how to wield pragmatically. Basically, I had no illusions aboout what Bush was.

As for Democrats: they are the party of the people, and I’ve always believed it. Clearly, they are most comfortable in the center, which is a good, non-extreme place to be. They are able to balance the extremes of fiscal responsibility and a viable welfare state. They are able to balance the extremes of pure security and pure liberty. Gore represented that centrism. And I said (above) that he is a modern-day John Adams. (And John Adams is one of my heroes.)

BUT… As long as the Democrats were to the right of no-one of consequence, and to the left of the “other party”, they would always be painted (and explained away) as psycho liberals.

My vote for president is important enough that I would try to change the system with it. If the popular vote held greater significance, I would certainly have voted for Gore. The absurd electoral system (and regressive campaign finance system) functioned such that my vote for president mattered less than my vote for systemic change.

So… Knowing what I know now, I accomplished nothing. But how could I know that then? More importantly, would my (and everyone in Massachusetts or Texas who voted for Nader) had changed a thing if I (we) voted for Gore? No.

Potter, don’t quit this conversation. ROS is the marketplace of ideas here. We need passionate people and thinkers like you.

My own 2 cents is that without a sweeping constitutional overhaul, the same old song and dance will continue until we’ve ‘outsourced’ our government itself. The ‘offshore’ bosses will, of course, mostly include multinational corporations. The USA will be parceled into corporate fiefdoms, and even then Hannity, Limbaugh, and O’Reilly will still be moronically parroting all the pre-approved lines from the Heritage Foundation (et. al.).

Without a national legislature whose seats are awarded by party slate — thus enabling genuine multi-party politics for the first time in the country’s history (Bull Moose and Perot being temporary blips that give false hope to perrenial ‘third party’ fantasies) — our options will continue to be the sham-choice between Elephant and Elephant-lite. No third party will ever arise without constitutional reform, because the thing is set up now to elect individual representatives, not parties. And the individuals (again, with a few local but insubstantial exceptions, like Jeffords) must seek the support of one of the Two to even begin to seriously garner the money necessary for campaigning.

So, even though I’ve read all the posts above hoping for change and sympathize with the sentiments, it’s all pointless: wasteful of our time and emotional investment.

We’ve gotta amend the constitution first, folks.
We’ve gotta amend the current government-of-malfeasance out of its democracy-denying 210+ year existence.

And the only means to generate the national political will is the internet: because the mainstream press won’t want to host the discussion.

Correction: Congress wouldn’t dare cut benefits by 30% overnight. On currrent projections, the current payroll tax will cover only 70% of promised benefits when the the “trust fund” runs out around midcentury.

I sure wish I could edit posts here.

Some of my pet controversies are now practically uncovered, including very pressing issues like Social Security reform. Basically, we had two, equally bad alternatives on the table, the current system and the Cato-style reform that Bush further corrupted with his promise of endless inflation-adjusted Treasury notes for his Orwellian “private accounts”. [Of course, Treasury notes are not investments at all in a market economic sense, much less "private investments".] Once the only airable alternative was found wanting, the debate ended, with no reform and hardly any meaningful debate, and the leading edge of the baby boom is now five years from retirement.

There’s a topic for this program, by the way. Whatever happened to Social Security? You want an innovative approach to the problem? Try http://www.knology.net/~marbrock/psupp.htm. If that’s too far-out for you, try Philip Longman of the New America Foundation. He discusses something similar in his book, The Empty Cradle.

The problem with Social Security is not that the system is “going broke” (it is in a sense) or that the “trust fund” is a scam (it is) or even that the system will inevitably strain the Federal budget in only a few years, not in half a century when the “trust fund runs out” (it will). By the time the “trust fund runs out”, the funding problem will already be solved, one way or another, because the day after we redeem the last “bond” in the “trust fund”, we’ll simply continue paying the same benefits with the same revenue stream we were using to “repay the bonds” before the “fund” ran out. Since Congress owes this money to itself and wouldn’t dare cut elderly benefits by 70% overnight, this outcome is inevitable.

The problem is that the system is extremely regressive, that it taxes the investments of the poor to pay the rich and that it misconstrues the purest form of consumption (elder support) as “investment” while construing the purest form of investment (child support) as “consumption”. The problem is that elderly consume eight times the volume of Federal largess that children consume, even while government expects to tax the marginal value of labor (a tax on the yield of investments in labor, i.e. the support of children), through the payroll tax, not to mention other forcible proprieties, to pay for the burgeoning population of retirees.

I’d also like to see a discussion of tax reform focused on a progressive consumption tax, like the tax advocated by Ted Halstead and others at New America. This progressive consumption tax is the progressive income tax with higher marginal rates plus unlimited contributions to a tax deferred investment account (like the IRA). With an unlimited investment allowance, we could have much higher marginal rates on very high incomes and thus direct the rapidly increasing income of the very wealthy away from castle building and toward productive investments offering more utility to the broader population, the sort of reform Adam Smith advocated in Wealth of Nations.

We could also subject inherited wealth to this tax without disrupting family businesses, and supply siders have shown convincingly that adjusting the marginal rates is an effective instrument of monetary policy, probably more effective and less disruptive than manipulating interest rates of fiat debt. We could also simplify Federal tax collection by merging the payroll tax into income tax and funding elder benefits from the same tax, particularly since the “trust fund” has this effect anyway. We’ll “repay the trust fund” with income taxes of course, so in a few years, we’ll be funding Social Security benefits with the income tax. If Congress raises the regressive payroll tax, again, to “repay the trust fund”, I advocate a campaign of assassination.

Since the Democratic Party is only alternative we’re allowed, we need some unapologetic, classical liberalism from the party in this country, not more state socialism, but I’m not optimistic that we’ll get it. We might get some national health insurance program on the Massachusetts model, which will end up being a corporatist boon to the insurance industry. We’ll certainly get higher taxes.

For straight news BBC is probably best imo. Bob Shieffer has been good but we will not stomach Katie Couric in that spot. Believe it or not 60 MInutes has had some good reporting on lately, esp. Bob Simon. ( Sorry – got off subject here)

Above, I intended “income equality was greater”. The intention is clear enough in context, but I need to correct the dyslexia.

This show is promising, although some of its content is disappointing. The China vs. Iran show was mind-numbing. Basically, I heard two factoids repeated over and over for an hour. “China has ‘manufacturing’.” “India has ’software’”. I also heard the usual cliches about India’s “democratic creativity” vs. China’s “command and control heavy industry,” with partisans of each incredibly simplistic characterization parroting their simpleminded thesis. Like I hadn’t heard that stuff a million times before. I don’t want to be unduly critical though. Some of the stuff I’ve found here is informative, and you can’t beat the audio on demand. I’ve never heard the program on the radio and probably never will.

I can’t get over how this administration uses this moronic right wing media as it’s megaphone, an arm of it’s machine.. So when Dick Cheney wants to explain himself, he goes to the comfy setting of Limbaugh. When Bush needs a press secretary he goes to Fox for a friendly talking head. Such cowardice! Even the Lehrer Report is disappointing these days with it’s “newmaker interviews” which are nothing more than propaganda mechanisms for the administration.

The Daily Show is the quintessential “progressive media” hit these days. Stewart’s book was also a hit, but if I were a “conservative” partisan these days, I’d pay more attention to the approval ratings of the Executive and Congress in public opinion polls. Bush is now the least popular President since Nixon and only slightly more popular than Congress. I don’t know what “the left” will offer and don’t have high hopes for it, but the winds are blowing toward a political realignment in the U.S. as sweeping as the New Labor days following post-Thatcher Britain. We’ve been trailing the U.K. in some kind of political cycle for decades now, and I don’t see the pattern changing. Whatever it is, it can’t easily be worse than the Bushnik’s brand of national corporatism.

Left-leaning new media has hit turbulence at the marketplace, newly released stats show.

A book hyped by major media as documenting a progressive revolution of “blogs” and political power, DAILY KOS ‘CRASHING THE GATE,’ has sold only 3,630 copies since its release last month, according to NIELSEN’s BOOKSCAN.

[NIELSEN claims only 2,062 copies of DAILY KOS have been purchased at the retail level; the rest coming through 'discount' outlets. The NIELSEN figures do include online sales from AMAZON.COM, and others.]

Meanwhile, the just released radio Winter Book [Jan-Mar 2006] from ARBITRON shows AIR AMERICA in New York City losing more than a third of its audience — in the past year!

Among all listeners 12+, it was a race to the bottom for AIR AMERICA and WLIB as mid-days went from a 1.6 share during winter 2005 to a 1.0 share winter 2006.

During PM drive, host Randi Rhodes plunged to 27,900 listeners every quarter hour, finishing 25th place in her time slot, down from 60,900 listeners every quarter hour in the fall.

A network source says the radio ratings released today do not reflect the overall growth of the broadcast.

“The demos are better, and listeners trust AIR AMERICA to give them the real truth on issues and the Bush presidency,” says the insider.

Developing…

The evil that is Bush would not matter so much if he were not in power, The question is how did he get there?

Vijtable: I didn’t vote for NADER, I voted for a SYSTEM.

So what did you accomplish?

I don’t understand either one of your rationales. If you want to change the system I would agree with you that change is necessary. The question is how do you accomplish this. Look at the results of your votes for Nader. Vijtable, people in safe states who supported and voted for Nader accomplished what beyond encouraging Nader voters in the unsafe states?

Nader would have never made a good president. The question I have for both of you is do you not think your vote for president is important enough to vote for someone who would be the best president? Did you not see who Bush was? Did you buy Nader’s bit about there being no difference. Even if there is little difference between the parties ( which I do not agree about) how about the difference between the candidates? No difference? it could not have been plainer.

If you want to change the country, maybe Nikos has it more right about changing the constitution. How about working to strenghten Greens and working within the Democratic Party and then taking it over? How can you dream that a third party can be anything more than a spoiler party? Vijatable how exactly did you think the system was going to be changed?

I gotta quite this. Sorry.

What we’re borrowing to fund certainly matters as much as the volume of our borrowing relative to GDP. I suppose the U.S. can afford some wasteful foreign adventurism, but the absence of imminent collapse doesn’t make me any happier about the taxes Congress must inevitably raise to pay for it. Of course, if you’ve been buying the bonds all this time, rather than making genuine market investments, and if you won’t bear much of the tax burden, these taxes don’t bother you so much.

I agree that China is not a great threat to U.S. economic health for the reasons cited. China’s phenomenal growth in the southwest masks a lag in infrastructure across much of the country, and China has a more rapidly aging population as well as potential political instability. When China devalues its own currency vs. the dollar, it simply gives U.S. consumers a gift of paper money to encourage U.S. consumption of its exports. This imbalance should alarm us much less than the Bushniks’ willingness to sell China the Congressional authority to raise taxes on U.S. citizens in exchange. That’s what happens when Bushniks sponsor huge deficits while China collects dollars through currency manipulation at the expense of Chinese domestic consumption.

The Times notes growing wealth and income inequality in the U.S. and seems to link the inequality to “very free markets”; however, wealth and income inequality also grows in China and is actually greater there by some measures. Any potential for resisting market discipline for this reason in the U.S. certainly also exists in China; however, contrary to the Times’ apparent thesis, resentment of the rich is not the potent force behind this resistance. It never is. The influence of the wealthy on political institutions destroys market discipline, not resentment of the rich by the less rich. The rich don’t want market discipline any more than the less rich, and the rich are more politically influential. It happened that way in the Soviet Union (where apparatchiks in charge of industrial organization were the wealthy), and it can happen that way in China, and it can happen (and is happening) that way in the U.S.

Attributing growth in inequality to free markets is mindless. The U.S. economy today is not freer than it was half a century ago, when wealth and income equality was lower. The Federal government is much larger. Regulation is more intrusive and costly. Barriers to market entry in established industries are higher. Patent monopolies are more broadly granted, both in the globalization of monopoly protection and the extension of patents to software and business processes. What we see in the U.S. is growing corporatism (in the socialist/fascist sense), not growing market freedom. That China exhibits the same trend is hardly surprising, since China’s economy is still dominated by one party socialist state, but if we imagine the U.S. as a bastion of liberal economic organization, by contrast, we’re deluding ourselves.

You are also right that Gore was a weak campaigner, and Florida was closer than it should have been.

BUT (and I sense Peggysue might back me up on this), given our absurd electoral system, do you believe people in clearly safe states (Massachusetts, Texas) should not have voted for Nader? Wouldn’t a legitimate third party help our system? Given the fact that key Democrats (or most Democrats) aren’t fighting some of the most abhorrent legislation (or Supreme Court nominees), isn’t part of Nader’s argument true – that there are Republicans and Republicans Lite?

I didn’t vote for NADER, I voted for a SYSTEM. The Democrats already fill a centrist role, which is good. But without a left-wing party, they will never have purpose as the coalition party, the party of reason, balancing two extremes. When I filled out my absentee ballot in MA, I voted for Nader; on election night, I rooted for Gore.

And let’s not also forget the rampant voter fraud, the made-up “angry citizens” at the voting offices, and the suspicious Supreme Court case, where four of the nine (if I remember correctly) should have recused themselves (three on Bush’s side, one on Gore’s).

While I accept Nader was responsible for some poor choices, his were not illegal nor unethical. I still hold the people who actually weakened democracy/repulican government responsible.

Peggysue, I truly hope that Greens do have a legitimate voice, because I would then be able to have a CHOICE in elections.

More important, I’d like to see Americans get involved with politics process again. I think blogging encourages dialogue, but why aren’t we seeing outrage and frustration on the nightly news?

Gore 2008!

In the end I believe that the person responsible for the evil that is Bush. Is Bush.

I gotta get off of this….sorry.

Nader got 97,000 votes in Florida. Bush was ahead by a few hundred ( 537) votes when “the powers that be” stopped the recount. Though one canot argue that all of Nader voters would have voted for Gore, some would not have voted at all, still can you honestly say that the probability was very high that Gore would have won Florida even with the corrupt election?

My feeling at the time was ( and still is) that Gore just did not have the stomach to turn himself completely inside out about that after a long tough campaign. I wish he had fought good hard fight for the sake of the country but I can totally understand letting go. The man and those who supported him who was/were most desperate for the job ( for their selfish IMO reasons) took it, stole it by hook and by crook.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/060424ta_talk_remnick

By the way I thought Peter Beinert was really off about Al Gore not taking a position on Iraq and the “war on terrorism”. It was as though he did not read/hear the speeches.

Jan- I agree with everything you say except that Gore is too good to be president. Wow have our standards declined. Either that or our hopes for this country are gone if this idea is pervasive.

Nikos You do love poetry! Thanks for that beautiful chills producing lyric. I hear Lisa Kindred singing it. http://www.trussel.com/lyman/amavat.htm

Peggysue Al Gore would have won Florida without Nader big time if you aassume that Nader’s voters would have voted for Gore, even a portion of them. That is not to say that any of the other factors were not kicking in. Without Nader it would not have been so close.

What disturbs me about Nader is HE KNEW what was at stake. Yet he did not drop out and tell his supporters to go for Gore. Instead he kept up the mantra that it did not make a difference whether you voted for a Republican or a Democrat in that race. Those who voted for Nader to make a statement sure made one in the form of GWBush. A vote for Nader was a vote for Bush anyway you slice it. A vote for Nader, it seemed to me, was a protest vote in a tight race where who won made a very big difference. I may agree that we need more choices in this country and we need a new system perhaps but the third party has traditionally been a spoiler party. If Nader was a mensch he would have done the right thing and supported Gore. In the light of what has happened I find no forgiveness for him anywhere in my heart.

And when I listened to the very early broadcasts after New Orleans was struck, when he just had to have four more days of vacation before his handlers shook him out and dried him, I’d swear he was slurring his words.

I wanted to hear the first part of tonight’s show because the David Remnick article on Gore was the only readable part of the last issue of the New Yorker. It was in Talk of the Town. Is there a way to get the text of this Radio Open Source? I don’t have broadband, so trying to listen is like going insane.

Talking about how listless Dems seem to be doesn’t do any good, folks. Why should we bash ourselves, we progressives? That’s what the Republicans want us to do: believe the adverse media hype on ourselves. “Let’s put all the Dems in a circle and watch them eat each other alive.”

If we’re progressives (or lefties or whatever opposes what one person above, rightly, calls the evil of the current administration and the right wing neoconservative takeover of our country) then we are responsible for change.

That means voting. That means voting for Democrats. I don’t have the slightest problem with that.

And it’s very stupid to bash Mrs. Clinton. She is brilliant. If you bash her without knowing her, that too buys into the media hype (or whatever negative pr loves to trash her). I had to spend time with her personally to change my mind, and I think of myself as open-minded. But very subtly, all the negative stuff about her had impacted me.

It’s so fun to hate a woman. It’s so fun to resent smart people. It’s so fashionable to act all ironic and cynical.

We can’t afford it.