As Destor has said in regard to great dearth of money, so may a lesser dearth thereof be ameliorated by....giving away money.

In this case the (unlikely to receive the wide approval it deserves), "helicopter manuever in full flagrante.

Yeah, how do we address this issue?

I love our liberal economists, I really do.

Bernie is all we have really.

Make rich folks deposit more money into SS?

Make oil companies pay the actual costs involved in their capitalistic enterprizes?

Make corporations pay when they 'outsource' to other countries?

Enact legislation taxing every sale of every share of stock? That could bring our coffers trillions over time.

Enact a 70% income tax rate for those making over a million a year?

Raise property taxes on those in gated communities; a state issue for sure.

I am attempting to listen. 

But there are so few voices.

II. Rising Inequality: The War on Working People

The term globalization is a euphemism for the economic policies of neoliberalism and free trade that drive the megatrends ravaging the world today.  Globalization in this essay refers specifically to the domination of the world economy by transnational capitalism through state-sponsored policies that subordinate the broad interests of communities and nations to the interests of the owners of capital.

The primary economic drivers of globalization are:

• the capture of emerging CONSUMER and CAPITAL MARKETS to insure the continued accumulation of capital through sales revenue and interest income
• access to cheap RAW MATERIALS and LABOR to increase the rate of capital accumulation on the production of goods and services

It is capitalism's relentless quest for cheap labor that impacts working people directly and drives the megatrend of rising inequality on both national and global levels.  The creation of wealth by human labor, whether the worker is employed in agriculture, manufacturing, or service, is the sustaining activity of all societies and the division of that wealth between the workers and the owners of capital is the essence of class struggle.

Josh is wrong about this. The problem is not a lack of policy ideas--it's a lack of understanding that cultivating the Democratic vote is not like cultivating the Republican vote. Democratic leaders take a Shaker-style approach to vote cultivation, always hoping that the number of independent or swing converts will outweigh the impact of activities that prevent new, enthusiastic Democrats from being born. It's an approach which is lowering the number of people willing to show up and vote Democrat in such numbers that Republicans can easily win contests just based on Democratic non-enthusiasm.

The problem, in short, is the cost of vote-farming. Republicans market heavily to single-issue voters, because in a nation that still adheres to the quaint tradition of one-person-one-vote, single-issue voters are the cheapest voters a plutocrat can buy, and they'll show up consistently to vote against their own interests on most issues as long as they believe that some Republican, somewhere, is working on their pet issue. Republicans have cornered this market, and Democrats would be best to leave them to it, because the reality is that there aren't as many dumb voters out there as Democrats would like to believe.

There are a ton of potential Democratic voters who would enjoy having someone represent their interests in Washington and in other places too. But Democratic voters are just different than Republican voters. They're a lot harder to farm, they tend to vote based on more than one issue, they tend to look at results, they tend to be turned off by efforts to farm them at election time and then not represent them when the moment comes. Most of all, they're turned off by the double standard of pandering to wealthy donors for campaign money and to voters in the few weeks before the elections. People aren't dumb--they know whose interests will be represented once the voting booths are folded up.

This is why I use the Shaker comparison--by using the Republican vote-farming tactics, and then refusing to consistently, ethically, and with a little oratorical flourish, REPRESENT the interests of ordinary people, Democrats fail to attract the people who might actually get them elected. It's a highly-questionable short-term strategy and a long-term disaster.

It's not a lack of policy ideas. It's a refusal to use them. We all know what happened to the Shakers.