Embrance populism, even if not George McGovern

My attempt to gin up support for a George McGovern presidency has met with mixed results. My McGovern 2012 Facebook group is limited to people on my friends list. Some have been so excited as to brandish their original McGovern for President buttons, others have questioned why I would pick anyone over the age of 89 to mount a campaign for President and ultimately occupy the White House. Perhaps I should clarify.

In your heart, you know you're right.

The point wasn't necessarily to persuade the 89-year-old George McGovern to give up his Florida winter home and start making speeches in Iowa and New Hampshire. The point was the American public believes in the core issue of higher taxes for better government services. Don't believe me? Check out these polls in Utah, Nevada, and yes, even George McGovern's home state of South Dakota. Even in these so-called "red states," people want government to work for the people. Oh, and Paul Ryan's plan to virtually replace Medicare with private insurance? That's not going over so well.

Yes, Democratic presidential candidates lost badly in 1972, 1984, and 1988, and I'm well aware of who just took control of the House of Representatives. But that doesn't mean Barack Obama or any other elected Democrat should simply cede ground to extremist corporate interests. Doing so only serves to further alienate the general public and re-affirm the belief that government doesn't work for the people among skeptics.


The time to turn things around is now. This is not the time to apologize for Barack Obama's inability to provide sufficient assistance the millions of Americans who are struggling financially because we perceive it politically unfeasible. Rather, the only reason he isn't running away with a second term is because he fell into a self-fulfilling prophecy that Americans didn't want more government. I merely proposed that the man partly responsible for this timidity among progressives unseat Obama and smash the myth of a "conservative" America once and for all.

Well, it probably won't happen with another McGovern presidency. But if the "sensible liberal" can understand that Americans want health insurance instead of bailouts for corporations and tax cuts for millionaires, that's an important step in the right direction.

Oh yeah, and in case you haven't seen it already, a video about the ultra-liberal state of North Dakota. They have another bank besides Wells Fargo.

What this blog is about

No one who works should be poor.  This fundamental tenant of human decency and respect essence is under attack in too many places--and it's not just the shouting heads on Fox News or the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal. It's everywhere.

It's in in the business section of the New York Times. It's practically standard fare at the University of Chicago School of Economics. It's a fixture of one major political party, a statute that another major party is too full of cowardice to challenge. And yes, it's  even on NPR and PBS. Every day.

I first saw this poster at a Bursar's Office. Only one of us got rich.

This blog exists because when I graduated from high school 10 years ago, I was told in no uncertain terms that a college degree was going to make me rich--and I needed that education to find out how to wisely spend all that money.

This last decade has been the decade that wasn't in terms of job growth. This country has just as many jobs in 2011 as it did in 2001. If we had adapted the economic policies we have now from the onset of when this country was founded, not a single American would have worked. That's worse than the Soviet Union!

Well I say no more. No more should Americans of both political stripes take an existentialist approach to our economic system. Stagnant job growth should be viewed as a failure of economic policy as apposed to the wheelings and deelings of "the invisible hand." No more should nonsensical abstract concepts like "innovation" take precedence over actual, measurable economic output. No more should politicians attack smokers and drinkers as the sole targets of "sin" taxes, as the sin of excessive greed causes more harm to our economic system and thus, should require heavier taxation. And no more should politicians and economists be fixated on providing economic growth to China and India. Nothing personal, we've got to take care of own first.

There will be plenty to blog about. It's pretty weird--to say the least--to hear Scott Walker attack public school teachers as a vestige of communism or listen to Barack Obama calmly explain that he intends to cut home heating oil subsidies for the poor. That's weird, all right. But when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

Who knows, I might even end up on CNN--not that anybody watches that network anymore.

~The Connecticut Yankee.