Surely you can stand a little humor as you browse through the internet.
Since the people in this video have strong Irish brogues and use pronunciation a little different from what you normally hear in the U.S., you may be able to just avoid translating certain words that you might otherwise find offensive.
I love this video by Elizabeth Warren, but
I am a little frustrated that she is not quite running the campaign the way she speaks in this video.
In her description of how she created the successful campaign to get the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau into the financial reform bill passed by Congress, she mentioned getting the AFL-CIO, SEIU, AARP, and Consumers Union to rally their members to the fight. (She also talked about a pyramiding conference call series.)
With regard to getting things done as a Senator, she tells the audience that they have to keep fighting for the action they want long after the election is over.
Then, seemingly forgetting how she described the fight for the CFPB, she tells the audience they have to talk to neighbors and people in the grocery line about what needs to be done. Yes, eventually it gets down to having individuals talk to other individuals, but if almost every individual in the country favors one particular policy, what good does that do if the people in Congress aren’t aware and moreover aren’t aware of how strongly people feel? We already know that in some cases a poll may show that 80% of the people favor a policy and the Congress still votes for the 20% side of the issue.
It is easy for the Congress to look at a poll and dismiss the import of what it says by simply telling themselves that people don’t feel strongly enough about the issue to do anything if Congress votes the way Congress wants and against the majority’s wishes. By and large, Congress’s dismissal has been correct.
It takes organizations like the AFL-CIO, SEIU, AARP, Consumers Union, (and the Occupy Movement) to get enough of a mass protest to shake the politicians’ attachment to the lobbyists working for the wealthy interests.
I’d like to see Elizabeth Warren demonstrate this organizing skill during the campaign. It has to be more than just Elizabeth Warren fighting for these things.
True, she has something like 85,000 people who have clicked on the “like” button on her Facebook page. That compares to something like 500 likes for some of her Democratic competitors. I am not sure Facebook “likes” would sway any other Senators.
What kind of movement changed the entire conversation in this country in a month or two and caused it to turn away from the 40 years of propaganda by the wealthy as embodied in the Republican Party, Faux Noise, almost all radio talk shows, etc.? The Occupy movement did that. As soon as Elizabeth Warren caught some flack for saying some encouraging words about the Occupy movement, she backed away.
In the election, you cannot back away from one of the major tools you are going to need after the election, and then expect to use that tool effectively later.
On Nancy Weinberg’s Facebook page, she featured an article from Forbes Magazine, The Rumors About Bill Clinton Are True.
The reporter was discussing a conversation with Bill Clinton at a book signing.
I asked, “What do you think about the Occupy Wall Street movement, personally, and what do you think it says about America?”
“I think what they’re doing is great,” he said. “Occupy Wall Street has done more in the short time they’ve been out there than I’ve been able to do in more than the last eleven years trying to draw attention to some of the same problems we have to address,” he said.
Without once looking around, but completely engaging me, the statesman continued. “There are a lot of young people out there, I see a lot of unemployed students and they are upset, he said. They don’t know where the jobs and opportunities are for them, and they are worried about how they’re going to pay off their student loans without going broke.”
But I learned instantly that Bill Clinton doesn’t just acknowledge problems he has solutions at the ready. He went on to say that student loan reforms were absolutely necessary and that limiting annual loan payments to small percentages of income made sense to not impoverish students as they struggle up the ladder in pursuit of the American Dream.
I asked if the Occupy Wall Street movement should have a platform. I was getting into another area he is passionate about, delivering messages on point. “Yes,” he said, “But it doesn’t have to be a platform; it doesn’t have to be twenty pages. They should start with three or four points to generate a political movement to get heard more clearly.”
There was more, but as he touched quickly on two other points as to how we got here, he said, “That’s in the book.” I wasn’t being sold on the book; I just had my copy signed. I was being steered to the address of important issues in the book and Mr. Clinton’s suggestions for getting back on track to fixing them.
Compare those remarks with Elizabeth Warren’s backing away from the Occupy movement.
Reader RichardH pointed me to The New York Times blog story, Newt’s Shop of Horrors.
Speaking of Newt Gingrich’s relationship to the Citizens Untied Supreme Court decision that visited all these horrors upon Newt, the article said:
Earlier, he’d sent out a video plea, saying, “Please join Citizens United and me in our fight for the First Amendment rights of every American.”
Yes, because every lone citizen’s voice is roughly equal to, say, the $3 million or so in negative advertising spent in Iowa to crush Gingrich. Those citizens who worked at corporations, or founded super PACs, were somehow denied their First Amendment rights, in the reasoning of the court and Gingrich. Money is speech, one and the same, in their world.
If Gingrich had any guts, or lasting principles, he would now sound alarms about the absurdity of a court decision equating the Norman Rockwell citizen standing at town hall to the anonymous millions that can kill a candidate in less than month. In Gingrich’s case, he fell 20 points in 20 days.
As I have pointed out before:
The logic behind corporations being people is based on a syllogism. If the Supreme Court and other Courts knew anything about logic, (gee should justice have anything to do with logic), they would be very wary of reasoning from a syllogism. It is fraught with the ease of coming to faulty conclusions
Here are some definitions of syllogism from the Free Dictionary:
1. Logic, A form of deductive reasoning consisting of a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion; for example, All humans are mortal, the major premise, I am a human, the minor premise, therefore, I am mortal, the conclusion.
2. Reasoning from the general to the specific; deduction.
3. A subtle or specious piece of reasoning.
Perhaps the questioning of prospective judges, especially Supreme Court Justices, should always include the question, “Do you know what a syllogism is, and do you understand its pitfalls?”
By the way, definition 1 above uses an example syllogism that leads to a correct conclusion.
In The Philosophy of Socrates: Syllogisms, the authoer says:
At the simplest level, the syllogism consists of a deductive process involving two declarative statements and a conclusion. Three simple terms are used and these are combined with each other in the form AB, BC, therefore BC (or negative terms might be used). For example: all apples are fruit; no apples are vegetables, therefore no fruit is a vegetable. The conclusion cannot be challenged without contradicting one or both of the premises. This is the basis of much logical deduction up to the present day.
How about the statement that not all fruits are apples? There may be a fruit that is also a vegetable. All we know from the statements presented is that it won’t be an apple.
The article about Socrates goes on to say:
Socrates, however, used the syllogistic process in a somewhat different way. Indeed, his approach was one that caused many of his enemies or at least indifferent observers to label him as ‘sly’
Calling Socrates sly in a freshman college paper got me a D on that paper. The professor did not understand the down side of syllogisms. This was in a Humanities course at MIT. I doubt I would have run into that problem if the course had been given in the Math department.
See my previous post The Corporate Pledge Of Allegiance for another discussion of the Citizens United decision and syllogisms.