The system itself is the same as it ever was re bribery, corruption, nonresponsiveness, etc. It only seems worse because there is a party whose sole goal is the downfall of our president, even if it means our nation suffers. That is what needs to change, not our form of government.

w bush,

So true, and one can only hope.

I'm with Rick. it just seems as though in the past 20 to 30 years, the Republicans have taken a my way or no way approach and have taken all compromise out of the system. And that's the only way things have ever gotten accomplished.

Compromise is not a word in their dictionary for the Republicans!

W Bush -

Your call for revolution is absurd. What do you propose to institute instead of the present Constitutional Federalist system of government? going back to the Articles of Conrfederation? Some autocratic system such as Poland's or Russia's? A British Parliamentary system? A quasi-monarchy like Uganda?

Here's what I recently published on the basic idea you propose:

“Tear It Down and Start over” –

But the Tea Party’s Methods Are Proven Disasters –

WHY Try It in America?

Tea Party followers in Wisconsin, at a rally Aug. 8, cheered the downgrade of U.S. bond
ratings and the massive drop in the Dow Jones average earlier in the day. To
the right-wing economic fundamentalists, “tear it down and start over” is an honored
principle, and thus seeing a government and economic system they despise
struggling, the cheers make perfectly good sense.

While not all adherents to the Tea Party movement have been motivated by the economic
doctrines as articulated by Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of
Economics, or the radical positions long advocated by Grover Norquist’s
Americans for Tax Reform, or the Heritage Foundation and the Club for Growth, a
hard central core of the movement is absolutely wedded to those positions.

Critics of the Tea Party movement cry dire warnings if the right-wing agenda were to
take full shape. For its part, the Tea Party and conservatives generally reply
that the warnings are “fear mongering.”

The conservative answer is that the economy would rapidly improve, and jobs
flourish, if only the country adopted a form of “pure capitalism,” including:

ü eliminating government interference in markets,

ü downsizing government size and spending,

ü sharply reducing taxes, eliminating public debt and balancing the Federal budget,

ü privatizing anything now done by government that a corporation could operate more efficiently, and

ü “freeing” workers to be more competitive and mobile by stripping all outside obstructions between employers and employees.

Those five points cover a great deal of actual territory, of course. But they
accurately describe what various states, now governed by Tea Party governors
and lawmakers, have been doing.

The actual events have included limiting or eliminating unions’ power, proposals to
eliminate minimum wage and child labor laws, privatizing public education,
selling or leasing public infrastructure to private interests, closing or
sharply cutting funding and staffing of regulatory agencies, cutting public
payrolls, and much more.

Ostensibly, economic distress underlies the states’ actions. Most states’ constitutions
require balanced annual budgets, or there are statutes to require that. The
conservatives point to the example of the states, and call for a comparable
approach to the national government in all respects.

However, the description of an ideal economy and government is not the kind of
“paradise” the conservatives idealize – because it will not become reality, and
never has existed. In fact, there have been many attempts at creating exactly
such an idealized condition, all complete and horrifying failures – except for
a very small group that became fabulously wealthy, powerful to the point of
absolutism, and ultimately corrupted thoroughly.

And what the Tea Party seeks has also already failed entirely in the United States.

30 Years of Failure in the U.S. and a Global Recession

The United States has been something of a “laboratory” for the Friedman – Chicago
School since at least the Reagan Administration. Some
writers, such as Thomas Frank, claim that the effort to implement the social
and economic philosophy in the U.S. dates back much further (see The
Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Ruined Government, Enriched Themselves, and
Beggared America, ISBN 0805090908). Frank, by the way, does not discuss the
Friedman perspective too much – he instead addresses the strategies and tactics
employed by conservative operatives including Jack Abramoff and Grover Norquist
to link corporations and the state in almost exactly the way that the Tea Party
idealizes today.

Nonetheless, as other analyses have shown, the Friedman principle has been in effect, if
somewhat imperfectly according to its “purist” adherents, since 1981. Only the
pesky resistance of political opponents and unfortunate economic problems
prevented the complete program from taking full root.

Among the problems were two recessions during the Reagan Administration, the 1988
stock market crash, a successive series of corporate scandals including the
savings and loan debacle, the Enron mess, the Worldcom mess, the dot-com bubble
and subsequent recession, and the 9/11 terror attack and subsequent recession,
to name but a few. And, of course, the Reagan Administration did not reduce
deficits and debt as the Friedman principles require – quite the opposite, in
fact. (Similarly, the second Bush Administration also preferred extremely high
loads of deficit and debt to the more austere aspect of Friedman’s program.)

Even so, some of the key Friedman principles were implemented – most especially
effective deregulation, not only of the insurance, investment banking and
commercial banking sectors, but also energy, transportation, thrift (the
savings and loan sector), workplace safety, environmental protection, major aspects
of labor relations, natural resources production (forestry, mining, oil and
gas), and still more.

In addition, although the Reagan Administration was forced to reverse its early
sharp tax cuts with a series of tax increases, as was the first Bush Administration,
major tax incentives dramatically altered corporate finance and governance.
Changes to capital gains levies encouraged a shift of business management focus
from long-term stability and steady business growth to a quarter-by-quarter
performance standard – and, at the same time, created the “day trader”
phenomenon in the stock market.

That simple change in tax policy led to the breakup of corporations to generate
“shareholder value,” incredible bonuses and benefits to corporate executives,
and a sharp squeeze on the labor market to reduce or limit growth in wages.

The Reagan Administration also encouraged globalization of American business,
removing barriers for transferring production to other regions and creating
incentives to do so. And by deregulating the process of mergers and
acquisitions, another Friedman principle, the Administration launched a massive
shift in the business landscape. By the end of the Reagan years, America had
substantially become de-industrialized.

In the Clinton Administration, some of the same process continued. The crowning
moment for Friedman followers occurred when Sen. Phil Gramm engineered the
merger of Citicorp with financial conglomerate The Travelers Group – in
violation of the Glass-Steagall Act. But the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, known as
the Financial Services Modernization Act, was handily ready. By presenting the
Clinton Administration with the fait accompli of the illegal merger,
Gramm ensured the bill would be approved and signed. It was a masterstroke of
manipulation to fulfill a Friedman goal, and the result was almost complete
deregulation of the finance and banking sectors.

Matt Taibbi, in Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids and the Long Con That
Is Breaking America (ISBN 0385529953), takes the tale of the bank merger
forward, showing how Friedman principles were followed to virtually abolish
all oversight of mortgage lending, capital markets, business insurance, and
other factors that had “inhibited” the free flow of financial products and
capital in U.S. and global markets. The idea that markets would be
“self-regulating” underlay the philosophy – a point that Tea Party advocates
espouse today.

The second Bush Administration enthusiastically embraced the approach and built a
very close relationship with the leaders of the major banking and investment
capital companies. That ensured that the firms were allowed free rein in their
business without bothersome interference from government.

The cumulative effect of following Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics
philosophy for 30 years in the U.S., the ideology of Tea Party advocates now,
was the global economic collapse.

Nope – Poor People Didn’t Cause the Problem Today, Either

Conservatives attempt to re-write history and blame a worldwide, $14 trillion meltdown on
unwise lending to poor people who couldn’t afford their mortgages – they point
to the Community Reinvestment Act as the evil root of the entire collapse.

Unfortunately, this argument is completely false.

The 1977 law aimed at the practice of “redlining,” a technique used by banks and
other businesses to either completely refuse lending, or offer loans at
excessive rates, in poor neighborhoods. The law, however, mandated sound
lending practices, and a study has shown that default rates in CRA loans were
within predictable and historical ranges. The lending practices did not produce
the 2007-2009 Great Recession.

Rather than argue the point, however, there is another way to see whether the Friedman
philosophy has been successful and offers a basis for reforming American
government, economics, and society. Friedman and the Chicago School of
Economics were directly involved in such revolutions in Latin America – Chile,
Argentina, Ecuador and Brazil. In all cases, the entire approach to laissez
faire capitalism was enthusiastically and wholly implemented.

So what was the success rate? In a word, dismal.

The Shock Therapy of the Tea Party Has Been
Tried Elsewhere – and Created a Horror Show

The “tear it down and start over” Friedman method failed in every possible aspect –
social, political and economic. It wrecked untold millions of lives, cost
hundreds of lives directly, and destroyed stable, progressive, developing
nations. And that is what the Tea Party advocates for the United States?

The entire sordid story, a tale of upheaval, oppression, genocide, and corporate
looting of half a continent, is told in unrelenting detail by Naomi Klein in The
Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (ISBN 0312427999).

The first field of operations was in Chile, where using the excuse – later shown to
be completely false – that socialist President Salvador Allende intended to
turn the nation into a Communist state, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency
and a cabal of corporations engineered a military coup. Chile at the time was a
relatively prosperous nation with a sizeable middle class and an extremely low
poverty rate.

Significantly, the Chilean coup took place on 9/11 – of 1973. Even before the actual
revolution, a major plan for reforming the nation along line of the Friedman
philosophy had been compiled and put on every Chilean general’s desk (Klein, P.
96). While brutally killing thousands to silence dissent in a reign of terror,
coup leader Gen. Augusto Pinochet also faithfully followed the Friedman
program. From the outset, it failed (Klein, pp. 97, 101).

Eventually in March, 1975, Pinochet welcomed Milton Friedman personally in Santiago,
Chile. The economist literally took over managing the nation’s economy – and
failed. Soon more than half the nation was in poverty, inflation was rampant,
public resources had been sold to a group of American companies, and the
once-flowering country of Chile was on its way to more than three decades of
bloody misery.

The scenario was essentially repeated in Argentina, Brazil, and Ecuador. The master
handbook created for Chile was employed in almost identical fashion. And the
results were largely the same.

The economic and political agenda of the Tea Party and conservatives in America has
been tried, repeatedly. It has never worked. It is a prescription for disaster.

i have to agree it's the two party system that has the country screwed up. tweedledum and tweedledee have no concerns outside of seeing their clique in power. Russia sort of came out of the doldrums when they put the skids under the Communist party. i think we'd do as well to take away the positions of privilege the two "major" parties have bestowed on themselves. any law that requires you to register as a member of any party ought to forthwith be declared unconstitutional as wall as any law that makes it harder for any "minor" party to put candidates on a ballot. name, rank and serial number should be all that's required to get the right to vote. in primaries, the voter can declare then in which party's primary they will vote. that way, the party's candidates will have to talk to more than the party's base, and perhaps our policies and programs will more closely mirror that of the average citizen instead of what the fringe elements want.

Sir -

Suggest you do some reading before continuing to spread your proaganda.

The Milton Friedman - Chicago School of Economics model is directly responsible for the present global crisis. It has been tried and produced nothing but greater pverty, misery and ecnomic failure since the late 1960's - and certain collapsed in America from 1981 forward.

The vision of this country that you articulate is bankrupt and unworkable.

Start with Naomi Klein, The Schock Doctrine: The Rise of disaster Capitalism, and go from there.

Putting the nation into the dumspster is not a formula for freedom or progress. The Libertarian/Tea Party perspective will wreck not just America, but the rest of the world. And it has already done so in nationa after nation for years.

ettucat-

I have to disagree with you on that the only Republican from West Virginia that was sent was Shelly Moore Capito. All the rest have been Democrats.

Gov Earl Ray Tomblin will be reelected!!!!

Obama/Biden 2012!!!!!

30% of the population is obses...the number is much higher for poor people...

.....and the Obama Administration solution is to expand Food Stamps, so more taxpayer money can be used to buy Doritos...