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(Click on Category/Link to filter postings for only the selected blog)
- ChumForThought.com – Throwing ideas into dangerous waters
- Common-Destiny.org – As world citizens, we must work together or most assuredly die together
- DavidSatterlee.com – Writer: Articles, Short stories, Poems, Videos
- SocioDynamics.org – Individual, cultural, and social development
- Smart-You.com – Quick lessons on bits of cultural literacy
- WordsmithServices.com – Editing, proofing, ghostwriting, transcription, formatting
- Salutology.com – Everything that is good for your health (future)
- DixieDiddler.com – Defending conservative values (future)
Dear _____,
If you were mayor of _____, what would be the first thing you’d do? Make sure city employees don’t lose their pensions? Support green business startups? Or maybe fight back against cuts to crucial local services?
This isn’t just a hypothetical scenario—it’s exactly what more than 4,000 MoveOn members just like you have been thinking about since taking the first step to run for elective office. And they’re not just running for mayor. They’re exploring running for offices including school board, town council, and state legislature in cities and towns across the country.
If you’ve ever thought, "I’ve got some ideas for doing things differently in _____," or seen a local politician and thought, "If that were me, things would be different," then it’s time to join thousands of other progressives across the country and run for office.
And if you decide to run, you won’t be alone. You’ll be part of a nationwide progressive strategy to take back local offices in 2012 and beyond. To help give you the resources you need to run a competitive campaign, we’ve partnered with the New Organizing Institute to provide you with online training and strategic advice. Trust me—running for office is easier than you think. So what do you say?
Yes, I’d consider running for office. (<– click here)
Back in 2010, tea party candidates, backed by national tea party groups, were elected to hundreds of local offices. That’s exactly what we’re going to do in 2012—but with a wave of candidates who will stand up for the 99% in communities across the country.
If you decide to run, you’ll gain access to the New Organizing Institute’s great online training programs. And to help progressive candidates in 2012, they’ve created a comprehensive set of candidate guides. Here are some examples of what you’ll have access to:
- Expert online courses on how to run your own campaign and how to get started
- Help finding the elected position that’s right for you
- An online community so that you can ask questions and share advice with other progressive candidates around the nation
- A database of time-tested strategic campaign tips, and more
So if you’ve ever wanted to change things in Iowa, or imagined yourself running for office in _____, now’s the time.
Clippings from Newyorker.com, The Political Scene, The Obama Memos, by Ryan Lizz, January 30, 2012
Two well-known Washington political analysts, Thomas Mann, of the bipartisan Brookings Institution, and Norman Ornstein, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, agree. In a forthcoming book about Washington dysfunction, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” they write, “One of our two major parties, the Republicans, has become an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme, contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime, scornful of compromise, unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_lizza#ixzz1kJZqylwT
In “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama wrote longingly about American politics in the mid-twentieth century, when both parties had liberal and conservative wings that allowed centrist coalitions to form. Today, almost all liberals are Democrats and almost all conservatives are Republicans. In Washington, the center has virtually vanished. According to the political scientists Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal, who have devised a widely used system to measure the ideology of members of Congress, when Obama took office there was no ideological overlap between the two parties. In the House, the most conservative Democrat, Bobby Bright, of Alabama, was farther to the left than the most liberal Republican, Joseph Cao, of Louisiana. The same was true in the Senate, where the most conservative Democrat, Ben Nelson, of Nebraska, was farther to the left than the most liberal Republican, Olympia Snowe, of Maine. According to Poole and Rosenthal’s data, both the House and the Senate are more polarized today than at any time since the eighteen-nineties.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_lizza#ixzz1kJk0nlgZ
Polarization also has affected the two parties differently. The Republican Party has drifted much farther to the right than the Democratic Party has drifted to the left. Jacob Hacker, a professor at Yale, whose 2006 book, “Off Center,” documented this trend, told me, citing Poole and Rosenthal’s data on congressional voting records, that, since 1975, “Senate Republicans moved roughly twice as far to the right as Senate Democrats moved to the left” and “House Republicans moved roughly six times as far to the right as House Democrats moved to the left.” In other words, the story of the past few decades is asymmetric polarization.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_lizza#ixzz1kJkPmwOF
Source: Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy by Bill Clinton
Abstracted from pages 34-35
From 1981 to 2009, the greatest accomplishment of the antigovernment Republicans was not to reduce the size of the Federal government but to stop paying for it. As a result, the national debt more than quadrupled from 1981 through 1992, then doubled again between 2001 and 2009, even before the financial meltdown, which then required more government spending—the financial-system bailout, increased unemployment, food stamp, and Medicaid expenditures, and the stimulus– to put a floor under the downturn.
At the same time, tax revenues declined as unemployment rose, businesses closed, and American spent less.
The PAYGO rule, which had done so much to ensure fiscal discipline, was scrapped, allowing the administration and Congress to enact both big tax cuts and big increases in spending on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan… We did all this on borrowed money, increasingly from overseas…
What did we do with the money? We didn’t invest it in new scientific and technological research, in rebuilding our manufacturing base, in reversing our fall from first to twelfth in the percentage of young adults with college degrees, in creating the millions of jobs that would flow from a serious response to climate change. Instead, we consumed it, in ways that distort our economy today and cloud our children’s tomorrows.
Source: Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy by Bill Clinton
Abstracted from pages 17-18
I believe the only way we can keep the American dream alive for all Americans and continue to be the world’s leading force for freedom and prosperity, peace and security, is to have both a strong, effective private-sector and a strong, effective government that work together to promote an economy of good jobs, rising incomes, increasing exports, and greater energy independence.
All over the world, the most successful nations, including many with lower unemployment rates, less inequality, and, in this decade, even higher college graduation rates than the United States, have both. And they work together, not always agreeing, but moving poured common goals. In other countries, conservatives and liberals also have arguments about taxes, energy policy, bank regulations, and how much government is helping an affordable, but they tend to be less ideological and more rooted in evidence and experience. They focus more on what works.
That’s the focus America
needs. It’s the only way to get back into the future business. In the modern world, leaned too few citizens have the time or opportunity to analyze the larger forces shaping our lives, and the lines between news, advocacy, and entertainment are increasingly blurred, ideological conflicts effectively waged may be good politics, and provide fodder for the nightly news, and columnist, that they won’t get us to a better future.
Our long antigovernment obsession has proved to be remarkably successful politics, but its policy failures have given us an anemic, increasingly unequal economy, with too few jobs and stagnant incomes; that is at a competitive disadvantage compared with other nations, especially in manufacturing and clean energy; and left as a potentially crippling debt burden just as the baby boomers begin to retire.
By contrast, other nations, as well as cities and states within the United States, with a commitment to building networks of cooperation involving the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, are creating economic opportunity and charging into the future with confidence.
My argument here isn’t that Democrats are always right and Republicans always wrong. It’s that by jamming all issues into the antigovernment, antitax, anti regulation straitjacket, we hog-tie ourselves and keep ourselves for making necessary changes no matter how much evidence exists to support them.
The antigovernment paradigm blinds us to possibilities that lie outside its ideological litmus tests and prevents us from creating new networks of cooperation that can restore economic growth, bring economic opportunity to more people and places, and increase our ability to lead the world to a better future.
Source: Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy by Bill Clinton
Abstracted from pages 12-14
We live in the most interdependent age in history. People are increasingly likely to be affected by actions beyond their borders, and their borders are increasingly open to both positive and negative crossings: travelers, immigrants, money, goods, services, information, communication, and culture; disease, trafficking in drugs, weapons, and people, and acts of terrorism and violent crime.
People everywhere face severe challenges, most of which can be grouped into three categories.
· The modern world is too unequal in incomes and in access to jobs, health, and education.
· It is too unstable, as evidenced by the rapid spreading of the financial crisis, economic insecurity, political upheavals, and our shared vulnerability to terrorism.
· And the world’s growth pattern is unsustainable, because the way we produce in use energy and deplete natural resources is causing climate change and other environmental problems.
Because the world is still organized around nations, the decisions national leaders make and citizen support today determine tomorrow’s possibilities. For poor countries, that means building systems that give more people a chance to have decent jobs and send their kids to school. For rich countries, it means reforming systems that once worked well but no longer do, so people can keep moving forward in an increasingly complex and competitive environment.
That’s what America has to do. We have to get back in the future business. Over the last three decades, whenever we’ve given in to the temptation to blame the government for all our problems, we’ve lost our commitment to shared prosperity, balanced growth, financial responsibility, and investment in the future. That’s really what got us into trouble.
Source: Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy by Bill Clinton
Abstracted from pages 27, 28
Contrary to the current antigovernment movement’s claim to represent the intent of the framers [of the U.S. constitution], our founding fathers clearly intended to give us a government both limited and accountable enough to protect our liberties and strong and flexible enough to adapt to the challenge of each new era.
In other words, our constitution was designed by people who work idealistic but not ideological. There’s a big difference. You can have a philosophy that tends to be liberal or conservative but still be open to evidence, experience, and argument. That enables people with honest differences to find practical, principled compromise.
On the other hand, fervent insistence on an ideology makes evidence, experience, and argument irrelevant: if you posess the absolute truth, those who disagree are by definition wrong, and evidence of success or failure is irrelevant. There’s nothing to learn from the experience of other countries. Respectful arguments are a waste of time. compromise is weakness. And if your policies fail, you don’t abandon them; instead, you double down, asserting that they would have worked if only they had been carried it to their logical extreme.
Source: Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy by Bill Clinton
Abstracted from pages 4-6
How do we ensure America’s economic, political, and security leadership in the more competitive, complex, fragmented, and fast-changing world of the 21st century? The 2010 election involved inflated rhetoric and ferocious but often inaccurate attacks that shed more heat than light. The attack proved to be very effective in the election, but I thought it was all wrong.
First, the meltdown happened because banks were overleveraged. In other words, there was not enough government oversight or restraint on excessive leverage.
Second, the meltdown did not become a full-scale depression because the government acted to save the financial system from collapse. Of course, the stimulus didn’t restore the economy to normal levels. It wasn’t designed to. You can’t fill a several-1,000,000,000,000-dollar hole in the economy with $800 billion. The stimulus was designed to put a floor under the collapse and begin the recovery.
Third, according to most economic studies, the stimulus, along with the rescue and restructuring of the auto industry, succeeded in keeping unemployment 1.5 to 2% lower than it would have been without it.
In other words, the crash occurred because there was too little government oversight of and virtually no restraint on risky loans without sufficient capital to back them up; the recession was prevented from becoming a depression because of a government infusion of cash to shore up the banking system; and the downturn hurt fewer people because of the stimulus, which is supplemented wages with a tax cut, saved public jobs, and created jobs through infrastructure projects and incentives to create private-sector jobs, especially in manufacturing.
 I moved to Dayton, a little town of 800 in rural Iowa. The local phone Coop had already installed fiber cable to the premise. The real estate prices are amazingly low – especially if you are willing to do a little work on a classic workman’s Victorian. Iowa is littered with such small, comfortable retirement nests. Drink coffee in the morning with our rugged, aged, native “children of the corn.” Put out a chair on the lawn of your acreage and listen to the August corn grow. No big hyper-bank planted on main street to boycott: everybody at the local bank knows your name… and your business. Please support all the many kids selling stuff for school fundraisers.
By David Satterlee
Published in the Dayton Review, September 28, 2011 – Front page, above the fold, with picture
Community news
Read the entire article at:
http://www.iowanewspapersonline.com/story.asp?sty_ID=5512&lstNewsPaper=90
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MoveOn.org Encourages Progressives to Run for Office
Dear _____,
If you were mayor of _____, what would be the first thing you’d do? Make sure city employees don’t lose their pensions? Support green business startups? Or maybe fight back against cuts to crucial local services?
This isn’t just a hypothetical scenario—it’s exactly what more than 4,000 MoveOn members just like you have been thinking about since taking the first step to run for elective office. And they’re not just running for mayor. They’re exploring running for offices including school board, town council, and state legislature in cities and towns across the country.
If you’ve ever thought, "I’ve got some ideas for doing things differently in _____," or seen a local politician and thought, "If that were me, things would be different," then it’s time to join thousands of other progressives across the country and run for office.
And if you decide to run, you won’t be alone. You’ll be part of a nationwide progressive strategy to take back local offices in 2012 and beyond. To help give you the resources you need to run a competitive campaign, we’ve partnered with the New Organizing Institute to provide you with online training and strategic advice. Trust me—running for office is easier than you think. So what do you say?
Yes, I’d consider running for office. (<– click here)
Back in 2010, tea party candidates, backed by national tea party groups, were elected to hundreds of local offices. That’s exactly what we’re going to do in 2012—but with a wave of candidates who will stand up for the 99% in communities across the country.
If you decide to run, you’ll gain access to the New Organizing Institute’s great online training programs. And to help progressive candidates in 2012, they’ve created a comprehensive set of candidate guides. Here are some examples of what you’ll have access to:
So if you’ve ever wanted to change things in Iowa, or imagined yourself running for office in _____, now’s the time.