I have an iMac computer, and feel really stupid about it. I used at get angry with my PC, as if it were a person. It was slow revving up, and sent me messages every time it did something. “I am backing up your files.” “I am updating your software.” “I am crashing now.”
I bought an iMac. It too is slow and annoying. If it goes to sleep and I wake it up, it snaps to attention! So it appears. But the keyboard doesn’t work. The network is not connected. That takes a couple of minutes. Just like a PC.
Apple has created the illusion of the superior computer. And I bought in. They totally got me with their slick ads and all of the product placement and all of these people who swear by Apple products.
Here’s an interesting post. Progressives and Democrats are aligned in objectives. In this case, we all want to see a strong minimum wage. And yet here we are fighting.
Don Progreba swears by the Democratic Party, and that is why we fight. He gets annoyed with progressives because he assumes we cannot see the objectives. Because we do not support Democrats, he thinks we are the problem. We are smug, he says, intellectuals who are lost in wonkiness and don’t offer practical solutions.
I would like to work with Don in fighting for a just minimum wage. He’s a nice guy, a smart guy, a teacher who is well-read and has depth and knowledge. But Don has laid down a gauntlet: In order for progressives to work with him, we must support the candidates of the Democratic Party. They are slick, like iMacs.
Piece of Mindful 
You’re all a bit too smug for my tastes, smug hipsterish ipad users and educated quick witted debate teachers. Dumb it down a bit for us mouth breathers.
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I see you are holding five cards but I don’t have a clue what they are. But it takes no quick wit or iPad to simply describe the policies of the Obama administration and then see that they are also the policies of Bush even intensified. Why is that difficult?
Enter human psychology. Democrats don’t seem able to see the simple fact above, and so project their own self-image on their leaders. In that state, they are easy to manipulate. But they know this on some level, and so react with vitriol and anger when it is pointed out to them.
It ain’t rocket science.
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Egocentric about covers it. “Others” need not apply. Minor dictators madly jumping around in small herds on pogo sticks. Amusing for a while if you watch from a distance.
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HIPSTER!? thems fightin’ words, Jack!
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I don’t see many reforms in our future. If anything the bribes of the past are becoming impossible to grant. If this is true then we will be ruled more by terror as the need for capitalist democracy becomes a fetter to making profits. As the objective concentration of wealth and poverty progresses, it will become even more difficult to work with in a system that has to openly attack the working class to survive. I am not sure progressives or democrats see this.
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I agree, but also know that in addition to not being addressed, the system cannot be sustained. That doesn’t mean it is going to remedy itself but the cataclysm of 2007 will repeat. Each of those events is more severe than the one before. I don’t believe that history repeats, but lessons of the past must be relearned. Last time it took a horrible war to introduce reforms. Some kind of climate catastrophe serves as well.
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I don’t think Don or I on any level oppose working with you or JC or whoever supports increasing the minimum wage. We just don’t know how you intend to do it. We, and by we I mean Democrats, already raised the minimum wage once, and included provisions that keep it going up periodically. We have stated our method for increasing minimum wage: elect Democrats, the most liberal ones we can hope to elect from any given district. We have demonstrated, five years ago, that it works. We are waiting for y’all to do the same.
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The paltry accomplishments of Democrats pale in the mountain of failures. Remember, your party, when it held the House, the presidency and effectively 60 Senate votes, did not even introduce EFCA.
And I’ll offer my own experience. In 1996 I carried petitions door-to-door to raise and index the state minimum wage. I did this as part of my losing campaign for legislature. No other Democratic candidate did so, and worse, I was advised by party leadership to back off both it and a clean water initiative, as they might interfere with getting elected, which is a good in its own right, I guess. I did not to do so.
So your mantra, that you are the path to progress, offers only an overgrown path seldom used. You have to remember that JFK ( a little), LBJ, FDR and Nixon only did the progressive things they did because they had to, and since the early 70’s the impetus has been to destroy ground-level organizing. To do so, organizers over the years have been absorbed into your party, and there they die. Tell me what happened for Farmer Labor, Rainbow, organized labor, after absorption?
Your purpose, as I see it, is to prevent the rise of a second party.
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We offer accomplishments. The best you have to offer are regrets and if onlys.
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That is so existential! You have no basis for the quantum leap for zero to one, so you merely affirm that one is there and walk away. For what it is worth, the Republican alternative to the minimum wage, the EIC, is ar more effective. The wage installed five years ago is inadequate, was not indexed, and is several dollars below what it was in 1970.
But that is also so Democratic – to offer a few crumbs and call it progress, telling us we should now join the party due to your great accomplishments. I choose not to throw my vote away in that manner.
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