btw, the stripped out budget is still not passed… if foiling quorum for a budget bill was a ‘bargaining chip’ before mar11, why isn’t foiling forum for a budget bill not still a ‘bargaining chip’?

Igor: So if North Korea is state capitalism, and South Korea is real capitalism…what does that make China? If they’re “real” capitalism, and of course “real” capitalism always engenders the freest societies possible…would you move there? I know I wouldn’t. But if they’re “state” capitalism, with its inevitable market failure, pray tell me: Why are they eating our economic lunch?

But in all the decades I’ve been in Madison, I have never seen anything like this. Even the Vietnam War protests (wasn’t here, but my sister was) were as nothing in comparison — violent, confrontational, and in the end (mostly) counterproductive, to say nothing of the lives lost when those murdering idiots bombed Sterling Hall.

To be on the Square in the past three weeks is to see something genuinely new — it’s the same “we won’t take it anymore” frustration that drove the Tea Partiers, but this time its aim is better, and the numbers are staggering. I was having lunch with my wife on State Street yesterday when we noticed that the street was suddenly full, curb-to-curb, for blocks.

“Out-of-state agitators”? Union members?

No. It was hundreds and hundreds of high school students, marching up to the Square. And that was just the contingent from Madison West, East High came in from the other side!

http://rickwayne.zenfolio.com/p438724726/h46c6aff#h46c6aff

Now, the iPod generation is famous for nothing if not its self-centered apathy. From what I’ve seen in the past three weeks, that is a complete canard, and that’s where my optimism comes from. Those kids are going to remember this. They were when history was made. Oh sure, some of them will bail, and many of them doubtless just thought this was more fun than classes. But if even one in a hundred stays engaged, we are already talking a serious movement here. Likewise the adults, this has galvanized them like nothing I’ve ever seen. Everybody I talked to on the Square ends their conversations with “And VOTE!” Going by my circle of friends, neighbors, and coworkers, I’d have to say they are directly involved and organized in get-out-the-vote efforts to a degree that’s strikingly novel, even for such a do-gooder bunch of volunteer-happy busybodies.

We have no illusions about what we’re up against, of course, in a post-Citizens-United world. And the commercials have been running nonstop. But a movement that can put 100,000 people in the street, nonviolently, and do it over an over, is the worst nightmare of the Karl Rove strategists of the world.

And so far, at least, it hasn’t been co-opted by any of the existing power structures, the way the Tea Partiers got so slickly folded into the GOP. Could still happen, of course, and it’s probably inevitable to some degree. (Certainly isn’t hurting the unions much!) Helps that, by and large, it’s an educated crowd.

I’m telling ya, this thing has legs. Amazingly, the bill’s passage didn’t drive people down, it re-energized them. I hate the tired use of war metaphor for every form of human endeavor, but Roosevelt’s words after Pearl Harbor keep coming back to me: “[They] have fired the first shot; we shall fire the last one.”

Can you undo that? I hope so. I admire your optimism.

I should mention, though, that none of this would have happened if the numbers and enthusiasm we see now was there in November. Can we make sure that next couple/few elections have outcomes that actually represent the state?

A recall would be spectacular.

So you’re telling me that now we have:
o Public financing of elections, with a ban on corporate political ads
o A clampdown on runaway DoD spending, with overseas bases closed and the war in Afghanistan terminated
o Single-payer health care
o Income and inheritance taxes as they were under Eisenhower
o Massive investment in education instead of in weapons
o The pernicious “corporations are persons” theory thrown into the wake of history, deservedly drowning
o An economy where the bottom 50% of Americans own, oh, maybe 20% of the wealth, and a CEO makes 30 or 40 times what a worker does, instead of 350
o Real First Amendment rights, where U.S. congressman don’t hold hearings demonizing your religion

How did I miss the headlines? Because if the left won, boyo, the country would look a lot different. Are you telling me that we’re not sufficiently in thrall to Wall Street and the General Dynamics and Boeings of the world? That what we really need is to roll over for them more, and it’ll all be better?

You see, Allah wanted to zap Washington at the same time, and they both missed the target.