Stephan: I was just starting to write this essay, when I found someone had already done it. This is another person's view of the Great Schism Trend, and I agree with almost everything Reich says. My only disagreement is that he does not take into consideration the migrations climate change is going to create, nor does he see that the quality of life in Blue value states will become so much better than life in the Red Value states that the best and the brightest in the Red states will move to the Blue states, and the Red States will become like Mississippi, third world countries. But this is just the first layer.
Beneath that what this is telling us is that when one party simply chooses not to govern, even seems to lose the skill, the Federal government ceases to function and the ripples that go out from that rot the country from the core out. And that takes us to the deepest level: In the end our situtation is also a commentary on how democracies die because the citizens vote in corrupt nonentities.
About a week ago I set up a web page called the Power of Ten. I sent out an announcement about it to over 10,000 people, asking them to take this pledge:
The Power of Ten Pledge
I pledge that I will vote in the 2014 election.
Within the next two weeks I will ask 10 people to pledge that they will do the same.
I will tell them I am making my choices for that which is compassionate and life-affirming, and I will ask them to join me.
I will ask them to commit to make this pledge to 10 people, asking them to carry the process on so that it can spread through the matrix.
That's all that is required. Between now and the 2014 election the expression of this shared intention on behalf of national wellness, if passed from hand to hand could change the outcome of the election to one oriented towards national wellness.
I am quite serious about this, and I make the commitment to you. Will you join me? This is doable.
There was nothing about party politics, or partisanship. It cost nothing, and it required no more than the basic citizen duty. So far of those 10,000 only 76 have made this simple pledge.
We have no one to blame but ourselves for what we are becoming.
Conservative Republicans in our nation’s capital have managed to accomplish something they only dreamed of when Tea Partiers streamed into Congress at the start of 2011: They’ve basically shut Congress down. Their refusal to compromise is working just as they hoped: No jobs agenda. No budget. No grand bargain on the deficit. No background checks on guns. Nothing on climate change. No tax reform. No hike in the minimum wage. Nothing so far on immigration reform.
It’s as if an entire branch of the federal government – the branch that’s supposed to deal directly with the nation’s problems, not just execute the law or interpret the law but make the law – has gone out of business, leaving behind only a so-called ‘sequester’ that’s cutting deeper and deeper into education, infrastructure, programs for the nation’s poor, and national defense.
The window of opportunity for the President to get anything done is closing rapidly. Even in less partisan times, new initiatives rarely occur after the first year of a second term, when a president inexorably slides toward lame duck status.
But the nation’s work doesn’t stop even if Washington does. By default, more and more of it is shifting to the states, which […]
