You Wonder why Haiti is so Poor? Consider that Jamaica and the Dominican Republic have Received About 22 Times the Foreign Investment that Haiti has Received

QUOTE: "...even though Obama himself is not a rightwing politician."

Laugh out loud.

In case anyone doesn't know, Haiti has not, in the last 100 years anyway, had anything other than a right wing, corrupt government. Aristide never got anything significant passed into law before he was deposed (twice!) so that would not really count, would it? Whereas the countries in the region that have not been so relentlessly right wing are far more prosperous than Haiti. Both Jamaica and the Dominican Republic have attracted more than 22 times the foreign direct investment that Haiti has.

To see a detailed spreadsheet showing international investment by country, click here.

The above was in response to this article at Common Dreams.
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The Left-Right Paradigm: how it can go Away and What Often Happens if it does go Away

GUEST COMMENTARY

guerrillaG February 3rd, 2010 4:26 pm
"... Obama himself is not a rightwing politician." (Yes, I see how many people already quoted this, and that is quite encouraging to see actually.)

" ... Obama himself is not a rightwing politician."

Realize this - There is NO difference in American politics, not for the people in charge anyway. Sure, maybe the people on the ground get fooled by this party bickering stuff, but those in charge, the President, the Federal Reserve, they do not play party politics, that is all for show, to confuse and divide the people on the ground.

I am not saying, like say Common Dreams socialists or like Bill O'Reilly fans that there is no difference between Left and Right. Sure there are, even in politics to some degree, BUT regardless of the slight differences the main goal from BOTH parties the Democrats and the Republicans, Socialists or Fascists, is CONTROL. They BOTH want to tell you how to run your life, what insurance to buy, what to think etc. etc. etc.; they BOTH want to control things. They just might have slightly differing ways of getting that control.

Saying that Obama himself is not a rightwing politician is a naive way of looking at American politics. It is believing the smoke and mirrors game, that because you get to cast a vote, that you are actually making a decision.

I am sure that everyone here that voted for OBOMBer (not me) thought they were voting for a guy of PEACE (real Peace, not some obviously meaningless prize) and they thought they were voting for CHANGE for the Better and not just a change of the face of the power of the status quo. But unless you are totally blind you have awoken to the fact that you were Bamboozled, and I hope you understand that this whole system is a Bamboozle. I don't care if you are a Dem or a Repub, both the parties are corrupt.

This is why the Real, the honest people of these parties, Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, they get no love from the system: because the game is fixed! Its actually broken, but thats why or how it is so easily fixed.

I give a hell of a lot more credit to the comment posters here on Common Dreams than I do to the writers of the articles. At least it seems the comment posters are mostly awake to the fact that OBOMBER is a stinking LIAR, but most if not all the writers of the articles seem to be apologists, naive or maybe they are controlled by the parties and are here to keep the divide alive, to keep the wedge between the so-called left and right, to blame everything on the Republicans and not look at the real problems, the System itself, the Federal Reserve, the printing of DEBT money out of nothing, the perpetual ENDLESS WARS, the Military Industrial Complex, the Government subsidies of the Too BIG To Fail system, the strangle hold of the poor via the supposedly to help the people entitlement programs, the corporate welfare programs in the names of Bailouts and Stimulus packages, and the list goes on and on.

The system is rigged from the inside. The left/right paradigm is used to divide people like classism and racism and all the others.

Until this is understood and corrected, the problems will only continue.

UNITY PROGRESS RESPONDING
The reason that the left-right paradigm is largely meaningless in the US as you say is that the US system has collapsed to the point where that paradigm is beside the point. It's all about survival now, particularly of course for elites. Nuanced and sophisticated left-right discussions are not relevant in a society as damaged as the US one is.

If you want to get perfectionist and technical, you can argue that the left-right paradigm is not yet completely irrelevant in the US and that the economic and political systems are not yet completely collapsed, but all of those things are heavily damaged and hanging by a thread.

In Germany between the two major World Wars, Hitler and the Fascists came to power precisely because that society was damaged to the point where the left-right paradigm became irrelevant. When the left-right paradigm goes away, dictatorship can and very often does follow.

Today though, in many, many other countries, including almost all of the well off ones, the left-right paradigm is still very much alive and well. Needless to say, all truly well off countries feature parties of the left who actually win at least some national-level elections. Also, it should be noted that whether a left-right paradigm exists or not in a nation's political system is one of many tests to determine whether that country is effectively a third world country or not.

For the record, as the US fell apart since 1980, the Republican party moved from right to far right and the Democratic party moved from center or more precisely center right to plain old right. Now they are stuck where they are because the system has collapsed to the point where the elites can't make any big changes or they will be thrown into unemployment and as we all know, unemployment can be basically permanent now and the elites definitely don't want to be permanently unemployed.

In other words, you need a decently functioning economy, a decently functioning political system, and overall a decently functioning society to have a left right paradigm operating. The US has collapsed to the point where you can say it does not have those prerequisites. The US is mostly about looting nowadays, which in non-collapsed countries both the right and the left will oppose and, more importantly, will prevent.

The above was in response to this article at Common Dreams.
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2010: Two Parties of the Right Fighting it Out and you have no dog in that Fight

One of the many things Rich doesn't understand is that Democrats in 2010 are way to the right of Democrats of the 1960's. So trying to compare Lyndon Johnson to Harry Reid is comparing apples and oranges. (Please save yourself some typing, I am aware that Lyndon Johnson did some right wing things in his day, but the point is that he was no where near as right wing as are most of the Democrats of 2010.)

When you see the Democrats and Republicans sparring these days, you are looking at two right of center parties fighting it out, nothing more and nothing less. This is why you can forget about, for example, real action for real job creation. All right wing parties are opposed to direct forms of government action for job creation. Whereas Lyndon Johnson was in favor of some direct government job creation.

It should also be noted in this very quick posting that most third world countries are more or less confined to right wing parties for their rosters of parties that can actually win national elections. So this is another one of those little signs that the US has crossed over into third world status.

The above was in response to this article at Common Dreams.
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I'll Take any of the Three Popular Canadian Parties Over Either of the two American Parties

There is no need to look at Europe, actually. You can just look at Canada to see how far into right wing loony land the US has gone. All three Canadian political parties are left of both US parties. That is, all three Canadian parties are more pro-worker and pro-common man than both of the US parties.

Just to name a few examples of differences, all three Canadian parties support national health care, public ownership of many utilities, and true public education. All of these things are lost or in the final stages of being lost in the US.

The US starting about 1980 went off the deep end, pure and simple, and now people who can't get a job or who don't have a house are paying the price. And they will continue to pay the price in most cases for the rest of their lives. Through such things as credit ratings, elites are able to transfer responsibility for their failures onto ordinary people.

Both US parties are dragging the country down the drain now. We can only hope, especially if progressives and perhaps libertarian conservatives continue to stubbornly resist unifying into a new party, that if the system completely collapses, that BOTH the Republican and the Democratic parties go into the dustbin of history. At that point, there would be a clean slate for a fresh start.

The above was in response to this article at Common Dreams.
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Waiting for or at Least Dreaming About Political Evolution in the USA

GUEST COMMENTARY

Trylon February 1st, 2010 8:49 am
Well, in the POV of a dual citizen the State of the Union is not Comatose, it is Deceased. The United States has ceased to be governable under the form of government it created in the Constitution. This form envisioned a "loyal opposition", not over-my-dead-body, better-dead-than-liberal/conservative, lock and load obstructionism. That experiment has failed. It is a "late parrot", as John Cleese would say.

We are in a political prison because of imprinting upon a two party system, an imprinting that has no more validity than the stupid refusal of Americans to use two dollar bills. Dual citizenship has exposed me, for 30 years, to the system of parliamentary democracy. It works. Citizens vote for the party that best expresses their view of the correct relationship between the individual and the state. Having done so, they entrust that party to choose their leader. What could save this country is the intelligence to abandon the Presidency. Wake up. State of the Union events show that our Presidents are really evaluated as good or bad kings. We get really ticked off by lousy kingliness.

If the American people get paddles on the government chest fast enough there could be a chance. The shock that is needed is the total dissolution of both the Democratic and Republican political parties, and their replacement with the full range of political viewpoints. If we don't have the sense to do this, we will turn into lurching Zombies. Not a few citizens of other countries feel that's what we already are.

UNITY PROGRESS
Exactly true, the best countries in the world have moved beyond domination by kings and presidents and by those few that fund them and militarily support them. Obama apparently knows all too well that it is his funders and not his voters that support him the most.

Those who have not moved on from presidents and kings are mostly your third world countries and countries that are borderline third world. How ironic, for example, that the results of the American Revolution have been more or less turned upside down. Another big irony is the big role that the Americans had in setting up the Japanese and German governments after World War 2. These governments have over the years proven to be much superior to the American one in the age of huge piles of money and globalism.

The above was in response to this article at Common Dreams.

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