Reply #5: You are exactly right [View All]

[Virgil]

What needs to change and who can do it. I used to live in an area dominated by furniture and textiles in North Carolina. I still live here, it is just that the mills keep closing.

It is one thing to say that you want jobs. Well, Bush wishes everyone had a job too so he could get re-elected. But how is that going to get done without sensible trade agreements. NAFTA was a tool of industry. It was not meant to benefit the common man. It allowed jobs to leave the country to seek their lowest level with no protections of tariffs and maybe even quotas. DK wants to end NAFTA and get out of the WTO and end the free trade stuff that only looks for cheap labor and no tariffs. The first thing the Congress did in 1793 was to adopt a seal. The second thing it did was place tariffs.

I do not care if someone is tall or has corporate whore experience. I do not care where they are from or if they are married or if they played high school football. I want to know what they are going to do.

After the economy, most people seems to be worried about health care. It used to be that one in four people got cancer and now it is one in three. How is a person to make it when he gets cancer and cannot work? The whole sytem is gamed by insurance companies that cherry pick the profitable and charge whatever they want because even if you can pay cash, the system penalizes someone outside of the system that is gamed. DK proposes single-payeruniversal health care. That would sell to an average American and it sure sells me.

The media situation is an abomination of the public air waves and the public good. It is destructive to our democracy, if in fact we are one. DK wants to make media companies with public airwaves furnish time for the political candidates so that we can get past sound-bite marketing. He wants to break up the media companies and that needs to be done in the worst way.

DK wants to end the war on drugs and be pragmatic. Substance abuse is real, but if you want to know the truth the most abused substance in America is sugar. With 5% of the population the land of the free has one in four prisoners in the world. We are not a land of the free, we are the land of pee. It is time to treat substance abuse in its proper context as a health care issue and not a criminal justice issue that leads to a police state and militarization. Who is talking about the failure on the war on drugs?

People are talking a lot of crap and have got to talk issues. The Democratic Party needs an identity besides being representatives of big business that do not have Republican representation. Send out the candidate that will do the most for the common man. He will win. If you send out a candidate that represents the establishment he may win, but what the H will change?

Talk farm subsidies. Talk steel industry. Talk outsourcing. But please talk about some issues and what the Democrats think they can do for the average guy. My real issue is the corruption of the entire system, but who will even want to acknowledge it.

Yesterday, I talked about Congress funding the bill that had its intent on removing the paper trail in voting machines. DK says they all should have paper trails and supports the legislation in the House that has no sponsors in the Senate. Now this does not mean that DK is brilliant as there have always been paper trails in my lifetime. It makes me think that he is at least honest with the problem when supports legislation to correct a no-brainer situation. The BBV is a sign of total corruption. People think there is a mistake that needs correcting. It is they that are wrong. Congress had it the way they wanted it the first time. That is why they do not see the need to change it now.