I've reached a disappointing conclusion about DU in the last few weeks. [View All]

[Exiled in America]

First, this is not intended to be flame bait. Because I don't want it to be flame bait I'm going to attempt to choose my words extremely carefully. That might cause my post to be a little long, but I'll try to avoid that.

Second, you should know I've been around DU in some fashion for I think about four years, perhaps more. No I'm not a ban jumper or person guilty of some other insidious behavior. The administrators of the site know my entire history and have used gracious and more-than-fair discretion in their continuing tolerance of little ol' me.

I mention that I've been around for years because my current post count does not reflect that. I say a lot less and read a lot more than I used to in the old days. Lately though, I've found that when I do make posts my tone is increasingly more frustrated and shrill. This is why that is:

I am extremely frustrated by the content of the biggest discussion forums hosted on DU. And quite frankly I'm a little embarrassed to think that these discussions would be any kind of cross section of the people in American who make up the Democratic Party. Over the last weeks and months, I've endured huge, colossal flame war threads about whether its ok for people to breast feed in public, whether all cars should require breathalizer tests to start, whether human beings have an intrinsic right to kill animals, whether parents are ok in spanking their kids, how bad of a racist is michael richards, and on and on.

Now, I understand that in some of these instances, the issues themselves have importance - but not comparative importance to issues absolutely critical to any hope of future social or economic justice or equality in America, which I almost never see as threads while these other topics dominate the boards.

When it isn't some of these what I'm not ashamed to label "lesser" topics dominating the boards, it is an almost solid wall of 2008 gossip and infighting. Virtually none of the posts about candidates for 2008 do anything which will affect the outcome in 2008 in anyway. Virtually none of them are based on any solid facts or evidence that won't be completely changed by the landscape as it gets close to an actual election cycle. It is almost purely gossip and people with passionate feelings about one candidate trying to "beat" the passionate defenders of another candidate.

Virtually none of the threads about 2008 candidates (especially the 15 billionth "who would you like to see run in '08" poll thread) have any redeeming value in my opinion. And where we are, after winning control of the house and the senate and it still feels like we are utterly unable to focus a majority of our attention on the issues that most critically matter to the future of this country.

I cannot believe that this democratic underground cannot find a way possible to have significant thread discussion devoted to emphasis on human needs and what human needs priorities should take precedence in a democratic congress.

Raising the minimum wage and indexing it is critical to the future of this country. So is rolling back tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy and (in particular) the ludicrous tax breaks afforded to US-based corporations. How many of you knew (and my source on this is a Government Accounting Office and IRS report) that in 2004 sixty-one percent of US-based corporations paid ZERO taxes? And attacking this colossal inequity that is catastrophically hurting the working class somehow isn't a regularly occurring topic on the main forums DU? What in God's name does that say about us?

Adequate funding for social services is equally as critical, and the situation currently is pretty dire. Some of the most serious historical harms to this country have come in the form of the exploitation of labor and the elimination of strong labor protections in favor of a state of corporate welfare. And please listen to this opinion: it is the unchecked, unbridled rise of corporations that have transformed America into an Oligarchical Corporatocracy that are the ROOT behind the war and violence on the GOP agenda. It is the root behind the notion of preemptive empire-building. And how many threads are devoted to discussing it, or researching it, or talking about the best ways for the people to fight it, or how to develop direct action to counter it? Let's just say in between all the other fluffy threads, its hard to find a lot.

You know the one force destroying more of the world faster than our agressive and violent forieng policy? It's the unexamined and largely unopposed doctrine of "Globalization" in the form of neo-liberalism as an economic philosophy and Corporatocracy as the benefactors. The IMF, World Bank function like the mob, and rape developing countries into the ground and insure that they will never - ever - be able to pay their way out of debt while constantly demanding more and more of their basic infrastructure, goods, and very life blood of their nations be privatized to western-european businesses for export and sale for profit they will never see.

There is next to nothing on DU about any of that, or how our government actively, aggressively pushes that agenda, nor how our own Corporatocracy at home fuels the decimation of developing countries around the globe, thus creating much of their own violence and devastation. We never talk about that.

Education isn't even a national priority right now, but I sure wish we here at DU were committed to making it one, and I wish that the topics and threads in the major forums would reflect that more often it reflected threads about whether or not cows were people to. Health Care has taken a back seat to everything else, even though health care in America is an absolute embarrassment and disgrace and millions of people and their families still cannot get access to the adequate health care they need in what is supposedly the richest and most powerful country in the history of the world. But there are no threads talking about what organizations are moving to change this, or what people are speaking out about it, or what the best ideas should be, or what kinds of opportunities there are to get involved in these fights.

- Labor rights (including wage, protections, conditions, and regulation of industry)
- Tackling the Corporate Oligarchy which has turned our country into a militant imperalistic hegemony machine instead of the beautiful ideal on which this country was founded
- Combating an unjust globalization model
- Putting as much emphasis on Education as we do on Defense
- Reasserting the need for universal health care options so that no one will ever be without adequate medical coverage

Every single one of these issues takes precedence over the bulk of what gets posted on DU every single day. And I don't just think we should "talk" philosophically about these issues more than we do, though I do think that. I think we should also be posting breaking news coming out of the organizations that are actively working hard to deal with these issues. Organizations like the Coalition on Human Needs, or the Global Exchange, PROCLAD or Corporation Watch - the list goes on and on.

What I'm complaining about it is an emphasis or focus that seems utterly ridiculous to me considering the number of serious and absolutely critical issues there are to deal with right now. And it pains me quite a bit that I can't see at least as many topics and posts devoted to these issues as I can about whether a guy should be allowed to smoke inside his own single person apartment or not.

That's really hard for me to take. So, I'll try to do my part. I have a lot of cool news and information on a lot of these fronts thanks to the organizations I am a part of, and I intended to start posting them a lot more frequently. Usually what happens when I do that is they immediately fall right off the first page, because no one cares about them as much as they care about the next crazy thing Michael Richard's said, but oh well...