Two top rated comments to the most viewed article in the NYT by Bob Herbert – When Democracy Weakens.
Further reading:RT Koenig from Memphis TN: “Maybe it’s time the American people took a lesson from the people of Egypt and take to the streets. Maybe it’s time that the poor and middle class working people of America staged their own Day of Rage. Maybe it’s time for a million unemployed workers or the millions who have lost their homes to a recession sparked by corporate greed to march on Wall Street.
Just this week we learn that JPMorgan Chase, one of the banks responsible for the recession and the recipient of millions in bailout money, defrauded thousands of American servicemen and their families. In some cases, the second largest bank in the US illegally foreclosed on U.S. servicemen and their families. If this latest outrage doesn’t spark protests, then perhaps we are no longer capable of outrage.
A Day of Rage cannot overlook Washington, where as Herbert has noted so eloquently, neither party is representing the interests of the poor, the unemployed and the underemployed. Americans fortunate enough to still have jobs need to stand together in protest lest they be next.
It’s time to get off the couch and take to the streets. As the people of Egypt have shown us, even the powerful cannot afford to ignore millions united for change, freedom and fairness.”
Mel Presley, Roskilde, Denmark: “There are only two factions that stand in the way of a second American revolution, a true political revolt to end rule by the corporate dollar and restore democracy.
One is partisan cheerleaders for the Republican political cause.
The other is partisan cheerleaders for the Democrat political cause.
The Times’ readership seems to divide itself about 10 percent to 90 percent, respectively, in favor of these two opposing camps. There’s virtually nobody at all with enough common sense to see that we’ll never find our way out of the woods, and away from plutocracy, until we all reject BOTH.
Street protests won’t work in America as they have in Cairo, because we face a far more entrenched enemy than the Egyptians. But there’s one thing that would. We need to form a temporary, single party of national unity with the sole purpose of having it write a Constitutional amendment to mandate modern, multiparty voting and an end to private funding of campaigns. If we all elect its candidates, and boycott all those of our fraudlent two-party system, we’ll have the mother and father of confrontations on our hands, and if the sitting powers attempt to annul the election results, we might even start a civil war. But I can’t see any other way to restore rule by the people – which is what democracy is supposed to be in the first place.”
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