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Herk, we agree that the risk of embarking on either or our proposals is less than the risk of current US foreign and military policy.

willravel, can you post how what you described wanting to do in response to the pressing issues of these times, differs from what pan has been posting about for a long time now? You sound, as pan sounds.... centrist, which is the status quo, more of the same. I see radical departure away from the center, which is away from the right, or nothing changes. We need a populist militancy, not seen since the 1930's through the '60's.

The eroding of the US and world economy will bring it about. It will be angry, loud, and probably violent. If I'm correct, as we've experienced here, it won't run it's course via calm discussion. We don't experience calm discussion here, we have "moderated" discussion. Keeping cool heads, being the "adults" acting "reasonably" by "keeping impeachment off the table", for example....what has that achieved, besides turning the vetoless president, into the president who vetoes every bill that reaches him?

Unrest is described as unrest, for a reason. It disturbs, it gets attention, it influences shifts in policy and power. When Huey P. Long started making noise, the poor school children had no books, and there were only 300 miles of paved roads in Louisiana, and just one bridge crossing the Mississippi river. A "mass movement" is a populist movement. They are the only ones witht the sheer numbers to bring one about. They impose change by political leverage. The centrists have already embraced an opinion, a way of doing things or not doing them.

Huey Long drew on the support of the people who had been uninvolved, were not aware that they could be part of a movement that could make a difference. Long did not make speeches about "getting along" with the dominant opposition, and the corporations that backed it. He organized his movement, and he used it to impose change on the oppostion. It was confrontational all of the way, and his constituency kept gaining as Long's political power grew from their support.

No state has ever experienced the publics works gains that happened in Louisiana between 1928 and the last 1930's. The money to do it all did not come from Long's supporters. It came from the people and the corporations who opposed him. After he died, they got to write the history, but the people got to ride on the newly paved roads, newly bulit bridges, and were treated in the newly built hospitals and schooled with the books he forced corporations to pay for. He didn't do it all by being nice, reasonable, or compromising.

This is the dirty little secret that the establishment has spent 70 years trying to remove from our political psyche. Huey Long pressured Roosevelt into reforms like Social Security. Long was killed in Sept., 1935. Who knows how much more Long could have pressured Roosevelt into doing to stave off Long's competition in the 1936 presidential race.