That’s a question Nader asked on DemocracyNow the other night.

But first, a mea culpa from me to any staff -or themselves if they read the FDL montage- of Rep. Kucinich or Senator Sanders for the disparaging remarks I made in a post after Rep.Kucinich indicated he would vote yes.

I watched the interview of Kucinich and Nader last night and I’ve now read FFlambeau’s diary critiquing Kucinich. There’s a saying "if you want to run with the big dogs, be prepared to lift your leg high".
Simply stated, neither Sanders nor Kucinich have "legs" long enough to lift high. Sanders is constrained by the corrupt institute called the Senate, a millionaires club where longevity accounts for more than the capacity for critical reasoning. And Kucinich would have been relegated to a nonentity by the House leadership (Pelosi,and in particular Hoyer-an agent of a foreign power if there ever was one-, et al) And lost his chairmanship (Kucinich is the chairman of the Domestic Policy Subcommittee of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee. He is also a member of the Education and Labor Committee. ) AND would have been targeted by the AFL-CIO, who have already committed to targeting lawmakers who vote no on Obama’s healthcare bill.

As towards the ‘failed Presidency’ meme, AFAIC, it already IS a ‘failed Presidency’. Obama has taken the hopes of a nation and pissed on them as well as failing to take advantage of the political gravitas of his election based on the idea of change. Obama is a corporate whore- nothing more- (well demonstrated by "I tested and probed and talked to everybody, all the way down the chain of leadership, to see if there’s any way, and frankly, it’s mystifying, except to say that they’re keeping a for-profit system intact. There’s no air in here to try to find a way to get to a not-for-profit system (including the ERISA waiver so States wouldn’t have to deal with lawsuits from the insurance companies when they enact single payer for their States) and said so during his campaign:
"REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: I think that right after the swearing in of President Obama, there was a climate for transformational change. I think it’s still there. And I think the President could really be instrumental in bringing about just about any kind of change that he wants. For whatever reason, he decided to carefully construct a plan that would admit no chance for any real challenge to the market structure of private, for-profit insurance companies. And, you know, and he’s worked very tightly within that system. That’s a choice that he made. And during the campaign, you know, he made it very clear that he wasn’t for single payer. He made it very clear that he was looking at reforms within the context of the for-profit system. I mean, that’s a choice that he made. And, you know, it’s not the choice that I would have made, but he’s the president. And if his presidency is on the line, he made the choice for that. But at the same time, we have to look at the consequences of what happens if it fails."

Which leads to what I have been advocating for awhile now; kill the bill, make sure that Obama recognizes that the defeat is due to his insistence in supporting the idea of campaign contributions over the promotion of the general welfare for the populace(a Constitutional imperative), and give him the chance that Kucinich seems to think "is still there".

Back to the subject line. Well, you have 64.8% of the workforce working in Feb 2010 and those people-for the most part- aren’t angry but self interested consumers. There are ‘angry’ people out there that encompass all aspects of this society but are fragmented into ‘tea partiers’,'Progressives’(not the Congress critter type),’conservatives’,'liberals’,etc.

But all the anger is dissipated and fragmented to the point of being non-coherent. And the corporate mass media does nothing to inform the public. So what to do?

I don’t know. I do know that until the whole mindset of permanently being at war is ended, it will be a hard and arduous journey. Anyone else recognize that there has not been a ‘war on xxxx’ that has been successful since the end of WWII? And that if there is not truly meaningful reform of the financial services industry, the Democrats will be truly burnt toast.

What the participants of the FDL community can do is withhold any monetary support from anyone who considers their party allegiance higher than their movement allegiance. And if Jane would put a list together of ‘veal pen’ persons and organizations, we could do withhold any monetary support from them and educate others about the veal pen(ners) lack of intellectual honesty and willingness to have the U.S. run by corporations. We can repeatedly tell the DSCC and DCCC and the DLC,etc. that NO monies will be forthcoming until they put the peoples business above their own. We can dialogue with those we have disagreements with on some basic issues. Above all, we can keep fighting for that which we know to be the better solutions to the nations problems.

I mean,what does it say about our nation’s ‘leadership’ when they will not sacrifice their political lives while asking the populace to surrender their very existence for wars that do nothing to enhance our security or our national interests and to corporate interests so that campaign contributions keep flowing to those ‘leaders’?

And if anyone hasn’t seen/read the DemocracyNow interviews with Kucinich and Nader, please do so.

And if you think you can effectively rebut Nader, please do that in a diary.