This has already been said many times before, but bears repeating. Most of those Confederate soldiers came from very modest backgrounds and held no slaves. In other words, they had no skin in the evil game. They simply died senselessly defending wealthy out of control plantation owners. Is it really any different now? I think not. Look at the all of the people who voted Kochpublican in 2016.

Even with the modern day clarity of this subject, right and wrong being crystal clear, we still have KKK rallies in Jefferson's hometown with a white boy domestic terrorist using his car as a weapon.

Bannon is behind the bigotry.....he easily programs numbnuts like Trump, and I'm sure Kelly is drinking the same Kool aid.

He never attended the Navel Academy, where he might have learned about military history.

Once again, most of our Republicans in the Senate (with the Help of Mike Pence) demonstrated that they "have no god but money" (for themselves and their financial sponsors) at the expense of everyone else.

In defense of her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, (1963), Hannah Arendt wrote, “When, many years ago, I described the totalitarian system and analyzed the totalitarian mentality, it was always a ‘type,’ rather than individuals, I had to deal with, and if you look at the system as a whole, every individual person becomes indeed ‘a cog small or big,’ in the machinery of terror."

The individual actors are only playing their parts in a larger story that must be told. But why must evil always do its dirty deed before it can be detected? And why must the audience always sit passively by, waiting to be entertained?

"The more things change, the more they stay the same." -- Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr

Michio Kaku, the renowned theoretical physicist and futurist, published a definitive work in 2011 about the possibilities of humankind achievement: Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100.

Unfortunately, his positive vision of human evolution requires an enlightened society that has reversed the deleterious effects of endless war, extreme wealth disparity, and the delusional, very destructive religious, political, and economic ideologies of today. Left unchecked, overt fascism, religious intolerance, xenophobia, nationalism, and our over-reliance on fossil fuels all condemn us to a very different future -- the stuff of which nightmares are made.

If you want to see the future, look no further than the present -- a continually collapsing singularity that determines everything afterward, the consequences of our actions. Right now that singularity is Trump and the Republican Party. Raise your hand if you are inspired ...and explain why.

I listen to podcasts. The call waiting sounds have been really bad when you are talking to a call in. The beep noise that is quite loud.

Why does everyone keep insisting on maintaining an old broken down 240 year old system. Can't anyone recognize that Republicans are setting the agenda, the Dems stupidly follow in opposition, completely neglecting their own narratives and ultra progressive ideas, even ignoring new progressive systems like The 7C Constitution, that contains all the progressive platform issues and 400 more human rights issues nobody addresses. Progressives have fallen down on the job.

Don't settle for $15/hr wages, we need $50/hr. We need 100% tax on all profits, put in a Communal Fund, for budgets, and its equal distribution to everyone equally, instead of going only to the rich. We need to abolish income tax. The top 500 richest need to be taxed at 90%. We need a universal basic income of $100,000/ yr worldwide. We need to abolish punishment, and jails, because they are the slave labor of today, andt punishment has never solved anything for 3500 years. It's a barbaric fear based system that we need to stop. We need to do as Portugal, to fix our crime and security issues. We need to abolish police and criminal judicial systems for non violent mercy based solutions, because punishment creates the mentality of war and violence in the streets of impoverished. We need to guarantee free food and housing to all as a human right that should never be abridged. We are suffering over 2 million homeless people in America alone, not including the rest of the world. All these empty homes need to be filled, but the rich banksters keep them as their spoils of theft. Abolish property taxes, and evictions.

This is why we need The 7C Constitution Based on Love & Altruism. DL@ bit.ly/7C31PDF & fix this problem for real. Thom, I urge you to please read this constitition.I know you have the million click/DL or you will not air it, policy, But get off your ass and address this. We need a new system for the real people. Thom, you live in a bubble too, and please take this criticism into your heart, because you are losing people, as you don't address real progressive issues. We are all hurting, but you keep flinging your old broken system at us with your books based on this. You are not innovative rehashing old presidents and economists. We can't think like that anymore. You don't change, so you get booted, and get stuck. We are moving on to a new system like The 7C Constitution. Sorry, but you got stale.

It is truly amazing that Republican voters can't even remember what it was like 8 years ago after the last round of Reaganomics brought the nation to the brink of total collapse.

The sole premise of Republican economics is: make the rich richer and everything will magically take care of itself. That is the only program that they believe in no matter that it always ends in absolute disaster, over and over again.

The clearest sign that we are becoming a third world country is that a large segment of the US population prefer the idea of having a dictator do their thinking for them. They don't care that Trump wasn't really elected by the people, but was put in office by an archaic oxymoron known as the Electoral College. In fact, Electoral College delegates voting for the most unfit, unqualified, untruthful, immoral, corrupt person to ever run for the presidency, is the ultimate proof of the failure of the Electoral College concept. When it was called upon to do its duty to insure that no dangerously unqualified candidate was somehow placed into the White House, it could not have failed more miserably.

Bit of subject change: I did have to laugh at Trump calling Papadopolus "a known liar." Now there is a classic example of the pot calling the kettle black if there ever was one. Also had to laugh at Papadopolus being called "just a coffee boy." So what the hell was he arrested for, getting the coffee order wrong. A case of felony coffee error. Be careful not to make a mistake at Starbucks. You'll be hauled in before the Grand Jury.

Reaganomics: The biggest economic lie ever told!

Wall Street is counting on its Goldman Sachs swamp monster insiders to get the job done, they better, because tax cuts for the Fascists have already been baked into the runaway market inflation.

If you don't think corpse crooks are cooking the books right now to fuel the inflated market, you're being extremely naive. Remember, most CEO compenation is in the form of stock.

Insiders are sounding the alarm that Wall Street crime is currently off the hook crazy. Banksters are enjoying a false sense of impunity while making billions with the current fraud friendly government....no one is watching. To make matters worse, experts indicate that global markets are feeding off our false lead.

The disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street has never been greater. People are hurting, they can't afford health insurance, let alone mortgages, and car payments...look up the stats. Most are living paycheck to paycheck buried in hopeless debt, again look up the stats.

It's all just one giant house of cards, and those in charge are not going to know how to fix it after they break it.

We're headed for an unmitigated economic disaster....third world stuff. In my opinion, even war for profit won't save us this time.

#22 - Dianrenolds

Because education is OWNED

It should be a part of "the commons"

For the benefit long term of participants and civil society in general

Hoping that is not a "leftie" thingy

It is certainly correct to criticize the trickle-down economic policies generally embraced by self-described conservatives. What they have done their best to conserve is privilege and advantage under the laws determining how government at all levels raises revenue.

There is an optimum amount of revenue to be raised by government. The sources of this revenue are what are called "rents" in economics. A rent is an income stream generated by a combination of (1) locational advantage; and (2) the aggregate public investment in infrastructure and other amenities. By one recent estimate rents account for about one-third of GDP. For local governments the primary source of rent-derived revenue is land. Every parcel or tract of land has some potential annual rental value which ought to be collected to pay for public goods and services. It is theoretically possible that if this policy was fully implemented, local governments would become the source of revenue sharing to county, state and even the federal govenment. There are also land-like assets yielding rents: the broadcast spectrum; the paths traveled by satelites around the globe; rights of way across public lands granted to railways; licenses to exploit the sea bottoms or extract fish from waters; and even take-off and landing slots at airports (which have a greater or lesser value based on the day of the week and time of day). New solar and wind technologies have dramatically increased the rents associated with some locations where these technologies have widespread application.

At the same time, we need to lift the burden of taxation from assets and activities that impose what are referred to as "deadweight losses" on economic outputs. It makes no real sense to tax what we construct, our buildings, our machinery and our technologies. These are capital goods the production of which is needed and should be encouraged.

There are frequent calls for some sort of "value added tax" imposed on the sale of goods. This form of taxation is also counterproductive, a cause of deadweight loss.

What we ought to tax is unearned income, such as the gains on the sale of financial instruments and land. Such gains are conveniently labeled "capital gains" but are not. There is in the real world no such thing as a capital gain. Actual capital goods depreciate over time and lose value (even when continously maintained).

Getting from where to are to where we need to be may be imposible given the political obstacles in the way of sound economic policy. And, sadly, the economics discipline has not been very much help in these policy debates. Among the voices of sound logic, I would draw attention to the writing of emeritus professor of economics Mason Gaffney (University of California), Professor T. Nicolaus Tideman (Virginia Tech) and Joseph Stiglitz (formerly at the World Bank). Each has identified the need to look to rent-derived income flows as the source of public revenue.

An effective starting point would be to restructure the individual income tax to become far more progressive than it is currently, as well as greatly simplify the system. Individual incomes up to the national median could be exempt from taxation. All other exemptions and deductions would be eliminated. Above the exempt income limit, an increasing rate of taxation could be imposed on higher ranges of income. The effect would be to lift the burden of taxation from income derived from work and shift more and more of the burden to rent-derived and passive investment income.

Edward J. Dodson, Director

School of Cooperative Individualism

www.cooperative-individualism.org

#1 - Agreed! How did money get into politics in the first place?

Lack of human dignity, self-respect and love of man

How did the lobby evolve???

The lobby MUST be abolished

It would be a start on cleaning politics