As for primarying, I think that this may actually make things worse. Because I think that a lot of this movement has been directed (in money terms) by liberal, not social democrats, and that when faced with a conflict between social democracy and liberalism, many of the new Congresspersons and Senators have adopted a social democratic path.
What has been happening has been in part due to the absence of an movement up to the task.
Indeed, it seems highly dubious proposition for a movement to be built in the process of trying to primary members of the millionaires club ... the focus has to be the House. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
What I'm saying is that you have liberal bankrolling candidates who are social democrats, and then the donors act shocked when their agents don't act as liberals advancing their liberal interests.
A point of clarification, I'm talking liberal in the economic, European, sense, here. And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg
And part of the conflict that you point to is intrinsic, because there are "liberals", in that double sense, who are insisting on achievement of policy objectives, for example regarding the environment and global warming, where achieving the objective is incompatible with their fundamentally liberal stance. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
Another significant reason to enact campaign reform is that a significant portion of the current contributors are going down in the flames of the melt down underway. Reform would obviate that problem. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
The formative enterprise for a progressive movement would be taking advantage of the gross gerrymandering of Congressional Districts to elect a solid Progressive-Populist caucus and using peer-to-peer small donation networks to ambush opposing members within the Democratic majority to spook them into going along with the Progressive-Populist caucus. On the back of that, real campaign finance reform might be attainable. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
Were the food chain for our country contaminated from one end to the other by poisons, and people were dying in droves, adding a small portion of known good food to the supply would not solve the problem, even though that is probably what the Bush FDA would try to do. The only certain way I can see to provide reliable credit in a relatively short time span is to create new banks operating under new rules with their capital provided by the US Treasury and taxpayer. With a 3% reserve requirement $250 billion of the "bailout money" could capitalize new banks with a lending capability of over $8 trillion. These banks would be free of taint. They would also be strenuously opposed by the financial industry. Creating them would essentially be like releasing the real economy from being held hostage by the existing financial services industry.
The market to Bush and Paulson:
"Hands up! Your money or the economy!"
Bush and Paulson to the market:
"We're thinking, we're thinking!"
What they are thinking is that they would rather give the money to the existing financial services industry, even though there is no reason to think it will help. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
