Examining Voter Anger From All Sides (Ratigan Video)

Video:  Jane, Matt, and Nate talk with Dylan this afternoon about big business and big government, catering to special interests, secret deals, lack of trust, and voter anger.

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Comments

[mark mchugh]

I caught Dylan's show yesterday. It was great. He is far and away the best journalist on television and puts all these other hacks to shame (if only they could feel shame....).

There was a segment yesterday when he said, "any politician would trade 10,000 votes for $10,000 dollars in campaign contributions in a heartbeat" (paraphrase). And urging people to make sure their voices were heard.

You know with the Bernanke confirmation looming, I couldn't agree more.

[James Street]

Dylan Ratigan seems to be trying to change the course of the American Ship of Discourse into a new direction with such terms as Corporate Communism and Unreformed Monopoly.

Thorstein Veblen did the same thing at the turn of the previous century with his book Theory of the Leisure Class using terms like Conspicuous Consumption and Conspicuous Leisure. The poet-singer Bob Dylan (Ratigan's namesake?) made a similar effort with the lyrics of his songs.

You will all have better success with the help of past thinkers and actors such as Thorstein Veblen and Roger Williams (whom many consider to be the first Libertarian produced by the United States.)

We don't learn history and the thought of our predecessors to impress our friends but the make our own thought deeper,more secure and, paradoxically, more relevant to our own times.

Go Dylan.

[DailyBail]

james street...i posted one of your essays on our headlines page just now...didn't know you had a blog...great stuff...

http://dailybail.com/headlines/essay-on-the-failures-of-liberalism.html

[James Street]

Thanks. I'm "in this business" to produce dialog, share my ideas and try to move the American Ship of State forward a bit before I "shuffle off this mortal coil."

Feel free to use any of my writings any way you see fit. Don't take all of them completely seriously of course, because I often exaggerate or take contrarian positions just to nudge people into thinking, or into looking at things from a slightly different angle.

And my fiction is just that, fiction. As Herman Melville might say, "I like to think that I understood captain Ahab better than most people did, but I'm not captain Ahab, I'm Herman Melville!"

Good luck with your site. I think you're on to something. My only advice would be not to argue too much with your commenters. Talk with them, yes, but don't fight with them -- too much -- just the right amount :)

The new paradigm, if it in fact comes to maturity, will be dialog and not just a few people at the top pontificating to everyone else, as it has been in the past. Real dialog and multilog is something that the Internet makes possible, for the first time in human history.

But old habits die slowly and, as history teaches us, sometimes never die.