An interesting game comes after this pre-game show, with this being the last playoff game for George Allen, not only as head coach of the Redskins, but also in the NFL as well as against the Minnesota Vikings, and of course they lost it. Otherwise Coach Allen would have coached the Redskins the following week. 1976 was also the last Super Bowl appearance and NFC Championship for the Vikings and also their fourth, so 1976 was an important year for both the Redskins and the Vikings.
Since very little of anything will be passed this year in Congress, with a Republican House and Democratic Senate, this will be a year when Democrats led by President Obama and Republicans led by House Speaker John Boehner will offer their economic agendas for the 2014 mid-term congressional elections and both sides’ plans for the next Congress, especially if either party has more power in the next Congress than they have in this one.
I haven’t had a chance to see President’s Obama’s full budget proposal. I’ve just seen summaries from the partisan right, who see it as another progressive wish-list tax-and-spend proposal. Progressives on the Left, like economist Robert Greenstein, a real Progressive, by the way, like the budget, especially as it relates to the Earned Income Tax Credit and new infrastructure investment. So I’m just going to give you the highlights of what I’ve seen so far.
I’m all in favor of expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit and actually I would go further with it and include things like health care, so low-income workers don’t have Medicaid as their only health insurance option. They need to put money away for college, retirement, and personal savings to give their children hope for a better future. They need savings for school, K-12, for things like tutoring, child care, transportation, etc. so they can send their children to better schools and supplement their education.
So I’m glad President Obama is proposing that and also doing it for childless low-income working adults, but I guess my concern would be childless adults ending up receiving more in public assistance than low-income parents, because I don’t want to see a situation where people who are on public assistance are financially incentivized to have more children. I don’t want to see a situation where people on public assistance with children have a harder time raising them because of public assistance. The EITC should be neutral when it comes to having or not having kids.
As far as the new infrastructure investment of $300 billion over 4 years goes, that to me is a hell of a down-payment but it covers only about 30 percent of what we actually need for infrastructure investment, according to the U.S. Corps of Engineers. So I would take the $300 billion over 4 years this year and then come back in the next Congress to get the over $700 billion or so that is paid for with both proposals, putting millions of Americans in the infrastructure and manufacturing industries back to work.
President Obama seems to be making his 2015 fiscal year budget about what he and the Democratic Party want to do, which is really what he should be doing and should have been doing all along. The 2014 mid-term election year is a good place to start doing that, and we’ll see what it brings him and Democrats later this year.
The Colts actually looked like contenders in the AFC through nine games in 1980 but then went back to where they had been in 1978 and 1979, which was a competitive but not a winning team with a real shot at making the AFC Playoffs. The last 6 years were awful for the Colts in Baltimore, including a winless team in 1982 and the franchise losing fans because of their consistent losing, which was the Colts management’s fault when the Colts left Baltimore for Indianapolis.
Here’s a perfect example of why I love being a Liberal. It is the perfect belief system for laying out the best plan in the fairest and most balanced way that protects everyone’s freedoms. It is also a label under which so-called free market economic Libertarians, and pro-big labor Progressives should be able to find common ground when it comes to Freedom of Assembly and the Right to Organize, which give all workers the freedom of choice they deserve and need.
There are people, let’s say, on the far left who do not so much believe in the Right to Organize but would like to see it mandated, and all work places, both private and public, unionized, requiring union membership of all workers, with a non-participation penalty of paying union dues whether or not they are members. Then you have the so-called Libertarian right, which demands that unions be abolished and the market (meaning employers) decide what all workers get paid. They also would eliminate most, if not all, regulations, including the minimum wage.
But if you are an actual Progressive and not just someone who calls yourself a Progressive, then the Right to Organize is real, meaning that it should be a right and not a mandate for workers to join or not join a union. If you are a real Libertarian and not just someone who calls yourself a Libertarian or a Conservative Libertarian, you don’t want government power or corporate or business power deciding for individuals whether they should sign up for a union because you believe in the individual and freedom of choice and not government or employers making these decisions for the individual instead.
Now here is where the common ground can be found for actual Progressives and Libertarians, that is, let the workers decide for themselves whether to sign up for a union and let people unionize if they want but then have the union earn its union membership and members, including dues, and not let them be automatically rewarded just because they are a union. And if workers do not sign up for the union, then they do not pay union dues and do not get the benefits of being union members. They work as free agents, negotiating their own wages and benefits. Both sides win. Big government and big business get out of the way. Individuals decide for themselves.
The pre-game show for one of the best NFL playoff games of all time was this 1975 NFC Divisional Playoff game between the Dallas Cowboys, led by, of course, Tom Landry and QB Roger Staubach vs. the Minnesota Vikings, led by, of course, Bud Grant and QB Fran Tarkenton. What is strange about this game is that the 1970s Vikings were famous for losing Super Bowls. They lost three in the 1970s alone and one after the 1969 season. Actually, technically they lost four in the 1970s if you want to be real technical, since Super Bowl 4 was played in January 1970. But they actually had the better team in this game but lost on a Hail Mary touchdown pass at the end of this game.
This is where political labels, that is, labels that only describe one’s political ideology, get people into trouble when they don’t understand what the labels mean and what that political ideology is about. I agree with Andrew Cohut of the Washington Post that yes, the Democratic Party has obviously become more liberal and that has been the case since the George McGovern reforms to the Democratic Party in 1972 that brought in more ethnic and racial minorities and more women as well as gays and Northerners. But has the DP become too liberal? What does Mr. Cohut mean by that?
Today the Democratic Party is very liberal on social issues, believing in a wide range of personal freedoms for individuals, and it uses the United States Constitution to make the case for ideas like marijuana legalization, equal rights for gays, privacy, free speech including hate speech, right to organize, and Freedom of Assembly. Now even many Democrats who are in favor of the Second Amendment believe that constitutional common sense gun control should be part of that as well. And Liberal Democrats, especially younger people, do not like being told by government or anyone else how to live their own lives as well.
Today the Democratic Party is also very liberal on economic policy, because we want to see the private enterprise system work for everyone and not just people born to wealth. We are not calling for less economic freedom; we are actually calling for more economic freedom for every American, not leaving people at the bottom or bare middle to struggle without the ability to move up. Which is why we are always speaking in favor of ideas like new infrastructure investment and job training and education for low-skilled working adults, low-skilled non-workers, and laid-off workers who need to develop new skills to move to the middle class.
I just laid out for you the center of the Democratic Party. We are called the center-left party because we are a liberal party not a social democratic party, even though we do have social democrats in the party who want to take America much further left economically and politically toward Europe, which does not favor our Constitution and would either change it or get rid it of altogether, scrap our federalist system, and move to a social democracy and perhaps even a unitary government. However, the social democrats do not run the Democratic Party today. The Liberals and Progressives, the center left, does.
It’s generally not a good idea to compare American politics with British politics because the center left in America is not nearly as far to the left as the British center today, but especially 30 or 40 years ago when the Labour Party still had very strong Marxist elements. You would have better luck finding Evangelicals who embrace pornography, homosexuality, and prostitution in America than you would be able to find almost anyone who considers himself a Marxist.
America is a Federal Constitutional Republic in the form of a liberal democracy and Britain is a unitary monarchy in the form of a social democracy with no national constitution. So British politics, Left or Right, is much further left than American politics, at least when it comes to the two centers, but the American far left doesn’t look much different ideologically from the center left in Britain. The two centers in America are Liberals on the Left and conservative libertarians on the Right. The two centers in Britain are socialists on the Left and conservative social democrats on the Right. But what both countries have in common is that the two major parties in both countries have broad coalitions and diverse ideological factions in them because neither country has two dominant political factions big enough to occupy their party on their own yet govern the country by themselves.
So you see the radicals on both sides of the pond trying to get those they want in top leadership positions and their policies addressed, and to push this as hard as they can but often ending up settling for the best of what whoever is in charge gives them. And because of this I like to look at the Democratic Party as a party of JFK/Bill Clinton Liberals and FDR/LBJ Progressives who are generally in charge of the party, at least since post-1988 but even post-1984, that moved past the McGovern coalition to become a mainstream center left party.
But there is still that George McGovern social democratic coalition that is anti-war, anti-military, anti-law enforcement, anti-corporate, and even anti-profit in a lot of cases, and wants to make America into a British or Scandinavian unitary government in which most of the governmental power would rest with the Federal state. And because of this, and with the growth of both Liberals and Progressives in the Democratic Party, younger voters tend to be very liberal on social issues but also tend to be business owners or managers of small businesses or perhaps even military veterans from the Afghanistan or Iraq war.
They tend to be liberal on social issues but not anti-corporate, anti-business, or anti-military, and of course I’m not saying Liberals are, because we aren’t, but young people in America tend not to be social democrats on the far left who believe they are under-taxed and that people have too much individual power. Because of this, unlike the Republican Party, the Democratic Party doesn’t need its fringe to be successful.
Without the Democratic Party, the far left wouldn’t be heard much in American politics. I mean, who the hell is Dennis Kucinich without the Democratic Party? Most of the country would have never heard of him and because of this going forward, the far left would be better off outside the Democratic Party, attempting to create a united national socialist or social democratic party they could call home.
Maybe we could see an international coalition of America, Canada, Britain, United Nations, European Union, the Slavic states, not including Russia, but also Ukraine stepping up with economic sanctions against Russia and even starting to put together a force from NATO to be deployed, if necessary, to back Ukraine against any Russian invasion of Ukraine. And perhaps Vladimir, seeing this, would know he’s better off backing off and getting out of Ukraine because he would be undermanned and underfunded against an international coalition like this.
1978 was one of the best NFL seasons of all time, and I believe the National Football League was at its best with rule changes as they relate to blocking and pass defending to equalize the defense and offense so neither side of the ball has an unfair advantage, with blockers now being able to extend their arms to block, which is critical when you are trying to block a 265-270 pound muscle man who probably runs a 4.7 forty. Now the OL has a fair shot at blocking a big man like that based on the rules: the coverage rules on defense, with defensive backs no longer being able to manhandle receivers at the line of scrimmage but at least run their routes even if they are not opened and completely covered.
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