Asturian-American Migration Forum

At last! (and I don't mean Etta James's song, either )
It will be so much fun to watch Madam Speaker Pelosi in Congress! A resolute Italian woman is just the person to do some "cleaning up". I'm truly relieved at how things have changed over night in the good old US of A. This 180-degree-turn of the tables can only improve matters at home and it will certainly mend the country's bruised image abroad.
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Por fin! (Y no me estoy refiriendo a la canción de Etta James )
Será muy divertido ver a la señora presidente del Congreso Pelosi! Una italiana resuelta es justo la persona que se necesitaba para "limpiar" un poco. Es un alivio ver como han cambiado las cosas de la noche a la mañana en los EE.UU. Esta vuelta de las tornas de 180 grados valdrá para mejorar los asuntos domésticos y ciertamente reparará la mala imagen del país en el extranjero.

Earlier I sent this response to a cousing of mine, he had just made some comments on the results of this election that pretty much said 'la misma hembra con otro calzon' type thing...

That's pretty much the jist of how I see it.

and they say I'm jaded and cynical...

The problem is, I don't necessarily disagree with you lol

I would say that (potentially) there are many good things that could come out of this. For instance I've been taunting the national debt as the worst of all problems, we had 4.5 trillion when Bush took over it is now up to 9.5 trillion 5 trillion in 6 years! That is about .84 trillion per year, or 70 billion per month. People like to focus on the cost of the Iraq war, but think about this; The total for the 3+ years of the Iraq war, occupation and reconstruction is less than 400 billion, this year the US will spend 450 billion in paying the interest on the debt alone, not the debt, just the interest. Since we don't have a bunch of cash laying around we must borrow to pay the interest on the debt making the debt even bigger, to make things worse we have a yearly deficit of about 800 billion so that gets tackled on to the debt. We would need to have a surplus of half a trillion next year just to break even and not dig ourselves further in the hole, of course that is not going to happen. Bush's mess is going to be with us for a very long time after he is gone, it is possible that he may have set this nation in an inevitable downwards spiral from which it may not recover. Most nations have their reserves in US currency, so far we have been covering many shortfalls by simply minting more money, no other nation can do that and get away with it by not being affected by inflationary pressures, we do because the rest of the world keeps buying US dollars. However, as the US deficit grows the US currency becomes weaker and weaker, eventually these nations will wise up and start 'diversifying' their holdings (a la China nowadays), the more they diversify (dump dollars for Euros or gold) the weaker the dollar becomes, when the rest see this at some point there will be a stampede for the exit making the US currency worthless, images of Germany after the Great War come to mind. We will only know for sure if the US is financially capable of surviving the Bush years in another 20 or 30 years.

The point to all of this is that if the Democrats force Bush to be fiscally responsible and are able to capitalize politically on that for the next presidential elections this scenario may not play out, however, they have a knack for botching things up.

Cheers,

To say I'm happy would be the biggest understatement of the decade.

FINALLY the American people have had enough. It's just too bad it took this long. My sincere hope is that our first order of business will be to launch investigations into the war profiteering of Bechtel, Halliburton, and the other hand-picked Bush cronies who have made immeasurable sums off the blood of our troops and the Iraqi people.

I hope this nightmare is over and the House/Senate sweep means we get our country finally back from the thrall of Christian fundamentalists, rabid neo-cons and the wrongheaded Cheney/Rumsfeld+village idiot tandem. Wolfowitz is on to bigger and better things at the WB, so we won't have to see him lick his comb anymore. A friend of my brother's sent this mail (below) today, which I thought was interesting:

'Never underestimate the power of self-delusion - it's just too much fun while it lasts. Thing is, it needs to feed occasionally on small bits of supporting evidence to sustain itself; a complete dry spell of two years is probably simply too long for most folks.

I've read a commentary that suggested it was Katrina that did Bush in (or at any rate, was the watershed event [sorry...] that marked the beginning of the end). Because before that, he was, difficult as it seems to believe,
widely seen as an effective leader, and in times of crisis, people tend to
stick with what they know. Katrina certainly took care of that, and this
caused a lot of people to take a more critical look at the situation in
Iraq. Apparently, they didn't like very much what they saw.

A perhaps even more intriguing question is, what are the Dems going to do
with this intractable mess they've just inherited? They certainly weren't,
and aren't, saying...'

Terechu, I too am happy that a woman is now in a powerful position in the US Congress. After all, I have granddaughters and want them to have as much power and influence in life as they choose to have.

I'm interested in our collective political vision in the US.

In our local elections in Maryland, or at least in my county, very conservative Republicans did very well. I'm amazed by how conservative Americans have become in recent decades. But it's not just "conservative;" it's reactionary and mean-spirited. The citizenry's vision for our future is stunted and self-serving. This shriveled vision will limit what the new leaders can do.

Although I am mostly pleased by the national election results, I don't see the national elections as changing everything.

For one thing, I wonder what it means that Harold Ford (an African American from Tennessee running for the Senate) didn't win? Does it mean that people still won't vote for qualified Black candidates? Of course, Ford was from a political family and maybe people wanted to sweep the political class out of government. Maybe the people are leery of candidates from political dynasties.

I agree with Is that it's disappointing to not hear the Democrats talk about their plan. Maybe a new leader will articulate a vision we can all latch onto. But won't most of these new leaders will tend to listen to the moneyed interests, just like the old ones did? That's where a lot of their campaign funds come from.

One potential vision would be to fix that conflict of interest. It'd be great if voters didn't have to sweep all the corrupt politicians out of office every twenty years, wouldn't it?

Hmm. Maybe I'm being overly pessimistic. In a sense we've just benefited from Howard Dean's vision. In Mike Hersh's words, "Dean hopes to re-unite middle class and working families against the greedy elites into a new New Deal Coalition. History shows that real progress is not possible without such an alliance among people of good will from all regions and races." Maybe we wouldn't have achieved the political shift last week without Dean's leadership.

And Dean has been promoting a positive vision for years now, as Mary Macelveen reminds us (in this essay). Dean wrote in his book "Winning Back Democracy", "Today we face three challenges. Our task is to bring people back into the political process and give them a democracy they can believe in once more, to rebuild the fractured American community, and to restore America’s role as an idealistic moral force in the world."

That's a vision worth working toward.

Me? I'm hoping to see a shift in our stance toward: international relations, Iraq, torture, the environment, and the emotional issues that have animated conservatives (Terry Schiavo, abortion, gay rights, etc.). And I really want to fix the problems with our electronic voting systems so that voters believe that their votes will be counted accurately.

Dean's plan worked, pure and simple. He wanted to go after the Republicans in their "safe" areas, like Montana and Virginia and make them spread the money around. He realized that the "red" states were really pretty purple, and it wouldn't take much to shift them to blue.

I thought this strategy would never work, but, happily, I was wrong. It's high time that the Democrats get back to their core value, which in my mind can be summarized as follows:

Protect the middle class and working poor from giant, ultra rich industry conglomerates and their leaders.

Americans cherish the greatness of our homeland, but many do not realize how extensive and profound are the transformation that are now taking place in our nation's moral values and political philosophy.

Our people have been justifiably proud to see America's power and influence used to preserve peace for ourselves and others, promote economic and social justice, raise high the banner of human rights, protect the quality of our environment, alleviate human suffering, and cooperate with other peoples to reach these common goals.

We have learned the value of providing our citizens with accurate information and treating dissenting voices with respect. Most of our political leaders have attempted to control deficit spending , preserve the separation of church and state, and protect civil liberties and personal privacy. All of these historic commitments are now being challenged.

From: "Our endangered values: America's moral crisis", Jimmy Carter, 2005