You might like to know that we have been discussing this on the Warren Reports section. Here is an entry from Elizabeth Warren on the subject. She shows how this organization cooked the numbers to make it look like the middle class is doing better than they are.
Satellite Sky Blog

Find the Truth. Do Justice.

But two of the board members are brothers and another two are married to each other. That's a power board!

Ben, I just meant that the country as a whole would be better off under the leadership of any Dem regardless of how centrist or lefty they might be versus anyone who calls themselves conservative. --Greg

Greg

Bush has been a miserable President and having a Republican Congress has allowed some of the worse impluses to be enacted into law. However, what might be the core of a Democratic set of policies is not unimportant when and if the Democrats regain the White House.

Thus any of the prospective Democrats would be a better President than Bush and any of the Republican alternatives. However, is the Democratic Party forever the party of the Depression? Is it going to try to tell people that they are worse off than they are just as Republicans try to convince people they are better off than they are?

Why isn't a politics based on honesty and accuracy an improvement rather than one based on an economic disaster that isn't the smart politics regardless of what it is called?

Daniel A. Greenbaum

Well, we've had the leftist extreme's third way in 2000 and 2004, and now there's this right wing-libertarian third way.. in all honesty, right wing, left wing, all the same damn thing anyway.

If you want to make change, then support good democratic candidates, and stop assisting leftist extremists to attempt to marginalize democrats and the democratic party. Also, take a stand against a joke like Howard Dean, as DNC chair. Isn't he overdue for criticism for his being a total waste of time and resources???

Tim Roemer, who ran as opposition to Dean was an advocate for achieving a real grassroots movement in the democratic party, while Dean was all hot air and hasn't even bothered to fake walking the walk. How about getting some spine on taking on the fact that for all the radical left's big talk on their knowing what's good for the party, all they've done is prove that they are even more disconnected than we suspected.

Everyone should be skeptical of electoral strategies based on Bill Clinton's example, unless the plans include resurrecting H. Ross Perot.

Howard Dean is the radical left? What did he do so wrong as DNC chair? Are you talking about the 50-state strategy? What is this extremism you're talking about? Does it consist of any actual policy positions?

MR. Swann,

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet's partner at America's most successful investment team, Birkshire Hathaway was once asked by an investiment reporter in 1999 at the hight of the dot com craze why Brikshire was not investing like mad in this 'explosive' sector.

Charlie calmly replied, In my experience when you mix chocolate raisins with rabbit turds, you end up with a big bag of shit.

I think after 8 years of conservative dominance and 30 years of rightward tilt in Americas domestic policy orientation we can see the results. Hard core conservative policy ideas are rabbit turds.

When you mix liberal policy ideas with conservative think tank turds in the name of "the Third Way" you end up with shit policies.

Just sell the liberal policy ideas already, its the best product you got.

That's the point.

No, Howard Dean is radical sham.. he's a republican who ran as a democrat to get elected in Vermont.

He was cherry picked by Joe Trippi, who is. Full knowing that Dean was neither capable or willing to achieve anything other than what profits him. He was a failure at his health care reform in Vermont, he only signed that gay rights bill when he was cornered with it after the state legislature had already done the hard work. He screwed up the ed system, he favored corporate factory farms and big corporations. Ho Dean was never any progressive wonder. Yet the radical left took a fit demanding that he had to be elected as he was the only one who would achieve anything positive.

There was no 50 state strategy, I know people all across the country who at least thought there'd be an effort made.. but there wasn't. I know a woman in Seattle who kept hoping, but while there would be news that there would be one meeting after another, nothing ever happened. The few instances there were, were in no way grassroots.. it was all a joke.

Tell me what Howard Dean has actually done at all as DNC chair? Not one darned thing, he even sucks at campaign fundraising.

The democratic party has issue positions.. and good democratic candidates have plans to address those issues. We need to get back to them, instead of wasting our time listening to the bigoted and classist leftist extreme

Sure, I'll read that. And maybe you could look over either this or this.

If you think privatizing Social Security is viable,

The link Greg provided me above made the same inaccurate statement within the first pages -- calling the opposing plans "proposals to privatize Social Security", followed by some misleading statements suggesting they will eliminate part of the funds currently going to disabled recipients.

... Lugar/Biden/Hagel are going to win the war in Iraq,

... and slowly bleeding the country to death in favor of cheap sweatshop goods at Walmart is desirable

William you can count out any Bush iniative as a non starter. His whole slide began with his non plan to "fix" Social Security after the election in 2004. I say non plan because he never did have the guts to make a proposal. In the face of overwhelming opposition he simply pawned it off on congress to come up with a solution to the "crisis". Republicans didn't want to touch it and Dems wisely resisted the urge to play his game. Politically it's a career killer.

Why? Because there's nothing wrong with SS. Bush himself got so twisted in knots trying to answer every objection to the ideas being floated that in the end he was talking about letting people invest that 2% or 4% in treasury bonds with a new government bureaucracy regulating their choices. There's no reason to do that when SS does the same thing and uses only 2% to administer the whole program. You want IRAs or 401K plans you already have them. There's no reason to make SS a welfare plan and put it on the road to phase out. That's my future you want to mess with. I don't want Wall St. getting their hands on it. I've never met a broker or a banker who was happy with a 2% profit.

As for Lugar/Biden/Hagel you've got guys who have sense enough to oppose Bush's disastrous foreign policy. Big deal. There's hundreds of millions of us in this country alone. Lugar and Hagel are Republicans. That disqualifies them.
It wouldn't take 5 minutes googling to find something godawful they stand for. Did I mention they're Republicans? Biden lost me with his disgusting grandstanding for the bankruptcy law.
Obama, Edwards or Hillary are better than any of them. So are Richardson and Clark.

On trade how about we insist our trading partners at least adhere to the environmental and labor laws we supposedly embrace? What are the Chinese and Indians gonna say in return? No we don't want breathable air or more than a buck an hour in wages?

Greg is right. There's no reason to adopt insidious or harebrained Republican proposals in order to win. There's even less reason to try to make them work.

So much of the rhetoric among activists on either side is aimed at how awful the other side is, but Americans are much more likely to respond to actual proposals or ideas for how to fix things than to a litany of complaints about the opposite side.

This is, unfortunately, exactly wrong, and understanding that it's wrong has been one of the keys of the right's success. Look at the last two presidential elections as examples: the windsurfing ad, the "I feel safer with Bush" stuff, and so on. Or the 2000 election, which was far more about the number of buttons on Al Gore's suit jacket than about any particular set of policy proposals -- in fact, Gore was mercilessly attacked for his policy expertise by the media. Ignoring the issues and doing dirt on the other side is how the Republicans have succeeded; it wasn't until a whole bunch of things blew up in the public's face and people were forced to pay attention to issues that Democrats won. And even then, Democrats won without a specific set of policy proposals: "A new course in Iraq" isn't a policy proposal. As anyone who has done sales knows, people make decisions based on emotional rather than rational considerations, and electoral politics is just another game of sales.

In times of peace, the wise man prepares for war. -- Horace

The blade itself incites to violence. -- Homer

Do not be misled, the Capitalist system is not going to relinquish control.

It will give the people choices alright, just so happens they have so many to choose from. Left of center, center, and right of center. Problem is they’re still Capitalist systems.

Don’t misunderstand me though, I think a person should see the fruits of their labor.

My experience , has shown me that when the United States had a viable alternative, in the form of Labor Unions, the middle class expanded, no longer were we, and our children , just slaves to be exploited. Many Capitalists fought against the right to organize, calling it Socialism.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eugene_V._Debs 

Debs ran for political office, eventually he was arrested for sedition for opposing the war. 

His indented quotes, are applicable today almost 100 years later

"The capitalist class is represented by the Republican, Democratic, Populist and Prohibition parties, all of which stand for private ownership of the means of production, and the triumph of any one of which will mean continued wage-slavery to the working class."

Third Way?

Many new parties are intended to appease the population, giving the appearance of addressing the concerns of the agitated populace, but when they come to power, they'll not answer to you the working class, but they'll succumb to the pressure of Capitalism .

The Republican and Democratic parties, or, to be more exact, the Republican-Democratic party, represent the capitalist class in the class struggle. They are the political wings of the capitalist system and such differences as arise between them relate to spoils and not to principles. The Republican and Democratic parties are alike capitalist parties — differing only in being committed to different sets of capitalist interests — they have the same principles under varying colors, are equally corrupt and are one in their subservience to capital and their hostility to labor

As a rule, large capitalists are Republicans and small capitalists are Democrats, but workingmen must remember that they are all capitalists, and that the many small ones, like the fewer large ones, are all politically supporting their class interests, and this is always and everywhere the capitalist class.

Ten thousand times has the labor movement stumbled and fallen and bruised itself, and risen again; been seized by the throat and choked and clubbed into insensibility; enjoined by courts, assaulted by thugs, charged by the militia, shot down by regulars, traduced by the press, frowned upon by public opinion, deceived by politicians, threatened by priests, repudiated by renegades, preyed upon by grafters, infested by spies, deserted by cowards, betrayed by traitors, bled by leeches, and sold out by leaders, but notwithstanding all this, and all these, it is today the most vital and potential power this planet has ever known,

"Why? Because there's nothing wrong with SS. Bush himself got so twisted in knots trying to answer every objection to the ideas being floated that in the end he was talking about letting people invest that 2% or 4% in treasury bonds with a new government bureaucracy regulating their choices. There's no reason to do that when SS does the same thing and uses only 2% to administer the whole program. You want IRAs or 401K plans you already have them. There's no reason to make SS a welfare plan and put it on the road to phase out. That's my future you want to mess with. I don't want Wall St. getting their hands on it. I've never met a broker or a banker who was happy with a 2% profit."

The Thrift Savings Plan offers a small set of investment choices that include bond and stock index funds. So yes, you can choose to invest in bonds in this plan. Most federal workers have a conservative portfolio split between the bond and S&P stock index funds. They've earned an average 8.8% on their money even with this conservative approach.

The funds in the plan outperform the market because their expenses are extremely low -- just 0.06% of the funds invested. So yes, if you use simple index funds and put them out for bid in the financial services industry, you get firms like Morgan Stanley or Barclays who are willing to do it very cheaply.

Some of the promise of this approach can be seen in a new set of investment options just offered by the Thrift Savings Plan. They just started offering life-cycle funds that invest in a mix of their other funds geared toward various retirement years. So their near-term plan is more conservative, for those near retirement, and the long term plan more growth-oriented. The logical thing would be to have contributions switch between these plans as a default setting through the years, so people won't have to make any choices if they don't want to. Then you have an account balanced somewhere near an appropriate level for wherever you are in your work history.

I don't often agree with you but this is a solid piece of analysis. I'm not sure whether you think the upshot of this will be a good thing or a bad thing (I think it is a good thing) but so far we're reading from the same page.

Brad, Again, the whole point of this post is that progressives should be focusing their fire on the right, not on each other. In the title of the post, I am clearly referring to the rhetorical tactic of the "third way" -- which is inherently designed to equate some ill-defined bad guys on the left with the right -- as opposed to the group itself. I honestly don't see how you can "detect" what you say you detect from what I actually wrote. --Greg

Even the most conservative stock funds have no guaranteed payout. If you dump 150 million new investors and their money into the market at the same time what do you get? Too many dollars chasing too little worthwhile investments further crowded together by your lifecycle funds or other restrictions.

Who pays beneficiaries when (not if) the market periodically tanks? Will you be part of an unlucky demographic caught without a chair when the music stops? Republicans seem hellbent on destroying our economy with debt and idiotic trade policies that depend on shaky economic partners like Venezuela, China and India. That doesn't give me a lot of confidence.

But I say again, there's nothing stopping you from investing in the stock market, you can even do it with various tax advantaged accounts. Just don't ask all of us to assume the same amount of risk you're comfortable with. It's 6 years after the bubble burst, 4 years after Enron and I still don't see the kind of regulation or transparency that makes me think it's anything other than a rigged game for the biggest investors and insiders.

And what message does it send our creditors (Chinese, Japanese and Saudi bankers) when the president says US treasury bonds aren't good enough for our retirees?

I've been paying FICA taxes since 1969. Been overpaying them since 1982 when Greenpsan brokered that deal between O'Neill and Reagan so there'd be trillions in the Trust Fund when I retired. The Trust Fund according to the three projections the SSA puts out each year isn't scheduled to go broke until 2041, 2072 or never.
that third projection (never) has been historically the most accurate. Leave Social Security alone. You have plenty of opportunities to chase riches without forcing the rest of us to sacrifice our security in your risky schemes.