"...to be active consumers once again."

I am with you except on this point. If that's the goal again, then the basic problem has not even been touched. We need an economy that doesn't exist for its own sake, which is what the consumer-based mentality is about---not satisfying human need or want, to say nothing of the wider world, but boosting the economy. An economy that HAS to grow in order to exist at all is fundamentally unsustainable, no matter how many feel-good green technologies you got running it.

"At least the far-left progressives were honest. They genuinely despised the mid-century American liberals, whom they viewed simply as another species of bourgeois imperialists. This is another one of the reasons I dislike the term "progressive." Why should I call myself by the name preferred by deluded radicals who despised the New Deal and the Great Society liberals I admire?"

Honest indeed. Finally a spokesman for American liberalism admits that they are not part of the Left. If only they would admit that "the Center" is just a code-word for mainstream conservatism, then they might be just as honest. Just so you know, those "deluded radicals" are the only reason there was a New Deal, which was FDR's way of avoiding a real revolution---and LBJ was an imperialist pig.

Kauffman is mistaken in his conception of the problem of meaninglessness. To Kauffman and those who think like him, that existence is meaningless is equivalent to saying that it can't be made meaningful. It's a deeply paranoid belief in the meaning of my existence being guaranteed by some Big Other (if not God, then Nature or History), without which life is unbearable. My objection to Kauffman's pessimism is that we are responsible for the meaning of our universe, of our lives---not the other way around. Meaninglessness does not preclude meaning. Kauffman suffers from what Sartre called "bad faith."

"The American people are poised to do something that could not be imagined 10 years ago -- elect the best man president, regardless of his skin color."

I wonder when we will see this headline, but instead of "skin color" it'll say "income" or "class."

Those are the words that all too often introduce an opinion by someone too gutless to support it on their own.

"Maybe the secret to adapting Chuck Palahniuk's novels into movies is not to take them so damn seriously. If David Fincher's "Fight Club" became a problematic monument in American film history by outdoing its source material in paranoid portentousness -- and by overwhelming it with cinematic technique..."

There is nothing worse than a film that matches if not out-does its literary source. I mean, when I see a re-make or otherwise filmic adaptation of a book, I'm not satisfied unless I'm not satisfied---only then am I satisfied. Maybe the secret to writing a film or book-review is to drop the consumerist resentiment and root for the piece of art that is done better, not deride a piece of art precisely because it's done better.

Just for your daily recommended dose of irony, Carl Marks is an investment firm.

I would like to see America hit rock bottom, knowing we've been there before and risen above it. Rather than see the ultimately apology for the failure of Capitalism, I would like to see the bailout rejected or delayed until it would be too late to implement. Maybe if the financial meltdown does spread to the real economy, our government will take a note from history and invest in The People, not corporate persons.

I'll admit, it really took The War too get us out of the slump, but mostly because America needed something in which to invest is social labour. There are wars to be waged against poverty, ignorance, disease, our crumbling infrastructure, dependence on fossil fuels and over-all ecological collapse. There is plenty for Americans to be doing that is a hell of a lot more important than fulfilling the dictates of your consumerist niche. The American people might as well get paid to do it.

Fuck the capitalist blackmail. That's all they have against us; We The People have history on our side.

This is a deeply underestimated political category.

I do not see why a rural American would get nostalgic over Truman. He was responsible for two of the most atrocious political decisions in American history: dropping two Atomic Bombs and the second Red Scare that would gut American union leadership of its best and brightest for being Communist or associated with Communism.

Obama should tone down, if not drop the kind of "save the middle-class" rhetoric he has been using for this whole election. This is not a matter of bending any kind of truth about class in America either, but facing up to the fact that middle-class is working class. When our economy tanks, it is not simply the lower-class who suffer, though their suffering is not as readily mitigated, especially after decades of neo-liberal and neo-conservative "structural adjustments."

The middle-class exist precisely for this kind of tension, and though Obama is on the upper end of that tax-bracket, he too WORKS for a living. Obama needs to stress that: working-class does not belong to the machinists and dock-workers only, but to a vast part of the population alienated from itself by the upward surge in wealth over the last at least eight years. This is a positive in-road for more skeptical Leftists, too, because if pulled off right it is a step towards rebuilding working-class solidarity.

The beautiful and sad part of this suggestion is that it isn't a matter of political conniving. It's a matter of being honest about an important issue, and it both connects him to unlikely voters and gives the true working-class an anchor for its interests, if not in Obama (I am not blind to his corporate backers) then in the campaign itself.