This is my response from a dialog I had with someone who has a very different concept from me of what the word "progressive" means in the context of politics today.
You have a different meaning of the word "progressive" than what most people do.
The income tax is progressive; you are definitely correct about that. And it should become so progressive that we tax the hell out of the rich to pay for the many universal social programs we need to lift everyone out of poverty... from public health care to public child care to programs like WPA and CCC putting people back to work with the government becoming the employer of first choice. Ending these dirty wars to pay for what society needs is what is progressive, too.
We have reached the point where the people being "elected" to the United States Congress and their hacks who write articles like the one I posted above are so far removed from the life most people experience daily which has become a crisis of everyday living for tens of millions of working class families in the wealthiest country in the world that they don't care about us and what we think.
There were massive demonstrations by the American people from all walks of life speaking out that they didn't want Bush to go to war. The number of members of the House and Senate voting against going to war was shameful and pathetic given the massive opposition from the American people. We are going to have to replace these very arrogant representatives of Wall Street getting richer off of war who get elected with our votes but who understand they are accountable to their Wall Street campaign contributors.
The United States Senate has just one solitary socialist in it.
Is it coincidental that this one socialist is the only one who stood up for the welfare of working people?
Look at all the other governments in the world. Take Canada our neighbor to the north. Their governments are filled with socialists from the local to provincial and federal levels. The Canadian Province of Manitoba has been dominated by the socialist New Democratic Party for years; they have been the governing party for much of the last 50 years in Manitoba.
We are missing something here.
If Bernie Sanders is the one and only United States Senator we can count on to reflect and represent our views shouldn't this tell us something? Something like we need more socialists in the House and Senate; not more Democrats.
There are 435 members of the House; 100 members in the United States Senate. There is one socialist.
What does this mean?
It means "we the people" are outnumbered 534 to ONE. Wall Street has 534 members in Congress; working people have ONE.
These members of Congress can talk all they want about war or anything else. When all is said and done Wall Street is going to win every single time. This is what "we the people" have to change.
Never mind the fact that most Americans don't know that Manitoba has a government just as socialist as little Cuba; most Americans don't even know that Minnesota has had two socialist governors, Floyd Olson and Elmer Benson; and in more recent years a governor whose politics were so socialist oriented that they called him "Red" Rudy Perpich--- his own Democratic Party dumped him for advocating a huge increase in the "taconite tax" for the iron ore industry and a huge increase in "stumpage fees" for the forestry industry to begin to do away with the regressive property tax to pay for public education by placing taxes where they belong: on the rich and the corporations.
Minnesota also sent a Communist, John Bernard, to Congress when electing a socialist governor.
This idea that somehow socialism is a foreign concept to American politics is an outright big lie. In fact, Minnesota's first socialist governor, Floyd Olson had intended to take the socialist Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party national and he was going to run against Franklin Roosevelt because Roosevelt wasn't implementing reforms quickly enough to alleviate the suffering of the people.
Minnesota had a socialist majority in its House and almost in the Senate with hundreds of socialists elected to public office on lower levels. We also had a socialist in the United States Senate elected on the same Minnesota Farmer-Labor ticket.
We have to "level the playing field" if we want to see peace, social and economic issues addressed in Congress. The only way to "level the playing field" with Wall Street our opposition is to send more socialists to Congress to join Bernie Sanders so the old guy doesn't have to stand up for over eight hours straight defending our rights--- talking to a completely empty Senate Chamber which proves there isn't one other member of the United States Senate whose interests go beyond what is good for Wall Street.
Not only is Mother Earth at her tipping point with global warming with capitalism already splattered and on the skids to oblivion taking us all down a dangerous, dark, bumpy, twisty, treacherous road to oblivion with no stops in purgatory--- we are headed straight to hell; but, our democracy, fragile as it has been since the initiation of the dark days of what we call "McCarthyism" which began in 1938 with the Dies Committee; our democracy of "we the people" is at the tipping point, too; and I would suggest that the only way to save democracy is by electing a whole slew of socialists of one kind or another to Congress... we simply can't rely on one old man, Bernie Sanders, to stand up against all the tremendous power that Wall Street's wealth can purchase.
As for who we Primary Obama with; anyone from Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders is just fine with me. And it doesn't make any difference to me if we elect socialists to the House and Senate on the Democratic Party ticket, as independents like Bernie Sanders or as part of a new party like the old Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party or something along the lines of Canada's New Democratic Party.