Howdy folks!

Here is the new and refined super-duper, non-partisan, all-weather list of demands to lob at people who propose to represent us.

To review, briefly, these are (intended to be) populist (things that resonate across parties and ideologies), medium-term demands.

I tried to focus on demands that, if realized, would put power back into the hands of the 99% such that a larger transformation of government is possible for us.

I winnowed the list down to 10 demands, reduced some of the wordings where I could and added a few things that people suggested in the comments a couple of weeks ago.

For this round of comment, if you feel that something vital is missing, please suggest either folding it into another demand or replacing one of the demands.

When we've got some sort of general consensus on the list of demands, we'll put it up as a document that can be linked to, tweeted, facebooked or printed out and mailed or distributed at candidate events, etc. I'll also write a short introduction that can be posted by way of explanation for people who don't regularly participate on C99 about the demands and how to use them and we'll post that for linking as well.

Howdy folks! It's been a while since I've written much of anything. Since the election, I've been pretty much dealing with the anger and disgust at what has happened.

I've read a lot of election post-mortems and proposals for how left/progressive people should move forward in the current political climate.

It appears that there is a very real political realignment going on now. On the right, there is a lot of energy, enough to elect somebody who promised to pay attention to the 99% (though seems quite unlikely to do anything useful for them). On the left, there is energy, but it is (as usual) being co-opted by the Democrat party and being channeled into a fake resistance movement which is an attempt to associate electing corporate democrats and preserving Obama's neoliberal "achievements" as real change that will help the 99%. The establishment Democrats at the head of this fake resistance have no intention of making actual change.

If left/progressives don't organize behind an agenda and force the Democrats to swallow it, the "resistance" will fizzle out into support for more of the same, sorry, "pragmatic" corporate crap that establishment Democrats have been shovelling out for decades and the right will own the nation's politics - perhaps even awarding them the preponderance of states (they are one state shy now) to amend the constitution or call a constitutional convention.

The stakes are a lot higher than most people realize and the corporate donors behind both parties would be delighted by an opportunity to modify the constitution to more fully lock down the prerogatives of the 1%.