Fellow readers, as someone unashamed to say that I occasionally partake in marijuana usage, I want to wish you all a Happy 4/20. I am obliged to repeat the question as to why pot is illegal while alcohol and cigarettes, which are far larger public health threats are much less controlled. Our drug laws are an insult to the pragmatic trend that has always shaped American policy-making. Just legalize and regulate the stuff.
**Steps off soapbox**
I wanted to wish all of my readers a Happy International Women’s Day. Here in America the fight continues against efforts to control the very bodies of women within the debate over abortion and contraception, ensure equal pay for women in the workplace and to ensure the participation of women in the political arena. And around the world (also in America) efforts continue to increase access to education and healthcare for women, prevent and eliminate domestic abuse, eliminate female genital mutilation and allow all women to realize their potential to the fullest level possible. To all women and men around the world who fight day by day and success and setback alike to allow the light of all women to shine in liberty, freedom and dignity you have my love, admiration and respect! May God bless and keep you.
In Solidarity,
Brandon
Thanks to Occupy Wall Street, our nation has finally started a long-delayed dialogue on income inequality. The Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, gives an overview of its negative effects:
Economists long ago tried to justify the vast inequalities that seemed so troubling in the mid-19th century—inequalities that are but a pale shadow of what we are seeing in America today. The justification they came up with was called “marginal-productivity theory.” In a nutshell, this theory associated higher incomes with higher productivity and a greater contribution to society. It is a theory that has always been cherished by the rich. Evidence for its validity, however, remains thin. The corporate executives who helped bring on the recession of the past three years—whose contribution to our society, and to their own companies, has been massively negative—went on to receive large bonuses. In some cases, companies were so embarrassed about calling such rewards “performance bonuses” that they felt compelled to change the name to “retention bonuses” (even if the only thing being retained was bad performance). Those who have contributed great positive innovations to our society, from the pioneers of genetic understanding to the pioneers of the Information Age, have received a pittance compared with those responsible for the financial innovations that brought our global economy to the brink of ruin.
Mr. President, should Timothy Geithner happen to step down as Treasury Secretary in your second term, would you please–for the love of all that is good in the world–hire Joseph Stiglitz? Just a suggestion.
Friends, family and those that read my blog who I am not yet acquainted with…I wanted to share a video about the place that I have spent the last two years working at. It is also the story of an important mission, bringing accurate and unbiased information to voters choosing the people who will lead our towns and cities, states and nation as a whole. It is a mission that I think our newsmedia have failed at recently but there are thousands of volunteers and a few hands full of staff who have dedicated themselves to picking up the slack. And our nation is better for them. Here is the video:
So I have made predictions for the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries. All, unsurprisingly, have been completely wrong. =) Perhaps the fourth time is the charm? Here are my predictions for the Florida primary tonight:
Mitt Romney- 46%
Newt Gingrich- 31%
Rick Santorum- 13%
Ron Paul- 10%
Washington State appears to be next in line to legalize gay marriage. I am particularly happy about Washington because it is one of the states where I may someday settle. In a story on this development, New York Magazine’s Dan Amira makes a pithy quip on the common complaint by conservatives that gays marrying is an existential threat to the institution:
But what about the threat of gay marriage to the sanctity of Newt Gingrich’s ability to marry a woman, cheat on her, divorce her, marry his mistress, cheat on her, ask her for an open marriage, divorce her, and marry his second mistress? What about that?
This has to be one of the most succinct and devastating ownings on hypocrisy I’ve seen in some time. Nicely done.
I am hoping to maintain an unblemished track record in failing to predict the race to the Republican presidential nomination…So here’s my prediction for the South Carolina GOP primary tonight:
Newt Gingrich- 37%
Mitt Romney- 29%
Ron Paul- 20%
Rick Santorum- 11%
Herman Cain- 3%
After the total inaccuracy of my previous two predictions, I will be shocked if even one of these numbers is spot on. =)
As a part of honoring the work and remembering Martin Luther King, Jr. I wanted to post one of his speeches which I think is particularly relevant now. In a speech entitled “Why I am opposed to the War in Vietnam” he railed against “the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism.”
Seeing how catastrophically wrong my Iowa caucus prediction was, I see no harm in throwing my hat in the ring again. Here are my predictions for tonight’s New Hampshire Republican Primary:
Mitt Romney-33%
Jon Hunstman-23%
Ron Paul-20%
Newt Gingrich-12%
Rick Santorum-8%
Rick Perry-3%
In an effort to prove my horrendous ability to predict…here’s my prediction for the Iowa caucus tonight.
Feel free to share yours too and maybe one of us will be able to hit this moving target.
Rick Santorum 27%
Mitt Romney 23%
Ron Paul 20%
Michelle Bachmann 13%
Newt Gingrich 10%
Rick Perry 7%
Paul Krugman makes what I as a lay observer of economics am inclined to take note and remember concerning the push for austerity in response to the financial crises of Europe and North America:
Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we’re impoverished by the need to pay back money we’ve been borrowing. They see America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage, and will have a hard time making the monthly payments.
This is, however, a really bad analogy in at least two ways.
First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base. The debt from World War II was never repaid; it just became increasingly irrelevant as the U.S. economy grew, and with it the income subject to taxation.
Second — and this is the point almost nobody seems to get — an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves.
This was clearly true of the debt incurred to win World War II. Taxpayers were on the hook for a debt that was significantly bigger, as a percentage of G.D.P., than debt today; but that debt was also owned by taxpayers, such as all the people who bought savings bonds. So the debt didn’t make postwar America poorer. In particular, the debt didn’t prevent the postwar generation from experiencing the biggest rise in incomes and living standards in our nation’s history.
Anyone who knows me knows very well that I am no fan of the idea of American Exceptionalism. It is merely a conventional method of justifying and rationalizing the sorrier aspects of American power. Paul Rosenberg writing for Al Jazeera takes apart the myth:
As indicated above, the idea of American exceptionalism was always a contested one. But it’s hard to deny that the New World in general was seen as a land of opportunity, and the American colonies were the place where the most opportunity was seen for people to actually settle in significant numbers. Yet, the way most people managed to get to this new land of opportunity and freedom was through indentured servitude, and when that failed to provide enough labour, the African slave trade was “Plan B”.
The land itself came courtesy of the earliest stages of America’s centuries-long series of genocidal wars. And when the American Revolution came, it was lead in large part by slaveholder advocates of freedom – men like Washington, Jefferson and Patrick Henry, whose influence only expanded as the new nation was established.
Although their primary arguments were grounded in universalist appeals, the actual rights-holding subjects of their political system were a relatively tiny minority of well-to-do white males. The promise of rights-based liberal democracy was intoxicating to all, but forbidden to most. Equality was for gentlemen only. And yet, those excluded would not be denied. Scattered state and local battles coalesced into a national abolitionist movement by the 1830s, which in turn spawned a women’s rights movement in the 1840s.
In Europe, the US example spawned the French and Polish revolutions, followed by more than a century of struggles in which the example of the US’ existence powerfully transformed the Old World in combination with Europe’s own internal modernising forces.
And even though the United States itself embarked on an imperialist course sparked by the Spanish-American War in 1898, its example as the first anti-colonial revolutionary regime inspired colonial revolutionaries as well. It was no accident that Ho Chi Minh approached Woodrow Wilson for his support at Versailles after World War I, before turning to communism as his second choice in seeking to rid his country of French colonialism.
Our history and our legacy is unique but we have no greater a share of what is a shared and human destiny than any other division that would in any way justify an ‘exceptionalist’ worldview.
Campaign finance reform is not a niche issue any more than fighting for a clean and sustainable environment is. Leo Hindery, a former CEO of the YES Sports network, seems to understand this.
Writing in Huffington Post, Hindery had the following comments on campaign finance reform:
Campaign finance in this country is in a very bleak place after decades of direct attacks and equally sad unintended consequences. The Supreme Court’s 2010 landmark decision in Citizens United v. FEC was the final straw in the corporate hijacking of our political system which began fully thirty years ago.
In Citizens United, the Court, after determining that corporations are in effect “people”, concluded that the First Amendment prohibits the government from censoring political broadcasts in candidate elections when those broadcasts are funded by corporations or unions. Specifically, Citizens United struck down provisions of the McCain-Feingold “Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002” which prohibited all corporations – both for-profit and not-for-profit – and unions from broadcasting “electioneering communications”: i.e., advertisements or other communications that mention a candidate within 60 days of a general election or 30 days of a primary.
While Citizens United did not strike down the ban on direct contributions from corporations or unions to candidate campaigns or political parties in races for federal office – such contributions remain illegal – by giving back to corporations and unions the unlimited ability to fund political ads specifically mentioning candidates in newspapers, magazines and all forms of television, it handed to a relatively small group of CEOs near-unlimited powers of persuasion in what the Founding Fathers intended as the quintessential democratic process of the Republic.
Perhaps worse, in an electioneering system in which, as former California State Assembly Speaker and Treasurer Jesse Unruh famously said, “Money is the mother’s milk of politics,” it makes almost inevitable the accommodation, if not the sponsorship, of corporate interests by a relatively small number of sitting elected officials, never mind by aspiring candidates.”
Robert Reich delivers an incredible speech to occupiers in Berkeley. We, the millennials, stand at the forefront of a cri de coeur for a genuine transformation.
Had to post this awesome speech by the legendary Bill Moyers.
Here is a segment from a recent episode of the Rachel Maddow Show explaining the genesis and growth of Occupy Together.
Watch live video of the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protests on OccupyNYC’s livestream. According to various news reports I have reviewed there were demonstrations in no less than 87 countries. That is nearly half of all nations on Earth.
With 2011 being a year of revolt and tumult this famous speech from the movie “Network” seems appropriate. The youtube video below is also an excellent example of kinetic typography:
From a wonderful essay on Occupy Wall Street. This quote concerns the supposed center-left Democratic Party’s response to the movement:
The response from most Democratic politicians has been tepid support. Many of them seem caught off guard, as if the sudden appearance of a national conscience were a chimerical beast bent on upsetting the natural order.
But it’s really not that hard to explain. Americans do, eventually, get fed up when they feel their values and interests are being ignored. They are capable of following the money. The great tragedy of the democratic party is that it has moved so far to the right that it no longer recognizes the protesters for what they are: agents of moral progress. Versions of who they used to be.
