Category: Obama Administration
My Preoccupation with Occupations
![[mail]](img/envelope.gif){kind=small}
| Categories: network television, Community Organizing, Obama Administration “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” Abolitionist Frederick Douglass
When members of Occupy Oakland set a U.S. flag on fire at City Hall last week-end, I had a Yogi Berra moment: “Déjà vu all over again.”
This ritual intrinsic to late opposition to the war in Vietnam appears to have divided Northern California Occupiers. The San Francisco Chronicle called it a “wrestling match for the soul of the Occupy movement in the Bay Area.” I’m disappointed, of course, but I also think it serves a little too well the narrative of these protests offered by corporate media. Perhaps that's why it got so much coverage. It would be a misfortune if this ill-conceived action overshadowed attention to the hundreds of actions in protest of the corporatization of our country as personified by Wall Street.
What delighted me from the first about the Occupy movement is its imagination and ingenuity and, just as importantly, its focus on education rather than militancy and scorn.
Dust Busters Needed
| Categories: Spirituality, environment, wilderness, Obama Administration It may have seemed at first like a publicity stunt or a gift from above, but last year Coloradans at Vail and Beaver Creek mountains saw pink snow.
“When you skied a run, you turned and your tracks were pink,” Melissa Macdonald, executive director of the Eagle River Watershed, told the Vail Daily. It wasn’t to be confused with the ever-popular watermelon snow
The Wisdom of Solomon
| Categories: Al Gore, Politics, Obama Administration, Hillary Clinton, Afghanistan Lately, when I think of President Obama, King Solomon comes to mind.
From childhood, I was riveted by the story I heard in Sunday school about how the king determined which of two women was the real mother of a newborn infant by threatening to cleave it in half with a sword. Of course, the biological mother preferred to leave her baby whole even at the risk of not being able to care for it herself. At least, the baby would live.
President Obama should take a clue.
Speaking Truth to Problems
| Categories: Politics, Obama Administration, healthcare policy, education I have two new heroes this week: Diane Ravitch and Dennis Kucinich don’t have a whole lot in common, but both of them exhibited the rare ability to hang onto their principles and change their minds at the same time. We could use more leaders like them.
Corporate Supreme
| Categories: Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, John McCain, CBS, President Reagan, cabletelevison, Politics, Obama Administration, healthcare policy, government regulation, Hillary Clinton, Supreme court, Roberts court, Samuel Alito, Warren Court, Citizens United v. FEC, campaign finance Years ago, when I was in a quandary about the direction of my career, I got some sound advice: Never fall in love with a corporation, because it’s constitutionally unable to reciprocate.
This week, the Supreme Court created a limited redress to that issue in Citizens United v the Federal Elections Commission, giving corporations unfettered permission to spend their general funds on the campaigns of politicians they favor, and turning them into “a real live boy” as Slate put it. Who says money can’t buy you love? If the Rehnquist court handed Republicans the presidency in 2000, it’s hard to believe the Roberts court hasn’t handed them the Congress in 2010.
XML Feeds