There's No Place Like Home(less)

There are a number of groups popping up to fill vacant foreclosed properties with the homeless. With the glut of commercial properties going into foreclosure, this could be an opportunity to end homelessness. All we need is the political will.

You Bet Your Life

Soon to come to network TV? A game show where celebrities torture contestants to death in return for, say, a kidney for their ailing daughter...We shouldn't say that too loud. Some network exec might take us seriously.

Now they are recreating the Milgram Experiment as a reality show on TV. The Milgram experiment involved a situation where people were asked to shock others until they complied with orders, and to turn the electricity up higher and higher until the shocks were life-threatenting. Only the people "shocked" were actually confederates of the researcher, and they were not actually being shocked, just pretending that they were. The experiment showed that most people would just blindly follow the orders of an authority figure.

Anybody Have Any Boxes?

‎"I don't know. I'll just tell you this, if this [health care reform] passes and it's five years from now and all that stuff gets implemented -- I am leaving the country. I'll go to Costa Rica."--Rush Limbaugh.

Need help moving?

Of course, Rush is already denying that he will actually move. He says he just meant he would go on vacation there.

Out In The Cold?

The first Cold War was political consisting of the West vs. the Iron Curtain countries. Are we at the beginning of a second Cold War--an economic Cold War, that we are losing to China?

And with our reliance on surveillance, the Patriot Act, detainment of enemy combatants and illegal immigrants with minimal due process, and corporate dominance are we becoming "Cold Fascists?" Kinder, gentler fascists?

Ethical Mayhem

People in power will have you believe that you have to accept what can be gotten along with. To a certain extent that may be true, but this is much more subject to change that their limited viewpoints may allow. The way it works is you have to get what you can grab. That's how they got where they are.

And I don't mean that people should run around bopping each other on the head and taking each other's stuff at random. You have to target what you need and what you ethically deserve based on your contributions, and go for it balls-out.

The Last Liberal President?

Nixon is looking like a liberal these days. A proposed guaranteed income, wage and price controls, creation of the EPA, enforced integration in southern schools, engagement with China and the Soviet Union, ending the Vietnam War. All that happened during the Nixon administration. Though Nixon pushed the drug war, two-thirds of the money went to treatment of addicts. "In many respects, [Nixon was] 'the last liberal president'"--Noam Chomsky.

Compare the Obama administration's talk. Obama seems to be writing the Republicans' strategy for them. It is pretty sad that after advocating single-payer as a State Senator, President Obama won't go anywhere near talking about it now. Supposedly, this can be chalked up to pragmatism, or a desire to build a consensus. But pragmatism is supposed to be a means for getting things accomplished, not for letting your opponents make you look foolish. C'mon, President Obama. Step up.

The Republicans are winning the language war in coming up with slogans that inflame people's emotions and point them at enemies, even if those enemies are straw men. Yet the Democrats have a former writer for one of the most popular shows on television as their leaders. C'mon, Senator Franken. Step up.

"Lead, follow, or get out of the way."--Thomas Paine

The Upside of an Economic Catastrophe

Our society is in a challenging place right now. There is no denying that many people are going through difficult times. There is evidence that many are suffering, and that some of the things that appeared to work in the past simply don't appear to work any more.

The problem is, some of the things that appeared to work really didn't work. They just created a bigger problem. There is no easy money. America simply doesn't have the right, nor apparently the ability any more, to just haphazardly grab most of the world's wealth and resources.

After World War II, we went on a huge binge. We partied like there was no end, and we bought into the myth that unparalleled, unlimited wealth was just out there for the taking. We helped create a myth that big, unregulated business built wealth out of nothing, and expert after expert added to the mythology by insinuating that creation of wealth was nearly unlimited. But it isn't. The world is a closed system. There is only so much stuff to go around. And when the population was expanding at a large rate, there were always people to pass the Ponzi scheme on to to keep the whole carnival of dreams going long enough to gorge ourselves on more and more cotton candy.

So now it appears that many of our young, and their young, won't have a pile of stuff to collect that approaches the piles of their parents. And there is a lot of resentment and backlash about that. It's easy to assign blame, but hard to find solutions. It's easy to whine and moan, and difficult to build a sustainable future.

But maybe some of the priorities that had gone so wrong can start getting right again. What we have had for a very long time is a society that is completely built on lies. The television, altar to our misguided paradigms, is an absolute icon to the lies that we have been sucking on like a mother's breast that only spews forth poisoned condensed milk.

There is no Huxtable family. Gilligan is not the Skipper's little buddy. That news reporter who cradled the diseased orphan in his hands and looked so concerned just left and moved on to the next story. Those people in that movie didn't fall in love from across the room, and their lives didn't just unfold easily and breathlessly from then on. If a guy buys that product, it won't make women more likely to have sex with him. That movie that told you how bad capitalism was raked in a pile for the various business organizations that backed it. I could be driving a Mazda, but I could be having sex with an ape, too, and I'm not. That frumpy loser in that sitcom doesn't live in a pristine, high-end house with a gorgeous wife despite having no apparent means of support.

A society that has lies so embedded into it as a core value couldn't have a better high priest than the television set. But maybe now that the lies are starting to fall apart, people will discover some truths.

We are defined by what we do, not by what we have. We need our community, not our possessions. That boat, or Porsche, or house in the Hamptons, won't fill a hole in your heart.

So if people spend as much time working on their communities rather than their bank accounts, maybe we will have a culture that is really based on traditions that do special things for all of us, rather than images created by faceless corporations. The corporate world would have you believe that our common heritage is Mickey Mouse and formulaic action films. They create a structure where if Steve Jobs wins, Bill Gates loses, because you will only buy one of their shiny boxes to masturbate to. We have the opportunity here to create something that is more than that. Actually, we had the opportunity the whole time, but most people didn't feel like doing it.

America--Improve It Or Leave It!

Many years ago, in a response to the counter-culture of the '60s, the refrain, "America, love it or leave it!" was a common talking point for the conservatives. I guess the implicit message behind it was that people should leave this idealized illusion of a perfect alone.

But every political system has its problems. The whole notion behind the formation of the United States was that the people should have the right to fix things that were not working right.

So maybe we should have a new refrain, as our country's problems mount: "America, Fix it or leave it!"

The Rich Taxed Us First

The rich started the class war, too.

New Union of the Unemployed

There is a new union of the unemployed. It is called UCubed and it looks like a really innovative idea for some of those in the lowest echelon of power to group together for leverage. If you are unemployed, you may want to strongly consider joining. Go to http://www.unionofunemployed.com/ for more details.

Democracy In Action, Sort Of

At our Democratic Precinct convention in 2008, there were about 1000 people who showed up. All the people couldn't even fit into the school cafeteria where the event was held. This year, two years later, only five showed up. Three of us were elected delegates, though we had space for 33 delegates and 33 alternates. But still, the precinct will have its full voting force at the convention. If the three show up, then each one will have the voting force of eleven people. But it is not clear if all three will show up for the Travis County Convention as some were ambivalent, and there are no alternates. Will we have a situation where only one person speaks for the entire precinct?

The Radical Corporatist Fringe

The radical corporatist fringe has taken control of our society and is determined to succeed even if many of us are driven into homelessness, hunger and destitution by their policies. They are inspired not by the spark, drive and compassion that characterize us as a people, but by the oceans of dirty money that they can tap into to strip our culture of its most precious resources. That is a condition that none of us should tolerate.

We should be building on our strengths, not tearing them down. There is no excuse for allowing anyone to be hungry, homeless or needlessly ill in a world where the resources exist to stop all of these conditions.