Social Security 101 (via Crooks and Liars)
Crooks and Liars is one of favorite blogs. This is a critical entry. It talks about the malicious propaganda we are all exposed to about Social Security and its trust fund. I wish everyone concerned with the issue would read this particular post.
James Pilant
From Crooks and Liars –
Yet it seems that conservative lies have taken hold to the extent that the truth is called a lie, while lies are called the truth. Once upon a time, that only happened in fiction. Now it’s real. So let’s talk about Social Security, what it is, and why you shouldn’t believe everything conservatives and their minions in the press tell you.
Gerry Rafferty Dies At 63
Gerry Rafferty was a wonderful singer who brightened my youth and my youth needed it. Here is a largely unappreciated classic, Get It Right Next Time.
James Pilant
Andreas Kluth – Hannibal And Me
This is a video of Andreas Kluth discussing his new book, Hannibal and Me. To be utterly brief, the book is about creativity and the straitjacket of success.
Watch the video, the buy the book.
James Pilant
Freedom to, freedom from (via The Hannibal Blog)
Sometimes, I think when looking at my blog, you can chart my intellectual journey by what I think is important at the time. I suspect that Andreas Kluth does something of the same thing. Here’s his thoughts on negative and positive liberty.
James Pilant
“Comcast Owns the Internet” (via Chasing Fat Tails)
At the moment, a great deal of weeping over the defeat of net neutrality is justified. Unfortunately the war for the internet can be lost on more than one front at a time. So, “Chasing Fat Tails” explains.
James Pilant
The Ethics Sage, Steven Mintz – First Post Of The New Year!
Steven Mintz has his first post of 2011 discussing the continuing crisis in the California State Budget. This is a satirical take on the crisis.
The Demise of the Golden State
Happy New Year to all. Here’s my first blog of the New Year. It’s about my home state.
California is in a crisis. No, it’s not because Lindsay Lohan has been in and out of jail more often than a correctional officer. It’s certainly not because Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger will be leaving office soon. Let’s hope he won’t be back! California’s problems can be blamed on its insatiable appetite to spend regardless of available resources, the lack of a political will to say no to those who come with hat in hand to Sacramento and the overwhelming desire by legislators to do what it takes to adopt the positions necessary to insure their re-election. A cynic might say it’s also due to the desire to enrich oneself by using political influence that can be bartered to the highest bidder.
There is a saying that goes: “As California goes, …. (For the rest, click here.)
I really wanted to add some satirical flair of my own to the topic but I don’t know as much about California as I probably should. Further, for a couple of decades I have been thinking that they would fix the problem or a least try. So, I merely thank God, that I am at a relatively safe distance.
James Pilant
On Fighting And Losing Well, Financial Reform Edition (via Rortybomb)
Rortybomb is one of my favorite web sites. Here, is a discussion of the efforts necessary to shape the new regulations on financial transactions in a more effective way. It’s a very sad story to me because the people (the President) we thought would be pushing for effective legislation were only interested in photo op legislation when the country needed better.
From Rortybomb –
Last week I wrote about President Obama and losing poorly, about how he loses in a way that doesn’t build toward long-term liberal goals, that leaves his enemies stronger and in control of the narrative while splitting his supporters. I want to talk about this argument and financial reform, specifically how the progressive community was able to overcome it. I would argue that the progressive community fought financial reform well for two key reasons.
A Community of Experts
The first is that Americans for Financial Reform (AFR), Roosevelt Institute, the financial blogosphere and many others found a large number of experts, built them up and deployed them in ways that pushed for stronger concrete changes. On Roosevelt’s end alone, our Make Markets Be Markets conference and Will It Work? How Will We Know? conferences took experts working in a variety of different places and on a number of individual topics and brought them together.
These were experts in their fields who had a different, stronger vision of how the financial sector should be regulated than what was proposed by Treasury. They made strong recommendation, markers for what serious reform would look like. This builds us for the long run, as there are now experts with a strong vision who have been tested in the public sphere, experts that wonks, media, lawmaker and regulators can call on for expertise in the future. That’s building a community.
(It was also fun! Frustrating, hard-work, a complete pain-in-the-ass, disappointing at times, but fun. Matt Stoller pointed that out to me, that this kind of political community building should be fun, along with the smart insight that financial reform battles that are lost need to be lost in a way that builds coalitions. How many liberal groups had a fun 2010?)
For the second reason, you will have to go to the full article.
Rortybomb is eloquently stating what I and many others have come to realize, the President is not on our side. It doesn’t matter what he said. It doesn’t matter what he did. He’s not on our side.
So, we have to fight for issues just as if he were an enemy politician. This involves experts and grass roots campaigning.
If there was anything more plain in 2008 than the need to put a stop to the casino style gambling on Wall Street, I would have been hard pressed to name it. Yet, the President let this thing sit for almost a year and a half till a good part of the outrage died and then the President deliberately tried to weaken the bill and to some extent succeeded. This is pathetic.
Well, it’s not getting any better. The President of the United States has thousands of issues upon which he has not yet caved, not yet surrendered or not yet modified to the interests of monied interests. We get to watch.
James Pilant
P.S. If you would like a simple, easy new year’s resolution that will benefit you for the entire year, click on the link to Rortybomb and then add it to your favorites. You’ll never regret it. jp
What Will Become Of The Internet?
The web blog, Grand Strategy: The View From Oregon, has a post on the future of the Internet.
It’s a very good post, thoughtful and reasoned. Here’s a quote. I recommend you read all of it.
James Pilant
The fight for WikiLeaks to make documents public in the Western democracies and the fight for activists like Ai Weiwei and Liu Xiaobo to speak out publicly in China are intimately related. One cannot avoid noticing that these struggles are taking place in the two largest economies in the world at present. Today, these are the fights worth fighting. This is the good fight. It is not a fight of nation-state against nation-state, nor class against class, but of individuals against institutions that seek to regiment the life of the individual for the convenience of those institutions and those who control and benefit from the institutions.
What “Star Wars” can teach my son about life (via Salon)
This blog deals in many ways with ethics. So, I pursue topics along those lines. When I saw this article in Salon I was intrigued. David Sirota is an author whose work I appreciate. He’s done a nice job on this one. He wasn’t just content to write a good article, he salted it with clips from various films illustrating his points.
Sirota is clearly having fun with his topic. But that’s okay, he’s invited us along.
Wherever you stand in the debate about what the Empire metaphorically represents — a huge corporation, your faceless county government, the vast military-industrial complex — it’s undoubtedly the kind of place in which many of us now toil: namely, inside a bureaucracy that has lots of worker-bee drones and a very clear management hierarchy. In the age of mass layoffs, de-unionization, the shredding of labor regulations, and a general desperation to hold onto a job, the “Star Wars” trilogy — and specifically, senior corporate executive Darth Vader — prepares kids for how that modern workplace operates.
Read this gem where Sirota reflects on the lessons of ET.
In their civics class, kids will almost definitely be told about the virtues of our Fourth Amendment — the one that’s supposed to protect their privacy. Most likely, though, they won’t be told about stuff that has destroyed those sacred safeguards — stuff like the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretapping, Facebook cyber-tracking, and the like. To prevent kids from being confused by this paradoxical conflict between constitutional principle and the real world practices of the National Security State, Spielberg gives them “E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial,” whose most frightening scene tells us how little privacy they can expect. After extensively surveilling Elliot’s family (ostensibly without warrant) via kidnapper van, the faceless government lunges into his home zombie-style — arms rigidly extended, fists tearing through walls/windows, and no warrant in sight, even as Elliot’s mom shrieks that “This is my home!” Welcome, kids, to 21st century “privacy” — expect nothing but a space-suit-clad federal agent at your door.
This is my favorite paragraph.
At some point, my son Isaac and children his age are going to want to know about the economy and the tough times of their youth. And at some point, they’ll probably hear about the housing crisis from some TV charlatan who tells them that it wasn’t really about big megabanks and shady schemes — it was really all about poor, lazy selfish minorities who were irresponsible and therefore deserved to be thrown out of their homes. But by the time they hear that factually unsubstantiated tripe, we should make sure our kids have already seen “The Goonies.”
There are many more gems like this one in the article. Please read it. We can all use a post holiday laugh tempered with a satirical edge.
James Pilant
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