San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

You are here: Home / Archives for Columns / Under the Perfect Sun

Don’t Celebrate This MLK Day: American Oligarchy is Killing the Dream

by

Don’t celebrate this Martin Luther King Jr. Day. And please don’t clap for anyone talking about how far we’ve come.

Rather than engaging in the usual empty gestures accompanied by vanilla rhetoric that turns Dr. King into a saint, we should be railing against the fact that last week, by indicating that they are prepared to cripple public sector unions, the Supreme Court of the United States took another huge step in moving the country further and further away from the America that King fought for and eventually gave his life to make a reality.   [Read more…]

American Media in 2016: Those Afflicting the Comfortable Need Not Apply

by

Just before the New Year I highlighted Project Censored’s pick for the most underreported story of 2015—the fact that 2016 will be when the top 1% will control half of the world’s wealth). In that same column I focused on two other largely ignored stories that broke subsequent to Project Censored’s annual report that also underline the perils of domestic and international economic inequality.

The first addresses the end of the American middle class’s majority status and the second examines the disproportionately negative effect that the global elite’s consumption has on greenhouse gas production.

These crucially important news stories should be shaping our national discourse but, unfortunately, they never make it through a sufficient number of what Noam Chomsky calls the corporate news “filters” to make a significant impact.   [Read more…]

Top 10 Political Hopes for 2016

by

It’s a new year and a big one for politics. As grim as 2015 was in many respects, this time of year begs for hope, and while I have a soft spot for the utopian, there are a few things that very well could happen that would bring some real tangible good to peoples’ lives and the planet. So here is my pragmatic political wish list for 2016:

1) That Donald Trump actually wins the Republican Presidential nomination and brings the entire Republican Party down when the sizable majority of Americans who hate his ideas vote out the party up and down the ticket….   [Read more…]

Censored 2015: The Most Underreported Story of the Year

by

As I wrote back in mid-October, Project Censored recently released their list of the most underreported stories of 2015. The number one story on their list features the news that 2016 will be the year when half of the world’s wealth will be controlled by the top 1%. More specifically, they document how:

According to the Oxfam report, the proportion of global wealth owned by the 1 percent has increased from 44 percent in 2009 to 48 percent in 2014 and is projected to reach 50 percent in 2016. In October 2014, a prior Oxfam report, “Even It Up: Time to End Extreme Poverty,” revealed that the number of billionaires worldwide had more than doubled since the 2009 financial crisis, showing that, although those at the top have recovered quickly, the vast majority of the world’s population are far from reaping the benefits of any recent economic recovery.

Even more staggering, the world’s richest eighty-five people now hold the same amount of wealth as half the world’s poorest population. “Failure to tackle inequality will leave hundreds of millions trapped in poverty unnecessarily,” the report’s authors warned.   [Read more…]

Three Progressive Literary Stocking Stuffers for 2015

by

It’s Christmas week and as we do every year, the grown-ups in my family are keeping up the tradition of buying nothing for each other.

But for those of you who must endure the fear and loathing of the consumer frenzy, here is my annual list of books that might serve as good stocking stuffers for the alienated progressives or other likely suspects on your list (with a special focus on some of the best work that received less attention than it deserved)   [Read more…]

Donald Trump: The Pure Product of American Politics

by

There’s been a lot of moral indignation recently in light of Donald Trump’s repugnant call to halt Muslim immigration and his fond remembrance of the American internment camps of the WWII era. Indeed, some folks have even started using the “F” word, rightly noting the fascist tendencies that the Donald’s inflamed rhetoric appeals to and accurately comparing his calls to ban refugees to the shameful exclusion of Jews fleeing the Nazis.

But as righteous as it is to call out Trump’s ugly racism and xenophobia, there is something suspect about the assertion heard in many quarters that somehow now this outlier has “gone too far.” Indeed, the frequent portrayal of Trump as an aberrant figure who has stepped outside the boundaries of mainstream American political discourse simply protests too much.

Donald Trump is not some “out of nowhere” demagogue who caught us unsuspecting; he is the pure product of the last thirty years of ugly American politics where “the center” has increasingly moved to the right.   [Read more…]

March and Rally for Climate Justice, This Saturday!

by

Balboa Park March and Rally Saturday December 12

Last week as the big climate talks kicked off in Paris it was my pleasure to co-host with Masada Disenhouse of SanDiego350 a community screening of Naomi Klein’s new film This Changes Everything. We used this screening to help facilitate a discussion among folks from the local labor and environmental movements along with representatives from various community and student groups that was focused on the intersection between the climate crisis and the fight against economic inequality. Many folks expressed spirited opinions on how we might join the interests of the poor and workers with those fighting to save the planet.  

The film poses an important question: how can we come to see the corner that the climate crisis puts us in not as a reason for despair but as an opportunity to challenge the stale hegemony of market fundamentalism and create a better more humane world?    

While there is not a single easy answer, it’s never been more clear that the intersection of our historic level of economic inequality and the bankruptcy of the old story we have told ourselves about our unexamined dominion over the earth and its resources is leading us down what Klein calls “the suicide path.”  
  [Read more…]

Nothing or Everything Changes After Paris

by

There has been much to be dismayed about in the wake of the horrible Paris (and Beirut) attacks, from the carnage itself to the ugly xenophobia it aroused in American politics to the sheer stupidity of the eternal return of the same that is the bipartisan hegemony on foreign policy. The answer for everything is always an eye for an eye until the whole world is blind with little to no intelligent reflection on the blunders that got us here—that might mean a fundamental rethinking of our role in the world rather than yet another knee-jerk response.

Perhaps the best piece I’ve seen on the phenomenon of ISIS came out months before the Paris attacks in The Guardian. In “Iraq Blowback: ISIS Rise Manufactured by Insatiable Oil Addiction,” Nafeez Ahmed gives a nice pocket history of how ISIS, the “Islamist Frankenstein,” is the product of the West’s “co-optation of Gulf states’ jihadists.”

More specifically, Ahmed starts by going back to the Bush administration where senior officials decided, “to pursue hair-brained ambitions to re-engineer the region through the de facto ethno-sectarian” conflict. Thus began years of ill-conceived covert operations amidst the chaos of post-war Iraq, none of them working particularly well.   [Read more…]

Clinton and the New Democrats’ Tired Third Way

by

Recently I noted how movements like the Fight for $15 and the insurgent Bernie Sanders campaign have revealed a widespread thirst for an overtly left politics that makes the battle against the billionaire class a central rallying cry. Indeed, Sanders has continued to force Hillary Clinton to tack to the left on multiple issues, and he has had a genuinely transformative impact on the national political discourse by unashamedly bringing democratic socialism to the stage.

This is why Harold Meyerson argues that the Sanders’s campaign represents “the largest specifically left mobilization—and by ‘specifically left’ I mean it demands major changes in the distribution of income and wealth and major reforms to U.S. capitalism—that the nation has seen in at least half a century.”

Last week, Sanders himself defined what such a movement should be based on in a speech in which he defined his version of “Democratic Socialism” by linking his political vision to FDR’s Second Bill of Rights and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s proposition that “true freedom does not occur without economic security”   [Read more…]

America’s Same Old Sad Story: Why the White Working Class is Killing Itself

by

Last week brought us the stark news that America’s middle-aged white working class is.  Princeton economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case released a report documenting that “The mortality rate for whites 45 to 54 years old with no more than a high school education increased by 134 deaths per 100,000 people from 1999 to 2014.” And strikingly, “rising annual death rates among this group are being driven not by the big killers like heart disease and diabetes but by an epidemic of suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse: alcoholic liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids.”  

Although researchers were somewhat puzzled by the extremity of this epidemic of nihilism, many observers were quick to note that there was “a more pessimistic outlook among whites about their financial futures” along with a corresponding wave of health issues and “difficulty socializing.”     [Read more…]

Fighting for More than $15

by

Teachers, Students, and Community Fight for $15 and More
3:00 Rally and March on Tuesday November 10th at City College near Park and B

For progressives it is the worst of times and the best of times.  As I noted on Labor Day, the American labor movement faces an existential crisis in the form of a looming Supreme Court decision that may essentially make the whole country “right to work” as the trend toward greater income inequality continues unabated.  

Our sitting Democratic President has made pushing a terrible neoliberal trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership, one of his legacy items, and the news on climate change seems to get worse by the day as our leaders bicker over half measures.     [Read more…]

The Day After the Day of the Dead

by

It’s the day after the Day of the Dead, a Mexican holiday which traditionally is both a time of remembrance of lost loved ones and a moment when the dead mock the pretenses of the living.  Death is the leveler of rich and poor, proud and humble.  

It reminds us that, in the end, all our bones are equal.  

As Octavio Paz observes in “The Day of the Dead” from his classic book The Labyrinth of Solitude, “Death is a mirror which reflects the vain gesticulations of the living.  The whole motley confusion of acts, omissions, regrets and hopes which is the life of each of us finds in death, not meaning or explanation, but an end.”     [Read more…]

©2010-2017 SanDiegoFreePress.org

Code is Poetry