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Welcome to Plutocracy: The “Endless Inegalitarian Spiral” Continues Apace

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Buried under all the noise of the national circus over the last month was some fairly stark economic news.  Despite all the hoopla about the stock market booming along and other financial happy talk, it appears the iceberg of economic inequality is becoming an even larger threat to our collective ship.  

Late last December we learned that the world’s wealthiest people got a whole lot richer in 2017.  As the Washington Post reported, “The richest people on earth became $1 trillion richer in 2017, more than four times last year’s gain, as stock markets shrugged off economic, social and political divisions to reach record highs.”   [Read more…]

Love and Resistance: Lessons from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

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It’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day and, for those of us who deeply value his legacy, it’s hard not to greet the first official King holiday of the Trump era with a deep sense of painful irony.  As I wrote last year at this time on the eve of his inauguration:

Today we are at [a] dead-end with Trump’s administration full of revanchist billionaires, right-wing demagogues, and military strongmen representing the triumph of market fundamentalism married to racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and authoritarian militarism. Simply put, in Trump Nation, King’s “triple evils” [of racism, economic injustice, and militarism] are akin to the holy trinity.

Unfortunately, the last year has done little else but confirm this proclamation, making this year’s remembrance especially important. For King’s critique of American society is now even more relevant than it has been in the decades since his death—it haunts us like a ghost.   [Read more…]

Reflections on 2017: The Year of Generalized Rage

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My first column back after the San Diego Free Press holiday hiatus comes in the wake of all the usual end-of-the-year media ruminations on the significance of 2017, most of which focused on a notable person, seminal event, a list of significant trends, etc.  While there were many astute observations to be found, the one thing that stood out to me as definitive of 2017 was not a person, place, or thing, but the phenomenon of generalized rage.  

In his most recent book, Requiem for the American Dream: The Ten Principles of the Concentration of Wealth and Power Noam Chomsky describes the phenomenon that more than anything else defines the Age of Trump   [Read more…]

Burning the Christmas Greens

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In William Carlos Williams’s famous poem “Burning the Christmas Greens” he notes how at “the thick of the dark moment” in “winter’s midnight” we turn to the trees because “green is a solace” that we use to “fill our need.” Thus the “living green” along with “paper Christmas bells covered with tinfoil and fastened by red ribbons” seem “gentle and good to us.” But then when their time is past we feel the relief as we clear our rooms and assign the greens to the fireplace and “in the jagged flames green to red, instant and alive.” And we stand “breathless to be witnesses as if we stood ourselves refreshed among the shining fauna of that fire.”

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Progressive Stocking Stuffers for Year Two of the Trump Era: Reading for Dark Times

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If you just can’t bring yourself to give up on the sordid consumer frenzy and go all in for a Buy Nothing Christmas, then perhaps getting your loved ones a few good books to help them navigate our dark times is the next best thing.  

Here is my list of a handful of some of the best books of the last awful year:
Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America by Nancy MacLean
No is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need by Naomi Klein
Thoreau, A Life by Laura Dassow Walls
New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

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California’s Burning: What Will Rise from the Ashes?

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Welcome to the future.  

That’s the thing I’ve been thinking to myself as the frenetic news cycle over the past year has veered from political chaos to natural disaster and back again in a vertigo-inducing downward spiral.  Increasing social division domestically as the rich pillage the rest of us, the intensified threat of international conflict, the brazen plundering of the commons, and utter disdain for the natural world amidst a myriad of sexual harassment scandals and horrifying mass shootings are punctuated by catastrophic natural disasters from the epic fires to supercharged hurricanes and yet more fearsome firestorms.  

Reality is exceeding the capacity of our dystopian imaginations.   [Read more…]

Taxing Our Democracy: The GOP Plan is Part of a Larger Assault on Democratic Institutions

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Back during the halcyon days of the Obama administration, political scientists Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin I. Page of Northwestern University published a seminal study on American democracy that illustrated that:

Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts. Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.

This threat to our democracy was the product of the fact that, according to Gilens and Page, “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”   [Read more…]

Will 2018 Be the Year of the Education War Inside the California Democratic Party?

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One would think that in the midst of the Trump era, with so many threats not just to essential government policies and programs but to democracy itself, Democrats would have a pretty clear idea of who their enemy is.  

A reasonable observer might also conclude that the Democratic Party in California which has, in many ways, been the vanguard of resistance nationwide would be laser-focused on not only maintaining the blue wall but on working to oust California Republicans from the House of Representatives.

Clearly, it would also seem to make sense that with Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education and the National Republican Party dead set on undermining public education in the service of moneyed interests, that Democrats would be rigorously defending it.  And at a time when the Supreme Court will soon rule against public sector unions, one of the core constituencies of the Democratic Party’s base, that Democrats would have the backs of their longtime allies.  
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Learning Courage from Thoreau in Dark Times

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One of the things that I am grateful for this Thanksgiving is the fact that I am fortunate enough to teach Henry David Thoreau every fall, particularly this 200th year since the great American author’s birth.  

Most of my students at City College have lived, worked, and struggled more than your average college student and, consequently, Thoreau’s call to avoid a life of “quiet desperation” speaks to them more profoundly than it might to other students from different circumstances.  Simply put, they are in a college English class reading literature because they have chosen to be there.  Running against the grain of all the siren calls for a more market-based education driven by efficiency and expediency, many of my students have decided that what moves them most is to read and think and to live a life they hope will be more meaningful because of it.  

Hence, before my students even get to this great old courage teacher, they have chosen to live “deliberately” as Thoreau put it.  And that, of course, is one of the central lessons that Thoreau still teaches us: that we can insist on choices and that those choices really matter.  They have moral consequences.  They make us who we are.   [Read more…]

Donna Brazile is Still Right: The Culture of the Democratic Party Needs to Change

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Last week brought welcome news for those of us looking for some light at the end of the tunnel as we close in on the first year of the Trump era when voters repudiated Republican rule by handing resounding victories to Democrats in Virginia, New Jersey, and elsewhere around the country.

While this is clearly a morale booster for beleaguered progressives, let’s hope that it does not stop folks from continuing to ask the hard questions that need to be answered if we truly want to change the course of the country from the dangerous path we are on.  

Some of those questions were beginning to be debated with a fresh focus in the wake of Donna Brazile’s revelations about the 2016 campaign in the days leading up to the good electoral news on Tuesday.  While most of the coverage belabored the question of whether or not the Democratic primary was “rigged,” what was more important about Brazile’s recounting of her time at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was what she revealed about the culture of the Clinton campaign and the national party.   [Read more…]

Education in the Trump Era: Bad for Your Mental Health?

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Fear and loathing in the classroom?  Not exactly, but things aren’t that great either.  According to a new study released last week by my union, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and the advocacy group the Badass Teachers Association (BAT), educators are feeling significantly more stressed these days.  

As Education Week reports, “The survey found that educators find work to be stressful 61 percent of the time—and nearly a quarter of respondents said work was ‘always’ stressful. Meanwhile, workers in the general population report that work is stressful 30 percent of the time.”

The result of this is that the mental health of the educators who serve our children is suffering. USA Today’s coverage of the AFT/BAT study explains that of the teachers who were surveyed, “58% said their mental health was ‘not good’ for seven or more of the previous 30 days. A similar survey in 2015 found just 34% of respondents felt the same.”     [Read more…]

Nathan Fletcher Round 4 vs. My Resurrected SD Free Press Columns: The Final Death Match?

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Tomorrow is Halloween.  Are we in for something scary?  

Not really.  

But, as in a lot of horror movies, so many things in San Diego politics never seem to die — they just keep coming back, over-and-over again.  That’s just how we roll here in the place “where happy happens.”  It’s not scary, but it’s not particularly exciting either.  

While the vast majority of people in San Diego are not paying the least bit of attention to local races heading into 2018, there has been quite a bit of petty drama surrounding the San Diego Board of Supervisors District 4 race in recent weeks.  It appears that local Republican operatives have decided to kill Nathan Fletcher’s most recent political aspirations with a strong dose of my all-powerful San Diego Free Press mojo from the 2013 mayor’s race by quoting me extensively on an anti-Fletcher website and, if my social media feed can be trusted, some people are in quite a twist about it.  
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