Today, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, the Columbia professor and former economic advisor to Bill Clinton, [published] a new report for the Roosevelt Institute entitled “Rewriting the Rules,” which is basically a roadmap for what many progressives would like to see happen policy wise over the next four years.
I find it very interesting that at the moment in our history when science has never been more important in making social policy there is an aggressive and well-funded campaign to keep science from doing just that. All in the name of profit. The only thing that is going to change the outcome is a mass movement of citizens who actively work for and vote for the most compassionate and life-affirming candidate of those available.
Some days, when I do SR by the time I am through I just feel that with the level of stupidity and greed that pervades our culture we don't deserve to survive, and probably won't. This is one of those stories.
There was a time when the American legal system was considered the benchmark for the world. Those days are long gone. The American gulag today and the courts and law enforcement agencies that service it constitute an octopus of the state that might described by Kafka on acid. In the United States if you are an ivy league graduate and work for the right financial institution you can weasel billions from fixed income grandmothers with no fear of being held accountable. If you are Black or Hispanic, and particularly if you are poor, however, any touch by one of the suckers of the octopus, and you are doomed. We manufacture criminals in the United States. Like cars they are created in the factories of the prison system. And they are needed, like terrorists, because they justify the expenditure of billions upon billions, producing profits made by a tiny faction of the population. There is a reason we have five per cent of the world's population, but twenty five per cent of the world's prisoners.
I have been witness to and participant in more than a decade of strenuous but essentially fruitless efforts to challenge the passivity with which America has collectively accepted an “upgrade” that gave us a concealed, computerized, privatized vote counting process–a Trojan Horse which the forensic evidence we have painstakingly gathered links inextricably to a bewildering political sea change tantamount to a rolling coup.
Central to Wednesday's strike is the evolution of its scope. What began two years ago as a fast-food workers movement has propelled into something wider, with Wednesday's protests including a range of workers workers from adjunct professors to home care and child care providers to Walmart employees.