This is on the long side-- it goes fast if you get into it-- but it is worth spending some time on it (about 50 minutes). Taibbi does a great job of showing that corruption in the financial sector continues unabated. He also makes it clear that solutions are not impossible.
I don't read enough. I don't have time; maybe I can sneak in 500 or 1000 words over breakfast. (I haven't been writing either.) I do listen to good podcasts when I work out and one of the best is from Doug Henwood. I've been reading his Left Business Observer for about 15 years or so. Henwood has a radio show too, "Behind the News" or sometimes "Almost Behind the News", which is sent out as a podcast. That's what ...
This video has made the rounds and it got me thinking. If this guy, Peter Beinart, is correct, we are on the verge of the next progressive wave in our history. It's a happy thought for a nice Fall Monday morning. The last one-- in the 20's and 30's-- got us the 40 hour work week, social security, the FDIC, and cheap, accessible higher education, among other things. I am hoping that this time we get a national health care and pension system, cheap or free higher education, student debt relief, and a strong link between productivity and wages, among other things. If it happens, Louis CK will be our John the Baptist.
The thing about right wing rhetoric is that it is upside down, a kind of unconscious irony that lacks all insight. Individual liberty means the freedom to carry a gun and to believe that climate change is a hoax and evolution a thinly supported theory. Never mind food and housing and health care and good wages and a pension. That's not liberty; liberty is being able to carry a concealed weapon. Individual liberty also means freedom from government regulation. Never mind that we are only now emerging from a world-wide economic collapse rooted in a wildly unregulated, often illegal, financial sector. Never mind that bridges are collapsing or that we are all growing poorer while the rich get richer. Never mind. We need to be free. I've often wondered how far this will go, if unchecked. Would the right-wing advocate, say, ...
