Category Archives: Writing

Seattle — Udacity, a company offering free online courses and aiming to bring higher education to the world, will participate in a new global entrepreneurship training program beginning in November. The company will partner with Startup Weekend, TechStars, Startup America and startup guru, Steve Blank, and others to create Startup Weekend Next.

>Udacity Blends Online Course with Offline Education

The Utopian promise of the internet has always been a capitalist promise, a political project in which people could do well by doing the right thing. Poverty would be alleviated not by consciousness raising but by markets. Nothing epitomizes this spirit more than this new Udacity project, called “experiential entrepreneurship education” which combines an online class with a kind of intensive workshop.

I doubt this will jump-start the world economy but I bet it will launch more than a few businesses. This is one of those good ideas that if the Republican Party– supposedly the party of business–had any sense at all, would be one of the pillars of its economic and foreign policy. It might be a struggle to sell this to those middle aged angry white men, but it wouldn’t be impossible. It’d broaden the Republican party’s demographic base too.

This is also one of those projects that those of us interested in substantive change ought to consider carefully and perhaps emulate. If Steve Blank can use online education– or a hybrid education, more precisely– to spread capitalism, what can we use it for? How about an online course and workshop that teaches activism? Perhaps it would be called “Occupy 101.” Or a course in Democratic Socialism, or radical economics or …

I would prefer that Obama win the election—not so much because he’d be so much better than Romney on policy but because he will disappoint so many of his loyalists that it would be good for radical politics. Instead of people bellyaching about McCain’s awfulness, as they would have had he won in 2008, we got Occupy. Occupy faded, in part because attention was turned to the presidential campaign… Presidential politics, given the power of money and all our constitutional structures that nurture orthodoxy, is the natural terrain of the big boys. It would be much more fruitful to organize around specific issues, like single-payer health insurance and living-wage bills; to develop better institutions, like livelier unions and third and fourth parties; and if one must work in the electoral realm, to build from the bottom up, where the likes of us could actually make a difference.

“Why Should the Left Support Obama? Doug Henwood”

At some level, I agree with Mr. Henwood– I usually agree with him— but at the same time I have some real misgivings. It’s true that lots of us have been so worried about the far right that we are willing to be, in effect, leftist yellow dog Democrats, willing to vote for any Democrat, even if he’s a yellow dog, figuratively or literally. I’m not sure that this is more than anecdote, but Facebook has made this election seem terrifying.

We’re all busy with families and jobs and to one extent or the other we are all low-information voters. On Facebook, though, I’ve discovered how deeply the right-wing has penetrated my family and friends back in Louisiana and Texas. I know conservatism well; I was raised by a man who joined the Republican effort to elect Reagan in 1976. I suspect Dad was Republican because he thought the chaotic Democratic party couldn’t run the country.

He shot himself in the foot. A few years into the Reagan era, when Dad died, the Republican administration had already succeeded in its efforts to eliminate Social Security’s once generous survivor’s benefits program. That made it much more difficult (among other things) for my little sister to go to college. Dad mistakenly thought Reagan would help him and the middle class. I see my family members and childhood friends making the same mistake.

Reagan’s election in 1980 was a landmark event, signalling more than three decades of erosion of power and affluence for everyone but the very rich. Reagan seemed like a bozo at the time and maybe he did no more than articulate the program already well underway. Romney seems like a very similar sort of clown, and maybe he too is doing nothing more than articulating the plan, but his ideas are worse than Reagan’s. We all need Obama to win.