Posted on December 7, 2010 in Accountability Campaign 2010 Class
My only question is “Jerry Brown? Won’t you run?
Posted on December 2, 2010 in Accountability Class Reading
I’m deep in Mark Twain’s Autobiography, a curious document which consists of his dictated remembrances, newspaper clippings, and a biography written by his second child, Susy. It does not follow any sort of neat line, but jumps about like a carnival ride landing here in his lecture circuit days, there in his boyhood, and here in his opinions of the current day. One passage that I have just read speaks to our time:
Jay Gould had just then reversed the commercial morals of the United States. He put a blight upon them from which they have never recovered, and from which they will not recover for as much as a century to come. Jay Gould was the mightiest disaster which has ever befallen this country. The people had desired money before his day, but he taught them to fall down and worship it. They had respected men of means before his day, but along with this respect was joined the respect due to the character and industry which had accumulated it. But Jay Gould taught the entire nation to make a god of money and the man, no matter how the money might have been acquired. In my youth there was nothing resembling a worship of money or of its possessor, in our region. And in our region no well-to-do man was ever charged with having acquired his money by shady methods.
The gospel left behind by Jay Gould is doing giant work in our days. Its message is “Get money. Get it quickly. Get it in abundance. Get it in prodigious abundance. Get ir dishonestly if you can, honestly if you must.”
How true! A new American feudalism arises before our eyes and it has bought the traditional check against its progress, the media. Ted Strickland, who was recently narrowly defeated as Ohio’s governor, thinks part of the problem is that the Democrats have failed to speak about these conditions in language which voters understand.
Instead of embracing populism, they have retreated into intellectual elitism.
Strickland says:
“I think it has to do with a sort of intellectual elitism that considers that kind of talk is somehow lacking in sophistication. I’m not sure where it comes from. But I think it’s there. There’s an unwillingness to draw a line in the sand.”
This intellectual elitist concurs with Strickland’s assessment. As the governor asks “How many times do you have to be, you know, slapped in the face?”
It’s class warfare and my class needs better generals.
Posted on July 21, 2009 in Class Commons Theft Insurance
Do you want me dead to preserve the ridiculous profits of an institution that should be founded on service rather than profits?
Posted on July 8, 2009 in Class Culture Wars Equality Gender
Too many leftists elect officials and then do nothing other than express their views in opinion polls and fail to show up for elections to remind them that their issues, their power is important.
Posted on March 17, 2009 in Class Journals & Notebooks Mania Spirituality and Being Writing Exercises
Mania is a long fall, sometimes so high it’s an orbit.
Posted on October 8, 2008 in Campaign 2008 Class
I have to wonder about middle-aged grocery clerks who pronounce financial apocalypse on the basis that Democrats are just going to go back to their old habits of the LBJ days. “Democrats are all tax and spend,” said the fellow checking my items at Trader Joe’s. “That just doesn’t work.”
“Unlike the Republicans who are don’t tax but spend anyways,” I replied.
“That was Bush.”
“And the Republican Congress,” I reminded him with a smile as I walked out the door into the October heat. Nice to see how the Republicans are cutting the lines to Bush, trying to forget that they lauded him and voted for his every program.
Don’t you forget.
Posted on September 30, 2008 in Campaign 2008 Class
Here’s a quick outline of Obama’s tax plan:
Posted on September 26, 2008 in Class
Senator Bernard Sanders thinks it should be the ones who earned the most during the Bush years.
Posted on September 24, 2008 in Campaign 2008 Class Commons Theft
Is this not Rovian foreplay for a fuckover?
Posted on September 4, 2008 in Campaign 2008 Class
Wow! No wonder McCain has so many houses: his wife has the price of a Scottsdale split-level hanging from her ears.
–Vanity Fair
The other day, Cindy McCain protested that she was indeed in touch with ordinary people. Why she did charity work (a kind of community organizing) and, therefore, could empathize with the downtrodden middle class.
She called Barack and Michelle Obama “elitist” which is the new buzzword for the Republican Party.
Then on Tuesday, she arrived at the Republican National Convention wearing $300,000 worth of upscale geegaws, most notably three-carat diamond earrings worth $280,000. The $3000 Oscar de la Renta dress that she wore might go to some needy lobbyist’s wife. She will keep the earrings.
Cindy’s clothes sense tell where her and her husband’s sympathies lie and it’s not with the middle class.
As a member of the middle class, I support Barack Obama because it’s obvious that people like Cindy McCain have too much money to spend. Obama supports a middle class tax break that gives 95% of working Americans a tax break of up to $1000. If there are any future tax increases to pay off the huge Bush debt, they will fall on the Cindy and John McCains.
Elitist Republicans wearing expensive diamonds and pearls will not, of course, like this. But real people will.
[tags]Campaign 2008, Cindy McCain, class, conspicuous consumption, social class, class[/tags]
Posted on September 23, 2007 in Class Myths & Mysticism
‘Halt, do not shoot, I am Che Guevara and I am worth more alive than dead.’
The Guardian has an article about the perserverance of the memory of Che Guevara, atheist Communist who is now regarded as a blessed one by the people of the village where he was brought for execution after being hunted down by Bolivian troops:
By 8pm in the main square of the dusty town of Vallegrande, the only sound is the buzz of prayer coming from the church. Inside, devoted Catholics sit and stand around the image of Our Lord of Malta – the only black Christ in Latin America, brought to this Bolivian town during the Spanish conquest.
But this is not the only foreign element of devotion. Father Agustin, the Polish priest, reads out prayers written down by local people: ‘For my mother who is sick, I pray to the Lord and …’, hesitantly, ‘to Saint Ernesto, to the soul of Che Guevara.’ ‘Saint Ernesto,’ the parishioners murmur in response….
In his 1967 dispatch to the Guardian, journalist Richard Gott, in Vallegrande on the day of Guevara’s death, wrote: ‘It was difficult to recall that this man had once been one of the great figures of Latin America. It was not just that he was a great guerrilla leader; he had been a friend of Presidents as well as revolutionaries. His voice had been heard and appreciated in inter-American councils as well as in the jungle. He was a doctor, an amateur economist, once Minister of Industries in revolutionary Cuba, and Castro’s right-hand man. He may well go down in history as the greatest continental figure since Bolivar. Legends will be created around his name.’
Gott was right. Susana Osinaga, a nurse who cleaned Guevara’s body back then, recalls: ‘He was just like a Christ, with his strong eyes, his beard, his long hair.’ Today the laundry where Guevara’s corpse was laid is a place of pilgrimage. On the wall above Osinaga, an engraving reads: ‘None dies as long as he is remembered.’ Osinaga has an altar to Guevara in her home. ‘He is very miraculous.’
Saint Che. Friend of Fidel Castro. You can’t go to a latino event in these parts without seeing his beret-capped face looking off over your left shoulder to some future Marxist workers’ state. When you view altars constructed for the Day of the Dead, you’ll often see his image among greats of the Left who include Dr. Martin Luther King and Gandhi. Bullets and compassion for the destitute and struggling made him so venerable.
Che was a thinker and a poet. He joined the Marxist left because he had witnessed the suffering of the poor and thought there was a better way. Only Communism, he thought, cared about Latin America’s downtrodden. So after studying medicine, he hooked up with Castro, took up a gun, and engaged in guerilla warfare in nations where a sliver of a class of wealthy magnates oppressed hundreds of thousands of workers. For decades, the peasants had cried for land reform. Capitalism had failed (as it still does) to provide the right to control of the means of self-survival. Those who worship him know that Che saw this and tried — in a flawed, pinkish way — to change this.
In the end, his opponents executed a man but not a legend. The faces of my mostly Republican neighbors turn red when they see his visage at Mexican Independence Day celebrations, but there is nothing they can do about it. He is an emblem of latino resistance to norteamericano machinations in their lands, a threat to white people of floods of tanned immigrants crossing their borders, taking their jobs and, by their naturalization and votes, their precious but falsely free market government. He does not die. Like many a saint, however, he stands for renunciation of the worldly as an icon for sale in vulgar, popular marketplaces and hash houses.
Posted on August 26, 2007 in California Watch Class Psych Wards Stigma
Check out Marty Kaplan’s article about Schwartzeneggar’s line item veto of Integrated Services for Homeless Adults With Serious Mental Illness. Seems Conan the Cruel thought it vital to preserve a tax break for owners of yachts, pleasure planes, and RVs. Phil Angelides would never have allowed this to happen.