All posts tagged: Politics

The tears of the oppressed

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It’s my birthday today. I took the day off of work, and I also took a day off from closely monitoring the news, setting out for a hike. It was a wonderful and refreshing hike, up Fireweed Mountain just down the road from my cabin. The weather is beautiful, the sun is shining on us in this magnificent valley, making it feel like a cathedral, surrounded as it is by grand mountains, roaring rivers, and a massive glacial field. But the news cycle caught up with me, and I write this with tears running down my face. It may feel like a cathedral here but there is no sanctuary, no place of escape from the violent karma that is currently raging in our streets. But for many Americans there has never been an escape from police violence.

New Party, New Narrative

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One thing I’ve been discussing with the comrades is a new political party. The Bernie Sanders left is now extremely well-networked and mobilized. This all goes back ten years or so, to the Occupy Wall Street movement. But the Sanders policies have been firmly rejected by the Democrat Party. So….What’s next?

Into The Wild: 2010 to 2020

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It was August of 2010. I saw the lights of Anchorage from the seat of my plane as we prepared for landing at Ted Stevens International Airport. My family had lived in Anchorage for a few years when I was very young but at age 32, this was my first time back in Alaska, as an adult. This trip had begun in my imagination, about a year before, as I walked around the Indianapolis Zoo. I was fascinated by a placard about grizzly bears, located nearby to a rather sad looking, caged Griz. The placard told of how a woman was attacked by a grizzly bear, in the city of Anchorage no less, while out for a jog in the park. For some reason that resonated with me. It wasn’t a sadistic thing, I don’t take pleasure in the suffering of joggers. I was just completely enchanted by the idea of a state like Alaska, where bears and moose made their presence felt, even in the biggest of cities. It was strange, that moment, but …

Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, by David Garrow

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1,460 pages. Audiobook length of over 56 hours. And all of that is just to cover the time leading up to the Presidency. “If I go into politics it should grow out of work I’ve done at the local level, not because I’m some media creation.” ~ The young Barack Obama “If I go into politics it should grow out of work I’ve done at the local level, not because I’m some media creation.” ~ The young Barack Obama

Berning in the woods

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A week from last Saturday was the big kick off push for Bernie Sanders campaign volunteers. There were nearly five thousand gatherings across the country, many that congregated in living rooms and around kitchen tables and private homes, across the fruited plains. There were several in my area and since I wanted to get a pulse on how the campaign was going, I attended three of them.

It’s the end of the world as we know it?

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Glenn Beck to Sean Hannity: “We are officially at the end of the country as we know it” if Trump loses in 2020. I sure as hell hope so, but I have my doubts. We’ve heard this kind of thing before. Those on the political right tend to use this kind of hyperbole to generate hysteria and rally the troops to get them out to vote. (This is especially when the Republican rank and file is being asked to vote for an an unsavory and unpopular like Trump.) But liberals do it too: recall that Obama was supposed to bring hope and change yet 8 years later we were in short supply on both counts. Nonetheless I remain hopeful. Hope, after all, is a choice.

Warren is for real and I’m pretty sure Mark Zuckerberg unfriended her

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It seems a bit… what’s the word?…Cheeky. It seems a bit cheeky to put anti-Facebook ads up on Facebook, but that’s precisely what Elizabeth Warren did. Predictably, Facebook took the ads down. In the ads Warren called for the break-up of tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Facebook, all of which Warren is calling out. I really respect what Warren has been doing in the early phases of the 2020 campaign. She’s come out swinging, challenging the domination of corporations with an intense and uncompromising sense of urgency, which is precisely what we needed if we hope to even make a dent in the corruption that both parties have made normative in America. Here’s more from the article:

Ocasio-Cortez: ‘Capitalism is irredeemable’ | TheHill

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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on Saturday called capitalism “irredeemable.” “Capitalism is an ideology of capital – the most important thing is the concentration of capital and to seek and maximize profit,” she said during an interview at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, according to Bloomberg News. “To me, capitalism is irredeemable,” she added, arguing that capitalism’s goals come at a cost to people and the environment, Bloomberg reported.

Should the DSA endorse Bernie?

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DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) is the activist organization that I “fuck with,” fuck with being a younger person’s slang/trendy term used to describe the persons/places/things/ideas that one is down with. All fucking aside, I’ve been a member of DSA for a few years now, and currently the national DSA organization is debating whether to formally endorse Bernie in 2020, so at our March organizing meeting here in Santa Cruz we dedicated a good bit of the meeting to discussing the Berning question. For us it’s kind of an odd subject matter because we mostly focus on local politics/activism, not so much on national politics or national issues.