News Blog

Putting The People Back Into Democracy

6/29/2010

For a decade now, we’ve been watching the unraveling of nearly every institution in which we the people used to place our faith. One by one they’ve toppled in our esteem, leaving many of us to conclude that most of the institutions that run our world are utterly hollow if not rotten to the core. With this loss of faith in the bastions of society has come a commensurate feeling that the government, which was supposed to protect us from bad institutions, did not always do so, at least in part because government itself is subject to those same institutions.

To recap, first there was Enron and the accountancy scandal, the pedophilia scandal in the Catholic Church, the discovery that the American military practices torture, the scandals in the mortgage and housing markets, and then the lending market generally, ending with the collapse of the entire global economy two years ago. To top it off, Barack Obama, for all that he isn’t George Bush, is not what many people hoped he’d be, and so there is that disappointment. Now, still in the same decade we began, BP is dealing with the reality that they are slowly destroying the Gulf of Mexico. Read More

Is Anyone Else Freaked Out?

Last Judgment By Jan Provoost

Originally posted: 6/1/2010

I was sitting outside with my mother last night, enjoying the gloaming after a pleasant and peaceful Memorial Day barbecue, when it suddenly occurred to both of us to look for the Last Judgement chapters of the Gospels.  We read a passage out of Mark about apocalyptic earthquakes, famine, and destruction — “When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come.”  I think I just laughed but it was nervous laughter. At no other time in my life have those words sounded so apt for the times.  And that freaked me out

But I was already freaked out.  I had a mini nervous breakdown this weekend, created by a variety of factors —  exhaustion, stress, Gulf oil spill disaster, financial market weirdness, strange storms that take down trees, and probably most of all, the need I’ve felt to continue to carry on with my life as though nothing were happening.

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The Limits Of Capitalism

1/22/2010

My argument, such as it is, is that Capitalism may be good at providing hefty benefits to the few, it’s no good at providing satisfying lives to the many.  And yet it dominates the lives of people worldwide, determining what work we will be able to do, how much we will be able to afford, what things will cost, and by extension, what kind of life we will be able to make for ourselves.  Capitalism is like Calvinism — it causes many things to be predestined.

As the moneys trickling down to the masses dwindles, we’re finding just how pervasive Capitalism is.  Everything we do is predicated on money and since the rules that govern money in America are predicated on Capitalism, we the people are forced to apply Capitalist principles in our lives, whether they really work for us or not.  Read More

Whither The Artist?

10/1/2009

I was musing today on the ongoing boycott of the Jay Leno show and it got me thinking how few avenues there are in modern life for creative people.  For those not in the know, television workers in LA are annoyed that the Leno show will effectively pre-empt five weekly, primetime shows and all the staff that would have been necessary to produce them.  According to the disgruntled, running the Leno show at 10:00 PM  is a cost-cutting measure that allows NBC to replace these five shows — and the artists and technicians employed in creating them — with one host and a skeleton crew. 

Nothing against Leno who is an affable and innocuous guy, but if you assume that it takes 50 to 100 people to produce one original, prime-time hour of television, that’s a lot of creative people who potentially don’t have jobs right now.  Read More

When Is Health Care Reform Not Health Care Reform?

9/18/2009

When is health care reform not healthcare reform?  When it comes on the backs of middle class Americans who already can’t afford it while providing a huge benefit to the very industry that caused the healthcare problem to begin with.

I have been reading along on the healthcare debate, mostly not liking it, and today I read in the Washington Post that there is now concern on Capital Hill that healthcare reform will be too expensive for middle class Americans to afford, especially for the many millions of uninsured.  I have to ask — are they’re just figuring this out? Read More

The Great Healthcare Debate

8/24/2009

Although I’ve witnessed a lot of great debates in my short time on the planet, the current discussion of healthcare going on across the country is probably one of the most compelling.  This time, it isn’t some weighty matter like war, elections, and impeachment that has us talking.  Instead, it’s a policy issue that just happens to affect us all.  Not surprisingly, most Americans are following along and many have opinions to offer.  So here’s mine, in a nutshell:  if we don’t insist on better healthcare, we’re never going to get it.  Conversely, if we say we’re ok with crappy healthcare, then that is what we will get.  It’s that simple. Read More

How Will It End?

4/7/2009

A long, slow, grinding decline — that’s what I fear more than anything.  My grandparents were in their early 20s when America entered the Depression; indeed, it must have been depressing after the boom of the Roaring Twenties to encounter such hardship.  The Depression dislocated people, mentally and geographically.  Unlike today’s fall, where at least some of us seem to think we had it coming, people seemed more shocked by the economic upheavals of that earlier era.  And yet there are optimistic investors driving up the stock market on the hope that if they can somehow make those indices bigger,  the dark and looming larger problems will go away by themselves.  As if  it were that easy.    Read More

Reading Between The Headlines

2/7/2009

In the last few days there have been a number of unusual headlines that have got me wondering what’s really going on in America today.  The backdrop of course is the economic “crisis” which if not fixed fast will lead to “catastrophe” which is why we have to give the banks all the money.  At least, that’s what I’ve been getting out of the latest talking points. 

I could be oversimplifying but I’m probably not alone.  In a scathing NYT piece “Slumdogs Unite!,” columnist Frank Rich refers to a “tsunami of populist rage” which is how he described the mood of America with regard to the shenanigans of the rich.  Addressing the Daschle debacle specifically, Rich suggests that the Obama administration, as well as most of Congress, is a bit out of touch when it comes to the views of so-called “ordinary” Americans — those of us who don’t have limos and mansions to forget to pay taxes on.  And he says that this disconnect could cause trouble for the governing class later on. Read More

Money Wants To Be Free

12/14/2008

Suppose we were to uncomplicate money.

I was reading a story in the Washington Post today about how the city of New York is cutting a daycare program for middle-class Alzheimer’s sufferers.   The program is badly needed by the families it serves, but the $1.2 million price tag and relatively low number of beneficiaries made it tempting to city government, and they cut the program.  All 12 centers will close by the end of the month.  Meanwhile, the hundreds of families they served are out of luck.

Once again, the question arises — why must we do without needed services provided by willing service providers just because of this arbitrary, made-up thing called money?  It’s true that when viewed through the usual lens of “because that’s the way capitalism works”, you can almost rationalize hurting real people to save a buck.  But when you jump up a level and look at the big picture, it just seems stupid that people go cold or hungry or without healthcare or education, because they weren’t blessed by birth or circumstance with a large enough share of the coin of the realm. Read More

What Is Capitalism?

Originally posted on iBrattleboro.com 10/28/2008

When I was ten, I borrowed a book from the School library called Capitalism, Communism, Socialism, which purported to explain the various economic systems to ten year olds.  My parents made me take it back because they said little children should not be reading about dangerous ideas like communism.  I showed them — in my senior year of high school, I wrote a term paper on The Communist Manifesto.

Despite this early interest in economics, I realized recently that I have almost no idea what capitalism really is, despite the fact that I use the word all the time.  So this essay is an effort to learn. Read More

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