RATIONAL RESISTANCE
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Biden is the clear choice when it comes to compassionate and decent leadership. In a battle of heart, mind, and character Joe Biden wins by a landslide. We n...
What’s The Deal With Trump Followers?
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Five years ago when Donald Trump road that escalator and announced his candidacy, everyone including most people who are now Trump-for-lifers, believed it was a stunt, and he was clearly unqualifie...February 10, 2016
During Democratic debates, Hillary Clinton has often said any of the candidates on the stage are a better choice for president compared to the Republican field. Of course this is true, but it masks the substantive chasm that exists between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.
September 1, 2014
Denial is a powerful force, and in a representative democracy, mass denial is incredibly dangerous. Combine mass denial with in-group collectivism packaged by a handful of self-serving elites, and we call it conservative media. And leading the charge is the ideological solidarity sold by Fox News for conservative consumption, a force assisting in transmuting our representative democracy into something much more closely resembling a representative oligarchy.
January 29, 2014
Post war until roughly the 1970s, increases in income in all quintiles more or less moved together. The bottom quintile increased with the top quintile. Since the 70s, the top two quintiles continued to grow, with the top quintile actually accelerating (although to be fair, it corrected/adjusted during the Great Recession, but only modestly). But since the 1970s, the bottom three quintiles have been pretty much flat.
January 24, 2014
The phrase “clear and present danger” is the standard by which freedom of speech can be abridged. As the saying goes, nobody has the right to shout “fire” in a theater. The United States Supreme Court began citing this standard in 20th century rulings, reaffirming that freedom of speech stops at the point where it puts pubic safety in peril. The idea is controversial, but it should be understood that constitutional rights are not absolute. Whether you agree with this standard as it applies to freedom of speech, is of little importance here. It only matters that you understand what it means, because economic inequality is a clear and present danger to American democracy.
January 23, 2014
This should come as no surprise, but a Pew study released today shows most Republicans believe you are poor because you choose to be poor. Or in other words, the poor are simply not working hard enough. This of course echoes the sentiments of Kevin O’Leary, who I wrote about yesterday. He’s the fat cat who said it’s “fantastic” that 85 people own the same wealth as 3.5 billion people (half of Earth’s population).
January 19, 2014
Is the affluence of the wealthiest Americans entirely earned, or is there a level of luck, timing, and in some cases, family inheritance involved? Or to ask it a different way, can people honestly make the case of one human being that is deserving of such massive wealth (like that of the .01%) on the merits of his or her productivity? Is there any single human being who deserves to be worth more than the combined wealth of millions of fellow citizens?
January 17, 2014
The latest piece by David Brooks in The New York Times is typical of conservative-think on issues of economic inequality. Because the free market is the most perfect system ever devised by man (yes, I’m laying the sarcasm on pretty thick), that means when we have an apparent failure of our revered capitalist system, that system is not to blame. Instead we should blame social issues. Oh, but only the social issues of the poor. Because the wealthy have reserved a special kind of guilt just for the poor.
December 5, 2013
Would you like to make an extra $50,000, $75,000, or $100,000 dollars a year? I know I would. Would you like a yearly income of $75,000, $150,000, or $300,000? In reality, most Americans make far less than even the lowest amount I listed. In 2012, the median income in America was $51,017, which was down slightly from 51,100 the year before. The poverty rate was 15%, which is over 45 million people. For the bottom 90% of the country, wages have been flat for the past three decades compared to top percent earners who have seen their income double, triple and more.
September 19, 2013
There are occasions when you read an article by the “opposition” and you can’t help but think, “The joke is on me. You got me! This is a fine piece of satire, have you considered submitting it to The Onion?” Such is the case with a Forbes op-ed by Harry Binswanger, and the pseudo satire begins with the title, “Give Back? Yes It’s Time For The 99% To Give Back To The 1%.”
March 10, 2013
It’s remarkable to me that any Republican could say with a straight face that Obama is a divider when you look at the track record of the Republican Party. After all, it was the GOP candidate for president who divided the country into makers and takers – the infamous Romney “47%” video.