1%
gregladen | August 24, 2016This explains a lot of things:
Boy, do we ever need campaign finance reform.
gregladen | January 22, 2016The book is: Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.
Also by the same author: The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals.
Here is my version of recent American political history:
Everyone in America knows that if you want to identify the people or corporations, and the motivations, behind politics, you follow the money. Americans have historically differed in the degree to which they formulate this concept in their own minds as conspiratorial end-times ranting or shrug it off as just the way…
sastyk | May 23, 2012So with the return of spring comes the return of Occupy, which by and large, is probably a good thing. OWS deserves some props for drawing attention to inequity, for bringing radicalism back, and for showing a very complacent corporate and political leadership that the people still have bite in them. Generally speaking I approve of Occupy.
One of the things I don't approve of, however, catchy as the framing is, is the "1% vs. 99%" rhetoric. The reason I don't is that I think it functionally masks really deep inequities - by putting the second percentile together with the 92 percentile, it…
sastyk | February 2, 2012Now let's be clear - we all knew Mitt Romney did not give a flying fuck about the poor. Other than the occasional service provider, he's never met any poor people, first of all. Moreover, it is a fact that no presidential candidate, Democratic or Republican for the last 30 years has cared about the very poor. Add in the fact that Mitt demonstrably cares only about his hair, campaign donors (not a lot of them among the very poor) and getting elected, and this isn't exactly news.
GOP front-runner Mitt Romney said this morning that he's not concerned about the plight of the country's very…