May 15, 2012
Here is what Rocky Anderson’s campaign stands for. If you take issue with any item here, I would like to hear what you think is wrong with it:

• An immediate end to the ongoing wars;
• Essential health care coverage for all citizens;/li>
• Urgent international leadership by the U.S. to prevent the most catastrophic consequences of climate disruption;
• Adequate revenues to balance the budget through fair taxation;
• Treatment of substance abuse as a public health, rather than a criminal justice, issue;
• Control of the Federal Reserve by the Treasury Department and Congress;
• A balanced budget (or a surplus) except in times of war or major recession;
• An end to the legal concept of corporate “personhood”; a constitutional amendment to overrule Citizens United;
• An end to the corrupting impact of money in our electoral system;
• Protection of U.S. jobs, through re-negotiation of trade agreements and the establishment of jobs programs like WPA and CCC to improve our nation's infrastructure and employ millions of Americans;
• An end to the stranglehold on our government by the military-industrial complex.

Apr 28, 2012
Ralph Nader has endorsed Ross "Rocky" Anderson for president and that is more than good enough for me.

Anderson, a two-term mayor of Salt Lake City, Utah, has a biography that reveals a lifetime devoted to fighting for social justice and a political system in keeping with the progressive, egalitarian principles which I believe were intended by our Founding Fathers, and from which we have strayed dangerously over the past thirty years. (But I needn't rehash what I have been writing about on this site for four years.)

Now I have someone to vote for for president in 2012. I confess to having voted for Obama in 2008 and I have regretted ever since not giving my vote to Nader, who represented my views far more closely than Obama. The latter talked a good game, and talked me into it, but his subsequent actions have appalled me. I fully expect him to win re-election, running as he is against an idiot who will probably scuttle his own campaign long before November.

So why vote for someone who is going to lose? Well, number one, Anderson doesn’t necessarily have to lose. The majority of Americans support the majority of his positions, believe it or not. And if you don’t believe it, then go to PollingReport.com and find out.

And number two, the lesser of two evils is still evil. Obama has clearly shown he is in the camp of the corporatocracy. Furthermore, he has extended presidential powers well beyond the framework of the Constitution; scrapped due process as it is generally understood (by everyone but his toadying AG); killed, imprisoned, and stifled more American citizens than we know of solely by personal fiat; and betrayed (by omission and commission) his race, his party, and his country. You don’t vote for someone who has done to us what he has done.

Americans are ready to demand a change. The U.S. has never been quite the beacon of decency and hope we have attempted to appear to be before the world. And today our escutcheon is particularly banged up. But we are still in a position to lead the world to a new level of democracy and freedom, if we can only retrieve from the forces of greed and oligarchy our tarnished American soul.
tags: Candidates | Politics | New Political Party

Apr 22, 2012

* NEW * A Dangerous Mind?

By Andrew F. March. RIP First Amendment. Torture, endless war, presidential privilege to murder citizens without judicial review, the end of free speech. Truly, 9/11 destroyed far more than the Twin Towers. It destroyed the American soul. From The New York Times, Apr 21, 2012. Accessed Apr 22, 2012.

Florida. How Soon We Forget.

By Erika Wood. The Republicans, at least in Florida, will stop at nothing to deny the vote to likely supporters of the Democratic ticket. We should be encouraging everyone to vote, not doing this. From the New York Times, Apr 5, 2012. Accessed Apr 6, 2012.

Mar 24, 2012
You don’t have to guess where Jeanne van den Hurk stands on the issues. This grassroots candidate for the 3rd Congressional district of South Carolina lays it all out for you at BeYourGovernment.org. This web site aggregates information on a variety of Independents and what I might call new-age Democrats, that is, Democrats not under the sway of the corporatocracy.

Van den Hurk supports universal health care, an end to the misbegotten war on drugs as well as our other militaristic misadventures, a green energy policy, restoration of Constitutional rights, and other issues of increasing importance to an increasingly alarmed electorate. As with the other candidate I have written about in this series, David Levitt, van den Hurk pays less attention than I think she should to employment issues. In time, I hope she will develop and deliver progressive positions toward alleviating the inequality which has exploded over the past thirty years and to the crisis in employment which is not going away soon. In that regard, I recommend she read over the entries I have posted here under the tag New Political Party.

[All the information about van den Hurk in this piece is taken from the above-referenced web page. If you are able to refute anything there or here, citing reliable sources, please email us with that information and we will post corrections to this piece.]

Van den Hurk accepts no corporate money and is therefore dependent on small and medium-sized contributions from—you. Yes, you, if you are reading this and are of the same mind as so many today who know we must find a means of wresting our country back from runaway capitalism and a bought-and-paid-for Congress. If continuous war isn’t to be the legacy we hand down to the next generation; if we are not to consign them to a standard of living significantly below that of our parents; if we are not to condemn them to a crippled planet and one in which the coming water wars will make the current oil wars seem like peace rallies: if this is not the world we are handing on to our children, then something needs to be done now, because this is the world where we are headed, as all the empirical evidence indicates.

Van den Hurk, like many of the doughty candidates who are stepping out of peaceful, private, middle-class lives to expose themselves to the cauldron of partisan politics, is married with children and is an entrepreneur with a jewelry design and antique business. I am a long way from South Carolina and only follow van den Hurk in her Twitter and Facebook capacities. I hope more is going on in her campaign than is evident in this social media. You can bet the Mainstream Media will avoid providing her with much coverage until and unless she makes dramatic inroads into the territory of the first-term Republican incumbent. And BeYourGovernment provides the minimum of campaign exposure.

So how are van den Hurk and these other candidates going to be elected? They will be elected by you. Your dollars, your word-of-mouth, your volunteer efforts, your votes. And if, come November, we find ourselves once again with a neo-liberal Democrat in the White House, a far-right Republican majority in the House, and a lame, old-age Democratic majority in the Senate—or worse, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.

I contributed to van den Hurk’s campaign, and I will do so again if it maintains its viability. This is the very least you can do, and it is something you can do it right now.
tags: Candidates | New Political Party | Congress

Mar 24, 2012

* NEW * Education woes linked to national security

By Kimberly Hefling. Seventy-five percent of our young adults are disqualified from military service because they are physically unfit, have criminal records, or have been inadequately educated. That's three out of four. And we're "Number One"? From Associated Press, Mar 20, 2012. Accessed Mar 23, 2012.

The White Savior Industrial Complex

By Teju Cole. He's not dissing Kristof so much as reminding the rest of us why Kristof is necessary: Because the worst excesses of colonialism are still with us, today delivered by such as the IMF and World Bank. And Kristof and other White Saviors (read Jolie, Clooney, Farrow, et al.) are missing, or ignoring, that point. From The Atlantic, Mar 21, 2012. Accessed Mar 21, 2012.

Age of Ignorance

By Charles Simic. Read the Comments. They are almost as good as the article. From New York Review of Books, Mar 20, 2012. Accessed Mar 20, 2012.

The Difference Between Private and Public Morality

By Robert Reich. Get distracted enough about irrelevant social issues (It's none of your business, Buddy!) and you won't notice them picking your pocket. From The Huffington Post, Mar 14, 2012. Accessed Mar 14, 2012.

Dennis Kucinich and “wackiness”

By Glenn Greenwald. Our Congress has lost its last sane voice, and as he fades from view, so-called liberals nip at his heels. From Salon.com, Mar 10, 2012. Accessed Mar 10, 2012.

Realities of a Syrian Intervention

By Col. Gian P. Gentile. A sober assessment of the consequences of intervention in Syria. From The National Interest, Mar 2, 2012. Accessed Mar 3, 2012.

Mar 06, 2012
David Levitt is opposing California Senator Dianne Feinstein, and will run in the non-partisan primary there on June 5. According to his web page, http://www.levitt2012.org, he has a doctorate degree from MIT and was a researcher at the MIT Media Lab before becoming a Silicon Valley scientist, engineer, and entrepreneur. This is his first foray into politics.

[All the information in this piece is taken from Levitt’s web page. If you are able to refute anything there or here, citing reliable sources, please email us with that information and we will post corrections to this piece.]

In California’s “non-partisan” primary, the top two vote getters will appear on the ballot in November, even if both are from the same party. Since Feinstein’s leading Republican contender is one Orly Taitz, known as “Queen of the Birthers,” it is not at all unreasonable to hope Levitt may face Feinstein in the fall.

Levitt’s major gamble—and innovation—is the Free Campaign. He intends to establish a credible candidacy with a tiny fraction of the money typically poured into Senate races. He will do so by exploiting the Intranet and its social networking tools. Of course, no campaign can be entirely free, and Levitt, like other progressive candidates coming forth, solicits small contributions from individuals and does not accept corporate money.

Levitt’s Issues and Solutions section of his web site is heavily weighted—perhaps too heavily—toward social issues (pro-choice, marijuana legalization, marriage equality), and is less attentive to economic issues. In time, I hope he will develop and deliver progressive positions toward alleviating the inequality which has exploded over the past thirty years. In that regard, I recommend he read over the entries I have posted here under the tag New Political Party.

Our country is on the cusp of becoming a police state inside of a banana republic. Mlitarism is rampant. The rule of law has been set aside. We are distracted by divisiveness over social issues that have nothing whatever to do with our well-being or our common interests. If we are to regain our greatness as the moral leader of the world, we must defeat a corporatocracy which has kidnapped our body politic. The only way I can see our doing that, short of armed rebellion, is by supporting a new “citizen congress.” Occupy Wall Street has shown us that we still have the ability to muster a widespread, grassroots social movement in this country, similar to the ones that brought about a measure of racial justice in the 50s and 60s and the end of a futile, illegal, and immoral conflict in the 70s. Such a social movement is needed more than ever today.

David Levitt, and others I will be writing about in this series, have stepped forth into the light—and the cross-hairs of an establishment that will stop at nothing to stop them—to offer themselves as a first generation of candidates for that citizen congress. We owe them our attention and, if their candidacy proves to our satisfaction to be a worthy effort, our financial support, our voices, and our votes.
tags: Candidates | New Political Party | Congress

Mar 04, 2012
Is anyone not familiar with Rush Limbaugh’s comments following Rep. Darryl Issa’s refusal to allow a third-year, Georgetown law student to testify before his committee about insurance coverage for contraceptives? Limbaugh decided to conflate her testimony (which she presented, but not to the whole Congress) with “loose” sexual mores. Interesting that someone married four times feels he can play the “morality card.”

In any event, Limbaugh wasted no time in calling the law student, Sandra Fluke, a slut and a prostitute. Predictably, people on the left or in the center denounced his breath-taking misogyny, while those who hope to trounce Obama in November either seconded Limbaugh’s remarks (Pat O’Reilly, for instance) or made tiny bleating sounds they hoped would be interpreted as criticism by the angry women whose votes they want. The only Republican who used strong language was Scott Brown and he’s running against Elizabeth Warren. His handlers told him what to say.

Let’s shove aside the extraneous: the manufactured kerfuffle over contraception, the manufactured kerfuffle over religious rights (hard to be Catholic? Try establishing a voice as an atheist in this theocracy), and the warp speed employed by Republicans to attack the president for telephoning Fluke.

The situation (Rep. Issa’s turning Fluke away, saying her testimony wasn’t significant; who cares what women think about contraception?) elegantly reflects the way in which the powerful (men) cut the powerless (we know who we are) off at the knees, leaving us voiceless and ashamed. By refusing to allow Fluke to speak they did what men have done for centuries: marginalized us, shut us up, ignored our concerns, slammed the door in our faces and said, “Get outta here.”

And then, as though that weren’t enough, they trivialized Fluke (and, by extension, women in general) by equating her thoughtful analysis of why contraception should be covered by employers with the desire to have endless amounts of sex. That contraception is necessary even if you have sex one time, that the need for it is a public health issue, that the vast majority of women of child-bearing age use contraceptives, that abstaining women also take birth control pills was all thrown by the wayside. In essence, both men and their supporters were saying that women have no right to talk about sex in public, that the expression of a need for contraception by an unmarried woman is shameful and shouldn’t be allowed. Yea, even unto the 21st century doth this continue!

Every few years, civilized people who had begun to believe that things had gotten better are shocked when troglodytes trot out the same, tired sexist and racist beliefs. It’s depressing. Still, this time there was an uproar. And though we figure that Rush will never be thrown off the radio so long as he provokes and has listeners, we can’t but feel that he will be a trifle less careless, a bit more self-conscious about what he says. And for someone as reckless as he is, I imagine that’s a burden. In addition, it must have been inconvenient and time-consuming for his employer to have to deal with angry advertisers pulling their spots. In this mixed-up world, we have to draw consolation from small things.

tags: Human Rights | Domestic Unrest | Health

Feb 29, 2012

Don’t tell us it’s not a class war

By Gerald Caplan. He evokes Naomi Klein’s classic Shock Doctrine, and shows how it pertains to the present. From The Globe and Mail (Canada), Feb 24, 2012. Accessed Feb 29, 2012.

Capitalism And Its Discontents: Richard Wolff On What Went Wrong

by David Barsamian. “When a system has everybody playing more or less by the rules and achieves the level of dysfunction we have now, it’s time to stop looking for scapegoats and understand that the problem is the system itself.” Hear, hear! Pardon me if I feel vindicated by this cogent, crystal-clear dissection of our current mess. From The Sun, Feb 2012. Accessed Feb 28, 2012.

The “Undue Weight” of Truth on Wikipedia

By Timothy Messer-Kruse. I like Wikipedia, and many of us rely on it. However, it is important to remember from time to time just where the articles come from and how they are maintained. Here is a credible, true-life story of a man who discovered that reliability was more important than truth on Wikipedia. It was an eye-opener for me. From The Chronicle of Higher Education, Feb 12, 2012. Accessed Feb 15, 2012.

All together now: Montaigne and the art of co-operation

by Richard Sennett. The Comments on this article are as interesting as the article itself, perhaps more so. It is an essay, and a sentiment, in support of what I have been writing about here since 2008. From The Guardian, Feb 10, 2012. Accessed Feb 15, 2012.

Contraception’s Con Men

by Garry Wills. In the wake of the recent flap over contraception coverage in health plans, Wills disassembles the opposition arguments one by one. From The New York Review of Books, Feb 15, 2012. Accessed Feb 15, 2012.

Feb 27, 2012
I have often on this site urged us to find, fund, and elect^1,2 a new brand of politician that will wrest our country from the grasp of the corporatocracy. I have proposed a third party, naming it the New Century Party, and provided it with a platform with ten planks that should appeal to rational individuals across the political spectrum, from conservative to progressive, from Tea Party to Occupy Wall Street.

With the 2012 election coming up, a grassroots groundswell of sorts is developing, with several candidates coming forth to challenge the incumbent Republican and Democratic minions of the corporatocracy. They share an agenda which puts the people first, and promises to reverse the disastrous trends of the last 30 years. They share an awareness of the dangers of gross inequality in income and opportunity among Americans; of the disasters we are facing from global climate change; of the evils of militarism and unregulated capitalism. They support a publicly funded health care program; a revitalized, green economy; and a return to the principles of open government, the rule of law, and adherence to due process.

These candidates are not going to be slick; they are not going to be air-brushed; they are not going to have $400 haircuts. They may sound more like your next door neighbor (if you are lucky in your neighbors) and less like the snake oil salesmen currently spending tens of millions of dollars attempting to manipulate the less worthy instincts of an undereducated and frightened electorate.

They deserve and demand our attention. If we find them credible and their campaigns viable, we should support them with our dollars, our word-of-mouth, our letters to the editor, our volunteer labor gathering signatures, our Tweets, and any other assistance we can bring to bear.

I will introduce them here, as they come to my attention. Please EMAIL ME with additional ones you would like to see featured here, providing me with at least the URL to their web page.
____________________
¹ Birthers and Death Panels, from All Together Now, Aug 14, 2009.
² Up From Slavery, from All Together Now, Sep 6, 2009.
tags: Candidates | New Political Party | Congress

Feb 21, 2012
Although Amazon has not produced a press release on the usage of their Kindle Owner’s Lending Library (KOLL) for January, as they did for December, I have been in touch with a writer who has taken part in the program. He has been able to extrapolate numbers from his own January activity. As a result, we believe KOLL loaned about 435,000 titles in January, paying authors or publishers around $1.60 per loan. Compare these to the figures for December which Amazon announced in their press release of Jan 12, 2012: 295,000 checkouts paying out $1.70 for each.

Amazon increased the royalty pot for January by 40%, from $500,000 to $700,000, and a good thing. There were almost 50% more checkouts in January, and without that extra money, they would have resulted in considerably less payout per loan. There is no word yet on whether the pot will be increased again for February. If it isn’t, and if February lending again increases by anything like the same amount, the per-loan payout will drop considerably.

I predict Amazon will sweeten the pot in order to retain their list of titles. Authors who entered the program in December will have the option of dropping out in early March (after their 90-day commitment). At present, there are just over 110,000 titles in KOLL. We will see how those numbers hold up as we move into March.

Meanwhile, we have discovered a new threat to libraries over the past two weeks. Bilbary is a commercial startup that has reportedly signed agreements with five of the Big Six publishers and is negotiating with 2,300 others. (See Bilbary Seeks to Heal the Digital Rift Between Publishers and Libraries, by Mercy Pilkington, on GoodEReader (undated).

Although paying lip service to the importance of libraries, Bilbary founder Tim Coates plans not only to sell titles on Bilbary, but to offer a lending component as well, probably on some pay-per-loan fee structure. Unlike Library Ideas’ Freading, which we reported on in Part IX, Bilbary is also wisely reaching out to self-published authors who, probably not coincidentally, provide the majority of the titles offered on KOLL.

This second commercial resource for eBook lending, if it actually materializes, is potentially an even bigger threat to public libraries than KOLL, as it will undoubtedly relax the restrictions—one checkout per month from a smaller pool of largely self-published titles—which are enforced for KOLL customers, who must also be affiliated with Amazon’s Prime service ($79/year).

I expect publishers are attracted to Bilbary as a potential antidote to the monopoly Amazon is pursuing in the book-selling, book-publishing, and book-reading businesses. Those 110,000 titles participating in KOLL, remember, can only be purchased at Amazon (in print or eBook format), and the eBook version will only run on the Kindle line of products.

Where does this leave public libraries? Where we have been throughout, I fear: Out in the cold. Unless we become better organized and more militant, entities such as KOLL and Bilbary threaten to both balkanize and commercialize the business of accessing eBooks, to the detriment, and possible dissolution, of our public library network.
tags: Books and Libraries