http://gowstakeout.com/2010/07/23/taste-of-formosa/ A republic by definition depends on the existence of res publica, public property. The existence of publicly held institutions, open to all, is the key to equality of opportunity. As public programs will continue to face pressure from so-called Republicans, it is wise to call to mind how access to them has shaped lives. I […]
Category Archives: Political Comments
Maintaining a Republic.
14-Nov-11An ass for a lion.
08-Nov-11Ah, the way Tom Paine writes. To the evil of monarchy we have added that of hereditary succession; and as the first is a degradation and lessening of ourselves, so the second, claimed as a matter of right, is an insult and an imposition on posterity. For all men being originally equals, no one by […]
“More unequal than Zimbabwe.”
01-Nov-11A piece on Bridgeport, Fairfield, and Darien, in Connecticut, home to more than a million people, where the income inequality index would make it the twelfth most unequal country in the world – worse than Zimbabwe, worse than Russia, worse than Mexico, worse than Rwanda or Madagascar. As a New Yorker you grow up with […]
“However destructive may be the policies of the government and the methods and products of the corporations, the root of the problem is always to be found in private life. We must learn to see that every problem that concerns us as conservationists always leads straight to the question of how we live. The world […]
How odd, the way things turn out.
28-Oct-11Seeing the picture below make the rounds on the internet, I was struck by the fact that Obama has been the president George Bush should have been: steady, stable, conservative, tepid, showing all the stability of someone immersed in the system, effective on foreign policy and not screwing up anything notably. There are people saying […]
A decent piece – it gets better as you go along – on the growing inequality in America that has made politicians rich paid servants of the rich. And indirectly a rebuke of Obama, who has no obvious relevance to this problem at all. Between 1979 and 2006, middle-class Americans saw their annual incomes after […]
From Andrew Sullivan’s superb piece on Occupy Wall Street: There is simply a limit beyond which economic inequality threatens democratic life, when the majority suspect that a tiny minority has fixed the system beyond repair through the existing institutions, and when the powerful minority begins to think of its own interests as distinct from the […]
Down on Wall Street.
26-Oct-11I was in New York City last weekend, and made two trips down to Wall Street to see what was going on. I arrived first on Saturday, and found Zuccotti Park jammed. People with signs with standing around everywhere, some signs indicating personal distress, others witty, others pithy. One sign featured a long quotation by […]
The Incoherence of the Incoherence.
23-Oct-11GOP Senator Lindsey Graham advocating infrastructure spending in Libya, and opposing it in the United States. The similarity to ancient Rome, which broke down under the incoherence of limited government at home and unlimited empire abroad, is remarkable as usual.
Responsibility to Prosecute.
14-Nov-11Seroquel to buy Sullivan confesses that “Greenwald has a point” – that one of the reasons why so many Republican presidential candidates support waterboarding is because there are no repercussions for it. It is just another tactic in a game to them. I’m sure that waterboarding a dog would land any of them in jail, a la Michael […]