attention industry: Protest, Fixed.
I spend a significant amount of my time in university feeling like protest, as a concept, was severely broken. To the point where I blogged about it a few times, completed a project under the name ‘ground war’ for a communication theory seminar, and basically attended a few protests in…
Serious Jon is serious.
Interviewer: You’ve long argued for the decriminalization of marijuana. Do you smoke weed?
Barney Frank: No.
Interviewer: Why not?
Barney Frank: Why do you ask a question, then act surprised when I give an answer? Do you think I lie to people?
Interviewer: I thought you might explain why you support decriminalizing it but don’t smoke it.
Barney Frank: Do you think I’ve ever had an abortion?
Awesome.
Seriously, can every politician be more like this?
“I don’t think they have a sense of what it means when tax dollars are spent in this way,” a spokeswoman for the Oakland, Calif., city government, Karen Boyd, told The Daily. “Oakland is very much a city that has been devastated by the economic downturn. We don’t have an extra $2.5 million to spend.”
Oakland police estimate that overtime eventually will top $3 million, and Boyd said this may lead to cuts in senior services and libraries. Last year, Oakland laid off 500 city workers, including 80 police officers, to close a $58 million deficit.
I can’t be the only one who thinks this is the point of the Occupy movement, no? That, far from passive resistance, this is exposing the flaws in the current structure based entirely on cold hard economic reality? If there’s no way to make a legal complaint to get these systemic inequalities realized, the equivalent of a reverse-boycott on policing / emergency services DOES make it important to actually address these issues, if only to slap a tourniquet on what, for some states / cities, seems to be a severed artery of costs.
Obama, and the danger of fighting the wrong battle
I’m not one of those people who thinks Barack Obama is doing a terrible job as President of the United States.
I just think he needed to pick one of two critical battles for the future of his country, and he may have chosen the wrong one.
In my mind, two major things are wrong with politics in the US. One of them is extreme partisanship making it nearly impossible for the country to act with decisive action. The other is the result of 8 years of that extreme partisanship, during the Bush presidency, throwing the country off balance.
It’s easy to confuse these as one problem, because both come (in part) from the same cause - people acting with an agenda that is too far in one political direction. But Obama has tried to address the root cause, before dealing with potentially catastrophic symptoms.
Then again, he made it abundantly clear that his goal was to work with his opposition, and rebuild a country and economy jointly, rather than trying to club them upside the head with his presidency and mandate.
The problem is, a country is a living thing. You need to make sure it’s stable before performing surgery.
Trying to find a new normal took precedence over going to war to get the country back on even footing. And I think that’s the best explanation for what’s happening in the Obama presidency. American politics went so far right that in making a compromise, the end result is somehow STILL a victory for the extreme right.
This has had me thinking for the last several months. Identifying which problem you need to solve first, is as important as being able to identifying problems at all.
And trying to do the right thing, the essential thing, doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve picked the correct right, essential thing to do.
