Articles Posted in the Opinion Category
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Modest Proposal for Occupy Wall Street
Occupy Wall Street and its local offsprings might consider intervening in political campaigns. Presidential primaries will begin early next year, with the Republican National Convention on August 27 and the Democratic National convention on September 1. Occupy Wall Street might consider dogging these presidential primaries, House and Senate campaigns, and conventions, to demand the candidates address America’s income inequities and corporate greed. What if at every campaign stop, a political candidate was confronted by Occupy Wall Street members demanding what the candidate was going to do about reigning in Wall Street and about America’s income inequities? The confrontations would let candidates know that failure to address protestors’ concerns will have adverse consequences in future elections.
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Moderate Mom Gets in the Thick of Occupation SF
There were thousands of us! Of course, the mainstream media did not report our numbers. The Sunday Chron buried the story on A11, putting a short local insert into a routine wire service roundup, and did not even attempt to estimate the crowd size. My estimate: at least 10,000 people marching, and it snowballed as we moved past Union Square and up Powell, through the cable car turnaround and back up Market toward the Civic Center.
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Ron Conway: Buying Our Democracy
and Squashing San Franciscans Like AntsOctober 13, 2011
Last year, Conway gave $35 thousand to the Yes on L campaign to criminalize sitting on a sidewalk. This year, Ethics Commission filings show that Conway has already spent $218,500 in San Francisco to support various conservative causes. A San Francisco Bay Guardian article notes Conway has given more than $320 thousand to Republicans since 1999. Like the Gettys, Warren Hellman, Dede Wilsey, Michael Moritz and the late Donald Fisher, Conway appears to be the latest member of the “1%” class who is spending exorbitant gobs of cash on a San Francisco election. All this is very interesting, of course, given that Conway is a Palo Alto venture capitalist. -
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Highest Paid Unions Go Wisconsin on Adachi
The fact is, only the highest paid public employees – cops, firefighters, nurses, and those who can afford silk-lined suits (including Adachi) – have anything to really quibble about with Prop D. Why? Because Adachi’s pension reform measure is a progressive solution to a financial math problem no sane taxpayer, city employee, mayor, Board of Supervisors, Civil Grand Jury or union boss no longer denies exists.
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Class War Winners and Losers
There are official data over time called the Gini index or coefficient between zero and one that is a statistical measure of economic inequality. When it is zero national income is evenly distributed among all citizens, and when it is one all the income goes to one person. Obviously the Gini figure will be somewhere between zero and one. Some nations have very low values and others very high ones. In the high category is the US. But more important is that the index has changed over time, rising from about 1980 to current times, after it had remained fairly stable over several decades. That significant rise from about .37 to .45 shows unequivocally that the rich got richer as most of the population in the middle class and below lost ground.
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Iran Releases U.S. Hikers
In September 2010, Shourd was released after $500,000 was paid. Bower and Fattal were convicted of illegally entering Iran and spying for the United States. We only have the word of the Iranian border guards that these hikers actually entered into Iran, and the world has yet to see the evidence supporting a spying conviction. On September 21, Bauer and Fattal were freed after $1 million was paid. Their release after cash was paid smacks of kidnapping for ransom, rather than an example of Islamic mercy.
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9/11 Ten-Year Anniversary and The Power of Nightmares
Prior to 9/11, the threat of radical Islamism as a massive, sinister organized force of destruction, specifically in the form of al-Qaeda, was a myth perpetrated by politicians in many countries – particularly by American neo-conservatives in the Bush inner circle – in an attempt to unite and inspire their people following the failure of earlier, more utopian ideologies.
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