Eugene Luther Gore Vidal, one of our greatest intellectual treasures, was an American writer and public intellectual known for his epigrammatic wit. His novels and essays interrogated the social and cultural sexual norms he perceived as driving American life. Beyond literature, Vidal was heavily involved in politics. He is boasted John F. Kennedy, Eleanor Roosevelt, amonst others his best friends. He had always said USA is a country founded by rich white wealthy men, FOR rich white wealthy men, the country they wanted was a nirvana for the small percentage of the wealthy, it was never built for majority of the poor. The United States of Amnesia-Gore Vidal (2013) [Documentary] What an amazing, brilliant man who lived life fully; and saw the whole picture.
Written by 55 of the richest white men of early America, and signed by only 39 of them, the constitution is the sacred text of American nationalism. Many Americans have opinions on the constitution but have no idea what’s in it. The book We the Elites: Why the US Constitution Serves the Few – a class analysis of the US Constitution, (Pluto Press, 2022) is an adroit collection of essays exposing the constitution for what it really is – a rulebook to protect capitalism for the elites. Author Robert Ovetz’s reading of the constitution shows that the system isn’t broken. Far from it. It works as it was designed. The misplaced faith of social movements in the constitution as a framework for achieving justice actually obstructs social change – incessant lengthy election cycles, staggered terms, and legislative sessions have kept social movements trapped in a redundant loop. This stymies progress on issues like labor rights, public health, and climate change, projecting the American people and the rest of the world towards destruction.
In this Democracy At Work program – Economic Update: Why The US Constitution Is An Obstacle To Change, Prof. Wolff presents updates on the US banking crisis, plant closing injustice, growing child labor in the US, Biden’s budget’s tax “proposals,” and a new book that shows US homelessness is an economic problem. In the second half of the show, Wolff interviews Prof. Robert Ovetz on how and why the US Constitution blocks social change.
- 00:00 – 01:06 – Intro
- 01:07 – 05:06 – US banking crisis
- 05:07 – 08:30 – Plant (Pactiv Evergreen’s PaperMill) suddenly shut in Canton, NC:
- 08:31 – 09:38 – Illegal child labor employment
- 09:39 – 12:25 – Biden’s budget’s tax “proposals”
- 12:26 – 14:40 – Homelessness
- 14:41 – 15:43 – Announcements
- 15:44 – 29:35 – Interview with Robert Ovetz
One of the premises within the US political parties is that private capital is to be left to those who are entrepreneurs, and not to go after the profit making. If businesses start being created under a democratic process brought on by the labor that produces the goods and services that creates those profits, the only response to stop would be outright fascism (we already operate under that in way already). Power that be always talk about free enterprise, until that freedom goes from the few to the masses.
The Homelessness is a Housing Problem discussion a very pressing issue offering a case in point about the homeless is an economic issue. Gregg Colburn, an assistant professor of real estate in the University of Washington’s College of Built Environments. Ph.D. in Public Affairs, … and Clayton Page Aldern, a writer and data scientist. They team up to seek to explain the substantial regional variation in rates of homelessness in cities across the United States. In a departure from many analytical approaches, Colburn and Aldern shift their focus from the individual experiencing homelessness to the metropolitan area. Using accessible statistical analysis, they test a range of conventional beliefs about what drives the prevalence of homelessness in a given city—including mental illness, drug use, poverty, weather, generosity of public assistance, and low-income mobility—and find that none explain the regional variation observed across the country. Instead, housing market conditions, such as the cost and availability of rental housing, offer a far more convincing account. With rigor and clarity, Homelessness Is a Housing Problem explores U.S. cities’ diverse experiences with housing precarity and offers policy solutions for unique regional contexts.
In the book Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O’Connell’s urgent mission to bring healing to homeless people Hardcover – January 17, 2023, the non-fiction, award winning author, Tracy Kidder has given new insight into a difficult and disturbing feature of contemporary America: an ever increasing homeless population. Kidder shadowed Dr. James O’Connell as he treated the homeless of Boston in clinics and from a mobile unit on the streets at night. The powerful story of an inspiring doctor who made a difference, by helping to create a program to care for Boston’s homeless community. Tracy Kidder spent five years following Dr. O’Connell and his colleagues as they served their thousands of homeless patients. It all started when Jim O’Connell graduated from Harvard Medical School and was nearing the end of his residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, the chief of medicine made a proposal: Would he defer a prestigious fellowship and spend a year helping to create an organization to bring health care to homeless citizens? Jim took the job because he felt he couldn’t refuse. But that year turned into his life’s calling.
Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor Paperback – Illustrated, August 6, 2019 is written by Virginia Eubanks is an American political scientist, professor, and author studying technology and social justice. Eubanks launched a powerful investigative look at data-based discrimination and how technology affects civil and human rights and economic equity. The State of Indiana denies one million applications for healthcare, foodstamps and cash benefits in three years―because a new computer system interprets any mistake as “failure to cooperate.” In Los Angeles, an algorithm calculates the comparative vulnerability of tens of thousands of homeless people in order to prioritize them for an inadequate pool of housing resources. In Pittsburgh, a child welfare agency uses a statistical model to try to predict which children might be future victims of abuse or neglect.
Author aruges that since the dawn of the digital age, decision-making in finance, employment, politics, health and human services has undergone revolutionary change. Today, automated systems―rather than humans―control which neighborhoods get policed, which families attain needed resources, and who is investigated for fraud. While we all live under this new regime of data, the most invasive and punitive systems are aimed at the poor. The U.S. has always used its most cutting-edge science and technology to contain, investigate, discipline and punish the destitute. Like the county poorhouse and scientific charity before them, digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhumane choices: which families get food and which starve, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. In the process, they weaken democracy and betray our most cherished national values.
Eubanks offers historical context about the role of the poorhouse in earlier American societies to explain how, through technology, we’ve built a digital poorhouse that is just as abusive and stigmatizing. This is a critical read for anyone who is trying to understand poverty in America and why well-intended technology is only going to be used to exacerbate existing social inequities. “Automating Inequality” is ethnography at its best, on par with Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed” or Matt Desmond’s “Evicted.” This book details how algorithmic technologies are upending basic government programs supporting the unhoused in accessing shelter, providing access to welfare, and managing child services programs.
With so many school shooting, another topic at the center of debates is Gun control. As a Buddhist, I am strongly against the use of weapon for the danger of violating the precepts of not killing – one of the very important precepts in the Buddha’s teaching. But after these several years of research into American social political and economic system, I can understand why there are also strong arguments about keeping the gun for self protection. Just like Marijuana, Fentanyl and many other additictive drugs, the government did not spend any resources to prevent the usage in the first place – another case of resources misallocation.
One of these arguments came from John R. Lott, Jr., an American economist, political commentator, and gun rights advocate, on his battle with disinformation over gun control! In this book, Gun Control Myths: How politicians, the media, and botched “studies” have twisted the facts on gun control Paperback – July 3, 2020 John brings together an impressive array of data and statistical analysis to argue that much of what we hear in the mainstream media — and from politicians — about gun violence and gun control is incorrect and biased. He has a point – well, several actually. This book should be read by anyone concerned about gun violence and, most importantly, by anyone who writes about gun violence. The book might not change many opinions, as positions in the gun violence and control argument are set pretty hard…but perhaps even those with the firmest-held beliefs will be forced to reflect and think carefully about some of John’s data, analysis and conclusions. They should, if they are truly interested in the truth.
Another book The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America Hardcover – June 1, 2021 Carol Anderson powerfully illuminates the history and impact of the Second Amendment, how it was designed, and how it has consistently been constructed to keep African Americans powerless and vulnerable. The Second is neither a “pro-gun” nor an “anti-gun” book; the lens is the citizenship rights and human rights of African Americans.
The recent instance of a young African teen were shot when knocking someone’s door is an reflection of the deep anxiety of America. Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education Paperback – November 1, 2006 The author Danielle Allen, a professor of public policy, politics, and ethics at Harvard University, brought focus back to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954 and to the famous photograph of Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine, being cursed by fellow “citizen” Hazel Bryan, Allen argues that we have yet to complete the transition to political friendship that this moment offered. By combining brief readings of philosophers and political theorists with personal reflections on race politics in Chicago, Allen proposes strikingly practical techniques of citizenship. These tools of political friendship, Allen contends, can help us become more trustworthy to others and overcome the fossilized distrust among us. Sacrifice is the key concept that bridges citizenship and trust, according to Allen. She uncovers the ordinary, daily sacrifices citizens make to keep democracy working—and offers methods for recognizing and reciprocating those sacrifices. Trenchant, incisive, and ultimately hopeful, Talking to Strangers is nothing less than a manifesto for a revitalized democratic citizenry.
Why Trust Matters: Declining Political Trust and the Demise of American Liberalism Hardcover Using both individual and aggregate level survey data, Marc Hetherington, an American political scientist, shows that the rapid decline in Americans’ political trust since the 1960s is critical to explaining this puzzle. As people lost faith in the federal government, the delivery system for most progressive policies, they supported progressive ideas much less. The 9/11 attacks increased such trust as public attention focused on security, but the effect was temporary. Specifically, Hetherington shows that, as political trust declined, so too did support for redistributive programs, such as welfare and food stamps, and race-targeted programs. While the presence of race in a policy area tends to make political trust important for whites, trust affects policy preferences in other, non-race-related policy areas as well. In the mid-1990s the public was easily swayed against comprehensive health care reform because those who felt they could afford coverage worried that a large new federal bureaucracy would make things worse for them. In demonstrating a strong link between public opinion and policy outcomes, this engagingly written book represents a substantial contribution to the study of public opinion and voting behavior, policy, and American politics generally.
Slanted: How the News Media Taught Us to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism Hardcover – November 24, 2020. takes on the media’s misreporting on Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, Joe Biden, Silicon Valley censorship, and more. For the past four years, five-time Emmy Award–winning investigative journalist and New York Times bestselling author Sharyl Attkisson has been collecting and dissecting alarming incidents tracing the shocking devolution of what used to be the most respected news organizations on the planet. For the first time, top news executives and reporters representing every major national television news outlet—from ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN to FOX and MSNBC—speak frankly, confiding in Attkisson about the death of the news as they once knew it. Their concern transcends partisan divides. We have reached a state of utter absurdity, where journalism schools teach students that their own, personal truth or chosen narratives matter more than reality. In Slanted, Attkisson digs into the language of propagandists, the persistence of false media narratives, the driving forces behind today’s dangerous blend of facts and opinion, the abandonment of journalism ethics, and the new, Orwellian definition of what it means to report the news.
With loving kindness taught by the Buddha, with divine principle as our guideline, with a sincre notion that we are all equal at the soul level, everyone of us all can strive to make this World Be A Better Place ! Because in uplifting others, we uplifting our own spirit.