The Coming Storm

With an average of three mass shootings per year in the US since the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, CO in April of 1999—and five mass shootings in the first nine months of 2013 alone—many are justifiably concerned and frustrated.  Mainstream politicians dither, debating how best to treat the symptoms of the problem without overly upsetting the arms manufacturers who fund their campaigns.  Increased background checks and bans on certain types of weapons are discussed, but little concrete action is taken and few Americans believe that the limited palette of solutions considered by Congress would do much to staunch the bloodshed. After all, the manufacture of new assault weapons was temporarily banned by federal law from 1994 to 2004, but it’s not clear this had any impact on reducing gun violence.  The National Rifle Association reliably rails against any gun control legislation, ostensibly out of reverence for the Second Amendment, but more likely out of

Something important is happening on the upper-left coast.  On August 6, socialist Kshama Sawant garnered 35% of the vote in a “top two” primary for Seattle City Council.  This allows Sawant to advance to the general election on November 5 where she will face Democratic incumbent Richard Conlin who received 48% of the vote. Considering that working people from coast to coast have been beaten and battered both economically and politically for more than a generation, and that we have been playing a losing game of defense for as long as most of us can remember; considering that one of the chief reasons for labor’s losses has been a tragic reliance on and obsequious deference to so-called “friends of labor” in the form of representatives of the Democratic and Republican parties, it is highly significant when an avowedly working-class campaign makes headlines. And the Sawant campaign has not been the least bit shy about stating the case for the millions of folks who live fr

There’s an elephant in the room.  We all know it.  But we need the audacity to proclaim it openly.  The litany of urgent problems grows ever longer: endless war; executive assassinations; climate change; savage economic inequality; racial, gender, religious and national discrimination; poverty; unequal justice; shredded civil liberties; unemployment; lower pay and more harsh conditions for those lucky enough to have jobs; poisoned food, air and water; attacks on public education, Social Security and Medicare; a deadly, dysfunctional, profit-driven healthcare system; crumbling infrastructure; and the oft-forgotten but ever-present nuclear threat. All of these problems have one, common, overarching cause: an economic system that puts profits before people; a system that rewards the accumulation of wealth for its own sake, by any and all means, regardless of the consequences.  The system has a name.  It is capitalism . Capitalism has got to go.  Deep down, we all know it.