Back to Kansas
Written on August 20th, 2004August 20, 2004 | Why does the pro-life Kansas factory worker who listens to Rush Limbaugh repeatedly vote for the party that is less likely to protect his safety, his job, and his pension? Why do blue-collar workers all over America, who embrace a moral agenda focused on things like opposition to abortion and gay marriage and support for school prayer, consistently vote against their own interests?
In ‘What’s The Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America,’ Thomas Frank looks to his traditionally “red-voting” native state of Kansas to examine the GOP’s success in building the most unnatural of alliances: between blue-collar Midwesterners and Wall Street millionaires, between workers and bosses, between populists and right-wingers.
The bio on Thomas Frank’s website reads: “Born on the wild plains of Kansas, Tom pulled himself up by his bootstraps, learned to read, write, and cipher. He likes big steaks, bar-b-que, and most other meat dishes.”
Let me add: Founding editor of The Baffler, Frank is the author of One Market Under God and The Conquest of Cool, and a contributor to Harper’s, The Nation, and The New York Times op-ed page.
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Voices of the Invisible People
Written on August 16th, 2004August 16, 2004 | During the past 20 years, more than 65 million people across the globe have become infected with HIV. Around the world, 25 million have died – more than all of the battle deaths in the 20th century combined. By decade’s end there will be an estimated 25 million AIDS orphans. If trends continue, by 2025, 250 million global HIV-AIDS cases are a distinct possibility.
According to Greg Behrman, author of “The Invisible People: How The U.S. Has Slept Through The Global Aids Pandemic, The Greatest Humanitarian Catastrophe Of Our Time,” the pandemic is reshaping the social, economic, and geopolitical dimensions of our world. Decimating national economies, creating an entire generation of orphans, the disease is generating pressures that will lead to instability and possibly even state failure and collapse in sub-Saharan Africa. Poised to explode in India, China, Eastern Europe and Russia, AIDS will have devastating and destabilizing effects that will reverberate throughout the global economy and the international political order.
Despite all this, Behrman points out the United States has consistently failed to act decisively.
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MoveOn as an Instrument of the People
Written on June 25th, 2004I had an early look at that birth. We both threw up web petitions within a week or so of each other. Wes Boyd and Joan Blades created Moveon.org while I, in league with writer Sara Davidson, produced enoughisenough.org. They were inside the high-tech world; I was someone who did email. About 15,000 people signed enoughisenough. When Boyd and Blades put the word out to their networks, over half a million people signed their petition.
I had high hopes for what they would do with that network, and to my mind Moveon.org has far exceeded those expectations. We may look back some day and feel it was too partisan to be ultimately revolutionary, but these are highly partisan times. From the perspective of April 2004, it feels like one of the very greatest gifts of the Internet age.
Joan Blades is a software industry veteran, having co-founded Berkeley Systems, responsible for the once ubiquitous flying toasters screensaver. Blades served on the Berkeley Systems board and as Vice President of Marketing. Prior to her work in consumer software, Blades taught mediation at Golden Gate Law School, and practiced mediation. A past member of the California and Alaska bar associations, Ms. Blades is also a published artist.
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Crime and the Ultimate Punishment
Written on November 18th, 2003November 18, 2003 | The United States, alone among advanced democracies, still enforces the death penalty. The public’s support for capital punishment, however, seems to be dropping in the face of numerous recent exonerations of wrongly convicted death row prisoners. So now the argument gets serious. When does a crime warrant the death penalty? Some say the ultimate punishment should be reserved for “the worst of the worst,” the most horrific cases — yet attorney and best-selling author, Scott Turow, says that’s exactly what can make for its undoing. Turow’s new nonfiction book, Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer’s Reflections on the Death Penalty, is about his shift from a self-declared “agnostic” on the death penalty to his current belief that it can never be made fair and accurate enough. Turow served as one of 14 members of the March 2000 Commission appointed by Illinois Governor George Ryan to consider reform of the capital punishment system.
The Professor Takes the Gloves Off
Written on November 12th, 2003November 12, 2003 | Accustomed in economic circles to calling a stupid argument a stupid argument, and isolated (in Princeton, New Jersey) from the Washington dinner-party circuit, Paul Krugman has become the most prominent voice in the mainstream U.S. media to openly and repeatedly accuse George Bush of lying to the American people to sell budget-busting tax cuts and a pre-emptive and nearly unilateral war.
Krugman cannot be dismissed by opponents as some dyed-in-the-wool lefty. He’s a moderate academic economist who’s been radicalized by the Bush White House and the right wing it represents. Krugman joined The New York Times in 1999 as a columnist on the op-ed Page and continues as professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University. His new book, “The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way In The New Century” (#9 on the New York Times best-seller list and a top seller on Amazon) is a collection of his op-ed pieces from January 2000-January 2003.
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