So here we are again. Nothing good ever comes from socialism for the rich and the Ayn Rand Silicon Valley and elsewhere crazies. Underscored. Nothing good.
Effing huge bonuses…some families could survive a couple or more years, and do…on just a fraction of those sums doled out (yup, the proverbial dole) to bank executives just days before those dudes’ (they almost always are dudes) failure that could sow chaos, again, into national and global economic systems and does actually devastate the daily lives of real individuals’ and families’ fragile economic security. While the bank dudes remain, probably, perfectly cushy.
What on this Green Earth, or with this nation which could in a rational and humane way lead, is OK with that idiot “Libertarian” practice? Not naming names, don’t need to get sued, but they are all over out there, pigs at trough, greedily gobbling and spitting what they can with disregard, complete disregard, for the multiple kinds of harm they cause. All the while spouting that society should not be helping dying people without health insurance, hungry families…let’s make that, hungry working families, now with curtailed food stamps…young professionals not born into privilege now laboring, no exaggeration, under crushing student loan debt…a maternal death rate highest in the Western world…gun violence highest in the Western world.
Obama fixed the B**h failure starting 2009 and now Biden has to fix the Recent Loser’s failure starting 2021.
Can’t even get started on Jackson Hole resort Fed dude Jerome Powell. Nice little trip you’ve got there when working families can’t get car loans or mortgages.
Slightly new topic.
Can’t even get started on the consequences of greed on the planet and what we grown-ups leave…or don’t…for coming generations if we, grown-ups, don’t address it. Green New Deal, people with brains and consciences.
Very new topic.
Margaret Atwood all over everywhere right now. Any woman who isn’t shite-scared by the black-clads should be. Women, they can and will take over your dreams, your talents, your expectations, your ability to make your own choices.
With sisters, I rode the bus to the Illinois Capitol, and marched, stood many, many hours with signs, on the day when my home state, home of Lincoln, in its worst hour defeated the Equal Rights Amendment. We could not believe what we saw there.
What my foremothers had to endure, a longer story, even so that I, me, even can, jeez, vote. Will the creepy old white guys take away that next?
Watching from Illinois at a later time, I could not believe what happened with Wendy Davis’ historic filibuster. Now watching Texas again, thankfully from blue-state distance, cannot believe women’s medical prescriptions are effing controllled, yes controlled, by creepy old white men. The other scary states, hard to keep up. How in the moral universe is that not wrong? What a go**amm***ed violation. What’s at stake for these creepy old white dudes? Sheerly control over women they don’t even know.
New topic.
President Biden has done what he can, given our society’s gun-crazies’ tug on policy, to maybe speed-bump the insanity of mentally ill young men’s (because they are pretty much universally men, mostly young) mass violence against innocents.
Back to the point I really want to make.
I was trained, and then worked, first as a journalist and then later as a social scientist, at prestigious places. Objectivity always was at the core.
But then, sometimes, a person has to just say no. Whatever objectivity means, not speaking back to these animalistic corrupt ideologies and practices can no longer stand.
For this no-longer-someone-else’s-straight-line-“objective”-by-the-“rulebook” journalist and social scientist, truth now has to win. I’m old enough. This is for good as long as I still am ticking.
Real facts, real arguments. Those also have been influential in the most meaningful ways. George Orwell, Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, Michael Harrington, Tony Judt, Barbara Ehrenreich, Paul Krugman, Robert Reich, Isabel Wilkerson, on and on. They didn’t, and don’t, write mush. Got the newest Piketty on my desk and the newest Sanders on its way. (Bernie’s been on book tour.) They wrote, and write, what they saw, and see, and also of their moral commitments.
My hero, FDR. Social Security, Medicare, most jawdropping scenic freeways (Taconic in New York and Blue Ridge in North Carolina, just to name two), bridges (Michigan Avenue at Wacker Drive in Chicago, just to name one) the young men of Civilian Conservation whose structures fit so aesthetically perfectly within their natural surroundings and which people of 2023 still, now, fully use (Bastrop and Palmetto state parks in Texas, just to name two), this Earth’s most frigging gorgeous city parks (Zilker, with Barton Springs, in Austin, just to name one), the enduring legacy of the federal writers’ and artists’ projects available to all and all. Inventories of that cultural heritage have been done, and it’s on par with pretty much any civilized society ever in human history.
Eleanor who wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (and whose book I read, still every morning, along with Thich Nhat Hanh and Simone Weil).
Lyndon Johnson was a little Texas-crude, not Massachusetts-polished, but LBJ got passed the Voting Rights Act which now we have to defend. Again.
If I could have bought Elizabeth Warren the Presidency I would given my own pittance to do it.
I’m every day writing one good page a day on economic discourse (bows, Isabel Allende one really good page every day gets you there…but it has to be really good, revision is key), one foot and then another.
And in so, I think I am done with so-called objectivity.
To quote, probably a little literally incorrectly, but in spirit correctly, Trevor Noah, “ain’t nobody got time for that.”
At the beginning of COVID someone I then knew wrote a short essay about chimps and bonobos. Chimps are the crappiest creatures, just recklessly throwing poo wherever. Bonobos take care and comfort theirs in need.
What the heck, humans. Are you chimps or are you bonobos?
Back to revising (and cleaning and cooking, and paying some bills).
Dayna Finet 