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bloodbenderz · 4 years

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Can I ask what your season 1 Lok reboot looks like?

this is about 3k words i checked lmfao dont say i didnt warn u

a key part of the whole thing is that korra gets way more perspectives and more experiences representative of like, normal people in republic city bc i think something that really defined what a good avatar aang was was how many people he met and got to know and how he didnt exclusively or even mostly associate w cops and bureaucrats and leaders. so mako and bolin. well first of all their backstories are a little more fleshed out and we get a less black and white view of the “triads” (lol) and mako and bolin’s experiences w them. cuz the show very much does the whole thing of like Criminals Bad but dont worry even tho mako and bolin did commit crimes theyre not Criminals!! so just a little more nuance on the alleged gang problem and the poverty in the city

korra does start out very naive w very black and white ideas (ex. “you guys are CRIMINALS?”) i think a really good way of developing her away from her sheltered naive worldview is putting her in whats clearly an incredibly complicated city w an absolute cesspool of political conflicts, ethnic tensions, the lasting effects of colonization, etc and having her try and understand the needs of “the people” in a more complicated way than “i have to save the good guys from the bad guys” ykwim? and i think the absolute WORST way to do that is what they did. bc we get mako and bolin who could contribute genuinely compelling thematic elements to the story: one parent who was indigenous and one who was from a colonizer background in the decades directly following the end of the war, kids who grew up in poverty apparently without any familial support, and who now are trying to be “respectable” members of society (especially mako). and then most of that is pretty much tossed aside bc asami swoops in w her capitalist dad and her piles of money and the class issue is just never talked about again.

so the way i’d fix all that is like. introducing more, like, normal people. some nonbenders, more workers, more immigrants, etc, to show what daily life is actually like for people. because. we dont know! we dont have any context about whether the nonbender oppression thing is actually an issue bc we dont KNOW any nonbenders with normal lives! and spoiler: the nonbender oppression thing is not an issue. bc it doesnt make historical sense. lok is set 7 decades after the end of the war. that is not by ANY stretch of the imagination long enough to heal from the scars of imperialism, ESPECIALLY not when lok is also set in a settler colonial state. like that fact should have featured PROMINENTLY in the political and social setting! realistically, nonbenders arent an oppressed class, earth and water nation people are, regardless of bending status! as in all settler colonial states, the colonizers and their descendants (in this case fire nation people) retain most of the financial and political capital, leaving the colonized and racialized immigrants (in this case earth kingdom and water tribe people respectively) generally impoverished and politically suppressed. like aside from the fact that theres no way toph would have become a cop, it’s so ridiculous to think that an established privileged class of fire nation colonizers would EVER accept being policed by earthbenders!

imagine how much more nuanced and interesting it would be to set republic city as a remnant of a colonial past still fraught w the violence and tension that colonialism and the associated ideology imposed?? instead of some vague ideas of criminal who wear 1920s outfits and harass shopkeepers think about why extralegal and violent groups like that might form! earth kingdom people trying to push for the reclamation of their land? ethnic groups protecting themselves against corrupt cops? ESPECIALLY w the history that the fire nation has of SPECIFICALLY jailing and killing earthbenders and waterbenders BECAUSE of the potential they have to resist against fire nation imperialism like it just makes no sense at all that earthbenders would be privileged on land that, 70 years ago, they would have been imprisoned on! like these various paramilitary groups falling along these different ideological or ethnic lines, fire nation or earth kingdom or water tribe, pro colonization or anti colonization, pro cop or anti cop, pro immigrant or anti immigrant, and then you juxtapose that w depictions of a govt thats failing to keep this all under control w tenzin trying desperately to keep it together despite the fact that it’s becoming increasingly obvious that the state has no interest in taking the conflicts seriously and would rather just point vague fingers at criminals and gangs? and THEN you bring in korra, who has no idea about any of this and thinks that all its gonna take is kicking some ass every couple days, meeting normal people who offer all kinds of different opinions abt the efficacy of the state and the different violent or nonviolent groups and ideologies clashing in the city and the way all this shit is affecting people’s lives and livelihoods and relationships w other citizens??

theres so much good shit there so many incredible things u could do w that like Where do we go after colonial atrocities? is it possible for a settler colonial state to take revolutionary or indigenous ideas seriously? is liberal reform enough in a state like this? and then all the growth that korra could do going from a simple black and white life about mastering the elements to this messy complicated sociopolitical knot of a city? and all the different kinds of characters u could introduce in this city? like why would u EVER think that the most interesting characters that this story has to offer is a police chief a congressman and a billionaire????

but anyways. that’s what the Setting of my idealized version of lok is. as for the actual plot, it is as follows

it starts out similarly as the show. republic city is MUCH more fraught w political tension and violence and korra knows this but assumes that it’s just a matter of throwing a few gang leaders and corrupt officials in jail. tenzin manages to come see them in the south pole and intends give korra real lessons while he’s there but they receive news of a terrorist attack in republic city only a few days after he gets there so his family has to pack up and leave again.

korra stows away to republic city (katara catches her leaving and gives her blessing im a SUCKER for that moment). she does have a hard time adjusting but she doesn’t do what she did in the show lol the first person she meets in the city is this older woman who works on the docks, directs her to a place where she can eat and gives her a roof to sleep under for the first night. so korra’s first exposure to republic city is just about forming connections w ordinary people like ship workers and a family owned restaurant and people practicing their bending in the park. and by the time she reaches air temple island a day or so later her head is spinning w all this new information and the way that nothing is really what she expected it to be. tenzin gives her his own perspective on everything and pema gives her her own perspective on everything and even those two seem wildly different from all the people she’s already met. and so korra starts to get a kind of outline of the conflicts plaguing the city as extremely complex and a lot more influenced by older ideas of fire nation imperialism and earth kingdom land reclamation than she had any idea about.

mako and bolin are still pro benders but not like. super famous like they are in the show. korra’s picked up a couple friends by now and one of them takes her to a gym where a lot of amateur pro bending (is that an oxymoron? lol) matches happen and thats how she meets mako and bolin and joins their pro bending team. Unfortunately for korra, this gym is run by lin beifong, and also has the distinction of being one of the most notoriously anti settler state organizations in the country. lin beifong is NOT a cop but she runs this gym (and the pro bending league) as a way to offer support to local earth kingdom/water tribe youth, teach self defense skills, a center of community organizing, and sometimes to act as a front to hide revolutionary/combat organizing against the pro fire nation paramilitaries/police force. tenzin is DISTRAUGHT that korra does this and this is where the friction btwn them comes from bc (from tenzin’s perspective) she does things like this without thinking or even fully understanding the context behind them and tenzin will have to deal w the political fallout of the avatar openly aligning herself w a very divisive figure in the community and (from korra’s perspective) tenzin is too unwilling to take sides in a conflict that’s claiming lives and when the state is clearly not taking sufficient steps to protect people well then why the hell shouldnt she align herself w lin beifong, who IS taking steps to protect and support people?

as korra more fully integrates herself into the city and learns more abt how different people think abt everything going on this is where the real exposition abt the equalists begins. they’re a paramilitary group w an ideology thats gaining increasing support among middle/upper class fire nation people, esp nonbenders. on the face theyre abt putting checks on “bender oppression” but really it’s an excuse to persecute and surveil earthbenders waterbenders and airbenders, bc fire nation people have all this leftover fear about benders who arent fire nation Rising Up Against them and these people who r using their Savage Excuse for Bending to terrorize good innocent (fire nation) people. theres all too frequent terrorist attacks that the equalists claim credit for mostly against monuments to earth/water/air nation people and earth/water nation community centers (one like it was the event that forced tenzin back to republic city) but also like the govt doesnt take a lot of these seriously or if they do only a couple people are charged without doing damage to the entire organization

this is also around the time that they meet asami and she becomes part of their friend group. asami likes pro bending but her dad HATES it so she sneaks out to watch matches at lin beifong’s gym (korra says ironically like don’t u know how ~divisive~ that is and asami answers that the only reason its Not divisive is that gyms like beifongs are the only place where nobody recognizes her). and asami alongside korra is also kind of developing a more nuanced perspective on the city that she lives in cuz obviously the only worldview she’s ever been exposed to is her father’s right? and she keeps pushing it off making excuses not to bring mako and bolin and korra around to her house or even not to be seen w them in certain neighborhoods until they call her on it and she’s like Well honestly my dad might do something awful to u! and i dont wanna risk it!

and as time goes on we see more abt asami’s home life like her father’s hyper conservative politics and asami keeps these secrets abt her hobbies and her friends from him but she’s still clearly under his influence and mako bolin and korra r getting increasingly worried abt it cuz like...asami seems to tend to make excuses for him so that she wont have to be drawn into conflict and originally they think its just her being privileged and thats def part of it but the more they find out abt it the more they realize what a tight fucking grip he has on her and the way that like. asami sneaking out once or twice a week is the Only thing she does for herself. and it really starts freaking them out how influential this billionaire is and all the information theyre getting from asami abt what a piece of shit he clearly is. and so that whole plot thing comes about and shows us how deeply embedded these “equalist” ideas are in conservative republic city politics and how much influence theyre actually having in policy making and law enforcement.

asami suffers in the aftermath of this like being forced to truly confront the harm her father is doing both to the city and to herself. and she ends up leaving home when this discovery really breaks. but bc of the deep corruption in govt and police sato isn’t really....dealt with? like this big story breaks and everyones like Oh, My God! Hiroshi Sato Is Funding An Illegal Paramilitary Group! and theres all kinds of inane political discourse about it and he’s arrested but he bails himself out immediately and his finances are examined but he maintains control over them and after a few weeks the gang (bc they Have become close among all this w much less interpersonal drama lol) has to admit that this news story hasnt done what they thought it was going to it hasn’t dealt the equalists a real hit its just given them a very high profile ally

and this is when things really start to ramp up in terms of action like up until now korra’s daily activities are mostly like hanging around in the city w her friends (which in part entails doing little avatar stuff that people dont feel comfortable going to police with, like Can you help me my ex husband wont pay child support or Please help i got robbed and i really needed that money for rent next month or Help my son keeps skipping school can you talk to him cuz im worried abt him being safe and doing well in school) and pro bending and airbending lessons (which i know ive neglected this part of the story in terms of her whole spiritual/physical conflict but it’s more of a subtle thing like it’s one of tenzin and korra’s more frequent arguments like tenzin says she needs to focus on spirituality and korra asks why she even needs to bc republic city is a sociopolitical problem not a spiritual one) but now the equalist threat seems to really be looming on every level of society like the storyline of equalists preventing pro bending matches happens here and everyones just at a total loss of what to do next. plus increasing and scary rhetoric about tenzin and his family that destroying the last airbenders is necessary to preserving the integrity of the united republic

and so theres the equalist takeover of the city. the people who are mostly resisting this are lin and ragtag group of people who have been resisting colonial rule for a long time (including suyin, who is part of a communist anti colonial community outside the city, because i said so and i think it would be fun), people who have been visiting her gym for years, members of her amateur pro bending league, plus asami and korra and tenzin. korra and tenzin have a sweet moment (bc they do genuinely care abt each other a lot even if their relationship has been marked w a lot of tension and arguing) where tenzin says like you know i think that ive lost focus on the kind of spirituality that might actually help you. korra says what do you mean? and tenzin kind of gestures to where theyre sitting with people buzzing around organizing to take care of innocents and civilians and to fight the equalists and he says this is a kind of spiritual too, isnt it?

and something something plot plot blah blah i havent decided on the details of the plot climax yet but that’s the climax of korra’s character development and what helps her connect w her spiritual side in order to protect the city: the realization that community is its own kind of spirituality. and it kind of represents the real development that i want her to have going from somebody who thinks that the world is divided into criminals and victims and she has to save the victims Into the kind of avatar who understands the people that she’s bound to serve. she becomes an avatar of the people!

and then happy ending lol korra and asami get together lin and tenzin reconcile after years of being at odds the show ends on a hopeful note that the inhabitants of republic city and the united republic as a whole Can move on from the scars of colonialism by reckoning w the remnants of fire nation colonial ideology and reparations to the earth kingdom people whose land this is and destruction of colonial systems that have maintained and enforced colonial violence all these years

#the ending of this isnt as detailed as the beginning and middle bc ive drafted the first couple chapters but i havent thought out the #logistics and details of the climax lol #asks #lok

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socialjusticeinamerica · 3 years

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I post somewhat regularly about current trans issues and these articles get the lowest number of likes and reblogs of anything I put up. It’s almost like nobody cares. Things will never improve for anyone if we only concern ourselves with our own micro-causes. We’re waging a war for the soul of this country and we need to focus on the big picture. These attacks are increasing because of the sudden wave of trans-phobic hate inspired by Republikkkan state legislatures introducing a tidal wave of anti-trans bills.

If we don’t resist all the Republikkkan attacks we will be fractured and will be under the boot of another fascist Trump. One that is more zealous and competent. BLM is the tip of the iceberg. We must end the hatred of all marginalized people. We must stand up for people of color, all lgbt, undocumented and documented immigrants, religious minorities, atheist and agnostic minorities, the elderly, the poor, the disabled and chronically ill, the traumatized veterans, victims and families of gun violence, the disenfranchised, victims of police brutality, victims of minimum wage and wage theft, the homeless, those suffering from gender inequality, and so many more that aren’t listed.

You can nitpick this, ignore it, or continue to focus on just your cause. I’m hoping more people see the big picture and stand together to support all marginalized people and all social justice causes. Privilege isn’t always literal. For example just because many cops are racists and disproportionately shoot African-Americans doesn’t mean they don’t shoot white folk as well. They do and in shockingly large numbers, it’s a matter of percentages and perceptions. I support BLM 100% and you should as well, but remember, if the cops/racists/Republikkkans/corporations can get away with targeting one group today you can expect them to go after another next until you have a domino effect where nobody is safe, which many are already starting to realize.

It’s impossible to please or even placate all the tumblr communities, seems like someone is always disgruntled, offended, or disenchanted for whatever reason. Odds are if you’re reading this you have a sense of how the billionaire/corporate class is using the Republikkkans against nearly everything most of us stand for. They are a numerical minority and rely on a poorly educated, and mostly bigoted base, located mainly in the south but spreading into the southwest and lower Midwest. We’re only human and it’s natural for us to have some disagreements and dislikes but we’re mainly progressives and decent people. We must RESIST as a block and lookout for everyone. There is strength in unity. Billionaires have unlimited dark money and they fund hundreds of foundations which spread their message of corruption, hatred, and discrimination. They have purchased an entire political party and now have three cable propaganda outlets (Fox, OAN, & Newsmax). They own most of the talk radio stations in the country and buy huge blocks of time on most of the others. This is their gateway drug for radicalization of right-wingers. Thousands of internet sites bolster their message and hundreds of print and publishing outlets further their agenda. They spend billions per year to oppress us and have thousands of employees spreading propaganda and radicalizing recruits 24/7/365. Meanwhile the Dems have a handful of progressive politicians begging for grass roots donations.

BOTH parties are not the same. The Republikkkans are a well oiled machine with unlimited resources, tens of thousands of worker bees, and cutting edge technology. They have hundreds of lawyers and academics working in far right think tanks to write state and federal legislation for their minions to pass to disenfranchise and oppress us. The Dems are the proverbial blind men feeling the elephant. They are completely lacking a national structure and cohesive agenda. As a whole they are working for us but are years behind in structure and funding.

We are the numerical majority! We must resist at every level and every opportunity and we must do it together. We must protect the small number of trans, force an end to the police violence that plagues the African-American community, and show the same zeal for ending the epidemic of gun violence that could take anyone of us at anytime. If we can bring the same mass participation enthusiasm we have for some causes to all causes we can prevail and have the modern progressive nation we deserve. I’m not trying to be preachy, self-righteous, or a common know-it-all. We have the numbers and the momentum. Let’s use it. Ousting Trump was only the beginning. The Republikkkan empire is striking back hard and historically the party that loses the White House tends to take the Congress in the mid-terms. Do you want to lose our power to Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, and all their heinous minions?

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theastrophilearchitect · 4 years

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March TBR/W.

Every book, audiobook, tv show and movie I want to consume in March 2021.

-Hence ‘TBR/W’ - to-be-read/watched.

I’m not usually a fan of pre-planning my media for the month - I plan out all my media obsessively, but doing it by month seems a little too much like setting deadlines for my taste, and I’m sure I’ll somehow manage to turn watching tv into a chore. Regardless, it’s worth a shot, so this is going to be a rough guide - I’m going to pick four of each category, one per week, because I’d rather underestimate and surpass than overestimate and have to defer things to the next month. So let’s go.

Books

1. Skyward and 2. Starsight by Brandon Sanderson

Skyward is set in a future where the human race is on the verge of extinction, trapped on a planet constantly attacked by alien warriors. Spensa, a teenage girl stuck on the planet, wants to be a pilot, but it seems far-off. Then, she finds the wreckage of a ship that appears to have a soul, and she must figure out how to repair it, and persuade it to help her navigate flight school.

In truth, I mainly want to read this because of how highly it’s been praised by Hailey in Bookland on YouTube. I actually tried reading Sanderson’s Mistborn series a couple years ago, and just didn’t click with it. I love fantasy, but I can pretty confidently say epic fantasy just isn’t for me. However, Sanderson’s work is adored by many, and Skyward and its sequel Starsight appeal so much more to me, and I can’t wait to get to them.

3. House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J Maas

This is Maas’s first technically-adult book; Throne of Glass is young adult, ACOTAR being classed either as young or new adult. I’ve been a fan of Maas for a long time, and, though I enjoy her books less now than I have in the past due to how seriously they tend to take themselves, I’d still love to read this one. Where her previous series were both fantasies, this sits somewhere between that and a sci-fi, but I can’t say as-of-yet what I think, because I haven’t read it yet.

Bryce Quinlan finds herself investigating her friends’ deaths in an attempt to avenge them after they were taken from her by a demon. Hunt Athalar is a Fallen angel, enslaved by Archangels, forced to assassinate their enemies, when he’s offered a deal to assist Bryce in exchange for his freedom.

4. Scythe by Neal Shusterman

I listened to this as an audiobook in 2019 as part of BookTuber Book Roast’s Magical Readathon, and didn’t hugely get along with it in truth. The audiobook was excellent as an audiobook, but the story Ian’s I just didn’t really vibe. I think I just want to like this book, so I think it’s worth a reread to see if my opinion changes.

This follows Citra and Rowan, a reluctant pair of apprentice Scythes - in a utopian future where humanity has the means to live forever, it is the job of the Scythes to control the population by essentially reaping the souls of those they choose to die. Neither Citra or Rowan want it, but I don’t remember enough about this book to say any more.

Audiobooks

1. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

This is the last book in the Hunger Games trilogy, and you either already know what this series is about, or you’ve been living under a rock for the last thirteen years. I read this book for the first time nearly seven years ago, and it’s stuck with me. It sent me into a phase of only reading dystopian books (The Darkest Minds by Alexandra Bracken was part of this, and was the series that really got me into reading), but this was the main one that stuck with me.

It contains a powerful message about capitalism and discrimination, and this is the second time I’ve listened to the audiobooks, though the god-only-knows-what time I’ve read the series. I listened to The Hunger Games and Catching Fire in February, which automatically puts this on my to-listen for March.

2. Ghosts of the Shadow Market by Cassandra Clare, Sarah Rees Brennan, Maureen Johnson, Kelly Link and Robin Wasserman

This is a novella bind-up set in the Shadowhunters world, that I would imagine has quite a bit to do with the Shadow Market, an aspect of the Downworld introduced in The Dark Artifices, which I finished in January.

In truth, I’m mainly planning to listen to this audiobook because it’s the only Shadowhunters novella bind-up with an audiobook, and I’d just rather read additions to the main Shadowhunters series in this format rather than physically.

3. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins

This is a Hunger Games prequel that was released early last year, and I just wasn’t going to read it. I heard several reviews, the general consensus of which was basically that it’s not as good as the trilogy and is somewhat unnecessary, but, in truth, my curiosity’s got the better of me, especially since I started listening to the trilogy’s audiobooks again.

This prequel follows Coriolanus Snow as a mentor in the Games before he became President of Panem and the wonderful villain of the original trilogy.

4. Eliza and Her Monsters by Francesca Zappia

I mentioned this in my physical TBR post a couple weeks ago, but have decided to listen to the audiobook instead. A few weeks ago, I’d started to run out of audiobooks I wanted to listen to, and didn’t want to read anything on my regular TBR in this format, including this book. But, I went through a load of audiobook recommendations, and this was one of them, so it joined my to-listen.

I’m not hugely into contemporary books, but I’ve wanted to get more into the genre for a while, and this was the first one to join my TBR.

This novel follows Eliza Mirk, your typical high school outcast, who publishes a hugely popular web comic under the pseudonym LadyConstellation. Then Wallace Warland, the biggest fanfic writer of her comic transfers to her school and begins to draw her out of her shell.

TV Shows

Before I go into my list, I’d like to mention that I am currently watching WandaVision and am definitely planning to watch Falcon and the Winter Soldier on Disney+, but both come out on a weekly basis, so aren’t being included on this list. Also, I’ve been watching way too much YouTube recently, so I’m not sure I’ll get through all of these this month, especially since I’m watching the Arrowverse shows, which have such long seasons.

1. Love, Victor Season 1

This Love, Simon spin-off follows a character named Victor at Creekwood (I think that’s the name?) High School. I saw Love, Simon twice in cinemas when it was released, and, miraculously, it made me cry. I love that movie.

This series was released last year on Hulu, which is only available in the US, but as of February 23rd, it’s one of the shows that came to Disney+ as part of Star.

2. The Flash Season 1

As mentioned, I’ve started watching the DC Arrowverse shows. I watch tv shows through alternating seasons - as in, I watch season 1 of show A, then season 1 of show B, then 2 of A, etc., then when I finish one, I start watching show C - but I’m treating the Arrowverse as one show (even though it isn’t) so it’s not the only thing I’m watching. So this is technically Arrowverse S3, preceded by Arrow S1+2 (though I haven’t actually started S2 as of writing this because of how much YouTube I’ve been watching, so I’ll be finishing that first).

I genuinely don’t know that much about most DC superheroes, Flash included, but I’m going into this having been assured it takes itself less goddamn seriously than Arrow. It’s my sister’s favourite Arrowverse show, and I can’t wait.

3. Dare Me Season 1

I added this Netflix show to my watchlist when it came out, and my basic understanding is that it focuses on the cheerleaders at a high school, and begins when a new coach arrives. It focuses on the psychological damage behind competitive cheerleading, and I’m not convinced I’m going to love it, but I think it’s worth a shot.

4. Arrow Season 3

I’m so confused by this poster. This is specifically the season 3 poster, and I’m so confused, but I’m sure it’ll make more sense when I watch the season.

I explained the weird way I’m watching Arrowverse (named as such because Arrow was the first show in it) already, but Arrow follows Oliver Queen, the son of one of the billionaires of Starling City upon his return after being stuck for five years on an island when a cruise ship carrying him and his father sunk. His father left him with a list of names of the people ‘corrupting’ the city, and Oliver takes it upon himself to assume a vigilante identity and take them down.

Movies

I’m not a huge movie-watcher, but I end up compiling so many to watch that, to ensure I get round to them, I watch a movie every time I finish a tv show season. I’m also currently re-watching the MCU movies in chronological order.

1. Instant Family

This is just something that came onto Netflix recently and I thought might be entertaining, and so it joined my list.

This follows a couple who decide to adopt a teenager, only to find out she has two more siblings.

2. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

This is just a continuation of my MCU re-watch - I love this movie. I love Guardians of the Galaxy, full stop (on another note, I just generally don’t understand why British people call it a full stop and Americans call it a period. Neither name makes particular sense).

3. Avengers: Age of Ultron

And here we have another continuation of my MCU rewatch. I honestly think this is my favourite Avengers movie, because the whole teams actually together, and Wanda, Scarlet Witch, is introduced - I love her. I really didn’t like Vision until WandaVision came out, though.

4. Behind The Try: A Try Guys Documentary

Not technically a movie, but still. (Are documentaries movies? I tend to think of them as separate categories, but I guess they’re both movies. Hm.) I’ve been watching the Try Guys for years, which means I need to convince my sister to give me her Google password so I don’t have to pay for this.

I’m probably not going to stick to this list, and even if I do, I’m either going to also consume things not on it, or just not finish it. But, you’ll have to wait for my March wrap-up to find out.

#tbr #book #books #reading #reader #bookblr #marchtbr #tv shows #movies #review #films #movie #tv show #writerblr #march tbr

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quakerjoe · 5 years

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A CUPPA JOE for 21 January 2020: Let the Games Begin

Today, the Impeachment Trial of trump begins and I’d like to remind you all of something. This is not a trial to see whether or not trump is going to be removed from office and then tried for his crimes. This is not about trump. We already KNOW Moscow Mitch is going to do everything he can to whisk this whole thing on through, sloppily and haphazardly, and he’s going to exonerate the permanently impeached angry orange.

This trial is about you. It’s about all of us in the United States, and the world is watching. WE are the ones on trial today. We KNOW beyond shadow of a doubt right now before this even begins that trump is guilty of a multitude of corruption charges and abuse of power to enrich himself. It’s been clear since before, during and after the Mueller Report. There’s enough evidence in the REDACTED version of it to warrant trump’s removal from office. The recent interview with Parnas has just pissed a ton of gas onto this dumpster fire and we know it, even if a fifth of what he said is true.

Here’s what’s likely to happen. Fuck-all nothing. McConnell’s “rules” set this sham of a trial up to be done after midnight and during a time that will minimize the time Chief Justice Roberts can attend. He’s setting things up so that not only will new evidence NOT be admissible, but that the EXISTING evidence won’t be either. He thinks he’s got enough GOP support to pull this off, and he may be right. The Democrats have many, many charges to throw at this administration, but so far they’ve lead with their weakest hand and everyone’s having a nutter over it.

WE are on trial now. WE must decide if this is a severe miscarriage of justice being carried out by the GOP and the Senate, of if we’re going to show the world that we simply don’t give a flying fuck and that we’re perfectly happy to let a corrupt bag of dicks tear down what little is left of our Republic and full-on burn the Constitution to ashes as we slip into Kleptocracy and become a Oligarchy; a Fascist state run by the rich and supported by the feckless idiots who can’t be bothered to study a bit of political science on their own because schools don’t really seem to teach it anymore.

WE THE PEOPLE are the ones on trial here. We’ve literally reached a point where we’re trying to save not only our nation, but to save sanity, reason, our place on the world stage, and most importantly, the planet itself. If the GOP doesn’t hold an actual, fair trial complete with accrued evidence from before the submission of the Articles of Impeachment as well as after and allow for the calling of Witnesses (like an ACTUAL TRIAL does and this IS a trial) then they’ll have demonstrated that they are irrefutably corrupt and MUST be recalled by their states and summarily FIRED. They CAN do that. Kentucky, for instance, CAN recall McConnell and fire his sorry ass if they 1- even KNEW they could do that (it’s not like the GOP would make that public knowledge) and 2- really WANTED TO. The eyes of the nation are looking at them and wondering “Why do you keep sending this asshole to DC?”

EVERY Senator today is on trial. We, the VOTERS are the judges, juries, and executioners come time for the election. If YOUR members of Congress have been hampering the investigation into ‘Individual 1’ and have supported measures to protect him from the reach of Justice, then you had damn well take notice because one day it may be YOUR guy on the dock and looking at a trial. The GOP had NO problem with interviewing everyone-and-their-mother during Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial but now the complete opposite is the accepted norm for trump? Fuck off, GOP; seriously? Right out in the open you’re doing this crap? You don’t even pretend to want to carry out justice anymore. YOU are the ones on trial, GOPers. YOU on the Left aren’t out of the woods either. If you Dems don’t get your heads out of your asses up there at the DNC and LEARN from 2016 that we are in a time where brave, bold measures are needed to unfuck the situation we’re in and that a centrist, “Status Quo” candidate will only get trump re-elected come 2020, then We the People need to replace ALL of you from the top down apparently.

Once this sham of a trial is done and over with, and it will be oddly quick and not remotely thorough, trump is going to walk back to the White House or, more than likely, Mar-A-Lago, and sleep like a babe. This WILL happen. He’s going to curl up to go to sleep, laughing the whole time because not only did he win, but We the People LOST. We ALL lose this trial. Rule of Law will not mean fuck-all NOTHING. What little respect there is left coming from our allies around the world will be gone. Nobody will trust the USA be it fighting terrorism or trade agreements. Meanwhile, the GOP will continue to wield power, your rights will wane away, and the economy, while seeming great for the rich twats on Wall St. will continue to be stagnant for the Average Joes out there and this notion of the “Middle Class” will become simply “The Working Poor” altogether.

I mean, face it- the Middle Class are the Millionaires. The Upper Class- Billionaires. The Poor- That’d be YOU. You think you can retire at a certain age? You think your pension will carry you through retirement? (I hear most of you asking ‘my what?’ here) You think you’re safe from crippling medical bills? You think the GOP cares about YOU? Don’t be thick. You think Democrats are coming to save the world? Bollocks. They’re paid to lose. Centrist assholes like Biden are the GOP if yesteryear. This is why Clinton lost in 2016, people. We the People do NOT want the goddamn status quo, but the Dems will offer us that because we’re spiraling down the drain under the GOP so to them, they’ll get to keep the corporate cash because they’ll be slowing down the rate of decay compared to the GOP. Yeah; great choice, Democrats.

Until we get more BRAVE Democrats willing to take a Progressive stand and call the Corporate Dems out on their bullshit and make trump and his cohorts accountable for their crimes, we as a nation are going to lose this trial that We the People are under right now. We ALL are going to lose, from the stupid fuckwits who thinks trumps just all that, to the frustrated, disenfranchised Independent voters who are going to throw their hands up and just NOT vote because there’s NOTHING to vote for. We are ALL on trial today. Today we will see, not the shit-show going on about trump, but the absolute, Olympic-grade fuckery of the Senate under the GOP, and if YOU, the Average Joe, don’t get active and recall those GOP assholes or at the VERY LEAST vote their asses out of office come November and hold them ACCOUNTABLE, then YOU lost this trial. We will have lost our nation, and from here on out, as the wings of liberty collapse, the wages plummet, and the inevitable rumblings of revolution grow louder to the point where the nation collapses into the next Civil War, we’ll have nobody to blame but We the People Who Did Nothing and we’ll deserve the horrors that follow. Let’s not let it get to that, eh?

Once this little shit-show is over, it’s up to YOU to get the current GOP shit-birds OUT so that an actual FAIR trial can happen. If Pelosi is every bit this legendary mega-mind her fans are raving about, then she’ll see to it that NEW charges are compiled and that trump becomes the first to be impeached TWICE. With a new Senate and a REAL trial to work with, maybe then justice will be carried out. Today’s inevitable debacle will be, or at least SHOULD be a wakeup call to ALL of us that the GOP is unwilling to uphold the Rule of Law that oddly enough the rest of us are expected to obey. The time to hold them and their supporters accountable is past due- Democrats needed to take the Senate last election cycle, not JUST the House. It wasn’t this big Blue Wave like they’re advertising. Loss of the Senate has led to where we are now and that’s on We the People. This is why there’s a mile high stack of passed, bi-partisan legislation sitting on McConnell’s desk right now collecting dust- because ‘We the People’ allowed him to remain in charge of the “Get Nothing Done” Senate.

So, I wish you good luck today. Pay attention, because with our current track record here in the US, We the People seem incapable of actually having the balls to call out our own government’s fuckery and we’re about to see nothing happen at all and the consequences will be the collapsing of the pillars of which hold this nation up. We’re witnessing history with this, and I’m betting that this is the beginning of a very horrific end of the United States of America. This is, of course, a bet that I’d be more than happy to lose.

#FuckTrump #FuckTheGOP #MoscowMitchTraitor

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relationshipsandpolitics · 5 years

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How I Alienated My Potential Readers Part #2

And we’re back. Here’s how we are looking after Part 1:

Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Corey Booker, Bernie Sanders, Julian Castro, Beto O’ Rourke, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, John Delaney, Pete Buttigieg

Well, some things have changed so we can just go ahead and remove Beto, which is a shame because I had a good rant about him sucking. Alas, my genius will have to wait.

Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Corey Booker, Bernie Sanders, Julian Castro, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, John Delaney, Pete Buttigieg

I debated where to put climate change in this breakdown. For me, climate change is issue #1b for me. If a candidate denied it, that would be an automatic disqualifier. It should be for every voter. But I am surprised about how we all agree this is a dire issue that needs to be dealt with immediately, but the only candidate who made it their chief issue, Governor Jim Inslee, got virtually no support and was one of the first to drop out. We really talk out of both sides of our mouth on climate change. We all agree it is going to kill us, but we don’t seem to prioritize it, do we? I have some thoughts about that, but I digress.

The good news is all remaining candidates agree climate change is happening and that we need to act. The bad news is many of the candidates do not appear willing to take those drastic steps needed to stave off the worst outcomes. This is a problem. Even the remaining candidates who are best on this issue leave a lot to be desire. As it stands, I’m not removing anyone because no one is Republican levels of awful on the issue, but also no one meets the bar that needs to be set on genuine change. But seriously, we are all awful on this issue, me included. We need to be taking steps in out personal lives to cut back on carbon emissions, and we need to be willing to pay more to save our planet. The truth is if the leading scientific minds announced that to save our planet, we needed to raise taxes by 2% on everyone, we’d instead spend double that to buy front row seats to the end of the world. We as a people truly suck.

Now let’s finally get into the issues that differentiate the candidates. This is really the whole game for me. Because there are certain issues I care about tremendously, issues that I feel we need to address if this country is going to survive or if we will slip fully into the oligarchy we seem destined towards. I’m talking about corporate power and workers’ rights. Look, we all know the stats. Income inequality is worse now than at any time since the Gilded Age. That preceded the Great Depression. Billionaires and corporations hold more power than the bottom 95% of the population combined. They can write a measly $5,000 check and get face time with the most powerful politicians in the country, and another $5,000 check gets them their full support. I know this because part of my job is to write those checks. I don’t try to get into too much about what I do, but suffice it say I work within politics very much behind the scenes. I don’t like what I do, even if I believe in the interests I advocate for. People like me should not exist, but our corrupt political system not only enables me, but empowers me.

We all want a candidate we can trust to act in the average American’s best interest. But we so willingly elect people who knowingly fuck us over in favor of the rich and corporate interests that it’s a wonder they even bother going through the motions trying to appease us. And what have we got for it? Unions have been decimated as lawmakers pass corporate-sponsored Right to Work laws. Wages have stagnated while wealth for the top 1% has skyrocketed. Americans are more productive than ever but seeing a smaller share of that productivity. Compared to all other industrialized nations, we offer no guaranteed paid vacation, family leave, or health care. This is despite being the richest nation in the world. College is a necessity to obtain a well-paying job, yet it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to obtain, meaning anyone graduating with loans will be paying them off until they retire. Or die.

These developments are not a coincidence. They are the results of deliberate efforts by monied interests. Next, they will come after Social Security and Medicare, claiming we need to reign in the deficit. And both Republicans and Democrats will heed their call, and we will buy their sudden concern about deficits. They’ll vote to raise the retirement age and cut benefits, we’ll get mad, and then re-elect them anyway.

How does this rant relate to the upcoming 2020 elections? It relates because the next decade will mark the point of no return, in my estimation. Either this country will wake up to getting screwed and finally vote to do something about it, or it will cement its acceptance of the status quo. Our descent into oligarchy has been relatively gradual because even the Democratic administrations have done little to stem the tide. They’ve just slowed it down by promoting policies benefiting the rich while throwing tokens of support to the working class, which is everybody else. They bump up the income tax rates slightly while ignoring the ways the rich really make their money. They threaten anti-trust lawsuits but never follow through. They bail out the banks and refuse to prosecute the heads of those banks. Then they appoint them to run the Treasury Department. Republicans do these same things; they are just more brazen about it. Whereas Democrats will announce tighter regulations on businesses but include weak enforcement and huge loopholes, Republicans simply get rid of the regulations. Republicans cut the taxes of the rich, Democrats keep them at the status quo.

The next president has a unique opportunity to finally right the wrongs of decades of neo-liberal fiscal policy. They can bring the country in line with the rest of the democratic world by pushing policies that help the poor, working and middle classes. Young parents would be able to afford to have a child. College graduates would be able to afford to buy home and have a crazy thing called disposable income because their college debt was wiped out and college itself became affordable. People would stop fucking dying because they don’t have health care. Seriously, on this last point, what in the ever-loving fuck is wrong with people for not being willing to raise their taxes to fund universal health care?

We need to begin assessing potential candidates by what they want to accomplish to fix this issue. And we can best determine if they will remain mired in the status quo of empty gestures and corporate checks, or if they will fight for us, by their words and actions. With that in mind, I’m going to base my choice on whether the remaining candidates can be expected to support the fundamental restructuring of government and wealth equality. I think you all know where I’m going with this one.

Corey Booker, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, John Delaney – The Technocratic Legislators

Here you have some good moderate Democratic legislators. Booker, Harris and Klobuchar are sitting U.S. Senators while Delaney is a former Representative. I don’t really have an issue with any of them, save maybe Delaney. They all are effective legislators, even if they may be more moderate than I’d like. I particularly like Booker and Harris as people if not politicians. But at the end of the day, I can’t really rely on them to push the things that need to be front and center. I don’t exactly know what their broad policy even is. Sure, they will come out with a good sound bite or a good proposal on some smaller but still important issue. Booker is doing great things on tackling issues facing inner city youths. Harris is good on gun reform. But Booker is way too closely tied with Big Pharma. Harris has an awful record on criminal justice and did nothing to help homeowners defrauded during the housing crisis.

They both illustrate a major concern we should all share. When you have a record of being too cozy with some terrible industries, it shows that the voters can’t truly trust you to have their back. Campaign contributions are par for the course. You need them to win elections. But when you take a disproportionate amount of money from very specific industries, it means you are probably bought by them. Don’t be surprised if Booker nominates a Pharmaceutical lobbyist to head up CMS. And when private equity managers donate to Harris, as Blackstone’s Tia Breakley did in March, 2019, they are doing so because there is a reasonable belief that Harris and others won’t come after them.

Again, I think Harris and Booker are good people and good legislators. And the critique about money is not limited to them, as I plan on thoroughly ripping into Buttigieg and Biden on it. But when you take these facts along with the truth that neither candidate is pushing the sort of structural reforms needed in this country, I think it’s fair to say their presidencies would be rather unremarkable.

Amy Klobuchar and Jon Delaney share the money problem, but they have so much more going for them! Klobuchar treats her staff like absolute shit, which only matters when you remember that we are relying on her to protect all low-level workers. She clearly has contempt for people beneath her on the career ladder, and a wise woman once said “when a person shows you who they are, believe them.”

Klobuchar and Delaney have spent their entire campaign advocating not for what they believe, but for trashing other candidates who dare to dream. Klobuchar and Delaney come from the school of Democratic politicians who believe things are too hard to try, and we might lose Republican voters by trying to be Democrats. The Klobuchar’s and Delaney’s of the world would be happy to adopt every major Republican fiscal position if it meant they got to be President. Also, Delaney is the moron who thought it was a good idea to trash Medicare for All at the California Democratic convention.

I would vote for Harris and Booker and not feel bad about it. I’d feel weird about voting for Klobuchar, and Delaney has as much chance of the nomination as Scott Baio. They are out.

Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Julian Castro, Pete Buttigieg

We’re going to go after the young guns now. The candidates we all secretly wish were just a bit better so that we didn’t have to choose from three candidates in their 70’s. But these candidates are ultimately empty shells of better candidates who seem too concerned with appearing like the rational voice in the room to have a vision for our country.

Let’s start with Mayor Pete Buttigieg. I was talking with my mother about who she was going to support in the primary. Let me be clear that I did not initiate this conversation. I’d literally rather talk to my mother about our respective sex lives than politics. But my mother has a bit of a control issue, and this blog was cheaper than therapy.

Anyway, my mother said she was supporting either Biden (shocking, I know) or Buttigieg. She said she liked that he was young, and it was great he was gay. I asked my mom what positions of his did she support, and she couldn’t really name any except that he didn’t support Medicare for All. This was a selling point for her. See, my mother represents a huge segment of the Democratic base that is upper middle class, socially liberal (except Kaepernick should’ve stood) and fiscally moderate (aka conservative but they swear they have homeless friends). What this really means is they are Democrats when it doesn’t hurt them to be. They think what’s going on at the border is abhorrent, but they know someone who was mugged by an “illegal” and we need a wall. And they support the idea of everyone having health insurance, but no way will that mean they have to pay more in taxes. They agree housing is too expensive, but then they’ll oppose affordable housing development in their neighborhoods because they attract a “bad element.” For these people, Buttigieg is the ideal candidate. They get to keep their money and nice gated communities, but because he is gay they can call themselves progressive. Plus, we know Buttigieg won’t do anything monstrous like keeping refugees locked up or denying basic rights to LGTBQ people, so how could anyone not support him?

Well, let me be the first to say that Pete Buttigieg is awful. First, keep in mind this guy is the Mayor of South Bend. That’s less a city and more a place for Notre Dame fanboys to “romance” the gold helmets in a sleazy motel. He won his last election with 8,500 votes. And he still managed to piss off a sizable number of his constituents by botching police relations with the black community. And now people think he can run a country. But he’s taken seriously because he raised a boatload of money and the pundits (also rich white people generally) like him. Never mind where that money is coming from and what favors he now owes to those people, right?

Mayor Pete came out for Medicare for All but decided when it was political opportune to trash it using Republican talking points. His actual healthcare plan is truly awful. Pete Buttigieg is the darling candidate for voters who don’t want anything to change, like my mother. They have good health insurance. They own their house and see it as an asset, not a noose. They don’t have any student debt, mainly because they attended college when it cost the equivalent of an iPhone. Buttigieg is a technocrat with a nice haircut. He is a lot like Obama, minus the everything. But his message is one of comfort to the people who own vacation homes in upstate New York and tie rainbow bandannas around their dog’s neck for Pride Week. Under a Buttigieg administration, civility will return and nothing else will change. If the biggest criticism of Sanders and Warren is they have pie-in-the-sky ideas, then Buttigieg’s biggest critique is he has no ideas. It’s just sad how little that matters to the people who will decide this election.

Julian Castro: you’re next. Here’s someone I kind of like. He is great on housing, one of the core issues keeping Americans from feeling secure. I live in an area once considered cheap for housing. But that’s changing. They keep building and building but rents still shoot higher and higher. Sometimes I feel the laws of supply and demand don’t work with housing. I mean, it works when there is low supply and high demand like in Los Angeles and San Francisco. But where I live, there is plenty of supply, yet rents are increasing as much as 10% year over year. Likely this is because demand is still high to live near an urban center. It doesn’t matter if there are tons of vacant units. Renters are willing to pay the cost and don’t do a good job shopping around. Also, as rents continue to soar while jobs continue to navigate towards major cities and people continue to need to live near those jobs, our commutes will get longer and longer. This means more cars on the road, more pollution in the air. Solving the housing crisis means putting a huge dent in climate change. No one seems to understand the impact of not having affordable housing, but Castro comes fairly close. I think I would go for him if he wasn’t so milquetoast on every other issue. He gets completely lost in the shuffle. I think Castro supports Medicare for All? I mean, I do know where he stands because I follow this stuff closely, but it should be clear to the average voter. Castro is young, attractive and is relatively progressive compared to the field. But he isn’t charismatic. He doesn’t articulate his message clearly enough, and my big concern is whether he can create a narrative that gives his administration a chance to pass meaningful legislation. It’s not that I can’t get on board with Castro based on policy, but I just don’t think he has the chops to get it done. Castro’s other problem is he doesn’t speak to workers’ rights issues enough. He pays them lip service, and I’m sure he believes in increasing union membership and raising the minimum wage. I just can’t envision him fighting hard for those issues once in office. I, quite frankly, see him as another politician pushing incremental change on some areas and tackling the low hanging fruit issues of the Democratic base rather than swinging for the fences.

Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders

And then there were three. I think we all knew it was coming down to these three. Let’s not kid ourselves here. We know who is getting the next ax, but the bottom line is these are the three true contenders and until things change, they are the only horses in the race. So we will tackle them together in Part 3, which is hopefully coming soon.

#politics #2020 #bernie sanders #pete buttgieg #elizabeth warren #joe biden #kamala harris #corey booker #elections #2020 election #democrats #julian castro

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rjzimmerman · 5 years

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This is another story of the corruption of trump, the trump family and the trump administration, adding to the long string of other stories of corruption that we have been told about for months. This story will particularly annoy the people of Minnesota who appreciate the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and the Superior National Forest and anybody who has experienced this Wilderness or any parcel of our public lands.

I will extract quite a bit, because I think the story is important, particularly because the New York Times is revealing to us the sordid story. But to understand the whole story, and to experience the proper sense of outrage, read the article. Just click/tap the caption (or photo, if you see a photo at the top).

This is a photo of just a small portion of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. The Boundary Waters Wilderness consists of 1,090,000 acres, of which 20% is water. Animals found in the BWCAW include deer, moose, beaver, wolves, black bears, bobcats, bald eagles, peregrine falcons and loons. It is within the range of the largest population of wolves in the contiguous United States, as well as an unknown number of Canada lynx. It has also been identified by the American Bird Conservancy as a globally important bird habitat. Adjacent or close to the Boundary Waters Wilderness is the Superior National Forest, Canada’s Quetico Provincial Park and Voyageurs National Park.

But beneath the placid and beautiful surface of the Boundary Waters Wilderness area lies trouble. The New York Times article tells us that there are an estimated four billion tons of copper and nickel ore under there, believed to be one of the world’s largest undeveloped mineral deposits. You starting to get the picture?

Here’s a map of the area:

These two characters are intimately involved in this story. Yep, those are Ivanka and Jared. The orange person on the right is also involved.

Then there’s this guy. A very rich (in the global billionaire class). His name is Andrónico Luksic, and he’s from Chile. He and his family members are the principal owners of Antofagasta, a Chilean mining company that appears to be based in London. This rich man has had a plan for a copper mine in the Boundary Waters area for years. But his plan was blocked by President Obama. Then came trump.

So, what’s the problem. First off, the trump people hadn’t even had their first pee yet in the White House or the buildings housing the Department of Agriculture (the U.S. Forest Service) and the Department of the Interior, yet they were already trying to figure out how to reverse the block on the mine imposed by President Obama. Then, this. Ivanka and Jared needed a place to live while daddy/daddy-in-law was squatting in the White House. So, this Luksic dude buys a house in DC and rents it to Ivanka and Jared, for $15,000 a month. Cozy, huh? Do a little favor to the family who will make you richer? Seems like a friendly thing to do, right?

Excerpt from the New York Times article:

Beginning in the early weeks of Mr. Trump’s presidency, the administration worked at a high level to remove roadblocks to the proposed mine, government emails and calendars show, overruling concerns that it could harm the Boundary Waters, a vast landscape of federally protected lakes and forests along the border with Canada.

Executives with the mining company, Antofagasta, discussed the project with senior administration officials, including the White House’s top energy adviser, the emails show. Even before an interior secretary was appointed to the new administration, the department moved to re-examine leases critical to the mine, eventually restoring those that the Obama administration had declined to renew. And the Forest Service called off an environmental review that could have restricted mining, even though the agriculture secretary had told Congress that the review would proceed.

Since the change in administration, the Antofagasta subsidiary Twin Metals Minnesota has significantly ramped up its lobbying in Washington, according to federal disclosures, spending $900,000.

Let’s get to the good part, about the Jared - Ivanka house:

Just before Mr. Trump took office, Mr. Luksic added a personalinvestment to his portfolio: a $5.5 million house in Washington. Mr. Luksic bought the house with the intention of renting it to a wealthy new arrival to Mr. Trump’s Washington, according to Rodrigo Terré, chairman of Mr. Luksic’s family investment office, which handled the purchase.

The idea worked. Even before the purchase was final, real estate agents had lined up renters: Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.

The rental arrangement has been a point of concern for ethics experts and groups opposed to mining near the Boundary Waters, and has focused national attention, particularly among some Democrats in Congress, on an otherwise local debate.

The Wall Street Journal first reported about the house in March 2017. At that time, Twin Metals was suing the federal government over the mining leases, but the Trump administration’s direction on the mine since then had only begun to take shape.

In recent months, the scrutiny has grown. In March, Representative Raúl M. Grijalva, the Arizona Democrat who is chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, wrote a letter with other lawmakers to the interior and agriculture secretaries raising significant concerns about the proposed mine.

The letter said the two departments’ actions “blatantly ignored scientific and economic evidence.” It also mentioned the “interesting coincidence” surrounding the rental of the Luksic house to Mr. Trump’s relatives. Separately, a group in Minnesota opposed to the mining, Save the Boundary Waters, has called the rental arrangement “deeply troubling” and has seized on it to cast doubt on the administration’s actions.

#Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness #Superior National Forest #trump #mining #copper mining #jared kushner #ivanka trump #Andrónico Luksic

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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Elizabeth Warren Is Completely Serious https://nyti.ms/2KlW3oV

PLEASE READ and SHARE this FASCINATING, IN-DEPTH expose on Elizabeth Warren's life, her DEEPLY HELD BELIEFS and excellent POLICY prescriptions to ADDRESS INCOME INEQUALITY, CORPORATE POWER and CORRUPTION in policies. She is an AMAZINGLY INTELLIGENT strong woman.

#2020PresidentalCandidates

#2020Vision #VoteBlue2020 #2020PresidentialElection

Elizabeth Warren Is Completely Serious

About income inequality. About corporate power. About corrupt politics. And about being America’s next president.

By Emily Bazelon | Published June 17, 2019 | New York Times | Posted June 17, 2019 |

The first time I met Elizabeth Warren, she had just come home from a walk with her husband and her dog at Fresh Pond, the reservoir near her house in Cambridge, Mass. It was a sunny day in February, a couple of weeks after Warren announced her candidacy for president, and she was wearing a navy North Face jacket and black sneakers with, as usual, rimless glasses and small gold earrings. Her hair had drifted a bit out of place.

The dog, Bailey, is a golden retriever who had already been deployed by her presidential campaign in a tweet a week earlier, a pink-tongued snapshot with the caption “Bailey will be your Valentine.” Warren started toweling off his paws and fur, which were coated in mud and ice from the reservoir, when she seemed to realize that it made more sense to hand this task over to her husband, Bruce Mann.

In the kitchen, Warren opened a cupboard to reveal an array of boxes and canisters of tea. She drinks many cups a day (her favorite morning blend is English breakfast). Pouring us each a mug, she said, “This is a fantasy.” She was talking about the enormous platform she has, now that she’s running for president, to propagate policy proposals that she has been thinking about for decades. “It’s this moment of being able to talk about these ideas, and everybody says, ‘Oh, wait, I better pay attention to this.’” She went on: “It’s not about me; it’s about those ideas. We’ve moved the Overton window” — the range of ideas deemed to merit serious consideration — “on how we think about taxes. And I think, I think we’re about to move it on child care.”

Her plan, announced in January, would raise $2.75 trillion in revenue over 10 years through a 2 percent tax on assets over $50 million and a higher rate for billionaires. Warren wants to use some of that money to pay for universal child care on a sliding scale. As she talked, she shifted around in her chair — her hands, her arms, her whole body leaning forward and moving back. Onstage, including at TV town halls, she prefers to stand and pace rather than sit (she tries to record six miles a day on her Fitbit), and sometimes she comes across as a little frenetic, like a darting bird. One on one, though, she seemed relaxed, intent.

Warren moved to Cambridge in 1995 when she took a tenured job at Harvard Law School, and 11 years later, Mann, who is a legal historian, got a job there, too. By then they had bought their house; Warren’s two children from a previous marriage, her daughter, Amelia, and son, Alexander, were already grown. The first floor is impeccable, with a formal living room — elegant decorative boxes arranged on a handsome coffee table — a cozy sunroom and a gleaming kitchen with green tile countertops. When Warren taught classes at Harvard, she would invite her students over for barbecue and peach cobbler during the semester. Some of them marveled at the polish and order, which tends not to be the norm in faculty homes. Warren says she scoops up dog toys before people come over.

For her entire career, Warren’s singular focus has been the growing fragility of America’s middle class. She made the unusual choice as a law professor to concentrate relentlessly on data, and the data that alarms her shows corporate profits creeping up over the last 40 years while employees’ share of the pie shrinks. This shift occurred, Warren argues, because in the 1980s, politicians began reworking the rules for the market to the specifications of corporations that effectively owned the politicians. In Warren’s view of history, “The constant tension in a democracy is that those with money will try to capture the government to turn it to their own purposes.” Over the last four decades, people with money have been winning, in a million ways, many cleverly hidden from view. That’s why economists have estimated that the wealthiest top 0.1 percent of Americans now own nearly as much as the bottom 90 percent.

As a presidential candidate, Warren has rolled out proposal after proposal to rewrite the rules again, this time on behalf of a majority of American families. On the trail, she says “I have a plan for that” so often that it has turned into a T-shirt slogan. Warren has plans (about 20 so far, detailed and multipart) for making housing and child care affordable, forgiving college-loan debt, tackling the opioid crisis, protecting public lands, manufacturing green products, cracking down on lobbying in Washington and giving workers a voice in selecting corporate board members. Her grand overarching ambition is to end America’s second Gilded Age.

[Elizabeth Warren has lots of plans.Together, they would remake the economy.]

“Ask me who my favorite president is,” Warren said. When I paused, she said, “Teddy Roosevelt.” Warren admires Roosevelt for his efforts to break up the giant corporations of his day — Standard Oil and railroad holding companies — in the name of increasing competition. She thinks that today that model would increase hiring and productivity. Warren, who has called herself “a capitalist to my bones,” appreciated Roosevelt’s argument that trustbusting was helpful, not hostile, to the functioning of the market and the government. She brought up his warning that monopolies can use their wealth and power to strangle democracy. “If you go back and read his stuff, it’s not only about the economic dominance; it’s the political influence,” she said.

What’s crucial, Roosevelt believed, is to make the market serve “the public good.” Warren puts it like this: “It’s structural change that interests me. And when I say structural, the point is to say if you get the structures right, then the markets start to work to produce value across the board, not just sucking it all up to the top.”

But will people respond? Warren has been a politician for only seven years, since she announced her run for the Senate in 2011 at age 62. She’s still thinking through how she communicates her ideas with voters. “The only thing that worries me is I won’t describe it in a way that — ” she trailed off. “It’s like teaching class. ‘Is everybody in here getting this?’ And that’s what I just struggle with all the time. How do I get better at this? How do I do more of this in a way that lets people see it, hear it and say, ‘Oh, yeah.’”

In the months after Donald Trump’s stunning victory in 2016, Warren staked out territory as a fierce opponent of the president’s who saw larger forces at play in her party’s defeat. While many Democratic leaders focused on Trump himself as the problem, Warren gave a series of look-in-the-mirror speeches. In the first, to the executive council of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. on Nov. 10, she said that although there could be “no compromise” on standing up to Trump’s bigotry, millions of Americans had voted for him “despite the hate” — out of their deep frustration with “an economy and a government that doesn’t work for them.” Later that month, she gave a second speech behind closed doors to a group that included wealthy liberal donors and went hard at her fellow Democrats for bailing out banks rather than homeowners after the 2008 financial crisis. In another speech, in February 2017, to her ideological allies in the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Warren said: “No matter how extreme Republicans in Washington became, Democrats might grumble or whine, but when it came time for action, our party hesitated and pushed back only with great reluctance. Far too often, Democrats have been unwilling to get out there and fight.”

Warren fought in those early months by showing up at the Women’s March and at Logan Airport in Boston to protest Trump’s travel ban. On the Senate floor, opposing the nomination of Jeff Sessions to be Trump’s first attorney general, she read a letter by Coretta Scott King criticizing Sessions for his record of suppressing the black vote in Alabama, and Republican leaders rebuked her and ordered her to stop. The moment became a symbol of the resistance, with the feminist meme “Nevertheless, She Persisted,” a quote from the majority leader, Mitch McConnell, defending the move to silence her. Warren helped take down Trump’s first choice for labor secretary, the fast-food magnate Andy Puzder (he called his own employees the “bottom of the pool”), and she called for an investigation of the Trump administration’s botched recovery efforts in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.

But somewhere along the way to announcing her candidacy, Warren’s influence faded. She was no longer the kingmaker or queenmaker whose endorsement Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders avidly sought during their 2016 primary battle. When Warren failed to endorse Sanders, the left saw her decision as an act of betrayal, accusing her of propping up the Democratic establishment instead of trying to take it down. (When I asked Warren if she had regrets, she said she wasn’t going to revisit 2016.) Sanders emerged as the standard-bearer of the emboldened progressive movement.

Trump, meanwhile, was going after Warren by using the slur “Pocahontas” to deride her self-identification in the 1980s and ’90s as part Native American. In the summer of 2018, he said that if she agreed to take a DNA test in the middle of a televised debate, he would donate $1 million to her favorite charity. Warren shot back on Twitter by condemning Trump’s practice of separating immigrant children from their parents at the border (“While you obsess over my genes, your Admin is conducting DNA tests on little kids because you ripped them from their mamas”). But a few months later, she released a videosaying she had done the DNA analysis, and it showed that she had distant Native American ancestry. The announcement backfired, prompting gleeful mockery from Trump (“I have more Indian blood than she has!”) and sharp criticism from the Cherokee Nation, who faulted her for confusing the issue of tribal membership with blood lines. Warren apologized, but she seemed weaker for having taken Trump’s bait.

Sanders is still the Democratic candidate with a guru’s following and a magic touch for small-donor fund-raising, the one who can inspire some 4,500 house parties in a single weekend. And he has used his big policy idea, Medicare for All, to great effect, setting the terms of debate on the future of health care in his party.

With four more years of Trump on the line, though, it’s Joe Biden — the party’s most known quantity — who is far out in front in the polls. Challenging Biden from the left, Warren and Sanders are not calling wealthy donors or participating in big-money fund-raisers. Sanders has been leading Warren in the polls, but his support remains flat, while her numbers have been rising, even besting his in a few polls in mid-June. Warren and Sanders are old friends, which makes it awkward when her gain is assumed to be his loss. Early in June, an unnamed Sanders adviser ridiculed Warren’s electability by calling her DNA announcement a “debacle” that “killed her,” according to U.S. News & World Report. A couple of weeks before the first Democratic primary debates, on June 26 and 27, I asked her what it was like to run against a friend. “You know, I don’t think of this as competing,” she responded. It was the least plausible thing she said to me.

In March, Warren demonstrated her appetite for challenging the economic and political dominance of corporate titans by going directly at America’s biggest tech companies. In a speech in Long Island City, Queens — where local protesters demanded that Amazon drop its plan to build a big new campus — Warren connected the companies’ success at smothering start-up rivals to their influence in Washington. She remarked dryly that the large amounts that businesses like Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple spend on lobbying is a “good return on investment if they can keep Washington from enforcing the antitrust laws.” She wants to use those laws to break up the companies instead — a move that no other major American politician had proposed.

After Warren started talking about the four tech giants, along with other critics, the Trump administration let it be known that it was scrutinizing them for potential antitrust violations. Conservatives have suspected social media platforms of bias against them for years, and with concerns about privacy violations escalating, big tech was suddenly a bipartisan target. Warren has specifics about how to reduce their influence; she wants to undo the mergers that allowed Facebook, for example, to snap up WhatsApp, rather than compete with it for users. Warren could unleash the power to bring major antitrust prosecutions without Congress — an answer to gridlock in Washington that’s crucially woven into some of her other plans too. (Warren also favors ending the filibuster in the Senate.) Warren wants to prevent companies that offer an online marketplace and have annual revenue of $25 billion or more from owning other companies that sell products on that platform. In other words, Amazon could no longer sell shoes and diapers and promote them over everyone else’s shoes and diapers — giving a small business a fair chance to break in.

“There’s a concerted effort to equate Warren with Bernie, to make her seem more radical,” says Luigi Zingales, a University of Chicago economist and co-host of the podcast Capitalisn’t. But Wall Street and its allies “are more afraid of her than Bernie,” Zingales continued, “because when she says she’ll change the rules, she’s the one who knows how to do it.”

Warren’s theory of American capitalism rests on two turning points in the 20th century. The first came in the wake of the Great Depression, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt seized the chance to protect workers and consumers from future economic collapse. While the New Deal is mostly remembered for creating much of the nation’s social safety net, Warren also emphasizes the significance of the legislation (like the Glass-Steagall Act) that Democrats passed to rein in bankers and lenders and the agencies (the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) that they put in place to enforce those limits. Warren credits this new regulatory regime, along with labor unions, with producing a golden era for many workers over the next four and a half decades. Income rose along with union membership, and 70 percent of the increase went to the bottom 90 percent. That shared prosperity built, in Warren’s telling, “the greatest middle class the world had ever known.”

Then came Warren’s second turning point: President Ronald Reagan’s assault on government. Warren argues that Reagan’s skill in the 1980s at selling the country on deregulation allowed the safeguards erected in the 1930s to erode. Republicans seized on the opening Reagan created, and Democrats at times aided them. (Bill Clinton signed the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999.) That’s how the country arrived at its current stark level of inequality. “The system is as rigged as we think,” Warren wrote in her 2017 book “This Fight Is Our Fight”— in a riposte to Barack Obama, who insisted it was not, even as he recognized the influence of money in politics. This, Warren believes, is what Trump, who also blasted a rigged system, got right and what the Democratic establishment — Obama, both Clintons, Biden — gets wrong.

The challenge for Warren, going up against Trump, is that his slogan “drain the swamp” furthers the longstanding Republican goal of discrediting government, whereas Warren criticizes government as “a tool for the wealthy and well connected,” while asking voters to believe that she can remake it to help solve their problems. Hers is the trickier, paradoxical sell.

Warren faces a similar challenge when she tries to address the fear some white voters have that their economic and social status is in decline. Trump directs his supporters to blame the people they see every day on TV if they’re watching Fox News: immigrants and condescending liberal elites. Warren takes aim at corporate executives while pressing for class solidarity among workers across race and immigration status. Trump’s brand of right-wing populism is on the rise around the world. As more people from the global south move north, it’s harder than ever to make the case to all workers that they should unite.

It’s a classic problem for liberals like Warren: Workers often turn on other workers rather than their bosses and the shadowy forces behind them. “Populism is such a slippery concept,” Michael Kazin, a historian at Georgetown University and author of “The Populist Persuasion: An American History,” told me. “The only real test is whether you can be the person who convinces people you understand their resentment against the elites. Trump did enough of that to win. Bernie Sanders has shown he can do it among young people. Can Elizabeth Warren pull it off? I’m not sure.”

It’s an inconvenient political fact for Warren that she’s far more associated with Harvard and Massachusetts, where she has lived for the last 25 years, than with Oklahoma, the childhood home that shaped her and where her three brothers still live and her family’s roots are multigenerational. If you include Texas, where Warren lived in her early 20s and for most of her 30s, she spent three formative decades far from the Northeast.

When she was growing up, Warren’s father worked as a salesman at Montgomery Ward and later as a janitor; neither of her parents went to college. (White women in this group broke for Trump by 61 percent in 2016, and white men supported him by 71 percent.) In the early 1960s, when Warren was 12, her father had a heart attack and lost his job in Oklahoma City. One day, after the family’s station wagon was repossessed, her mother put on the one formal dress she owned, walked to an interview at Sears and got a job answering phones for minimum wage. This has become the story that Warren tells in every stump speech. She uses it to identify with people who feel squeezed.

There’s another story that Warren tells in her book about the implications, for her own life, of her family’s brush with financial ruin. Warren was going to George Washington University on a scholarship — “I loved college,” she told me. “I was having a great time” — when an old high school boyfriend, Jim Warren, reappeared in her life.

He asked her to marry him and go to Texas, where he had a job at IBM. Warren knew her mother wanted her to say yes. “It was the whole future, come on,” she told me. “I had lived in a family for years that was behind on the mortgage. And a secure future was a good man — not what you might be able to do on your own.”

Warren dropped out of college to move to Houston with her new husband. “It was either-or,” she said. Many women who make this choice never go back to school. But Warren was determined to become a teacher, so she persuaded Jim to let her finish college as a commuter student at the University of Houston for $50 a semester. After her graduation, they moved to New Jersey for Jim’s next IBM posting, and she started working as a speech therapist for special-needs children.

Warren was laid off when she became pregnant, and after her daughter was born, she talked Jim into letting her go to law school at Rutgers University in Newark (this time the cost was $450 a semester). After she had her son, she came to terms with the fact that she wasn’t cut out to stay home. “I wanted to be good at it, but I just wasn’t,” she told me.

In the late 1970s, she got a job at the University of Houston law school. She and her husband moved back to Texas. A couple of years later, when their daughter was in elementary school and their son was a toddler, the Warrens divorced. In her book, Warren writes about this from Jim’s perspective: “He had married a 19-year-old girl, and she hadn’t grown into the woman we both expected.” (Jim Warren died in 2003.)

Two years later, Warren asked Mann, whom she had met at a conference, to marry her. He gave up his job at the University of Connecticut to join her in Houston. At the university, Warren decided to teach practical classes, finance and business. In 1981, she added a bankruptcy class and discovered a question that she wanted to answer empirically: Why were personal bankruptcy rates rising even when the economy was on the upswing?

At first, Warren accepted the assumption that people were causing their own financial ruin. Too much “Tommy, Ralph, Gucci and Prada,” a story in Newsweek called “Maxed Out”later declared. Along with two other scholars, Jay Westbrook and Teresa Sullivan, Warren flew around the country and collected thousands of bankruptcy-court filings in several states. “I was going to expose these people who were taking advantage of the rest of us by hauling off to bankruptcy and just charging debts that they really could repay,” she said in a 2007 interview with Harry Kreisler, a historian at the University of California, Berkeley. But Warren, Westbrook and Sullivan found that 90 percent of consumer bankruptcies were due to a job loss, a medical problem or the breakup of a family through divorce or the death of a spouse. “I did the research, and the data just took me to a totally different place,” Warren said.

That research led to a job at the University of Texas at Austin, despite the doubts some faculty members had about her nonselective university degrees. (Mann worked at Washington University in St. Louis.) They finally managed to get joint appointments at the University of Pennsylvania in 1987, and she stayed there until 1995.

During this period, Warren was registered as a Republican. (Earlier, in Texas, she was an independent.) Her political affiliation shifted around the time she began working on bankruptcy in Washington. More than one million families a year were going bankrupt in the mid-’90s, and Congress established the National Bankruptcy Review Commission to suggest how to change the bankruptcy code. The commission’s chairman, former Representative Mike Synar of Oklahoma, asked Warren, now at Harvard Law School, to be his chief policy adviser. “I said, ‘No, not a chance, that’s political,’” Warren said in her interview with Kreisler. “I want to be pure. I want to be pristine. I don’t want to muddy what I do with political implications.”

But Synar persuaded Warren to join his team. It was a critical juncture. Big banks and credit-card companies were pushing Congress to raise the barriers for consumers to file for bankruptcy and harder for families to write off debt. Bill Clinton was president. He had run — much as Warren is running now — as a champion of the middle class, but early in his first term he began courting Wall Street. He didn’t want to fight the banks.

Warren flew back and forth from Boston to Washington and to cities where the commission held hearings. It was her political education, and the imbalance of influence she saw disturbed her. The banks and lenders paid people to go to the hearings, wrote campaign checks and employed an army of lobbyists. People who went bankrupt often didn’t want to draw attention to themselves, and by definition, they had no money to fight back.

By 1997, Warren had become a Democrat, but she was battling within the party as well as outside it. In particular, she clashed with Joe Biden, then a senator from Delaware. Biden’s tiny state, which allowed credit-card companies to charge any interest rate they chose beginning in 1981, would become home to half the national market. One giant lender, MBNA, contributed more than $200,000 to Biden’s campaigns over the years, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Biden strongly supported a bill, a version of which was first introduced in 1998, to make it more expensive to file for bankruptcy and more difficult to leave behind debt. He was unpersuaded by Warren’s charts and graphs showing how the change would increase the financial burden on families. “I am so sick of this self-righteous sheen put on anybody who wants to tighten up bankruptcy,” Biden said during a Senate hearing in 2001.

The bankruptcy battles continued, and when Warren testified against the proposed changes to the bankruptcy code before the Senate in 2005, Biden called her argument “very compelling and mildly demagogic,” suggesting that her problem was really with the high interest rates that credit-card companies were allowed to charge. “But senator,” Warren answered, “if you are not going to fix that problem” — by capping interest rates — “you can’t take away the last shred of protection from these families” that access to bankruptcy offers. The bill passed two months later.

Biden’s team now argues that he stepped in to win “important concessions for middle-class families,” like prioritizing payments for child support and alimony ahead of other debt. When I asked Warren in June about Biden’s claim, she pursed her lips, looked out the window, paused for a long beat and said, “You may want to check the record on that.” The record shows that Warren’s focus throughout was on the plight of families who were going bankrupt and that Biden’s was on getting a bill through. He supported tweaking it to make it a little less harmful to those facing bankruptcy, and the changes allowed it to pass.

In the years since it became law, the bankruptcy bill has allowed credit-card companies to recover more money from families than they did before. That shift had two effects, Matthew Yglesias argued recently in Vox. As Biden hoped, borrowers over all benefited when the credit-card companies offered slightly lowered interest rates. But as Warren feared, the new law hit people reeling from medical emergencies and other unexpected setbacks. Blocked from filing for bankruptcy, they have remained worse off for years. And a major effort to narrow the path to bankruptcy may have an unintended effect, according to a 2019 working paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research, by making it harder for the country to recover from a financial crisis.

In 2001, a Harvard student named Jessica Pishko, an editor of The Harvard Women’s Law Journal, approached Warren about contributing to a special issue. She didn’t expect Warren to say yes. Students saw Warren as an example of female achievement but not as a professional feminist. “She didn’t write about anything that could seem girlie,” Pishko remembers. “She wasn’t your go-to for feminist issues, and she was from that era when you didn’t put pictures of your kids on your desk” to show that you were serious about your work. But Warren wanted to contribute. “She said: ‘I’m doing all this research on bankruptcy, and I want to talk about why that’s a women’s issue. Can I do that?’”

The paper Warren produced, “What Is a Women’s Issue?” was aggressive and heterodox. In it, she criticized the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund for singling out Biden for praise in its annual report because he championed the Violence Against Women Act, which made it easier to prosecute domestic abusers. Warren thought his support for that law did not compensate for his role in pushing through the bankruptcy legislation, which she believed hurt women far more. “Why isn’t Senator Biden in trouble with grass-roots women’s groups all over the country and with the millions of women whose lives will be directly affected by the legislation he sponsors?” she asked. The answer raised “a troubling specter of women exercising powerful political influence within a limited scope, such as rape laws or equal educational opportunity statutes.

Warren wanted feminism to be wider in scope and centered on economic injustice. She urged students to take business-law classes. “If few students interested in women’s issues train themselves in commercial areas, the effects of the commercial laws will not be diminished, but there will be few effective advocates around to influence those policy outcomes,” she wrote. “If women are to achieve true economic equality, a far more inclusive definition of a women’s issue must emerge.”

She challenged standard feminist thinking again when she published her first book for a lay audience (written with her daughter), “The Two-Income Trap,” in 2003. Warren argued that in the wake of the women’s movement of the 1970s, millions of mothers streamed into the workplace without increasing the financial security of their families. Her main point was that a family’s additional income, when a second parent went to work, was eaten up by the cost of housing, and by child care, education and health insurance.

Conservatives embraced her critique more enthusiastically than liberals. Warren even opposed universal day care for fear of “increasing the pressure” to send both parents to work. She has shifted on that point. The child-care proposal she announced this February puts funds into creating high-quality child care but doesn’t offer equivalent subsidies to parents who stay home with their children. Warren says she’s responding to the biggest needs she now sees. More and more families are squeezed by the cost of child care; not enough of it is high quality; the pay for providers is too low. Warren is framing child care as a collective good, like public schools or roads and bridges.

“The Two-Income Trap” got Warren onto “Dr. Phil,” giving her a taste of minor stardom and the appeal of a larger platform. When the financial crisis hit, she moved to Washington’s main stage. At the invitation of Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader at the time, Warren led the congressional oversight panel tasked with overseeing the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program that Congress created to save the financial system. In public hearings, Warren called out Timothy Geithner, Obama’s Treasury secretary, for focusing on bailing out banks rather than small businesses and homeowners. Through a spokeswoman, Geithner declined to comment for this article. In his memoir, he called the oversight hearings “more like made-for-YouTube inquisitions than serious inquiries.”

But Warren could see the value of the viral video clip. In 2009, Jon Stewart invited her on “The Daily Show.” After throwing up from nerves backstage, she went on air and got a little lost in the weeds — repeating the abbreviation P.P.I.P. (the Public-Private Investment Program) and at first forgetting what it stood for. She felt as though she blew her opportunity to speak to millions of viewers. Stewart brought her back after the break for five more minutes, and she performed well, clearly explaining how the country forgot the lessons of the Great Depression and the dangers of deregulation. “We start pulling the threads out of the regulatory fabric,” Warren said. She listed the upheavals that followed — the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, the collapse of the giant hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1998 and the Enron scandal a few years later. “And what is our repeated response?” Warren said. “We just keep pulling the threads.” Now that the government was trying to save the whole economy from falling off the cliff, there were two choices: “We’re going to decide, basically: Hey, we don’t need regulation. You know, it’s fine, boom and bust, boom and bust, boom and bust, and good luck with your 401(k). Or alternatively, we’re going to say, You know, we’re going to put in some smart regulations ... and what we’re going to have, going forward, is we’re going to have stability and some real prosperity for ordinary folks.”

Stewart leaned forward and told Warren she had made him feel better than he had in months. “I don’t know what it is that you just did right there, but for a second that was like financial chicken soup for me,” he said.

“That moment changed my life,” Warren later said. Stewart kept inviting her back. In 2010, Congress overhauled and tightened financial regulation with the Dodd-Frank Act. In the push for its passage, Warren found that she had the leverage to persuade Democratic leaders to create a new agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Its job is to safeguard people from malfunctioning financial products (like predatory loans), much as the government protects them from — to borrow Warren’s favorite analogy — toasters that burst into flames. Warren spent a year setting up the C.F.P.B. When Obama chose Richard Cordray over her as the first director because he had an easier path to Senate confirmation, progressives were furious.

Warren was an unusual political phenomenon by then: a policy wonk who was also a force and a symbol. In 2012, she was the natural choice for Democrats recruiting a candidate to run against Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts, a Republican who had slipped into office, after Ted Kennedy’s death, against a weak opponent. Warren had another viral moment when a supporter released a homemade video of her speaking to a group in Andover. “You built a factory out there?” Warren said, defending raising taxes on the wealthy. “Good for you. But I want to be clear: You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.” Brown called Warren “anti-free enterprise,” and Obama, running for re-election, distanced himself in an ad shot from the White House (“Of course Americans build their own businesses,” he said). But Warren’s pitch succeeded. She came from behind in the race against Brown and won with nearly 54 percent of the vote.

Voters of color could determine the results of the 2020 presidential election. In the primaries, African-Americans constitute a large share of Democrats in the early-voting state of South Carolina and on Super Tuesday, when many other states vote. In the general election, the path to the presidency for a Democrat will depend in part on turning out large numbers of people of color in Southern states (North Carolina, Virginia, possibly Florida) and also in the Rust Belt, where the post-Obama dip in turnout among African-Americans contributed to Hillary Clinton’s squeaker losses in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

Warren has work to do to persuade people of color to support her. In the last couple of Democratic primaries, these voters started out favoring candidates who they thought would be most likely to win, not those who were the most liberal. Black voters backed Hillary Clinton in 2008 until they were sure Barack Obama had enough support to beat her, and in 2016 they stuck with her over Bernie Sanders. This time, they have black candidates — Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Wayne Messam — to choose from. And voters of color may be skeptical of Warren’s vision of class solidarity transcending racial division. As it turned out, Warren’s case that most white people voted for Trump because of economic distress, and “despite the hate,” as she said right after the election, didn’t really hold up. A study published last year found that among white voters, perceived racial or global threats explained their shift toward Trump better than financial concerns did. What does that say about the chances of winning as a liberal who tries to take the racism out of populism?

When Warren makes the case about what needs to change in America by leaning on the period from 1935 to 1980, she’s talking about a time of greater economic equality — but also a period when people of color were excluded from the benefits of government policies that buoyed the white middle class. In a video announcing that she was exploring a presidential bid, Warren acknowledged that history by saying that families of color today face “a path made even harder by generations of discrimination.” For example, the federal agency created during the New Deal drew red lines around mostly black neighborhoods on maps to deny mortgage loans to people who lived in them.

Warren spoke about this problem years before she went into politics. Redlining contributed to the racial wealth gap, and that had consequences Warren saw in her bankruptcy studies — black families were more vulnerable to financial collapse. Their vulnerability was further heightened by subprime and predatory lending. In “The Two-Income Trap,” Warren called these kinds of loans “legally sanctioned corporate plans to steal from minorities.”

In March, Warren took a three-day trip to the South. She started on a Sunday afternoon, with a town hall — one of 101 she has done across the country — at a high school in a mostly black neighborhood in Memphis. It’s her format of choice; the questions she fields help sharpen her message. The local politicians who showed up that day were African-American, but most of the crowd was white.

The next morning, Warren drove to the Mississippi Delta. Her husband, Mann, was on spring break from teaching and along for the trip. Warren’s staff welcomes his presence because Warren loves having him with her and because he’s willing to chat up voters (who often call him “Mr. Warren”). In the small town of Cleveland, Miss., Warren sprang out of her black minivan in the parking lot of a church to shake the hand of an African-American state senator, Willie Simmons. They were meeting for the first time: He had agreed to take her on a walking tour after her campaign got in touch and said she wanted to learn about housing in the Delta.

Simmons and Warren set off down a block of modest ranch houses, some freshly painted, others peeling, preceded by TV crews and trailed by the rest of the press as her aides darted in to keep us out of the shot. The scrum made conversation stagy, but Simmons gradually eased into answering Warren’s questions. He pointed out cracks in the foundations of some houses; the lack of money to repair old buildings was a problem in the Delta. They stopped at a vacant lot. The neighbors wanted to turn it into a playground, but there was no money for that either.

Warren nodded and then took a stab at communicating her ideas to the local viewers who might catch a few of her words that night. She hit the highlights of the affordable housing bill she released in the Senate months earlier — 3.2 million new homes over 10 years, an increase in supply that Moody’s estimated would reduce projected rents by 10 percent. When the tour ended, Simmons told the assembled reporters that he didn’t know whom he would support for president, but Warren got points for showing up and being easy to talk to — “touchable,” he said.

That night, Warren did a CNN town hall at Jackson State University, the third historically black college she has visited this year. Warren moved toward the audience at the first opportunity, walking past the chair placed for her onstage. She laid out the basics of her housing bill, stressing that it addressed the effects of discrimination. “Not just a passive discrimination,” Warren said. “Realize that into the 1960s in America, the federal government was subsidizing the purchase of homes for white families and discriminating against black families.” Her bill included funds to help people from redlined areas, or who had been harmed by subprime loans, buy houses. The audience applauded.

Warren also said that night that she supported a “national full-blown conversation” about reparations for slavery and Jim Crow. She saw this as a necessary response to the stark wealth gap between black and white families. “Today in America — because of housing discrimination, because of employment discrimination — we live in a world where the average white family has $100 and the average black family has about $5.” Several Democratic candidates have said they support a commission to study reparations. Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of the influential 2014 Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations,” said in a recent interview with The New Yorker that Warren was the candidate whose commitment seemed real because she had asked him to talk with her about his article when it came out years ago. “She was deeply serious,” Coates said.

Warren is often serious and doesn’t hesitate to convey her moral outrage. “I’ll own it,” she told me about her anger. She talked about women expressing to her their distress about sexual harassment and assault. “Well, yeah,” Warren said. “No kidding that a woman might be angry about that. Women have a right to be angry about being treated badly.”

Trump gets angry all the time; whether a woman can do the same and win remains a question. Warren’s campaign is simultaneously working in another register. On Twitter, it has been posting videos of Warren calling donors who have given as little as $3. They can’t believe it’s her. When the comedian and actress Ashley Nicole Black tweeted, “Do you think Elizabeth Warren has a plan to fix my love life?” Warren tweeted back and then called Black, who finished the exchange with a fan-girl note: “Guess who’s crying and shaking and just talked to Elizabeth Warren on the phone?!?!? We have a plan to get my mom grandkids, it’s very comprehensive, and it does involve raising taxes on billionaires.”

After Trump’s election, Warren and Sanders said that if Trump followed through on his promise to rebuild the economy for workers and their families, they would help. If Trump had championed labor over corporations, he could have scrambled American politics by creating new alliances. But that version of his presidency didn’t come to pass. Instead, by waging trade wars that hurt farm states and manufacturing regions more than the rest of the country, Trump has punished his base economically (even if they take satisfaction in his irreverence and his judicial appointments).

Warren has been speaking to those voters. In June, she put out an “economic patriotism” plan filled with ideas about helping American industries. By stepping into the vacuum for economic populism the president has left, Warren forced a reckoning on Fox News, Trump’s safe space on TV, from the host Tucker Carlson. Usually a Trump loyalist, he has recently styled himself a voice for the white working class.

Carlson opened his show by using more than two minutes of airtime to quote Warren’s analysis of how giant American companies are abandoning American workers. Carlson has warned that immigrants make the country “poorer and dirtier” and laced his show with racism, but now he told his mostly Republican viewers: “Ask yourself, what part of the statement you just heard did you disagree with?” He continued, “Here’s the depressing part: Nobody you voted for said that or would ever say it.” The next day, a new conservative Never Trump website called The Bulwark ran a long and respectful essay called “Why Elizabeth Warren Matters.”

A month earlier in Mingo County, W.Va., where more than 80 percent of voters cast a ballot for Trump, Warren went to a local fire station to talk about her plan for addressing the opioid crisis. It’s big: She wants to spend $100 billion over 10 years, including $50 million annually for West Virginia, the state with the highest rate of deaths from drug overdoses. In Trump’s latest budget, he has requested an increase of $1.5 billion to respond directly to the epidemic. Against a backdrop of firefighters’ coats hanging in cinder-block cubbies, Warren moved among a crowd of about 150. Many hands went up when she asked who knew someone struggling with opioids. She brought up the role of “corporations that made big money off getting people addicted and keeping them addicted.” People with “Make America Great Again” stickers nodded and clapped, according to Politico.

If Warren competes for rural voters in the general election (if not to win a red state then to peel off enough of them to make a difference in a purple one), her strong support for abortion rights and gun control will stand in her way. Lately, she has framed her argument for keeping abortion clinics open in economic terms, too. “Women of means will still have access to abortions,” she said at a town hall on MSNBC hosted by Chris Hayes of the effects of new state laws aimed at closing clinics. “Who won’t will be poor women, will be working women, will be women who can’t afford to take off three days from work, will be very young women.” She finished by saying, “We do not pass laws that take away that freedom from the women who are most vulnerable.”

Biden and Sanders have been polling better with non-college-educated white voters than Warren has. David Axelrod, the former Obama strategist and political commentator, thinks that even if her ideas resonate, she has yet to master the challenge of communicating with this group. “She’s lecturing,” he said. “There’s a lot of resistance, because people feel like she’s talking down to them.”

Warren didn’t sound to me like a law professor on the trail, but she did sound like a teacher. Trying to educate people isn’t the easiest way to connect with them. “Maybe she could bring it down a level,” Lola Sewell, a community organizer in Selma, Ala., suggested. “A lot of us aren’t involved with Wall Street and those places.”

Warren may also confront a double bind for professional women: To command respect, they have to prove that they’re experts, but once they do, they’re often seen as less likable. At one point, I asked Warren whether there was anything good about running for president as a woman. “It is what it is,” she said.

When I first talked with Warren in February, when her poll numbers were low, I wondered whether she was content with simply forcing Democratic candidates to engage with her ideas. During the 2016 primaries, when Warren did not endorse Sanders, she wanted influence over Hillary Clinton’s economic appointments should she win the presidency. Cleaving the Democratic administration from Wall Street — that was enough at the time. She could make a similar decision in 2020 or try to get her own appointment. If Warren became Treasury secretary, she could resuscitate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which Trump has worked to declaw, and tip all kinds of decisions away from banks and toward the families who come to her town halls and tell her about the loans they can’t pay.

By mid-June, however, when I went to Washington to talk to Warren for the last time, she was very much in the race. New polls showed her in second place in California and Nevada. She had more to lose, and perhaps as a result, her answers were more scripted, more like her speeches.

Warren, like everyone in the race, has yet to prove that she has the political skills and broad-enough support to become president. But a parallel from another country suggests that perhaps bearing down on policy is the best strategy against right-wing populism. Luigi Zingales, the University of Chicago economist, comes from Italy, and he feared Trump’s rise back in 2011, having watched the ascension of Silvio Berlusconi, the corrupt billionaire tycoon who was elected prime minister of Italy in the 2000s as a right-wing populist. After Trump’s victory in 2016, Zingales pointed out in a New York Times Op-Ed that the two candidates who defeated Berlusconi treated him as “an ordinary opponent,” focusing on policy issues rather than his character. “The Democratic Party should learn this lesson,” Zingales wrote. He now thinks that Warren is positioned to mount that kind of challenge. “I think so,” he said, “if she does not fall for his provocations.”

Warren and I met in her Washington apartment. The floor at the entrance had been damaged by a leak in the building, and the vacuum cleaner was standing next to the kitchen counter. I said I was a bit relieved by the slight disarray because her house in Cambridge was so supremely uncluttered, and she burst out laughing. She sat on the couch as we spoke about the indignities to come, the way in which her opponents — Biden, Trump, who knew who else — would try to make her unrecognizable to herself. What would she do about that? Warren leaned back and stretched her feet out, comfortable in gray wool socks. “The answer is, we’ve got time,” she said. “I’ll just keep talking to people — I like talking to people.”

Emily Bazelon is a staff writer for the magazine and the author of “Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration.”

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olicitysecretsanta · 7 years

Text

Mystery Solved

To: @felicityollies

From: @ginervamariechaseeverdeen (Lauren)

Merry Christmas! I hope you enjoy this hopefully fun high school AU about a mystery, hacktivism, the Arrow, a game of Secret Santa, and the start of Oliver and Felicity’s relationship!

>>––––––––>

“Frack! Of course, I would get stuck with Oliver fracking Queen, Mr. Perfect Billionaire who has everything and anything he could ever want. What in the world am I supposed to get for someone like that?” Felicity ranted to her friend Alena while they sat in her car during lunch.

The two girls first met when Felicity was freshman and Alena was in 8th grade, when Alena’s parents moved her family to Starling City. They had hit it off rather quickly, which was unusual for the two girls who were usually loners, but they bonded over their shared love of tech and eventually discovered another mutual interest—hacktivism. And that was the beginning of Helix, their hacktivism club in which they gave themselves projects ranging from breaking through the school’s pathetic firewall and into the system to fix an unjust grade—there was absolutely no justification for getting a failing grade in PE just because you couldn’t do a perfect pushup— to their current project, finding the identity of the Arrow, a vigilante who had been actively working to take down many of the city’s rich and powerful for the last few months. As well as discovering his identity, they were also trying to determine whether he should be stopped or helped. So far, however, they hadn’t made a lot of headway.

“I don’t know,” Alena replied, “but you should at least be glad your AP Bio teacher is letting you have a Holiday party and do Secret Santa on the last day of class since you’ll have already taken your AP test. Advanced Physics is just studying for the final which will be oh so much fun,” she sighed.

Felicity just laughed. “You take apart a computer and put it back together blindfolded, but physics just might defeat the mighty Alena. On another note, any leads on the Arrow?”

“I think he’s working out of the Glades. See?” she turned her laptop to face Felicity, and on the screen, were several videos taken from CCTV showing the Arrow riding his motor cycle down the same few streets in the Glades.

“He’s smart. He isn’t taking the same route every time, but he’s not that smart, because he’s just switching between four different routes. Now if we look at these streets on an overhead map, we should be able to triangulate his point of origin.”

“I completely agree, but that might have to wait until after school because the lunch bell should be ringing in three, two, one.”

A shrill ringing sounded from the school and all the students who had been eating outdoors despite the chilly December weather began to head back inside.

“It’s a little eerie how good you are at that,” Felicity laughed as she turned off her car and climbed out.

“It’s a gift,” Alena responded a bit sarcastically. “See you after seventh period?”

“Yep! And then we can get back to work on our project. Mom’s working the late shift again tonight, so my house is open.”

“Sounds good!”

The two girls separated to go to their respective classes, Felicity heading to AP Biology. The AP test was tomorrow, so she probably should have been paying better attention, but her thoughts kept coming back to Oliver Queen and what she should get him for Secret Santa. Despite the fact that they hardly spoke, Felicity liked to think she knew him pretty well. He was a year ahead of her, and his first three years of high school, Oliver was a notorious party boy, skating by in his classes and dating every pretty girl in school, but mostly Laurel Lance, his on again off again girlfriend since middle school. After his father had died in a boating accident last summer however, something had changed. He stopped partying so much, started actually trying in his classes, was currently off again with Laurel, and maybe for good this time, and apparently got into weight lifting. Because he had gotten really buff, not that Felicity paid much attention or anything.

Oh, who was she kidding. Oliver Queen was really cute and every girl in the school knew it. Not that it mattered what she thought of him. Oliver Queen had a very specific type: tall, blonde, and beautiful. So, a short goth chick with black hair and purple highlights didn’t exactly fit the bill.

“Maybe I can get him some workout clothes,” Felicity muttered unintentionally to herself, staring at the muscles in Oliver’s arms. Her brain to mouth filter was a bit faulty from time to time.

“What was that Miss Smoak?” Mr. Raymond, the teacher, asked and all eyes were immediately on Felicity.

“Nothing,” she said softly and began blushing, staring down at her desk.

“I know this material may not be challenging to some of you,” Mr. Raymond said looking at her pointedly, “but that does not mean that other students do not need this review session. So please refrain from speaking in class.” Then he began to carry on with the review.

When the bell rang at the end of class, Felicity gathered her things and began to walk towards her last class of the day. Before she could make it out of the Biology room however, someone called her name.

“Felicity Smoak?”

She turned around to see that it was Oliver Queen talking to her. Well this was an interesting turn of events.

“Yes, that’s me,” she replied.

“I’m Oliver Queen.”

“I knew that. I mean I think everyone in this school or maybe even the whole city knows that. But you were probably just trying to be polite and introduce yourself and I’m babbling like an idiot which will stop in three, two, one. Can I help you with something?”

“Yes actually, I’m having a bit of trouble with my computer, and I hear that you’re really good with them. I was wondering if you could maybe take a look at it.”

“Uh sure. What seems to be the problem?”

“Can I bring it to you tomorrow? It won’t even turn on right now, so I didn’t bother bringing it today.”

“Any ideas why it won’t turn on?”

“Um, I spilled a latte on it,” Oliver responded like he wasn’t completely sure that was the reason.

“Okay then. I’ll look at it and see what I can do. Just bring it to me tomorrow morning. I’ve got to head to class now. Don’t want to be late! Bye Oliver!” she called as she sped out the door and into the hallway.

“Thanks Felicity,” Oliver said, grinning a little as she hurried away.

>>––––––––>

That afternoon, Felicity and Alena took up residence in what was formerly the spare bedroom and had, over the years they lived in Starling City, turned into Felicity’s office and computer workshop as well as Helix’s unofficial base of operations.

“Any luck discovering his base?” Alena asked.

“If my calculations are correct—” Felicity began.

“And they always are!” Alena interrupted her before smiling sheepishly and motioning for Felicity to continue her thought.

“If they’re correct, then the Arrow Cave is somewhere on this block,” Felicity said as she pointed at a street with practically nothing on it.

“Well that makes no sense,” Alena said. “All that’s there is the Queen’s old steel foundry and that shut down years ago. Why would his base be in an abandoned part of town?”

“I know right! It would make so much more sense to work from a populated area so that he could come and go without attracting so much notice on CCTV as the only person who ever went there.”

“Exactly. Also, I’ve cross referenced the list of all his victims so far, and I think you’re right. It’s not just the rich and powerful he’s after. It’s the corrupt rich who abuse their power. With a little more digging, I found lots of dirt on all the victims that could have potentially landed them in jail if the SCPD was actually competent and active in the Glades,” Alena told her friend.

“Have you figured out who he’ll go after next?”

“Well, I have a list, and it keeps growing. There doesn’t seem to be much of a pattern to the order he’s going after these guys, so it could be any of these people or even someone we haven’t thought of.”

“Well I guess our best course of action would be to hack the CCTV near the old Queen steel foundry and see if anything turns up in the next few days. Speaking of the Queens, you’ll never guess what happened to me today.”

“You figured out what to get Oliver for Secret Santa?”

“Nope. But it does have to do with Oliver. He asked me to fix his computer because he apparently spilled a latte on it.”

“Well he came to the best. I’m just surprised his parents won’t just buy him a new one. It’s not like they can’t afford it.”

“Well, the whole thing was a bit suspicious. I mean, Oliver Queen has never spoken to me that I can recall, and then he didn’t seem super sure about his latte story. He’s bringing it tomorrow, so we can take a look at it and see if anything is up.”

>>––––––––>

The next morning, Oliver Queen approached Felicity as soon as she got out of her car holding a laptop riddled with what appeared to be bullet holes.

“Uh, that doesn’t look like you spilled a latte on it,” Felicity blurted out.

“Well, good morning to you too, and my coffee shop is in a bad neighborhood,” Oliver replied with a grin and shrug before handing her the laptop.

“So, I’ll take a look at it and see what I can do. I’ll let you know by the end of the day tomorrow if I’ve salvaged anything.”

“Thank you, Felicity! I really appreciate it!”

“You’re welcome, see you later Oliver,” Felicity said quickly as she put the laptop into her backpack and dashed inside to find Alena before their first class of the day.

“Alena,” Felicity furiously whispered as she found her friend at her locker. “You have to see this!”

“What? Why are you being weird?” Alena asked, very confused.

“Oliver gave me his laptop in the parking lot and you’ll never believe what it looks like. Here look,” Felicity told her as she shoved her open backpack into Alena’s face.

“Uh dang, his coffee shop must be in a bad neighborhood or something…”

“Yeah that’s what he said,” Felicity muttered, frustrated with all the secrecy. “How in the world did Oliver Queen get a laptop riddled with bullet holes?”

“No idea. I think we need to investigate this at lunch.”

“Most definitely. There’s definitely some funny business going on here.”

“Do you think it has something to do with our secret project?” Alena whispered as the girls headed to first period.

“But why would Oliver Queen be involved with the Arrow?”

“Well he is rich…”

“Yeah but I don’t think it’s necessarily on par with the previous victims.”

“Maybe he has a deep dark secret!” Alena whispered with a chuckle.

“Oh yes,” Felicity responded with biting sarcasm as they walked into their classroom, “he’s secretly using his wealth to force the citizens of the Glades to do his bidding. Honestly though, this is weird.”

>>––––––––>

“Okay,” Felicity said as she sat in her car with Alena at lunch that day, “hook me up!”

Alena plugged the cord coming out of Felicity’s computer into Oliver’s very dead laptop so that Felicity could attempt to extract any surviving data off the hard drive.

“Well, well, what do we have here?” Felicity asked as she looked through the data she was pulling from the destroyed computer. “It seems that Mr. Queen is taking things that don’t belong to him. This computer says it belongs to a Mr. Warren Patel.”

“And a quick search on him tells us that our dear Mr. Patel is rich and is competing with Oliver’s new stepdad to buy Unidac Industries. Oh, and surprise, surprise, he’s on my list of potential future Green Arrow victims,” Alena informed Felicity.

“Why would Oliver have his laptop? Do you think it’s some sort of corporate espionage? I mean, couldn’t they have had someone at Queen Consolidated attempt to salvage the laptop if it was? And I still can’t figure out how the laptop got shot up in the first place,” Felicity babbled.

Alena gasped, putting pieces together as Felicity babbled. “What if…” she trailed off.

“He couldn’t be. There’s no way!”

“But our footage from last night shows the Arrow definitely going to the old Queen foundry, so that’s got to be his base. And Oliver has gotten suspiciously buff this year which matches the Arrow’s description. Think about it. And now he’s got this laptop. It just adds up,” Alena argued.

“I mean, I guess you could be right. Now that I think about it, based on the SCPD’s witness descriptions of the Arrow, he seems to have the build of a teenager or someone in their early 20s rather than an older guy. And I’m almost positive I remember something about Oliver taking archery lessons in middle school. And it would make sense that he wouldn’t be going to parties anymore if he’s out all night as the Arrow…”

“I think we might have finally found him. Hey, what’s that?” Alena asked, pointing at Felicity’s laptop which was now displaying a blueprint of the exchange building.

“If Oliver really is the Arrow, he must be after someone at Unidac Industries auction. But why would Warren Patel have had blueprints of this building. Unless of course he’s planning to try something at the auction this weekend which would make him a valid target for the Arrow.”

“Felicity, I think we’ve got to get this to Oliver. If he really is the Arrow, which despite the evidence, I still think is insane, then he’ll need this information.”

“Yes, but what if Oliver’s not the Arrow? I still think we need to get this info to the right guy…”

“True. But how can we tell for sure. We can’t just go up to the guy and ask him point blank without seeming like we’ve gone nuts.”

“And it could be dangerous. What if he doesn’t want anyone to know his secret? But Alena, just imagine if he is the Arrow! You would never be able to make fun of me for my tiny crush on Oliver ever again. I mean he would basically have the total package: handsome, mysterious, strong, fighting for justice…” Felicity began to babble again sharing more than she initially intended.

“Felicity, you can stop with the many virtues of the new and improved Oliver Queen. He’ll probably get back with Laurel again before you know it. Arrow or not, you should probably move on. You know Cooper has been hinting that he wants to take you to the Christmas dance.”

“No way Alena. Coop may be pretty cute and smart, but can you honestly tell me he doesn’t seem just a bit devious.”

“Felicity, that’s a load of crap and you know it,” Alena laughed. “But let’s get back to the subject. How do we figure out for sure if Oliver’s the Arrow without asking him outright?”

“Hey! I’ve got an idea!”

“What?”

“So, Secret Santa is tomorrow, and I have the perfect idea for a gift for Oliver.” Felicity told Alena with a smile.

“Which is…” Alena urged her friend to continue.

>>––––––––>

“Thank you everyone for bringing your Secret Santa gifts. Please come up to my desk to find the package with your name on it. You may then open them and try to determine who your Secret Santa is. After that, we will enjoy some of the wonderful looking snacks you all bought while we watch a Christmas movie. Now let’s begin this holiday party,” said Mr. Raymond.

Everyone grabbed their gifts, returned to their seat, and opened them, eager to see what they had received. Felicity was too busy watching Oliver open his gift from her to pay attention to the bag with her gift. As soon as he opened the box to see a Nerf bow and arrow, a brief look of worry appeared on Oliver’s face before he schooled his expression into a more neutral look.

That look was all the confirmation Felicity needed. Oliver definitely had the look of a guilty man on his face when he saw the bow. He looked worried that someone knew his secret, so Felicity planned to confront him with the laptop after school. Turning her attention to the movie, Felicity forgot about her unopened gift that sat on her desk.

>>––––––––>

At the end of the day, Felicity and Oliver both approached each other in the parking lot.

“Can we talk somewhere more private?” Oliver asked tensely.

“We can sit in my car if you want,” Felicity offered.

“Let’s go then.”

“Okay, this one’s mine. It might be a tight fit…”

“I’ll manage,” was Oliver’s only reply.

After the two squeezed into Felicity’s tiny car, she pulled out the laptop and handed it to Oliver as well as a flash drive with all the information she extracted from it.

“So, this laptop isn’t yours—” she started to say before Oliver interrupted her.

“How did you find out I’m the Arrow? I know you were my Secret Santa Felicity, but how did you figure it out?” he asked gruffly.

“Well it wasn’t that hard after my partner and I put the pieces together. You have the right build, you used to take archery lessons, you’re never at parties anymore, and you gave me this sketchy most definitely bullet ridden laptop. And it’s most definitely not yours. Mysteries bug me. They need to be solved. By the way, that flash drive contains blueprints of the exchange building where the auction for Unidac Industries is occurring tomorrow. One in which both your stepdad and Mr. Warren Patel, the owner of this laptop, are participating in. And it seems like Patel is up to something suspicious.”

“Are you going to tell anyone?” Oliver asked point blank.

“No. I think you’re doing a good thing. I don’t exactly agree with your methods, especially the killing, I really wish you wouldn’t do that, but if I were going to turn you in for being a vigilante, I’d have to turn myself in for being a hacktivist, and I have no plans to do that anytime soon.”

A small smile appeared on Oliver’s face. “Felicity Smoak, you are remarkable.”

“Thanks for remarking on it,” she replied with a shrug and grin.

“You know it’s funny,” Oliver told her.

“What?” Felicity asked very confused.

“Did you even open your Secret Santa gift?”

“Uh no, I actually was more concerned with being sure if you were the Arrow based on your reactions to your gift. I think it’s in my backpack though.”

“Why don’t you open it?”

“Uh okay then…” Felicity trailed off as she pulled the bag out of her backpack, pulled out the tissue paper, and found a sprig of mistletoe inside as well as a Bill Gates biography.

She made eye contact with Oliver, and he smiled back.

“I was your Secret Santa. It’s kind of funny that we both got each other. I wanted to get you something you might enjoy and something symbolic. Felicity, ever since you and your mom moved to Starling City, I’ve been fascinated with you. You’re smart and kind and you don’t care what anyone thinks of you. And most of all, you stand up for what’s right. I never realized before this year that I kind of liked you. I think I have all along, but I was too caught up in my old lifestyle and in Laurel that I never really looked at you like that.

“I’ve been trying to come up with a way to talk to you all year, but then I decided that I didn’t want to put you in danger by associating myself with you. If my enemies ever find out who I am, my friends and family will all become targets. But, this computer stumped me, and I hoped you might be able to help. So, anyways, Merry Christmas Felicity,” Oliver told her stunning Felicity into silence. He slowly started to lean towards her when Felicity interrupted him.

“I’m Jewish,” she blurted out.

“Well then, Happy Hanukah,” Oliver chuckled and then leaned back in.

Felicity met him half way and their lips met in a soft kiss.

“I’ve had dreams about this,” Felicity mumbled.

“You have?” Oliver asked, smiling.

“I said that out loud didn’t I?” Felicity panicked.

“Yes, but I like that you speak your mind.”

“At least someone does. By the way, do you happen to have any openings for tech support in this whole Arrow venture? My partner and I have decided that you need the help, and if this laptop is any indication, you do not treat technology with the care it deserves.”

“Are you sure you know what you’re getting into? You know the risks?”

“As a matter of fact, I do. The members of Helix already break the law to fight for justice. We just want to join forces with you so that we can all be more effective,” Felicity explained.

“And Alena is trustworthy too?”

“What? How did you know she’s my partner?” Felicity asked, thrown for a loop.

“You’re not the only one good at solving mysteries,” he said simply.

“Well, okay then. Yes, she’s trustworthy. You have to be good at keeping secrets to do what we do.”

“Then I’ll see you both at— “

“At the old Queen Steel Foundry in the Glades tonight at 7. We’ll be there.”

“I think I need to stop underestimating you Felicity Smoak.”

“Like I said, mysteries need to be solved.”

#arrow #olicity #olicity secret Santa 2017 #olicity fic #olicity fanfic #submission

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darkwinterchild · 7 years

Text

Arrow: how season 1 set up the world

Originally posted on Reddit

Warning: a lot of words, as usual.

Worldbuilding is an important part of storytelling, so I wanted to talk a little about one of the most important pieces of worldbuilding in Arrow: Starling City itself. Because I think it has been neglected after the first seasons. The city used to be so full of life back in the days. It felt whole, it felt real and it felt grounded, and there are two major ways the writers managed to accomplish that: first, they introduced characters from all walks of life, both mains and minors; second, they set up a social background, the issue of class, and used that background to frame, color, compare and contrast their characters from the get-go - give them more depth and complexity.

So first, let’s look at season 1’s array of characters

The main character belonged to Starling City’s elite: that was our point of entry, our main point of view. On the one hand, we had Oliver, Thea, Thea’s friends, Tommy, Max Fuller and Carter Bowen to represent the privileged youths of the city. On the other, we had Walter, Moira, Malcolm, Frank Chen and the people on the List (Adam Hunt, Martin Somers, etc.) to introduce us to the older generation and their shenanigans.

Middle class? The Lance family used to be at the center: Laurel, Quentin, Dinah and Sara (dead but certainly not forgotten). From there, we had Laurel’s friends and colleagues at CNRI (Joanna in particular), and we had Quentin’s friends and colleagues at SCPD (Pike, Hilton, McKenna). We also had Diggle and Carly, poor Rob, and Felicity Smoak.

The people of the Glades were given a voice via Laurel’s storyline as a lawyer: Emily Nocenti, Peter Declan, and Eric and Nancy Moore with their son Taylor. Roy, our main boy, was introduced in episode 15. Raisa, the Queens’ Russian maid, left an impression in spite of only being featured in episode 1. Others were antagonists, but they were still given depth and motivations: the Restons and the Savior in particular.

Organized crime in Starling City used to operate at every level. At the very top, we had Malcolm Merlyn and his organisation. Then, among the lesser rich, we had the Bertinelli family (Frank and Helena). Ted Gaynor and his disgruntled veterans belonged more or less to the middle class. Finally, down at the bottom, we had the Triad, the Bratva, and Count Vertigo’s drug ring.

Throughout the first season, the main characters also mostly all had their own distinct narrative space. Just to cite some of the most important ones: Laurel shared separate storylines with Oliver, Lance and Tommy; Felicity shared separate storylines with Walter and Oliver; Tommy shared separate storylines with Laurel, Oliver and his father; Thea shared separate storylines with her mother, Oliver and Roy. There were so many different factions with different opinions and different agendas, doing completely different things - which made it all the more exciting whenever these storylines intersected (and they all came together in the big finale). This was a way to breath life into their world: Starling City used to be more than just a bunch of vigilante saving nameless faces. It used to be Laurel and the lawyers at CNRI fighting the city’s corrupt elite; it used to be Tommy trying to find his place; it used to be Quentin Lance and SCPD fighting crime and chasing after the Hood; it used to be Walter, a good man trying to solve a mystery; it used to be Moira, trying hard not to drown in her conspiracies; it used to be Roy and Thea figuring out who they wanted to be; etc.

So, this diversity of POV wasn’t a coincidence, but a consequence of the choice the writers made when they incorporated class as one of the thematic pillars of their show. Once they made that decision, it was obviously very important to have both main and minor characters at every social level through which we could explore life in the city. Note also the variety of professions/life styles within the same social class: in terms of worldbuilding, it is doubly important, because of course that leads to a variety of locations. The city didn’t just feel different in season 1 because of all the characters, it also looked different because of all the different sets associated with these characters.

How class was used to ground Starling City and bring it to life

The class issue was an integral part of the story. For a show based on a liberal superhero (from what I’ve heard), it is the one social justice issue they chose to tackle (racism, homophobia, sexism, etc. basically weren’t addressed at all), and they obviously put some effort into it.

Most characters and relationships during the first season explored class dynamics to some extend. When you look at romance, for example, class was the most essential element of Thea/Roy, a core element of both Oliver/Laurel and Tommy/Laurel (Quentin resenting these rich bad boys for what Oliver did to his daughters, Moira telling Laurel that her son loved being at her place because he didn’t feel like Robert’s son there, just himself; Tommy being cut off being an important part of the development of his story with Laurel; etc.), and definitely colored the way Moira/Walter as a high-end couple was written. Concerning characters, the fact that they were billionaires was a defining characteristic of both the Queens and the Merlyns, just like the fact that he was poor was a defining characteristic of Roy. Actually, we can’t just talk about a defining characteristic: their social standing was basically one of the driving character traits in their storylines, for all these characters.

Class used to be at the very core of show. Oliver’s story started when he realized his family’s fortune was built upon the suffering of others - when his father shot himself in the head and left him with the mission of righting the wrongs he committed toward the lower class. On the outside, the Hood was designed to be a champion of the people, an avenger going after the corrupt elite: he was the monster they created, karma in a way, consequences for all those who thought they could abuse their power and get away with it just because they had money. On the inside, the Hood is a deeply personal story about redemption and legacy, it is about an ex- billionaire playboy making amends for not only his father’s cruelty and indifference, but also his own mistakes - the entitlement that made him hurt his girlfriend horribly and irreparably, and left her sister dead at sea.

The Hood going after the List grounded the show in so many ways. First, it made his story different than all the other superheroes out there. Second (and particularly relevant to this post), it allowed the writers to explore the city in so many different angles: these people were not only businessmen but also accountants, investors, financial advisors, etc. By telling us their stories, the writers were also telling us how the city worked in all its complexities, who were the many different players. It made it more whole. Third, it meant the Hood had a justification for being a vigilante: he wasn’t there to replace the police back then, he was there to do what they couldn’t because they weren’t allowed to. Go after the guilty that eluded the law, that fancied themselves above it. His targets and his M.O. meant Oliver couldn’t do what he wanted to do by legal means. Each operation was carefully planned in advance, complete with detective work. This added a layer of believability to his story and the world they lived in that completely fell off in latter seasons.

The class issue wasn’t used to ground just the hero’s story into something real: it’s the same deal for the big bad’s plot. Everything about the Undertaking is a commentary on class, from Malcolm’s motivation (the crime-infested Glades that killed his wife), its execution (using his power as the most successful businessman in Starling to persuade or bully the other powerful players into joining his cause, take control of the corrupt first class via blackmail, infiltrate the law-enforcement, etc.: all of that to have a hand of command over every important chess piece in the city), to his end-goal (the annihilation of the poorest part of town). Actually, I’ve always found the diversity of Malcolm’s main group, the team that orchestrated the Undertaking, striking: he was the only white man, the others were two women, an Asian man, and a black man (Robert was killed right after they switched objectives so I’m not counting him). The only thing they had in common was their social standing, so you feel like it was deliberately constructed not to be a gender or race issue, but specifically a class one.

Even if you exclude the hero and villain’s plots, most storylines during season 1 had a relation to class in one way or another. The Savior? Fed up with the gangbangers in the Glades and the executives who let them run around free. The Huntress? Couldn’t stand her father oppressing the poor anymore. Ted Gaynor? Resentful over having to babysit rich kids. Firefly? He was created during the Nodell Tower fire, a tragedy that only occurred because the construction company that built it used substandard material to save a few bucks. Etc. Every single one of these storylines served to flesh out Starling City and its citizens a bit more.

Season 1’s most iconic quote is probably “You have failed this city” - the vigilante’s tagline. These words are directly related to the class issue, and what made them powerful was how thoroughly the writers set up the city’s social background, how full of life they made Starling feel.

The current situation

Since season 1 was, well, the first season, it was its responsibility to set up solid foundations for the show, notably a believable world. A city in which the show could grow into something more. I think it did a good job, but the seasons that followed didn’t really respect that work with the exception of season 2.

The class issue was dropped somewhere after the first third of season 2, which was busy trying to introduce more comic-booky elements. Season 3 and on didn’t pick it up again. I feel like season 3 was trying to do something worldbuilding-wise w/ the League of Assassins, but failed miserably (they succeeded in destroying one of DC’s most legendary mythos that’s all, and I’m very bitter about it).

So what does Star City look like today? IMHO: boring. You’d think Oliver being Mayor would mean it gets more development, but it’s more bland and empty and dead than ever.

In terms of point of views in season 5 and 6, mostly all we get is Team Arrow in the Arrow Cave and Team Arrow in the Mayor’s Office. They killed, wrote off the show, or forgot about most of the characters that added layers and diversity to the city. Apart from the masks and their allies, mostly all we have now are some villainous POV here and there, most of them not even originally from the city but just coming around to cause mayhem for some reason (I do think the character of Susan Williams was a welcome break for that reason, but she wasn’t particularly well-received). I don’t even know how the city looks like anymore, empty warehouses is all I can see in my head.

It’s actually a joke how the background of the characters, wrt the totally dropped class issue, simply doesn’t matter now. We were left wondering where Oliver, the main character, lived for an entire season. Most of Team Arrow doesn’t have a job, and it’s only recently been addressed. Curtis, well-off genius who used to hold a good job in a giant tech company, can say stuff like “as a black man I’m 80% more likely to get shot than you” (/paraphrased) to Rene, poor latino guy from the Glades who has actually been a victim of random gun violence and used to be a marine - because the history of these characters barely matters anymore, it’s just superficial.

In terms of believability, all the work season 1 put into making it all seem grounded has been thrown out the window. Revolutionary tech is invented on the fly in a matter of minutes. Felicity can hack into anything in a matter of seconds - her and Curtis basically have God-like powers, I swear. I still don’t understand how Oliver manages to be the Mayor and also moonlight as the Green Arrow. Also he’s good at being the Mayor and Thea was an awesome Chief of Staff despite them having zero credentials in politics because our heroes can now be absolutely anything they want if the plot demands it (or just if it pleases the writers). He can pass magical bills on controversial issues that everyone is happy with because Star City is now just a bland simple-minded mass. The Arrow cave is more technology advanced than the NASA and honestly, since they don’t kill and only go after common criminals, I don’t even know why they haven’t simply joined the law enforcement - as a special unit or something, Marvel style. The whole vigilante thing seem pointless at this point, just another hurdle.

(I mean, for real, last episode, Dinah, instead of confronting Vigilante in her capacity as a cop, had to go put on her costume first - that I have no idea where she hid since FBI lady was snooping around. Seems inconvenient and a giant loss of time when people’s lives are at stakes, yk?)

Tobias Church can just show up and take control of Star City’s organized crime (which, btw, I’m surprised to see is even still around) in a matter of… what was it? Two weeks? Which completely undermines these guys, in addition to being unrealistic. It’s another thing that makes the citizens of Star City look stupid or useless, just like the fact people haven’t figured out Oliver and his little gang are the vigilantes makes them look stupid. The writers destroyed any credibility the city had as a whole.

So, yeah, the world of Arrow’s latter seasons is a senseless one, and Star City feels like it has lost its soul.

This is all my humble opinion. Thoughts?

#arrow #a1 #a5 #a6 #oliver queen #mp #my commentary #so i totally forgot to post this here too #i wanted to put pictures so

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bibhabmishra · 5 years

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Ferris Bueller’s Day Off The Impact of Social Class

The eighties, goes the general thinking, was the decade of venality. No one in America—heck, in the WORLD—had been interested in making money before the 1980s came along and corrupted us all. It was, apparently, the era in which everyone walked around in gold lamé and regarded Ivana Trump as the last word in understated chic. Seriously, you couldn’t take the dog for a walk in the eighties without tripping over a giant Versace gold logo. And a pair of giant shoulder pads. And a massive pile of cocaine. And cocaine plays absolute HAVOC with one’s Armani stilettos. Maybe it was—far be it from me to cast aspersions on lazy descriptions of an era—but a little-remarked-upon truth is that this is not, in fact, the mentality depicted in many mainstream eighties movies. Many Hollywood movies ar- gued for, if not actual class warfare, then certainly a suspicion of wealth. Re- peatedly, wealthy people are depicted as disgusting, shallow, and even mur- derous, while working-class people are noble and good-intentioned, such as in not exactly niche films like Wall Street,I Beverly Hills Cop, Ruthless People, Rais- ing Arizona, and Overboard.

Contrast this with today’s films like Iron Man, in which the billionaire is the superhero (and is inspired by actual billionaire Elon Musk), and the deeply, deeply weird The Dark Knight Rises, in which the villain advocates the redistribution of wealth—HE MUST BE DESTROYED. But the eighties films that were the most interested in issues of class were, of all things, the teen films. The motivating force of almost every single classic eighties teen film was not, in fact, selling soundtracks, watching an eighteen-year-old Tom Cruise try to get laid, or seeing what ridiculous hairdo Nicolas Cage would sport this time round. It was social class. There’s The Karate Kid, in which the son of a single mother unsuccessfully tries to hide his poverty from the cool kids at school who make fun of his mother’s car; Dirty Dancing, in which a middle- class girl dates a working-class boy, much to her liberal father’s horror; Can’t Buy Me Love, in which a school nerd gains popularity by paying for it; Valley Girl, in which an upper-middle-class girl dates a working-class boy; Say Anything, in which a privileged girl dates a lower-middle-class army brat and her father turns out to be a financial criminal; The Flamingo Kid, in which a working-class kid is dazzled by a wealthy country club and starts to break away from his blue-collar father; and all John Hughes’s teen films. Of course, issues of class can be found in the undercurrents of pretty much any American movie, from The Philadelphia Story to The Godfather. The differ- ence with eighties teen films is that they were completely overt in their treat- ment of it: class is the major motivator of plot, even if it’s easy to miss next to the pop songs and Eric Stoltz’s smile. All these films stress emphatically that the money your family has determines everything, from who your friends are, to who you date, your social standing in school, your parents’ happiness and aspirations, and your future. They, to varying degrees, rage against the failure of the American Dream. They stress that true class mobility is pretty much impossible, and certainly interclass friendships and romances are unlikely, for the simple reason that rich people are assholes and lower-middle-class and working-class people are good. Which was unfortunate because according to the vast majority of eighties teen movies, the only way a teenager could truly move up out of their socioeconomic group was if they dated someone wealth- ier than them, Cinderella-style. The one exception to this rule is Back to the Future, which definitely does

not rage against the American system; instead, it concludes that, yes, money does buy happiness and that’s just great. When Marty returns from 1955 to 1985, he realizes that he has inadvertently changed history so that now his par- ents, formerly poor and therefore miserable and barely on speaking terms, are now rich and therefore happy and cheerfully smack each other’s backsides: “I remember how upset Crispin [Glover, who played George McFly] and Eric [Stoltz, who was originally cast as Marty] were about the ending of Back to the Future: now that they have money they’re happy,” recalls Lea Thompson, who played Lorraine Baines McFly. “They thought it was really outrageous. It went right over my head, of course. Maybe because I was poor and when I got wealthy I was happy!” This is indeed a subject that still riles Glover enor- mously. For decades he has spoken out against what he describes as “corpo- rate movies”—that is, studio movies—that peddle “propaganda” and he is cur- rently writing a book on the subject addressing, he says, “the Back to the Future issue in great detail.” “The main idea was that the family was in love and I felt that if there was any indication that money equals happiness, that was a bad message to put out,” he says, the exasperation still palpable in his voice thirty years on. “I was not given the screenplay before we shot the film because Universal and Spielberg were at the time making it apparent that they needed to keep their movie under wraps. Which I understand but as an actor you have to investigate the psy- chology of the character, and you can’t do that until you’ve read it. Now I would be very insistent [about reading a script before committing to a film], but I was twenty years old at the time and it was a Universal movie; of course I was glad to be in it. So I wasn’t given the opportunity to read it before I was hired and so it was fair for me to be asking these questions but they did not think it was fair. When you raise questions people say ‘You’re crazy, you’re weird,’ because you’re questioning the authority that people have been brought up to think is the only correct way to think, when there are many correct ways to think.” Ultimately, Glover says, he was so disgusted with the message of Back to the Future he refused to be in the sequel.II, III “The point [of making the McFly family wealthy] was that self-confidence and the ability to stand up for yourself are qualities that lead to success,” says Bob Gale, cowriter of Back to the Future. “So we showed George and Lorraine had an improved standard of living, we showed them loving toward each other, and we showed that George was a successful author. It was the way to show the audience that George had indeed become a better man. And, of course, in the beginning, we depicted George as a loser, Lorraine as a drunk, with a ter- rible car and a house full of mismatched and worn-out furnishings.” Back to the Future is such a charming film that it’s easy to be swept along by it and not notice this equation of lower-middle-class status with being a “loser.” But it does echo precisely the same message that other eighties teen films sent: the class you are born into dictates every aspect of your life. “Class has always been the central story in America, not race—class,” says Eleanor Bergstein, the writer and producer of Dirty Dancing. “And when you’re a teenager you really start to notice this.” And there was no teen filmmaker who felt this as deeply as Hughes. David Thomson complains in his majestic Biographical Dictionary of Film that in Hughes’s teen films “the fidelity of observation, the wit and the tender- ness for kids never quite transcend the general air of problem solving and putting on a piously cheerful face. No one has yet dared in America to portray the boredom or hopelessness of many teenage lives—think of Mike Leigh’s pictures to see what could be done.” The first thing to say is that to complain that John Hughes isn’t enough like Mike Leigh is like getting annoyed that a chocolate cookie is not trying hard enough if it’s not a roast chicken. But it isn’t fair to dismiss Hughes’s movies as devoid of “hopelessness” since his repeated depiction of class issues in his films definitely shows the “hopelessness” in these American teenagers’ lives. Pretty in Pink (lower- middle-class girl falls for wealthy boy) and Some Kind of Wonderful (lower- middle-class boy falls for lower-middle-class girl who has gained acceptance among the rich kids through her looks) are the most obvious examples of Hughes’s teen films that were obsessed with class injustice and how difficult it is for kids from different classes to connect (Hughes, despite his inherently romantic nature, apparently thought they couldn’t, really). But it’s there in all his teen films, including Sixteen Candles (Jake’s house is notably bigger and flashier than Samantha’s) and The Breakfast Club (Bender’s somewhat implau- sible-sound-ing home lifeIV is compared to pampered Claire’s world, in which she can give out diamond earrings on a whim). But the film that really empha- sizes how unfair he thought the system is is Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. There are many reasons to love Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and I’ve gone through all of them. As I said in the introduction, this was the first what I called REAL MOVIE (that is, neither animated nor a musical) I was allowed to see and it instantly became my first love and Ferris my first crush. It represented every- thing to me, everything I wasn’t and didn’t have and wanted: teenagehood, freedom, coolness, sexiness. Every day after school, for a whole year, I would come home, go straight to the TV room, carefully close the door to keep out my dorky parents and Jeanie-ish younger sister, and watch Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Every. Single. Day. I carefully transcribed the script into my diary, which I still have, and at some point I decided my sister was sufficiently acceptable to allow her to reenact scenes from the movie with me, using my transcribed script. That summer, I taught my sister about making out, using the scene in which Ferris makes out with Sloane in the museum as a guide, and the two of us would duly writhe around on the living room, making out with our imag- inary boyfriends (Ferris for me, Marty McFly for her), while our parents, watch- ing from the doorway, wondered what new game their innocent little nine- and seven-year-old daughters had invented. This is perhaps the only time in my sister’s and my lives that our parents underestimated us. As a kid, I loved the film and Ferris because I thought Ferris was so cool— he was cute, he was funny, and, most thrillingly of all, he could drive a car. I fantasized about him driving me to school, holding my hand all the way. (Yes, that was my sexual fantasy. Like I said, I had a pretty sheltered childhood.) When I finally, and contrary to all my expectations, became a teenager and realized driving a car wasn’t quite as rare a skill as I’d believed as a nine- year-old, I decided that the real reason to love this film was that it was so weird. Like all of Hughes’s teen films, it has a simple premise (boy skips school and brings his best friend, Cameron, and girlfriend, Sloane, along for the ride) and takes place over a tiny period of time (like The Breakfast Club, Fer- ris Bueller’s Day Off doesn’t even cover twenty-four hours). But it is a much stranger beast than anything else Hughes ever wrote. While all Hughes’s other teen films deal with the emotional minutiae of being a teenager, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off doesn’t make even the slightest pretense to realism. The characters are all surreal exaggerations of recognizable characters—the teenager, Ferris, is just that little bit too cocky, the principal, Ed Rooney (Jeffrey Jones), is defi- nitely too demented—and the situations it depicts are, quite clearly, impos- sible.

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zagenta · 7 years

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Really boring/cliche criticisms about Batman and Superman that people think they’re the only person to ever say:

Superman is a boring character because he’s basically perfect

cool, all the people who actually have any sense of creativity actually realized this a long time ago and used this excuse to have him encounter situations that are far more intriguing than the character itself such as goofy outlandish villains, aliens, magic etc. I mean, he’s an alien and one of his few weaknesses is magic. How is that not exciting? Not saying that superman stories can’t be boring, but hinging on the creativity of his opponents can make the stories a lot more interesting & people are extremely dismissive of Superman

Batman is better because he’s always prepared

you do realize this skirts a very thin line of essentially implying “batman is better because he’s rich”, right?

Batman sucks because he’s boring and moody and works alone

Batman has had like 5 billion sidekicks at this point. The best versions of batman care a lot about people despite his rough exterior. Characters like Nolan’s Batman are not meant to be the “ideal”, they show how messed up Bruce Wayne is without anybody else to rely on, since his only emotional support is Alfred and Rachel. It’s not meant to be a sustainable form. Also Batman is at his best when he’s being a detective and isn’t just solely using his money to solve his problems.

Batman is better because Batman is smart, and Superman is dumb

Like I said, Batman is best as a detective, but it’s really boring when he just can pull off incredulous feats just because “he’s Batman”. He shouldn’t just solve everything instantaneously because he’s just that smart or just that rich, that’s bad storytelling. If people like Batman because he’s smart, we should see him using his brain solving crimes. Also Batman should be frickin smart, he’s a billionaire, i’m sure he’s had a tutor now and then.

Superman is a reporter with much more humble working class origins. Sure he has like 100 different superpowers, but he’s just a normal guy. Also, people seem to think Superman is a doofus who punches his way through his problems, but actually from what i’ve seen it’s Batman who relies much more heavily on intimidation tactics and threat of violence. Most popular iconography for Superman his him flying, carrying things, essentially trying to fix things when they’re broken and save people from harm, etc.

Batman is a bad person for punching criminals rather than pumping his money into Gotham’s economy or the police force.

he does both these things. Also good iterations of Batman still care about the criminals he’s fighting and would rather see their recovery than continuously punch them. Also the whole point of Batman is that “There is always crime in Gotham”. He’s always going to be a shady superhero because his crimefighting techniques raise questions about the morality of vigilante justice and surveillance and other icky stuff like that, but claiming that working with the police would solve everyone’s problems is kind of missing the point. The police force in Gotham is corrupt, that is why Batman only works with Gordon. Personally the reason I find Batman’s universe so interesting is because a corrupt police force more accurately represents my reality as a mixed Latinx woman.

Batman is better than Superman because he’s dark and gritty whereas Superman is a boy scout

.... it’s almost like they’re ideological foils and live in cities with entirely different problems.

Also were you not listening to me before? Dark and moody Batman is the worst kind of Batman for everyone involved, unless the story functions as a critique on why Dark and Moody Batman is The Worst, and even then we still have to suffer through Dark and Moody Batman

Also Gotham and Metropolis have entirely different needs. Gotham is full of corruption and therefore (arguably) needs a vigilante hero to solve his constant state of crime. Superman does nice boy scout things because Metropolis is for the most part a good place full of good albeit somewhat cynical city-dwelling people. Lois thinks he’s a corny boy scout too is all i’m saying. Superman can do mundane shit like rescue cats from trees but also can save the world from Lex Luthor because his entire deal is to be a good person and do good deeds. Gotham has a perpetually corrupt status quo, whereas Metropolis does not.

Batman and Superman are both bad because they think of themselves as above the law

at the end of the day superhero narratives work best as metaphors for like.... fulfillment fantasies for the audience where the hero is a self-insert about the power of the individual to do good for the world, some corny shit like that... and it’s best to read most superhero narratives as that or else they kind of start to fall apart, because this critique has a point. But that’s also why both characters have a “no kill”, whereas someone with a more militaristic history such as Wonder Woman does not. Also, i think the idea of vigilante justice from what I’ve seen resonates more with marginalized peoples where the law has not always been on their side. Just because something is the status quo or the law doesn’t mean its right.

Sure characters like Batman and Superman are "problematic”, but that’s because the moral of many superhero stories (but mainly spiderman) is “with great power comes great responsibility”, but there’s a fuzzy line between having great power to help others and having great power to rule over others (thanks Dan-O)

#shut up Janelle

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crogerswrites · 4 years

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The Dark Door

I do not think there is going to be a more pivotal moment in the collapse of the American Golden Era than the rejection of Bernie Sanders. The american people, but maybe more accurately the Democratic Party, rejected the view of the world that Bernie Sanders campaigned on. At the center of the campaign was the push for Medicare for All, meaning a single-payer healthcare system that covered everyone (not the bastardized version of part public, part private that every other candidate was running on). We heard stories from people who had lost loved ones due to rationing of their insulin supply, because of the insanely high price Americans pay for the medicine. We heard tales of people losing loved ones only to be saddled with the insurmountable medical debt. There were so many tales of suffering, and the idea of people profiting off it was always at the center. It was the cornerstone policy of the Bernie campaign that if he was elected they would create a single-payer system that stopped the profiteering off the sick, and covered everyone despite their financial situation. Along with Medicare for All was the proposal to eliminate student debt and provide free tuition to public colleges, better wages for our most vulnerable people in the workforce, a serious step back from foreign intervention, and rolling back the influence of corporate money in politics just to name a few. I believe in all of those things, and I believe that a Bernie Sanders administration would have fought for that full heartedly. If you look at Bernie’s voting record, it is hard not to see anything but a political outsider who has fought his whole career for what he believes in, and has been on the right side of every disastrous American policy. Something none of his opponents can claim for themselves. The Bernie camp knew that enacting these policies would be an uphill battle, but the strategy of the campaign was to create a mass movement of people who believed in these policies that could continue to apply political pressure to achieve them. The idea was to finally create a base of people that could fight the class war on behalf of the working class. Bernie's slogan "not me, us" was a perfect example of the strategy.

That view of the world was rejected though. Single payer was never possible, education is a privilege not a right, labor is not an issue the Democratic party cares about, the American Empire must always play world police, and billionaires work hard to buy our politicians. We had won so many people over to the Bernie movement since it began in 2016, but in the end the Democratic Party decided to go with business as usual. Just as they were putting the finishing touches on derailing that movement, the United States of America fell into the corona virus pit. The market was already stuttering before the virus hit mainland USA. Capital very quickly abandoned their leading role of the ‘perfect’ system. They massively laid off and fired workers, pulled mass amounts of money out of the market, and liquified as many assets as possible to have hard cash in case this was really the end. Capital abandoned us and left the state to step in (while also asking the governemnt for a bailout, which they so generously received). The state has been hollowed out by capital over the past 40 years, and is nowhere close to being able to handle this type of crisis. Now hospitals are understaffed, overfull, under prepared, and hardly holding on. Hospital staff are begging for more help and proper resources. Imagine living and working through that horrific reality, and the only thing we are willing to do for our healthcare system is to clap during the shift change. When capital dumped their workers without a second thought, there were only fragments of a social security net to catch people. Now state governments and the federal government are trying to scrounge together something that will try and patch up a workforce that currently sits around 20% unemployment. All the critiques of the current state apparatus and capital that came from the Bernie campaign are now ringing true in the most horrific and terrifying way.

That is not something to gloat over to make a political point. Although, you would be ignorant to not look at the rejection of the Sanders campaign as a massive turning point for the United States. Finally there was an offer on the table for the Democratic Party to offer real change, a politics that unites us over common goals to provide a better quality of life for all our fellow citizens, to offer something finally good from the party who doesn’t have much to hang their hat on other than not being the Republicans. They did not want to offer it though. A single payer system in the United States would never work. How would we pay for it? The eternally ringing question. Always asked in relation to a social program that helps people. One that will not be uttered once about the federal bailout money going to corporations who pay their CEOs millions and their workers minimum wage. A massive bailout that will make sure the CEOs can keep those extravagant salaries and shareholders can still receive massive payouts. I find it hard to swallow that any movement making an attempt for a better world meets so much scrutiny, and the most obvious, craven corruption is met with a smile and a thumbs up.

We treated this fight as do or die, as it was our only good chance at making a positive change in the world. It was not about winning for the sake of being triumphant, it was about fighting the material realities the vast majority of people face. We knew that a lot of people’s lives depended on a single payer healthcare system. We fought hard, and we failed. This seemed like our last chance, because of all the failures of leftist politics we have had in the last 4 years. Since 2016 leftist politics has been resurgent, and we were riding a wave of new found popularity for a bit afterwards. Yet, Corbyn was rejected in the United Kingdom. The NDP had an absolutely abysmal result in Canada’s 2019 election. Both offered a radically different politics from the status quo, both could have given their governments the much needed shot in the arm, but both were heavily rejected by voters despite having their policies be widely approved. Bernie was our last chance, and we failed. We have no choice but to wear that failure, and as much as I am sickened by people’s adverse reaction to these campaigns, I know the failure is also our own. I do not know what needed to be done differently in any of these cases, but I accept that we failed in our mission.

The Bernie movement was an attempt by the left wing of the party to take control of the Democratic Party. We came extremely close, we won the first three primaries, and looked to be the strongest among the split field. The Party got smart though; after Biden’s South Carolina win they cleared the deck so Joe was the only centrist candidate running. Candidates who had been viable and popular up until Super Tuesday dropped out suddenly. Oddly enough Elizabeth Warren, who apparently held a base that somewhat overlapped with Bernie’s, stayed in the race despite not being a viable candidate at all. From there, the movement lost its momentum, corona virus basically made campaigning impossible, and eventually we had to concede that we lost.

So the Democrats successfully fought off our insurgency, and the establishment is still very much in charge of the party’s direction. They rejected our vision of politics, so what will they be offering come November’s election? Well, that is why I think this is a pivotal moment in the collapse of the American Golden Age; because they really are not offering a change at all.

Obama was elected on the platform of change, his slogan was hope. The only change that came from the Obama years was Obamacare, a doomed policy that was always more of a capitulation to the medical insurance companies and the Republican party than a truly radical policy. Trump has somewhat dismantled it, but the horrible failures I listed above about the American medical system are just as much failures of Obamacare. Obama’s legacy is simply the continuation of the status quo. That is what Hillary ran on in 2016, she was the establishment candidate. She offered no real change at all but a steady hand on the wheel that could keep the country in the same direction. The idea being that she would pick up all the disgusted Republican voters Trump turned away. Wrong. Part of the reason she lost so badly was because people did not like that she embodied the establishment (she also embodied the worst part of the establishment, and could be tied to way too many shady events). Trump successfully pitched himself as a political outsider, someone who was going to bring change to the White House. You can argue about the reality of his pitch, but you can not argue that it helped him cobble together a base that won 2016 and is going to be hard to beat in 2020.

Currently the Democratic Party controls the House of Representatives. It was considered a big moment, as now the party had a position to negotiate from with the Trump administration. They have not been able to do much negotiating though, the list of capitulations they have made with no pushback far outweighs anything they have done with their control of the House. Nothing shows the impotence of the Democratic party like their handling of the Trump Corona virus Bailout. Democratic party leaders did nothing to stop the worst parts of the bailout. They did not push back against the massive tax cut that is buried in the bailout. They did not push back against corporations being able to layoff their employees, receive a corporate bailout, and still pay dividends to their shareholders (meaning those who actually do the labor and provide the profit are dumped, while shareholders continue to get paid and receive a bailout). Nancy Pelosi did push back on something though, remote voting for the House of Representatives, which allowed the Republican controlled Senate to be really the only effective body in Congress. Let us be honest though, the Democratic establishment did not want to push back on these things, they were also pushing these measures themselves.

After Bernie suspended his campaign, the narrative immediately shifted to whether the Bernie movement would rally behind Biden. Bernie endorsed Biden quickly, and he will do what he can to campaign for him and convince his base to jump over. Whether it will work, or whether we should, is a very long and arduous argument in itself that I am not taking up here. I think the important choice has already been made; there is no real option for change on the table. There may be a difference between Trump and Biden, and a Biden administration would have tangible differences over the next four years undoubtedly. In the long run though I do not think either party is able to execute the radical change that is needed to heed off what seems like the now inevitable downfall of the American state. The legacy of the Democratic party over the last 30 years has been nothing but failure, broken promises, and complete subservience to capital. At every opportunity the Democratic party has had to institute change for the positive, they have not just balked, but continued to protect the interest of global capital at the expense of the most vulnerable. I do not think we have time to give them another chance, there has never been a more crucial time for left-wing radical change than right now. The corona virus has shown the frailty of our current system and its inability to properly handle the crisis, but let us remember we seem to be balancing on the edge of a few crises. Our environment continues to become more and more hostile to human habitation, and natural disasters are not just more common now but fully expected. People have been predicting an economic downturn for some time now, and the markets were limping into the pandemic already. People continue to lose more faith in their public institutions, and that only leads down a dark hole. These are not just boogeymen, they are real existential threats. I know the Democratic party is not offering anything substantial to combat these issues, look at the party establishment’s complete disdain for the Green New Deal. So when it comes time, how am I supposed to believe that the Democratic establishment won’t throw people to the wolves to save those who they are truly beholden to?

The Bernie movement offered something more than just material improvement to people’s lives, it offered social cohesion. Another slogan of the Bernie campaign was “Are you willing to fight for someone you don’t know?”. Bernie’s platform was one of serious material change, but it was also a serious pitch to those outside of the Democratic party as well. Capital and the neoliberal policies it puts forward have been hollowing out social cohesion for the last 40 years, and anyone looking at the state of the world’s politics would see an extremely divided political landscape. Neoliberalism has not only put the emphasis on the individual, but it has turned every interaction into a transaction. Friendships, careers, even family are all looked at as something to get the most out of for your investment. There are a million books detailing how to optimize your life, and get the most production out of your day. Capital has successfully convinced us that turning yourself into a robot soley possessed by maximum production is a noble pursuit. Bernie’s movement offered something counter to that; the idea that you would fight to improve someone’s life you didn’t know, not because you would get something in return, but that it was the ethical way to treat people. The foundation of socialism is building a tight knit social cohesion that looks to provide for all. The right is offering the exact opposite of that. The Democratic Party says they are offering that, but if you look at the policies on the table, their voting record over the past 40 years, and who they really have gone to bat for over and over again, it is apparent they do not have the ability to create a movement that offers a greater idea of social connectivity.

I am not saying the failure of the Bernie campaign now means that a movement like his couldn’t be on the table again in the future. What I am saying is that it very well may be a serious turning point in American history. The crises that continue to plague the world only seem to grow worse, social cohesion only seems to diminish, and the liberal left continues to fail to stop our political rightward drift. How much time is left to offer a viable alternative and solution before it is too late? Ask a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley if they think the American Golden Era will ever end, and they will probably laugh at you for thinking such a thing. Ask someone in Flint, Michigan the same question and they will tell you it already has.

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

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In 2014, the New York Times sent an investigative reporter to the University of Oregon to cover a disturbing sexual assault case involving three basketball players.

What he found, ultimately, was a university culture thoroughly corrupted by its entanglements with corporate America — the school’s questionable handling of the rape allegations was just the tip of the iceberg.

In this case, the corporate sponsor was Phil Knight, the co-founder and chair of Nike, one of the biggest companies on the planet. An alumnus of the University of Oregon, Knight has become the school’s most prominent donor, giving almost $1 billion to the university since 1994. His donations are largely responsible for transforming Oregon’s athletics program into a national powerhouse.

The NYT investigative reporter, Joshua Hunt, wrote a book about what he discovered at Oregon, titled University of Nike. But the book is not just about Knight and Oregon; it’s about how public universities are compromising themselves in exchange for endorsement deals and financial partnerships — and about what happens when universities become shills for their billionaire benefactors. It’s also, crucially, about the consequences of states defunding higher education, which has created the space for corporations to step in and foot the bill.

I called Hunt to talk about how we got here and what we can do to shield public universities from corporate influence. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing

The New York Times sent you to the University of Oregon in 2014 to investigate a sexual assault case involving several members of the basketball team. What did you find when you got there?

Joshua Hunt

The reason I went to Eugene in the first place was that this very graphic police report had come out. The Eugene Police Department released a report that was filed by a freshman at the University of Oregon who alleged that three of the school’s basketball players had gang-raped her at a house party.

The police report was two months old by that time. In the meantime, these three basketball players had competed in the NCAA tournament and had made it far enough in the tournament that the head men’s basketball coach at Oregon, Dana Altman, had gotten a $40,000 bonus. It just really seemed like this was something the school had tried to keep quiet until basketball season was over. The goal was to find out if that was true or not.

What I found when I got to Eugene was a lot of roadblocks on the part of the administration. The university’s office of public records was doing their best to keep me and other journalists and community members from getting our hands on email communications between top administrators and public relations staff at the school, as they were drafting their PR strategy for this story.

The school’s administrators had been quietly trying to hand these players off to another school, basically allowing them to transfer quietly without anyone knowing that any of this had ever happened.

And the whole time I was in Eugene, the faculty, the students, everyone I met who wasn’t an administrator told me, “Look, this all has to do with Nike. This all has to do with the school’s relationship with Nike and Phil Knight.”

It was the fact that the University of Oregon brand was so valuable and its business dealings with Nike so lucrative, and its relationship with Phil Knight so close and cozy, that everything became driven by the fear of a bad headline, fear of a scandal, fear of something that might tarnish that brand.

Sean Illing

Did Oregon sweep this case under the rug?

Joshua Hunt

This is a tricky question. Did Phil Knight show up on campus or make a phone call and say, “Sweep this under the rug”? I can’t say whether or not that happened. What I can say is that nearly everyone at the University of Oregon is terrified of the public relations department. It has a tremendous amount of power, and they determine things like what public records are released to journalists, for instance.

Sean Illing

And their public relations department is an extension of Nike’s PR department — they’re staffed by people from Nike, right?

Joshua Hunt

It’s mixed. There aren’t any Nike PR people on staff, but this is actually even more insidious … behind the scenes, there’s all this informal advising going on that we don’t have access to, unless you talk to people on the inside and you see it going on.

I spoke to the guy who used to be in charge of releasing public records to journalists at the university. For years, he thought he had a relatively straightforward job. If the school is building a new athletics facility, for example, he would know about it well in advance so that he could start putting together a PR plan to roll out to the media.

So he was very surprised one day when he was called into a meeting where there’s all these Nike folks saying, “Here’s the new logo for the University of Oregon, we’ve been working on it for a while, and here’s this new brand that we built for you guys, and here’s how you’re gonna integrate it into the school’s identity.”

He called it an impressive bit of PR-age and said it was very, very unusual to him. He basically was the best-informed person on campus, but what he didn’t know was that behind the scenes, all these Nike marketing, advertising, public relations, and legal staff were running around talking to a very select group of administrators and making decisions about the school’s future.

So it’s impossible for me to think that something similar didn’t happen in this case.

Sean Illing

I want to move beyond Knight and Oregon and ask you about similar dynamics playing out across the country at other universities. What other major brands or billionaire donors have leveraged their financial power in ways that have compromised the independence of universities?

Joshua Hunt

This is happening now in every state. Oregon was one of the first states to defund higher education at this kind of extreme level, providing an opening for corporations to step in, but other states are now catching up.

In Oklahoma, Texas oilman turned hedge fund investor T. Boone Pickens has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into his alma mater, Oklahoma State University. There’s also the University of Maryland’s relationship with alumnus and Under Armour founder Kevin Plank.

There are other schools in other states that don’t have [to contend with] a charismatic, swaggering CEO, so the dynamic is very different. Sometimes it’s purely about money. For example, UC Berkeley has had two famously disastrous partnerships. One was with the Swiss pharmaceutical firm Novartis in the late ’90s, and one happened about a decade ago with BP Oil.

These partnerships grow out of the same need for funding, but they’re insidious because they hinder transparency. Schools are able to find these loopholes for public records laws for protecting trade secrets. And the contracts these corporations write when they want to collaborate on research with universities are often written so there’s no obligation to publish research, so they can kill studies that might benefit the public but harm the corporations funding them.

We know this is something that happens regularly.

Sean Illing

Why should average citizens be concerned about this?

Joshua Hunt

I think everyone should understand exactly how vulnerable our public institutions are and how they can be taken over pretty quickly and easily. There doesn’t have to be some grand, evil scheme. It can all just start with something as simple as defunding an institution.

These institutions, when their survival depends on it, will pretty easily and quickly find a corporate benefactor, and this is invariably corrupting.

It rots away at the entire structure of a public institution. If you care at all about the role of the university in our society, then you should be alarmed by this.

Sean Illing

And no matter what, if you’re a taxpayer, you’re likely paying for this one way or the other.

Joshua Hunt

Absolutely, and that’s an important point. Phil Knight, the co-founder of Nike, doesn’t give money away; he invests it. So one thing Phil Knight likes to do is if he wants to build a $150 million athletics facility that’s going to be named after him, or someone in his family, he’s not going to pay for all that. He’s going to pay for $80 or $90 million. And the school is going to say, “Well, trust us, we’re going to come up with the rest of the money.”

And in the end, they won’t — at least, they never do at the University of Oregon. What they end up doing is going to the legislature for state bonds. Those bonds come with hefty interest payments, and part of the brunt is borne by taxpayers. Taxpayers who never get any credit for all this stuff, and who probably don’t even know what they’re helping to subsidize.

Sean Illing

How is this impacting the quality and direction of education on college campuses?

Joshua Hunt

It’s always tied to the corporate benefactor’s needs; it’s not tied to the university’s needs. The university’s needs are secondary, always. Which means the university is always in a weaker bargaining position, which means they always get the worse end of the deal.

For example, the University of Oregon’s partnership was built on college football because they had a fluke trip to the Rose Bowl in 1995. Phil Knight’s an alum, so they went to him for help and he said, “Sure, I’ll help out.”

But consider what’s happened academically at Oregon since.

As the football team has become a rising brand in the sport, and has become infinitely more valuable, at the same time they’re paying their faculty less and less and they’re at the bottom of their cohort of similar schools across the nation.

The faculty are getting screwed and the class sizes are larger, and meanwhile, the school is making more money by bringing in more out-of-state students (who pay more tuition), thanks in part to the popularity of the football team.

This is the sort of perverse situation that really concerns me, where you have this misalignment of incentives, where the schools are going to be making more and more money as the quality of education actually goes down and down and down.

Sean Illing

Is Oregon a vision of what most major state universities will look like in the near future?

Joshua Hunt

Yes, because for one thing, more and more states are disinvesting in higher education at an alarming rate. It’s a big problem. Oregon was early to this trend, but everyone else is following along now. So that’s one problem.

The other problem is we’re in this age now of the professional administrator, the professional university president. So once upon a time, a university president rose through the ranks at their university; they rose up through the faculty and they became university president. That’s not the case anymore.

Now, university presidents come into office and stay for at most five years, and they come in with a pretty clear playbook, which is, “I need to build something and put my name on it, or have my name associated with getting it built. And then I need to leave for a bigger paycheck at another school.” It’s this merry-go-round of professional university presidents who are just professional administrators and have never really been faculty in any significant way.

So that’s a problem, because that kind of short-term thinking is precisely what leads to deals with corporations and with billionaires like Phil Knight and T. Boone Pickens that aren’t necessarily great deals for faculty or for students. The administrators are more or less just thinking about making the campus look better for marketing brochures.

Sean Illing

There doesn’t seem to be any clear way out of this spiral, particularly in light of our current political climate. Apart from getting states to invest in their universities, do you see any obvious solutions here?

Joshua Hunt

We need to collectively take stock of how important these public universities are in our society, the role they play in upward social mobility and democracy. Public universities are one of the great ideas in world history, and we should fight to save them.

I think a good start is making sure the corporations are paying their fair share of taxes, so that if Amazon is supporting the University of Washington, if Nike needs to be supporting the University of Oregon, they can do it with their tax dollars, as opposed to secret gifts and unfair apparel or research deals.

That’s a good place to start.

Original Source -> How corporate cash bought higher education

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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thechangemachine-blog1 · 7 years

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Dear Society: It's time you open your eyes and realize the real lies

Dear Society: It's Time To Open Your Eyes And Realize The Real Lies. My name is Cory Figura. Most people these days can't be bothered to read stuff like this; I hope you aren't one of them ! . As a concerned resident of this planet I feel obligated to inform you, we're long past due for a change in how things work. . For a long time now, all around the world, the common folks have been lied to and misrepresented by the very governments that are supposed to be acting in our best interests. . We all know deep down that the entire system which shapes our lives, has slowly become less open and less trustworthy with us. . The corruption runs so deep that nearly everyone believes to some degree, there is no better way to run the world. And that's just plain old wrong. . And secretly, this understanding has left people feeling empty and defeated, a big contributing factor to why the world is what it is today. . I'm the type of person that can "sense" the way people are feeling inside. Not sure what that's all about, but this gut instinct has rarely let me down. . If you're lying to me or you're untrustworthy, I usually pick up on it right away. It's really hard to slip anything shady past me. . Sometimes though it's like I sense the whole world at once. And if I had to bet, I'd say you're ALL angry and upset about something. . And you're probably going to be surprised when I tell you what I've discovered that "something" might be. . I used to think it was fear. Like you were all afraid of something. But over the course of the last six months I had some deep realizations that made everything clear enough to write this. . I was an extremely aware, sensitive, and emotional kid. Unfortunately feeling this way didn't work out so great. In fact it caused me a lot of grief. . Besides being too smart for my own good when it came to certain activities, I was very easy to get a reaction out of. And from an early age, others took full advantage of this. . It wasn't hard to figure out why by 17 years old I felt the way I did, which was overwhelmingly depressed, hopeless, and empty. . I tried to figure out how to get past these feelings, but I never really got anywhere with it. Not until I hit my 30's, then a lot changed. . One night I was looking back on how crazy my life had been. Believe me, it was. So I wasn't expecting at all to see what I saw. . As I reflected on my long list of failures, instead of hating myself and continuing on my destructive path, I saw everything in a whole new perspective. . Instead of failures, I saw the lesson from every single screw up, mistake, failure, broken heart, and crushed dream I ever had. It was like my life flashed before my eyes. . Shortly after, I came to the personal realization that I had an empty spot inside myself. It had always been there, but I guess until this point, I didn't recognize it for what it was. And no matter what I tried, I couldn't fill that void. . So I started asking others about this, and to my surprise almost everyone I talked to could relate. . I soon realized that most people were only pretending to be happy for the sake of others. It was from that realization I knew the world had to change. . It didn't sit well with me knowing I was surrounded by smiling, happy looking people, who were just living a lie. . I also decided to try and figure out what had the world living this lie. I wanted to know what made us all feel so insecure on the inside. . I soon discovered even the ones who appear the most together, hide secrets about what is going on inside them. . It was like these secrets had been buried so deep we didn't even remember what the secrets were. . People whose lives were saturated with material goods, money, education, friends, family, success, love, stability and security, even seemed affected. . It was intriguing to me that people with all these things weren't satisfied either. . It was leaving them so unsatisfied that addictions, depression, and a lot of other problems entered their seemingly awesome lives. . I don't understand how, with everything going for them, people end up dead from suicide, like Robin Williams or Chris Cornell for example. . Whatever the case, something is really wrong with the human race. I've done the research and came to a conclusion. And now I want us to come together and at least try to implement a solution. . I believe the secret we all refuse to accept is, society is being deliberately influenced and manipulated to fit a design model and produce a desired effect. . And we know who is doing it, we know it's wrong, but we are too afraid to speak up. . But I'm not. So I'll say it like it is. Most refer to the ones doing this to us as the elite 1%. A legion of greedy billionaires and their minions who place wealth above all else. . They impose, and enforce a misleading, confusing, and often contradicting, governing set of beliefs on mankind through religion, news media, tv stations, educational facilities, the entertainment industry, government policies, and laws. . It leaves us unable to know what is, and what is not, true. As well as facing the idea we are ruled by liars, cheaters, and thieves. . I'm sick of it, and its time for YOU to realize there is a way out from under this stressful way of life. . It just depends on if you're willing to accept this information, and act accordingly, or not. Aren't you tired of living in denial yet? . Just so you're aware, I write from first hand experience, having lived what I'm going to be talking about. I didn't read about what I'm going to be telling you in some book. I was there. I observed, participated, and concluded with open eyes ready to see the world for what it is. . Even still it's been a chore trying to figure out how to penetrate the veil of illusion created by the elite. . The challenge of getting people to realize whats going on has been a major source of struggle for me throughout my life. I've been passively pointing all this out now for about 25 years. . I thought it would be easy getting through to the like-minded with this information. But even that has become somewhat of a challenge. . And even harder, trying to get through to those who have no comprehension for what I'm trying to share because of said denial you all refuse to move past. . Without a doubt, the billions of members of organized religions, will be the least likely to show any appreciation for what I'm saying. . Their firm position is for everyone to accept Jesus as the saviour. And like them, be content while ignoring the sick, and disturbing way these elite tyrants abuse the world. . I should state for the record, it's not God I blame for how these people act, but the leaders of these religious denominations who operate hand in hand with the elite tyrants controlling us. . I'm not one to sit and wait for things to fix themselves anymore, so here I am, trying to make things happen in a far more assertive way. . When I set out to solve or examine ways to solve a problem, I see what I call The Big Picture. . I don't analyze situations for the effect they have on my immediate surroundings. And I don't look for a local solution. . So, for example, if I see a person who hasn't eaten for awhile, I don't look for an apple to provide, I look for the reason why all people on this planet went hungry today. . It's an overwhelming way to approach the day. But it's my way. And I am who I am. So I try to roll with it. . After all, it's the whole world that's in trouble anyway, so a solution that works for everyone is what we need. . I've always had a vision for something I've decided to call The One World Solution. . You'll see why I chose that name after I get to talking about what it is. But let's just say it has a lot to do with the little recognized fact that we all started out here together as one. . The elite would sure like us to think differently, considering all the division they've created using race, religion, wealth, class, and politics among the most prominent dividers. . But the truth is, we are all together on this amazing planet called Earth, as one. . A That's how I know the threat of New World Order which I'm sure you've all heard about, is straight up REVERSE PSYCHOLOGY! Pure hype. New World Order is actually the LAST THING the elite would ever want. .' The massive amount of fear and propaganda on the subject, trying to make us hate and reject the idea, speaks loud and clear to me and tells me this threat is simply elite trickery. . I hope you REALIZE THE POWER of what I just explained about New World Order. It's one of the extremely limited number of weak spots in their armour and now it's exposed. . UNITY is the kryptonite the elite fear most. I hope knowing this helps you look at racism, religion, wealth, class, and politics in a new, and different way. . These are the main tools of Divide & Conquer, a centuries old plot to control us. And it still functions like a well oiled machine to keep Unity well out of our reach. . If you ask me, it's time to wipe the shame and embarrassment from our faces, and admit just how wrong we have been to allow the world to develop the way it has. . And knowing this is happening right in front of me, and that I accept this treatment for myself, and for others less able to stand up for themselves, well, that makes me feel like a coward. . And guess what? Nobody likes a coward. The truth I see is we are all angry at ourselves for what we've allowed these elite creeps to do to us, and to this planet. That, is our Common Bond if you ask me. . They have accumulated enormous wealth while those who perform the actual work that made them all very rich, are left with barely enough to scrap by. . They are in full control of every single one of our lives. Even though, everyday somebody tells me I'm crazy to think this way. . They tell me about how good they have it, and how they aren't a slave to a system that only cares for their ability to pay taxes, interest on loans, and purchase items. . The bad news is, not only have we been financially enslaved with debt, we are also prisoners too. . Nobody is exempt from passport requirements. If you want to leave a country like Canada, you will need the permission of not only Canada, but also the country you intend to enter. . That, my friends, is what I call a minimum security prison. Instead of a big electric fence with barbed wire, these prisons keep us inside with imaginary lines called borders. . I feel bad for the people stuck in places like North Korea or Cuba. For everyone to appreciate the "free world", they also had to demonize places to remind us just how good we've got it. . You'll realize the depth of the illusion created by the elite when you investigate and understand The Central Banking System. . You will quickly learn how North Korea refuses to accept the conditions of The Central Banking System. And Cuba was among the last to conform. And we've all been led to believe those countries are the corrupt, evil, and unacceptable ones. . The entire world, except North Korea, is now under the financial control of The Central Banking System. It's functions so intricate and deep, I'm sure most of the people it employs don't even understand how it works. . Having every single country on earth actually all agree that The Central Banking System is the best possible way to deal with the worlds wealth, doesn't seem right. It puts the management of a nations finances in the hands of an outside third party. . So, how did we get to this point? It's ancient history actually. Just not history from any book you'll remember from school. . When I look back and contemplate history from the very early days of man, there must have been a time where we had only a simple understanding of ourselves and we were all considered equal. . Eventually one of those early humans began to think differently from the others. Soon the idea they were not all equal was introduced to the community, likely arising from some kind of conflict. . From this conflict a concept called authority was created. And it was enforced using the threat of violence. . Why this desire to be greater and in control came about, I can't explain. . I can explain how this one single event was the beginning of a social structure that one day in the distant future, would be known as the government. . I can also explain how the top spot in the hierarchy became the envy and desire of all the others who held lesser positions of authority. . And how, eventually corruption would settle in as each member of the government set out to gain the favor of higher ranking officials. . And in turn had the citizens doing the same thing to gain favour of officials as society expanded and the need for business and industry grew. . Which further explains why the people not included in the government or expansion of business and industry quickly took a dislike to it. . I can also add how the government saw a potential threat from the average citizens who had quickly grown tired of being taken advantage of. . A control mechanism that would force people to conform was required before the citizens could revolt. . These men involved with the government took the time to research and investigate the mind frame, thoughts, hopes, dreams and fears of the common citizens. . With all they had learned about what the people who made up mainstream society believed, something called religion was introduced to reduce us to mere servants in our own minds eye. . The stage was now set for a corrupt system of total control over the population by men with no care for anything other than satisfying their own greed in a bid to accumulate extreme wealth. . Yes, the truth hurts. But all the logic in the world says this is just how it happened. Again, I am not saying God doesn't exist. Just that God has been used to control people by greedy, treacherous men masquerading as his servants. . Do I wish a magical solution existed that was quick and easy and offered up a whole lot of instant gratification? I do. . But nothing, not one damn thing about my life was ever easy. And this won't be either. But that's okay. It'll be worth it. . I was bullied and picked on from 7-18 years old. Viciously. Honestly, you don't even want to know. It only ended because I messed up and went to jail. . The funny thing about the experience of going to prison was, the people locked up in there with me, had nothing but respect for each other. . As long as I continued to act in a way not to lose respect, I was all good. Only I could act in a way that would lose their respect. So different from the "real" world I grew up in. And, a welcome change. . My first deep realization of the illusion was learning the very people society condemns and uses as the bad example are more advanced in human relations than any regular citizens I'd ever met. . What I didn't realize back in 1988 was that I had to live that criminal lifestyle to gain part of the knowledge and understanding to write this very document today in 2017. . So thats exactly what I did for fourteen years. Eventually, in 1999 I walked away from a life of crime. Eighteen years later I'm proud to say I'm still a "free" man. . Having seen both the illusion and what's beyond it helps me to plant seeds of knowledge inside the minds of people who still believe there isn't anything wrong with the world. . I used to laugh, before Fukushima dumped radioactive waste water into the ocean, and say they're right. It's not the world that's the problem, it's the people running it that have to go. Now I point out the price were still somehow willing to pay to avoid conflict with these monsters. . I tell these people to take an honest look at the issues facing society and tell me the people running the show deserve to be in charge of our future. . People aren't starving in some places because there is no food for them. They are victims of the insatiable greed, and indifference of their leaders. . The homeless aren't without a place to Iive because there are no homes for them. They are victims of a system that cares only for their capacity to pay for a home. . The environment isn't raped and pillaged because there is no alternative technology. . There's no shortage of brilliant ideas suppressed by power hungry, greedy, profit driven, mega corporations. . Racism isn't rampant because people with different skin tones are actually poisonous to each other. . Racism is rampant because those in power understand that a world full of hate for each other is a world full of conquered slaves to perpetuate their cycle. . Do you honestly not know what it's like to live in a place like Syria? Or Iraq? Or North America (the illusion runs deep here)...I was talking to some of them myself on Facebook, and it's really really wrong. . It's time everyone was included, and made to feel like they belong. Starting with the ones we've already allowed to slip through the cracks into a deplorable state of poverty, addiction, crime, and homelessness. . Are you aware close to half the world lives in a state of poverty? . Eighty percent of the worlds population has to survive on ten dollars a day or less. EIGHTY PERCENT. Billions of people. . Where I live, Edmonton Alberta in Canada one in eight people live in poverty. That's 100,000 people. Just in one city. And Canada is considered one of the best places on Earth to live. . When I learned up to 22,000 children die every single day on this planet directly due to poverty, I had to take a break from researching. I was too upset. . WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH US??? You can't honestly tell me you're okay with knowing that! Twenty. Two. THOUSAND! . One of the bigger mistakes the elite made in crafting this system was believing themselves to be superior in intelligence to the rest of us. . Not for one minute did the elite consider their systematic placing of lies, deceptions and corruption to be within the range of average people to decipher their modus operandi. But I feel I've done just that. . This revelation shines a bright light on another and equally detrimental, mistake the elite made. . They have simply driven too much of the worlds population into poverty. It will greatly influence and improve the ability to create Unity having such a large portion of the population sharing the common bond of poverty. . As the arrogance of the elite is exposed, people will come together in the realization of why their lives are what they are. I will never stop trying to tell them all either. . Old thoughts, fears, and perceptions will be confronted, diminished, and replaced with a much brighter way of life if I have anything to say about it. . Replacing these old issues; stability, equality, financial security, and positive personal changes for everyone. . Suffering the weight of being controlled by the callous nature of this debt driven monetary system needs to quickly become a thing of the past. Money can no longer be our MASTER! . And it most certainly is. The modern slave requires no chains. They are held captive by debt. And the fear of what happens if you don't pay your bills. . Men like William Wallace, General MacArthur, and Crazy Horse must be rolling over in their graves. We've been acting like a bunch of cowards. . I've spent my whole life able to intermingle with people from all walks of life. I've sat with the homeless as one of them. And dined at the tables of a few millionaires. I fit in either way. I see us all as equal is why. . Not in strength or intelligence or ability. No. Too many view equality that way so they can deem themselves superior. . When I think about equality, what I think is every person deserves an equal opportunity to discover where they fit in the world and equal availability of said place to exist. . Everyone has their place, it's just a matter of sorting it out and finding where we all belong. . From a place where you feel you belong, you can contribute to maintaining a sustainable society much better than if you're lost, and busy searching for your place. . And for the most part, the people I'm referring to, are quite removed from society. They are the poor. The lower class. The rejected. And most certainly, they are lost. . And a whole lot of them once had a better title to live with. At one time, they were a part of the middle, or even upper, class. . They were content with their little pink houses and white picket fences. Until something unexpected came along and changed things for them. . Just the idea of going through life referred to as lower class, is enough of an insult to warrant non-conformity to the rest of the population. . What you need to understand is the division that's been established between the lower class and what's above them, it's retaliatory, not instigated by the lower class. . They were bullied into submission unknowingly on behalf of filthy rich bankers out to make money and secure a stranglehold on the collective wealth of society. Something they have successfully done if you don't know. . We simply cannot continue to participate in this approach of classifying human beings in this way. This behaviour is responsible for some very destructive results. For both sides. . Spawned by this deep division between classes of people, comes three aspects of today's world that are cruel, sick in their nature, and deliberate in their result. . What I'm talking about are the war on drugs, the crime cycle, and the prison system. All of which serve to keep the elite sitting on top. . Each of these intelligently designed tools of division provides a long list of very well paying, secure jobs to loyal, law abiding, voting, citizens. . The crime cycle ensures the population is left living in fear. Fear that their home may be robbed, or their car stolen. Their businesses broken into. They are afraid their children will get into gangs, or hooked on drugs. . Fear is an extremely useful tactic when trying to manipulate people into holding certain beliefs. Such as disliking lower class people, or hating drug users for example. . I honestly do struggle trying to understand how all the people employed within the prison system and police services, can't seem to realize the absurdity of the system they support. . How anybody can't see it's a cycle that repeats itself over and over and rarely provides any lasting results or significant change, is beyond me. . Without having ever attempted a different method, I'd dare say that's pretty much insanity right there. . There has been no progress made whatsoever in 30+ years of this war on drugs. . They see the same offenders go in to jail. Get out. Go back. Somehow we conclude it's these criminals letting us down in life, and not the other way around. . In fact we mostly feel the lower class deserves all the punishment they receive. . I guess being a judge, prison warden, chief of police, head coroner, or crown prosecutor, provides a quality of life that makes it worth sacrificing the lives of "undesirable" people to achieve the social status that is so important to them. I don't know why else. . Don't these people consider themselves prominent, intelligent members of society though? . So why should I, or you, believe that with a grade 10 education, I can see all this stuff, and with all their brilliance and degrees they can't? . Their education alone, tells me they can see the truth, but they choose to block it out. And with a blind eye, they continue on with their role in the system regardless of who suffers at their expense. It's a harsh analysis if you sit here and think about that for a few minutes. . There isn't much room to deny there's not many places for poor people in society other than perpetuating the crime cycle. And that's exactly what is happening. The world's poorest people are being put in a terrible position then condemned for doing whatever they must to survive. . The elite take everything from a person. Leave them broke and unemployed. Then punish them for resorting to alternative measures to survive. The result is a never ending cycle of drugs, crime, violence, prison, and death. . I'm so glad I see this system for what it is, a well thought out deception. But that's all it is, one big deception. And WE are the ones acting out their script to make it a reality! . I'm sure you must realize by now I believe the government in any given country is a mere facade. They are the public face of leadership, but by no means do they hold any real power. . Their bosses, the elite, are the real people who control our fate. Justin Trudeau, our Prime Minister in Canada can no more change laws than I could. . Our actual Hierarchy here in Canada has one position above Prime Minister, The Governor General. . This person answers only to the Queen of England. Sorry Justin but it's true. You're symbolic. . Just like prison is in Canada. Symbolic. Its really not doing anybody any good unless, of course, you happen to work there. . The approach is insane. Comical even. To examine I mean, but absolutely not, to be trapped in. . I could offer more success from a sixty day prison sentence in the sense of rehabilitation than our current system can achieve from locking a person up for five years. . And I'm just me. Look at the resources the government has available. They sure don't spend them on prison programs and rehabilitation, that much I hope you know. . The main objective of the prison system, other than to provide long term, secure employment to voters, is to ensure the crime cycle continues. . Prison is in no way meant to serve the individual incarcerated or help them to become better people. It's quite the opposite from my viewpoint. . It's the prison staff who represent society and all that is "good" about it in the eyes of those imprisoned. . Prison inmates face many, many, stressful and frustrating abuses that come with being in jail. . The inmates also see the laughable approach to provide rehabilitation which society is told is the priority and reason people are sent to jail. . These same inmates associate that damage to the outside world. . I personally was beaten up by a prison guard. I've had my personal property they take away from you at time of arrest, disappear. I've had my weekly canteen purchases forgotten. I've had numerous written requests for services like dental care and visiting go missing after being submitted. And if you don't know how humiliating it is to take your morning crap on a toilet in front of 40 other men, give it a try one day. You feel less than human all day, all week, every month for as many years as you're in there. . It's no wonder people become so crushed while incarcerated, they no longer wish to ever be part of society again. . But that's just what the system wants from these people. If this wasn't the case, the last portion of a prison sentence would include being released to a furnished bachelor apartment and a prearranged place to work. . The funny part of that is, the citizens who suffer the consequences of criminal activity the most, complain when the government wants to try to improve things for these convicts upon release. Talk about Brainwashed. . It's the victims themselves who feel they get revenge by seeing the criminals released with nothing. . I've personally gotten out of jail with $30, a bus ticket, and the clothes on my back. What exactly can you expect the result of such negligence to be? I'll tell you, it's never going to be a good thing. . Let's face it, there's no place for these disenfranchised people to go to get away once they are released from jail. No escape. They either do as you all want them to do as if their lives are yours to control, or you ostracize them. I guess I shouldn't say no place to go; there's one. . The subculture of drugs, alcohol and criminal behaviour awaits with open arms. And welcomes them in with a great big, sinister smile. . At first Its all fun and games. The drugs seem to solve all their problems. They gain friends and become popular. . They don't have to suffer the humiliation of searching for a job as part of the lower class with a criminal record. They can generate income as drug dealers. . It's the only way they can afford to mask the guilt, shame, and despondency associated with knowing they will never achieve the security and benefits enjoyed by the very people out to catch them. . You may not see those emotions in the hardened individuals these people present themselves as but believe me, behind the masks they wear, they mostly all wish life was different. . I understand how this is a very general look at crime, prison, and the war on drugs. But I hope you can now see how these cycles relate to each other. . They work hand in hand to promote a system that is sacrificing an entire class of people and controlling the lives of many, many, more. . It's no wonder they are lost, and off course but when you get the privilege to earn your way to seeing them for who they really are, it's amazing. . Some paint, others carve, draw and create amazing artwork. Many play guitar, sing and even dance. I was quite surprised by the love they put into what they do when I first found myself being invited into their circles. . It's an amazing experience, but it's hard knowing that kind of genuine soul exists inside of someone society treats so damn poorly. . Which is why it's time to reevaluate what is considered acceptable behaviour as a human being. We must create new ways to address our old perception of good vs bad. . Especially when it comes to the war on drugs. It's my position this war is the catalyst that ignites the crime cycle, which in turn, then feeds the prison system. . The reality is a vast majority of drug users suffered some painful event in their past that had them seek out drugs in the first place. They felt they had no place else to escape their pain. Some things are just so disturbing, embarrassing, or sickening they can't bring themselves to talk about it for years and years. They relive this abuse daily and without drugs, suicide is the next option. . Imagine being victim to mental and physical abuse, domestic abuse, neglect as a child, sexual molestation, and bullying. These are among the most prevalent reasons people seek out drugs. Not for fun. Not to rebel. . So really what you're doing by supporting the war on drugs, is supporting the furthering of the abuse against these people. It's time to help and not hurt these people anymore. . From previous discussions over the years, I've learned the common belief is there is no alternative to the way drug use is enforced. . There's cause, and effect, and that's next to impossible to deal with in any other way. But is that true? . I'm curious about what you really know about drugs? Is it personal knowledge? Or second hand? . Let's not forget there has been a lot of lies told about drugs which further agendas created by the elite. This much I know. . I also know what the common public perception of the long running public display of sorrow and misery called Skid Row, is. . The most extreme examples of drug addicts and alcoholics are sequestered in what are predominantly very old, run down, neglected sections of the inner city. The eerie backdrop of dilapidated buildings only adding to the illusion. . Here they are on full display for the straight edged, ill informed, law abiding citizens, who would never consider stepping out of bounds and trying drugs themselves, to see. . They have no need to try them, the obvious result of drug use is seen in the faces of the homeless, malnourished, dirty, addicts on the street. Right? . The truth is, those people on skid row represent 3-5% of all drug users. They are the result of extreme circumstance. . A vast majority of the time they have mental health issues as well. These people are NOT AT ALL the true face of the drug using public. Not even close. . Over 85% of people who use drugs Do Not end up impoverished, addicted, their lives in ruins. . I won't say they have perfect lives, we all have our issues. But, they maintain. And that's no reason to go after, and ruin someone's life. . They may use drugs, but they aren't harming people or doing anything much different with their lives as the rest of society. And guess who they are? . They are your neighbors, co-workers, children, family members and friends. . Perhaps it's the doctor you have an appointment with. Or the sports star you root for. Or the police officer writing you up for speeding. . The FACT is about 60% of drug users keep their drug use a complete secret from nearly everyone they know. The only exception, the dealer they meet in private, behind closed doors. . Some have a few select friends who are almost always completely removed from their regular circle. No mutual friends. . They have jobs. They go to work. They attend church. They drive their cars. They take their children to movies. They attend parent teacher meetings. Your kids have been to birthday parties at their house. They are at the mall. At the grocery store. Playing golf. Fishing with their kids Sunday afternoon. And they are high. . And because you have no idea, you talk to them. You work with them. You laugh with them. Even enjoy their company. And nobody has a clue. And nobody has a bad thing to say about that person. . Unless you've been there like I have, you can’t begin to imagine all the people involved who have never even been suspected of drug use. . The numbers would astound you. I mean blow your mind. And they are from every single walk of life. . The sober, righteous, and the naive among us, are right in the middle of a lot of drug use and don't even have a clue. . But then something happens to expose a person's clandestine drug use. And instantly, everything changes. . Suddenly people fear them. We no longer trust them. They lose our respect and friendship. They're let go from their jobs. And demonized. And why? Before we found out this information we thought they were nice, reasonably well adjusted, people. . So? What if I told you that one of the most harmful consequences of drug use, is the response from misinformed people??? . The judgement we pass on them is what drives them away, some never to return. And they end up involved in crime as a further result of being labeled and cast out. . Once that label is attached, it leaves them nowhere else to go. So we point our fingers at them and blame them some more. . I’ve been there. I was their dealer! I know what kind of people they are. They are good people. Most would give you the shirt off their back if need be. Can you see how wrong this is? Can you? . I really hope you heard something in what I just said to challenge your thinking. . The truth about the remaining percentage of drug users, the ones who fuel the crime cycle and prison system is their situation is a little more difficult to approach with a solution. A lot of them have evolved into this criminal element because they are adrenaline junkies and thrill seekers. And they enjoy crime in a way. . They enjoy the sense of payback they feel committing crimes against the very society which rejected them at some point in their lives, or maybe imprisoned one of their parents. . Others fall into crime because they are very sensitive people. So the hurt they feel when family, friends, siblings, and society attach the social drug stigma to them, it cuts too deep for them to handle. . They feel too ashamed, too guilty, and too afraid to face up and take responsibility for their actions. Which, in turn, eats away at their self esteem until it pushes them into things most others try to avoid. . Trapped by their sensitivity in a downward spiral, they resort to crime to meet the basic need for food and shelter which eventually lands them in jail. . What they NEED more than anything else, is simply a place in society where THEY BELONG. A place where they can heal in their own way. A place void of judgment, ridicule, and negativity. . It's so obvious to me why the government won't provide that. And it makes me sick. And angry. Not only with them, but I must say, I'm angry with YOU for accepting this behaviour from your government. . They won't approach this issue in a way that helps because if they fixed these people, it would mean the end of their precious crime cycle and all the taxpayer funded jobs attached to it. . I believe there is a solution for those who simply fail over and over as well. They can't stop and won't stop, and don't want to stop, using drugs in an extreme manner. . They are violent or abusive, and unpredictable. They prove they can't be managed or trusted. . Of course there are limits to what kind of behaviour should be tolerated by society. But the fact is even those people committing crimes can be productive in the right setting. . The right setting for them is a minimum security, controlled environment. Small communities removed from Interacting with society, like jail, but not jail. . In exchange for the lifestyle that is provided to these people, they are to perform simple jobs that generate the income to cover the price of providing for them. . They get a small furnished one bedroom apartment to call home. A part of the community would be a Walmart type superstore that sells everything they need. . And these people would work and live here. And yes. I would expect drugs are available to them. And access to treatment. . To get out once it's been decided you need to be there, you have to become sober. Simple as that. . Or, should you get violent and in trouble, there is always still real jail. In which there is no access to drugs at all. . Not many addicts would be willing to mess this up, the incentive to behave here is huge for them. . The time to stand up for the truth, and for each other, is here now. . Stop accepting lies. Educate yourselves, not by others examples or explanations, but by going out and gaining your own personal understanding. . I'm not saying go out and use some drugs, so don't assume that's my suggestion. There's other ways to come to an understanding. Here's one. . They may look scary. Or dirty. Or angry. But I'll tell you one thing about street people, they are also lonely. And friendly given the chance. They give what they get. . And all it takes is making the effort to have a genuine conversation with some of them, and most times they will respond in the way they are approached. . And you will learn by talking with them about the human beings they actually are. And I promise you, the experience will affect who you are. It will open your eyes. And you will thank yourself for taking such a brave step towards the truth. . A tolerant, non-judgmental, society that accepts we are all different, will achieve far greater success than a rigid society controlled by fear, any old way you look at it. . One thing I wish I could get you to understand is that if marijuana was simply accepted by everyone, it would literally change the world. . One simple acceptance, all on its own, would have such an impact, you would have to call it a monumental, revolutionary act of peace and healing. . Here's a quick generalization of what would happen. . First and most importantly, families would no longer be torn apart over it, as going to jail for marijuana would end. . That means less children from broken homes. Less broken homes means kids experience a two parent family lifestyle, and hopefully, less stress. And more discipline. . These kids grow up with fewer problems. They do better in school and keep their respect for society. . I get upset thinking of the kids growing up in the alternative. Angry and hating life. That anger carries on with them as they move into adulthood. And soon enough they themselves are getting into trouble and end up in the prison system. . There is a long list of products that can be made from the fibre of this plant as well. . This fibre is very durable and can be used to create clothing, rope, tents, tarps, sails. It can make bio-fuel. Plastics that decompose. There really is no limit to the uses for the amazing plant. . It has a plethora of medicinal uses as well. The way it eliminates seizures in children with epilepsy is nothing short of amazing. . If society were to hear what I'm saying right now about marijuana the demand on criminal courts, policing, and housing for offenders in prison would be reduced greatly. . As would the demand for the ever increasing cost to provide these services. Without even considering money generated by the sale of marijuana, an enormous amount of revenue becomes available. Other government projects such as availability of treatment programs for addiction, and mental Heath issues could receive the major overhaul they so badly need. . As well the financial savings could be used to develop industry specifically to employ people leaving prisons, rehab facilities, and mental health facilities. . I'm sick to death of seeing society kick people when they're down instead of offering them a hand up! And that's what the ones who need it really only want, a hand UP, not a hand out. . To me it would make far more sense to simply accept drug use as a personal choice. That way we can all look out for each other and not feel like we need to hide who we are. . It makes little sense sentencing them to an existence without hope. Instead, let's help pick them back up, and put them on their feet again. . I beg you, help me end the days of hating them ! Please😔 They are my friends, and I love them. . Contrary to common beliefs, I think I've shown there is a different way to address how we chose to approach this problem that is really hurting society. . The messed up, cruel, way we approach people who use drugs could sure stand a change. And only YOU can change it. . As I've said many times, to beat the elite, we need to beat them in the one way they wouldn't ever expect us to try, and that, is at their own game. . Their game is politics. Of course, these politicians themselves are not necessarily part of the elite. Some are. The ones who are not, are under the thumb of the elite tyrants. They are puppets who live to serve their rich masters. . From behind the scenes the elite manipulate, influence, and dictate what the politicians will say and do. . The elite truly have little concern for the common citizens desire for how things should work anymore. Their policies are proof enough. Everything works in their favour and we rarely have any input as to how things should be. . Politics is a dirty game. The power and control lends its hand to corruption. It's obvious those in this position have failed to adhere to the very sense of control they project our way. . Dirty or not, it's the game I feel we should play. It's the one LOOPHOLE in everything they've done to control us. . I've spent a majority of my life looking for the gap in their otherwise bullet proof armour. And here, I have found it. . This hole is about the biggest mistake these men could make. Their arrogance got the best of them leaving a way in like this for someone like me with the intelligence to take advantage of it. . They believe the tangled web of division they have created is so well crafted, it could never be penetrated. . You have to admit, once you can see past the illusion, they really did create a seemingly impenetrable veil of division to keep us under their control. . Racism. Religion. Wealth. Politics. Class. Just these alone create enough division to do the job. But there is just so much more if you think about it. . It worked so good, for so long it was impossible for them to accept anyone could ever out think them and find a way to illuminate their deception. . But they were wrong. I see through it. And l'm willing to tell you, and show you all I've seen in my life. . So now what I would like to do is show you some interesting numbers. In 2014 in Canada 26,618,560 people filed an income tax return. Here is a brief overview of what was earned and by how many people. People Wage 2,015,670 under $5,000 8,532,860 under $20,000 18,226,430 under $50,000 3,094,980. over. $75,000 164,220 over. $250,000 . 18+ million VS 3.1 million. Yet the rich control the system. . Somewhere around $40,000 is the low income cut off or poverty line for a family of four. . Approximately $19,000 is what is considered the low income cut off, or poverty line for a single person. . What this says to me, because nobody is happy to live in poverty, is there's an awful lot of unhappy potential voters all connected by at least one thing in common. They are all struggling for money. . And most of them are being pushed into the world of drugs as a way to cope emotionally, and as a way to survive financially. So I'd say these people have more in common than just a lack of money. . I can only imagine how grateful they would feel knowing of a plan to restore their dignity and remove the stress from the threat of harassment, arrest, and jail. . So how exactly are we going to accomplish this monumental feat? That's the million dollar question. . Well first things first. There are an awful lot of people in The Struggle Zone. . They struggle financially. They struggle with esteem. They struggle to belong to something they feel life is worth living for. . As I mentioned earlier, I consider this to be the second biggest mistake these elite scoundrels in control made. . They let greed and lust take over and guide them to driving too many people into poverty. Smart ones like me. . Again their arrogance allowed them to believe nobody could ever find a way through the division and unite society into one solid group ready to stand their ground. Especially with the lower class included. . It seems the elite believed their own bullshit about how drugs mess up your mind leaving you a stupid, unproductive, lower class piece of garbage. . However I won't deny the fact that Yes, drugs will mess you up if taken to the EXTREME. . But used moderately, and while surrounded by informed people willing to confront you if you start to get out of control, I honestly don't see what the harm is. . I myself have used drugs most of my life. Do my words seem like those of a brain damaged, useless, stupid, loser with no understanding of good vs bad or the inability to value life? . We are all tired of not only that empty little feeling inside us, but the crippling financial pinch imposed by the elite. . We are tired of how it's left an awful lot of people living in poverty, or dangling from a thread waiting to drop below the invisible line that separates us from them. . 22,000 KIDS have died since this time YESTERDAY because of the financial pressures placed on humanity by gluttonous billionaires. And that just messes with my mind. . So I will stand up and say NO LONGER! Never again will I sit by quietly and embrace our current system as an acceptable way of life! It most certainly is not. What about YOU? . Trillions of dollars are being hoarded by WORLD SCUM! And guess what? They think we OWE them! . When will you accept the outright blatant way the elite use the system against every singe one of us? The corruption is very real. The theft of resources is very real. How it perpetuates the crime cycle is very real. . They tax us heavily. They lay claim to natural resources which are no more theirs, than they are mine. Then sell those resources back to us. They regulate what we do on our own land. To say a person can't collect rain water is surely insanity in action. It's happening though. . So what is it that makes these people feel they can buy, sell, and own what is not even theirs to control? . I refuse to accept I am any less of a man than any one of the worlds 1800 or so billionaires. Neither should any of you! Money does NOT define your worth! So this is it for me. I'm taking this position against tyranny and until things change, you can count me out of this disaster called society. . I really want no part in it other than helping to reconstruct everything to include a stable, happy, place for everyone involved. . This all starts with us! And it's time to admit our own role in how the world is being operated. . I can't imagine anybody still not understanding that we MUST stand up to this elite rule. . I'd like to see their faces when they realize we became UNITED by the very poverty imposed by them as a way to keep us DIVIDED. . For my entire life I've watched the same Mega Charities shamelessly parade malnourished children with flies buzzing around them on TV. Over my 47 years I've never seen a time when those charities weren't there. . How can I be expected to believe nothing has changed in that much time, and with that much money thrown at them? . Africa is not a resource poor continent. Not at all. What it is I've learned by talking to the PEOPLE of Africa, is that they have a big mismanagement problem. . The elite call the shots and exploit a civilization that has been crushed by poverty imposed by generations of vicious leadership. . Since forty plus years of constant charitable donations hasn't solved the issues these people face, wouldn't you say it's time to demand an answer as to why? . What excuse will you provide for doing nothing? I'm all out of excuses. I can't live this lie another day. How can you? . LITTLE KIDS are paying the price for OUR indifference! I am NOT OK knowing they still live in squalor. I am NOT OK knowing anyone lives in squalor. . I'm sorry but how can any of us accept this? Yet here we are! WE ALL ACCEPT THIS! How is that possible? . I can only say it's time to usher in a state of renewal, repair, unity, and healing. We really, really need it. . It's time to help each other progress in life. It makes zero sense to hold each other back any longer. Doesn't it? Or is it just me? . I'm not doing this for myself, but for ALL the people who have been abused, branded and cast out. . The ones who've had their homes blown to smithereens in the last 17 years as this insane war on terrorism rages around the world. . I'm doing this for the ones who've had their jobs taken away by greedy corporations either setting up in town and running them out of business. Or relocating to countries where profits are much higher because weaker laws protecting workers keep wages very low. . You do understand the elite clandestinely own companies that produce every single item needed for war from multi million dollar helicopters, right down to the toothbrushes soldiers in the field use right? . Don't take offence when I point this out, but do you realize they sell these items to governments all over the world at super inflated, ridiculous prices? . And our governments use OUR TAX money to make these purchases? DO YOU GET THAT OR WHAT??? DO YOU CARE??? . We can't even get the damn streets cleaned of snow where I live but I'm supposed to be ok with my government handing over all our tax money to fill the pockets of billionaires? . BECAUSE THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT YOU'VE BEEN ASKING ME TO DO!!! . They want us to live in fear, under stress, miserable, tired, and used up in the end. . All to satisfy a greed that will never lose its appetite until the last dying creature takes its last dying breath on Earth. . OR WE STOP THE INSANITY. . People are too afraid to accept the idea the government is not on their side. I get it. . They've done a very good job DIVIDING us. So good, you start to believe it's just you up against the full weight of the government all on your own. . Its no surprise people feel hopeless, helpless and defeated before they even take one small step towards confronting the elite. That's the CONQUERED part of Divide & Conquer playing its role. . Furthermore, deceptive ideas of revolt and revolution are spread by the elite as distraction. . It leaves only two choices. CONFORM or take part in an unorganized revolt with a ragtag army of tinfoil hat wearing crazy people as they are made out to be. . Of course the road most taken leads to conformity. Conformity to a system that sucks the life right out of them. If you ask me that's some strong proof of their power over you. The illusion at its very best. . I mentioned my thoughts for something called The One World Solution near the beginning of this manifesto. So now I'll tell you briefly what I'm thinking about that. . The One World Solution will function in two ways. First, as a Non-Profit Association. A hands on, boots on the ground, interactive coalition of people working directly with the people who need us the most. . Second, a multi national political party with branches in every country on Earth that the law allows a new party to be created. . Every branch will promote the same literature. The same values and the same ambitious approach to creating a more unified world where everyone gets to enjoy life, not just certain ones, born in the right place. . In the long run, I'm talking about a government that values each and every life it agrees to take responsibility for. The term Public Servant will be recognized as the reality in a One World government. . Mentoring programs for children. Food sharing. Life coaching. Housing programs. Spousal abuse safe houses. Connecting employers and potential employees. Daycare for working parents. Addiction treatment programs. Mental health counselling and treatment. Bully prevention. Programs to build esteem, teach values, and promote a strong sense of community. Funding for children's sports. As well, many other new services aimed at readdressing the many abuses and deep wounds suffered by the people who most desperately need these services. . The idea being the non-profit association directly serves the poverty stricken people displaced by the current system being utilized right now. . While helping to meet the needs of those impoverished and cast out by the current system, we will also begin to educate them. . Our message will begin to awaken them to the idea behind the political movement. . Our service work will deliver a realization that of all the things these people have lost over the course of their lives, the RIGHT TO VOTE was not one of them. . I didn't look into anything about the other countries around the world, but I found out some interesting info about political regulations in Canada. . I'm quite hopeful what I found out about politics in Canada, will also apply in the other 122 democratic countries on Earth. . Creating a new political party is simple. A few forms, a signature, proof of support from 250 citizens who believe in your vision, and a reasonable fee of about $500. . Anybody can run for Prime Minister of Canada. The only restriction I could find states you may not run if you are currently imprisoned. . Even a criminal record like mine doesn't disqualify me. It's their belief that my criminal record, being a public document, would surely discourage anyone from supporting my ideas knowing what I'd done in the past. . I am who I am, and did what I did. I have no issue admitting my mistakes. And I freely share the lessons I learned from it all. . Besides, I paid my debt to society for what I've done in this lifetime. Even though all my trouble was a result of the stigma attached to people associated with drugs. . As mine is a vision that includes forgiveness, I feel quite fine in being the example of how to ask for it, and what to expect, and how to return that forgiveness to complete the circle. . To begin this very ambitious project an online presence needs to be created to express our ultimate vision. . The website will be something tangible people can attach to and show their support and commitment to a new way of life. . It will be the ignition switch that fires people up into supporting The One World Collaboration between our non-profit association and our political party. . The people already supporting my idea are an amazing, dedicated, and extremely intelligent group of caring people. There is little doubt in my mind that we can handle the creation, and establishment of The One World Solution. . We will promote a message of our desire and approach to restore dignity to the victims of elite rule in the ways I've outlined in this article. . For the most part, by respectfully accepting people as they are, for who they are, and working towards establishing a place in the world for everyone to belong, we will gain the support we require. . The vision I have for a government is nothing like anything else that's been tried before. . Though all the branches of One World in all the countries on Earth will be part of one massive group and share all the same policies and procedures, they will operate independently of each other. . What happens in one region, for example, a building permit for a massive housing project in Poland, will not be influenced by any other region. . The only times these independent branches of One World would act as one unit, would be in self defense of any, and all of them, from outside sources who act aggressively. Or in the face of natural disasters or terrorist attacks. . Considering how with each successful political victory in the democratic nations of the world, not only will the elite be removed from their positions of authority over policy and law enforcement, but they are removed from their control of the military in that country as well. . All those weapons owned by these countries that the elite hide behind, profit from, and promote war with, will no longer be theirs. And that literally means, the beginning of the end of wars. . The One World countries will never act aggressively or instigate wars under any circumstance. We do not act in defense of any country not affiliated with our collective. And we do not retaliate by declaring war. . I see a government that is totally transparent in all ways. It is not the position of One World to keep secrets or make single handed decisions without consulting the public. . There will never be a 100% consensus on any topic, but that can't be helped. However, I feel major decisions should be made together. . Secret ballot voting will no longer be the way things are done. Transparent voting that can be cross referenced for accuracy by anyone who wishes to do so, will replace the secret ballot. . Finances, and resource wealth distribution will be at the top of the list of things to become transparent. . All in all I feel the biggest problem with the world, other than the still to be determined consequences of the Fukushima disaster, is who is running it. . It's not even so much that all their policies and programs or laws, need to change. What they need is an honest approach implemented, a zero tolerance for corruption policy, and a varying degree of adjustments to priorities, and procedures. . And to the people with anarchist views where we have no government and simply govern ourselves, know this: . The need and expectation by humans for guidance has been deeply ingrained over thousands of years. There is no magic switch that turns it off. . That is why the goal of One World is to slowly, over time, restore what the elite have taken, restricted, and controlled. . Eventually we will return the population to a more natural and sustainable way of conducting our affairs on Earth in a far less profit driven and destructive manner. . The End game being a self sustaining, unified world that stands up for each and every one lucky enough to receive The Gift of Life on Planet Earth. . One strength. One wisdom. One Spirit. One challenge. And it awaits you answering this call. . Through all the hardships I've personally endured; the long days in prison, the cold nights homeless with no place to go, I wouldn't take back a single moment of it. . I'd keep every bit of anger. Each day of despair. Every loss I ever felt, and dream that was ever crushed. It's my motivation to end this so no future generations have to live with what I do in my head everyday. . I just hope the people I've hurt along the way while I gained the knowledge I needed to write this, realize it had to be told. And it had to be real. I had to live it to be able to tell it. . And to those who did me wrong, it's all good. You showed me exactly why I needed to confront the world head on. Be sure, I have no hard feelings. . Again, thank you for your patience in reading this. It's time to rise! © 2017 Cory Figura

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