Votes for Children!

Allow me to copy almost in its entirety my favorite blog post of the day, which suggested that we just extend the vote to all American citizens, regardless of age:

Objections to this usually take the form of imagining a highly disciplined party of seven year-olds reliably delivering bloc votes to whichever candidate credibly promises endless kindergarten. If you think for five minutes about the practical problems of political organizing, and then for five minutes more about the practical problems of getting kids to do anything I think you’ll see quickly that this is a misguided worry.

Seriously. Imagine a campaign directed entirely at 7-year-olds. It would be HILARIOUS. I fully support this proposition. I know plenty of high schoolers who were entirely informed enough and enthusiastic enough to vote, and the decisions made by elected officials - especially at the very local level, like the school board - can really effect students, so why shouldn't they have a say? And, I want to see campaign commercials featuring Muppets or Barney. They'd be smarter than Herman Cain's most recent ad.

Here's to the Crazy Ones

Judging from the blog posts I've come across today, practical, policy-focused liberals are coming to this conclusion: Yes, Occupy Wall Street looks sort of crazy and disorganized. But maybe it's time we got behind it anyway.

This was my favorite quote from this morning, talking about Occupy Wall Street, Steve Jobs, and the Crazy Ones:

The pragmatic progressives like me didn't start this movement. We thought about the long-term impact for the left and the short-term electoral optics for Democrats. When the economy collapsed, we were quiet, the tea party spoke up, and the rage the country felt was directed toward government, not Wall Street. In short, we were afraid.

Thankfully, the crazy ones weren't.

...

Perhaps it's a natural evolution, but it also seems likely that the movement is changing because the seasoned organizers and pragmatists are working alongside the radical idealists who were there from the start.

The only reason those pragmatists are there is because the crazy ones took the first steps.

Ok, maybe I object to the word crazy. For a variety of reasons, including that there's nothing sane about our current economic system, so anyone who's actively working against it, even if they're dressed in funny clothes or not quite on-message, looks pretty damn sane to me.

But it's not just progressive writers like the ones at Mother Jones who are starting to wrap their head around OWS. Paul Krugman wrote about it today in the New York Times. Here's my favorite bits:

What can we say about the protests? First things first: The protesters’ indictment of Wall Street as a destructive force, economically and politically, is completely right.

...

Given this history, how can you not applaud the protesters for finally taking a stand?

Now, it’s true that some of the protesters are oddly dressed or have silly-sounding slogans, which is inevitable given the open character of the events. But so what? I, at least, am a lot more offended by the sight of exquisitely tailored plutocrats, who owe their continued wealth to government guarantees, whining that President Obama has said mean things about them than I am by the sight of ragtag young people denouncing consumerism.

Kevin Drum responded to Krugman by suggesting that no matter how off-beat some of the leaders of Occupy Wall Street look, the average liberal observer needs to remember whose side they're on - and if you're not with the protestors, then you're siding with the banks. (And again, I'm annoyed that they're not taking the anarchists/socialists/whatever who organized this so impressively seriously except as a jumping off point for some sort of standard policy ideas, but whatever.) Think Progress has a lovely roundup of what's wrong with our banking system.

And finally, Occupy DC had a busy day yesterday.. I wish I was there!

Some Occupy Wall Street Reading

First, the latest on Occupy DC:

According to Huffington Post, the central group of protestors is about 40 strong, now half a week into their protest. They need warm clothes but have way too much bread. You can donate through their website, which also has information on upcoming invents, including a planned march on Koch Industries and a rally this weekend in collaboration with other Occupy-inspired groups.

The Huff Po article also has some interesting description of the leaderless, consensus-driven debates that go on at the General Assemblies in DC. On Monday they debated whether or not to have concrete demands, one women argued that they wouldn't need to; people would understand. Huffington Post said:

The media professed to not understand, but I suspect we all know exactly why those people are there. It isn't a sophisticated political position, it isn't an answer to the problem, and it doesn't fit our pre-fab protest narrative with a clear goal that is either won or lost, but at heart it's the same idea that's been expressed by President Obama and people on both sides of the proverbial aisle: the way our economy functions is really screwed up.

True fact.

Meanwhile, in New York, the New York Times isn't sure whether to blame police or protestors for arrests.

The media thinks it's anti-capitalist to protest the banking industry. Think Progress disagrees, and I agree with them. (Wow, that was confusing.) The banking industry received trillions of dollars in government money to bail them out, while continuing to screw over millions of Americans. The unfair business practices that we the taxpayers helped pay for are more of a problem then capitalism, Think Progress (and many Occupy Wall Street protestors) argue.

Though I have to say, I'm getting sick of the idea that's I've heard a few times in the past few days, which is that any protest/political opinion that challenges capitalism is automatically written off. I think there are lots of very legitimate grounds on which to challenge capitalism, and that there'd be benefit in listening to them.

Anyone else have any good readings about Occupy Wherever?

Class and Steampunk

Think Progress has some graphs today about just how big the gap between the top 1% and everyone else really is. They make a powerful point about who has the wealth in America. I think I've seen charts like these show up in my blogroll about once a month for six months now, but I think they bear repeating again and again.

This is percentage of the country's wealth by percentile. That's the top 1% with 42% of the nation's wealth, and the bottom 80% - as in, 80 times more people - with 7% of the nation's wealth.

This is the percent of the country's income growth taken home by the bottom 90% compared to the top 1%. While income for the top 1% has shot way up in the past 50 years, income for the bottom 90% has dropped steadily.

But you knew all that. Let's get to the fun part: What does this have to do with steampunk?

Nothing, really, but Margaret Killjoy has a fabulous article on Tor.com about how steampunk can never be apolitical, and it made me think of those numbers. He argues that, coming out of Cyberpunk as it does, steampunk has deeply political roots: "Cyberpunk was the punking of science fiction, introducing as it did the corporate dystopia and a strong sense of class struggle, taking the stories away from interspace travel and back towards the problems here on earth." Being rooted in the 19th century, which we often remember as a time of deep inequality - Charles Dickens' street rats on the one hand and ladies in ball gowns on the other - steampunk seems to me uniquely positioned to play with themes of economic inequality and its consequences. So maybe if you're sick of seeing graphs like the ones above, you could stop reading blogs and pick up some good science fiction, and get a pretty similar message.

Small Solutions vs. Small Government?

Right now I'm reading Eaarth by Bill McKibben. It's an interesting book, if not rather depressing, about how global warming has changed the world irreparably, and how we should go about living on our now kinda freaky planet. I'm in the habit of assuming that if it cites reliable science it's probably written by a liberal, so I was surprised when the chapter I read last night included a critique of big government that would have made any Tea Party member proud.

Ok, granted, it was better argued than most Tea Party arguments. His point was that a strong central government was useful when we had big national projects to accomplish - building the land grand colleges, the interstate highway system, putting a man on the moon. Now, we don't have so many big national projects, and we have a lot of issues that might be better solved at the community level. I think that's not a bad idea. There was an article a while ago in the Daily Beast about local communities being improved by smart small-scale reforms in everything from law enforcement and criminal justice to education and health care. Programs like that, rooted in the needs and resources of a community, might be more efficient and successful than the big government programs it's so popular to criticize nowadays.

And yet...

Take, for example, Texas. Texas has pretty much the worst health care in the country. All of the small community leaders in the state could do their best to provide good care to their community, but Texas would still probably have pretty awful health care without some major incentive to change, which, given that their governor seems pretty damn satisfied with the situation, seems unlikely to happen.

That's where I feel federal government programs are important. It's not fair that someone in Texas is more likely to die of any number of things than someone in Massachusetts, when we as a country could have the resources to look out for everyone. Small-scale community solutions are great, but they seem to me to leave a lot of gaps in care and resources for people who need them, and that to me is unacceptable. Maybe our current system of trying to smooth those disparities isn't the most effective, but I think it's better than the alternative of not having anything to try to fix regional inequalities. (Also, sometimes communities screw up. See the Alabama judge who wants to make criminals go to church or else face jail time. Uh... just no.) So, while I appreciate that small-scale programs have a lot of potential to be awesome, I'm not ready to jump on McKibben's critique of big government just yet.

Tea Party Highlights

Did you watch the Tea Party GOP debate last night? I didn't even know it was going on, so imagine my surprise when I opened my blog roll to find more offensive things posted in the past few hours than I usually get in a week. I thought I'd share some highlights and try to figure out what they mean in terms of policy... One much-played clip from last night is this one, where Representative Ron Paul implies and the rest of the crowd frankly states that society should just let uninsured people die:

 

 Here's the quote:

Blitzer: Let me ask you this hypothetical question. A healthy, 30-year-old man has a good job, makes a good living, but decides, "You know what, I'm not going to spend $200 or $300 a month for health insurance because I'm healthy, I don't need it." Something terrible happens, all of a sudden he needs it. Who's going to pay if he goes into a coma, for example? 

Paul: In a society that you accept welfare-ism and socialism, he expects the government to take care of it. 

Blitzer: Well, what do you want? 

Paul: He should do whatever he wants to do, and assume responsibility for himself. My advice to him would be have a major medical policy. But not forced— 

Blitzer: But he doesn't have that. And he needs intensive care for six months. Who pays? 

Paul: That's what freedom is all about. Taking your own risks.

I will give him props for being internally consistent with his vaguely distressing philosophy, though he shied away from actually saying we should let the man die. I guess my follow-up question to him would be that, if the government doesn't have a stake in its citizens welfare in the form of emergency medical care, what responsibility does it have to them? If people should be entirely responsible for themselves, should the government, say, help fund hospitals or medical research, as it does now? There's a lot of ways the government is indirectly involved in supporting people's health, from requiring nutrition labels on food to offering free flu vaccines to students, and that seems to be generally in line with the mandate in the Constitution that Congress "support the general welfare." But in Paul believes that people without insurance shouldn't receive any care, what does he think about the role of government in health more generally?

 Meanwhile, Rick Perry thinks we should "free up" Wall Street, even though a bipartisan committee concluded that doing so was what led to the financial crisis in 2008. I don't know much about finance, to be honest, or what it is Wall Street does except look at those numbers on the big screen and run around looking panicked. However, I've gathered from the past few years of economy implosion that it involves playing lots of high-stakes games with other people's money. So I gather that what Rick Perry wants to do is take away the rules to the game. Which is sort of like giving a bunch of 2-year-olds the board game Life and expecting them to play properly and not choke on the tiny plastic cars.

 And finally, Rick Santorum misspoke and said something about the "illegal" vote before correcting himself - he meant the "Latino" vote. My reaction to that was as follows: "Wow, what a douche."