Progressives and Picket Lines

The story was very different, depending who told it.

To the organizers of the two affordable housing conferences I attended a few weeks ago, news that the Seattle Olive 8 hotel was under boycott by the hotel workers union for refusing to allow workers the choice to unionize came out of the blue.

Vote Teachout

Part of progressive frustration with the Tea Party, aside from shaking our heads over the sheer lack of enlightened self-interest shown by most of its on the ground supporters, is jealousy. They run primary campaigns against the mighty, like Eric Cantor, they expect and intend to win, and sometimes they do. Sometimes losing doesn’t change their audacity.

It seems sometimes like progressives have decided that because sometimes choosing the lesser of two evils might be the right political choice, that it’s actually always going to be the only choice available to us.

But it’s not.

Income for Everyone

If you wanted to come up with a totally cockamamie idea to attribute to someone to smear them as unrealistic bleeding-heart socialist, what would you come up with? Possibly “the government should just give everyone a salary (even if a minimal one) just for breathing”? That ought to do it, right? I mean who in their right minds . . . ?

Turns out, however, quite a few people.

Compassion for All at the Border

If your social media feeds lean the way mine do, you’ve likely been seeing a picture of a sign getting passed around that says “Keep the kids. Deport the racists.”

As slogans go, it very neatly sums up the horror, even nausea, that many of us feel about the fact that some portions of our country have reacted to unaccompanied children fleeing horrific violence with threats of violence and a desire to circumvent our own laws to sent them back into that violence without due process.

Actually United States

Americans are a people hopelessly divided by culture wars and fundamental disagreements about the role and appropriate size of government. You know this; I know this. Everyone knows this. In some parts of the country people carry machine guns through the baby products aisle and want to cut both food stamps and millionaire’s taxes, while in others we’re extending marriage equality and trying to build decent mass transit and celebrating diversity. It’s a deep, unbridgeable rift, and the dysfunction in our Congress just reflects this.

Right? Well, hold on.