Content about The Road to Resilience

Trying to get more involved in government policy decisions is a tough and thankless task when the emphasis seems to be on choosing the least worst power broker to run the nation who has the least objectionable plan (if any) to get us out of any number of messes that our established corporate power brokers have gotten us into.  Better that we start to focus on a positive vision of the future we want and the ways that we can make it happen.

Our task remains essentially the same as it would have been if Bernie Sanders had been elected President.  Sanders made us to understand that nothing he was espousing would happen without a major grass roots effort to force our elected officials to act.  I imagine we all thought it might be a whole lot easier with Bernie in the seat of power, but we weren’t being totally honest with ourselves.  Assuming (hoping) we are not insane enough to elect Trump, we will have a President Clinton, who has already verbally supported much of what we would like to see.  As Roosev

Picture this scenario.  The presumptive nominee for the Democratic Party is lagging in the polls before the nominating convention.  Another candidate that might attract more votes lags behind in elected delegates but can take the nomination if the superdelegates vote for him.  The superdelegates stick with the presumptive nominee, who goes on to lose in the general election to a charismatic, conservative blowhard that hails from the entertainment industry.

Both the Republicans and the Democrats have been challenged this election year by a populist insurrection.  Many of us bristle as the pundits throw Trump and Sanders supporters into the same bag.   After all, the motives and intentions of the two factions seem to be as different as night and day.  Yet, some of those Trump and Sanders supporters claim that they would vote for the other populist candidate if the one they are backing is not in the running.  (Technically, Bernie is still a choice.)  That being said, it seems to me that we need to understand what Tr

First off, the article in the last issue, “Politics Among The Billionaires,” was wrongfully attributed to me.  It was written by Ward Carson.

The current trends for employment seem to be heading toward a train wreck.   There is a strong push to lower labor costs as more and more work is being outsourced to lower wage labor pools around the world.  In fact, slavery seems to be on the comeback.  Free trade agreements, although not advertised as such, have lower labor costs as a main goal among others.  At the same time, we now have a demand for a living wage, that is, a wage that a full time worker can raise a family on.  I can’t help wondering, as higher wages drive up costs, will higher wages a

A guest article this week by Ward Carson:
I’ve always appreciated the value of a trust fund.  My friend Jim has one.  He deserves it I suppose; his father was a millionaire.  He’s always lived free and easy.   His fund has treated him well.

When Bernie Sanders entered the presidential race, he proposed universal health care as a basic human right.  This has been envisaged as a single payer health care system, that is, a system in which the many private health insurance providers we now have would be replaced by a single, public payer, as it is currently done in Medicare.  Obama, as well, campaigned in 2008 to institute universal coverage, but had to settle for the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, as a first step toward the solution to the health care crisis.  The Republican Congress, claiming gross government

The differences between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are becoming apparent.  Unlike the Republicans, the Democrats have had some good debates that have clarified their positions on specific issues. I am disregarding O’Malley at this point because, as appealing as he is, he is not seriously in contention right now. In my mind, all three are islands of sanity compared to Trump and Cruz.  I think a lot of Republicans would agree with me on that.   

Throughout the time I’ve been writing this column, I’ve tried to point out ways in which we as individuals and as a community could become more resilient to changes that are and will be occurring in our world.  I’ve also attempted to convince you that unprecedented change is, in fact, occurring.  This year, I’m going to be talking a lot about the November election at the national level because we may be presented with starkly divergent choices of direction that our country could take.  One direction could take us to a positive, cooperative future in wh

In January of 2012, I wrote a summary in this column of the decision at the Durban UN Climate Conference to kick the can down the road with a promise to produce a binding agreement at the 2015 conference that would take affect in 2020.  Previous  to Durban, in Copenhagen, the world agreed that global warming must be limited to 2 degrees Celsius.