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America Needs to Hold the Billionaire Class Accountable

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In the recent 2022 midterm elections, political contributions from billionaires topped the previous all-time highs reached during the 2018 midterms, clocking in at over $881 million. Looking at the graph of billionaire contributions since the Citizen's United  Supreme Court decision in 2010, each election cycle looks like a stair step to the next, with each seeing notable increases over the previous election cycle. With the majority of American media owned by billionaires or groups of them, politics increasingly becoming inundated with their money, and industry-dominating companies owned by the wealthy often seeing record profits while the American people struggle with inflation and supply-chain disruptions due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the thoughts, opinions and will of the billionaire class in this country surrounds and permeates our public discourse as never before. If the United States wants any chance of creating and maintaining a more equal and fair democracy and economy, the...
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Why America Needs to End the War On Drugs

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In June of 1971, President Richard Nixon declared what would become the longest-lasting and most expensive conflict thus far in American history, that of the War On Drugs. Dramatically increasing the size and role of federal drug control agencies while pushing through policies like mandatory sentencing and no-knock warrants, the administration introduced one of the worst aspects of the Neoliberal era into the American mainstream, a legacy which lingers with us to this day. According to drugpolicy.org, a top Nixon aide by the name of  John Ehrlichman later admitted: "You want to know what this was really all about. The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt thos...
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Location: California, USA
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Why America Needs a Guaranteed Housing Program

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For more than half a century, the term 'American Dream' has been indelibly associated with home ownership; typically of the suburban, white-picket-fence variety. While the early years of this 'Dream' were historically reserved for white, heterosexual, married Americans with a college-educated male breadwinner and a stay-at-home mother tending to their two or three children in a single-family dwelling with a car parked in the driveway, in the decades since this rigid picture of American life has thankfully loosened and become more inclusive in both reality and the popular imagination. That said, not only is the goal of homeownership and generational wealth-creation within middle and working-class families still woefully underserving people of color, particularly the black community, but the ability to buy into the housing market at all is increasingly out of reach for current and upcoming would-be homeowners of all backgrounds.  If this reality is to change, we need to t...
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Location: California, USA
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Why America's Economy Feels Stacked Against the Middle Class

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From the end of the second World War in 1945 until roughly the late 1970s, the average American worker and family, alongside the national economy as a whole, enjoyed an unprecedented stretch of growth and improvement. Manufacturing remained strong, union membership was at or near historic highs, service sector jobs were booming, home ownership saw a consistent rise, university education became accessible to millions, real wages rose alongside life expectancy and the average American's quality of live consistently improved decade over decade. Due to a variety of factors, however, this growth began to slow and even sputtered during the Oil Shock and stagflation years of the late 70s. This led to large-scale deregulation beginning under President Carter, carrying on into and well past the Reagan administration. Instead of simply updating regulations and retooling the economic levers available to state and federal governments, America ushered in the Neoliberal era of trickle-down econo...
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Location: California, USA
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America Should Dissolve the Presidency and Senate

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Prior to the presidential election of 2016, a majority of Americans reasonably presumed politics would continue more-or-less as usual. After decades of frustrating yet rather consistent Neoliberal politics stretching back to the Reagan Administration of the 80s, wherein both major political parties seemed more like different sides of the same policy coin rather than ideological opposites, discontented populist wings within both parties were clearly growing in prominence. Yet, left-leaning progressives and rightwing nationalists alike remained unable to capture the majority of the vote from their respective sides, let alone coax enough moderates and independents in the ideological middle to win the White House. That all changed, however, with the election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States. Since his ascension to the Oval Office, America's political discourse has been treading dangerously close to the edge of losing the democratic republic we hold dear. Sadly...
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Location: California, USA
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Every American Should Have Basic Needs Guaranteed

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The United States of America has long been a nation of free enterprise and personal freedoms, the land of opportunity and protector of huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Yet, America is also a nation founded largely upon stolen land, much of it built by enslaved peoples and exploited immigrant laborers, where industrialists, tech tycoons and wealthy folks of all shapes and sizes have wielded huge and corrupting levels of power and influence for most of our history. Greed and exploitation has defined America just as much as freedom and prosperity has, yet the powers-that-be overwhelmingly push to remind us of the latter traits over the former. In fact, if one points out the rampant corruption and greed inherent in our current system, or makes an effort to discuss our history in its truer form, they are often labeled 'un-American', 'unpatriotic', 'socialist', 'woke' and any number of other politicized slurs used over the years to dampen dissent and p...
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Location: California, USA
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America's Government is a Problem and the Solution

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Over the last fifty years or so, America has been living under a federal-level regime of thought and policy known as Neoliberalism. While the movement towards deregulation, 'trickle-down-economics' and a general "government is bad" philosophy began emerging throughout the 1970s, these trends entered American reality in-force during the 1980s and 90s. In his inaugural address in 1981, President Ronald Reagan stated unequivocally, "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." The president was speaking to the supposed ills of deficit spending, allegedly high taxation and the rampant stagflation and oil shock which had impacted Americans during the back half of the 70s. This line from President Reagan, more than possibly any other sentence from any other speech during his time in the White House, has guided the trends and policies advocated for by both major parties in the United States, yet particularly the...
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Location: California, USA
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