The Millennial Democracy

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...

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...

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...