Political Change

The system is broken.

American Apocalypse by Rena Steinzor examines the history, motives, and momentum of six powerful groups aligned with the far right: corporations, the Tea Party, the Federalist Society, Fox News, white evangelicals, and militias.

The groups at the center of this inquiry are accused of “waging war” on the US government. Although each group has its own motivations and agenda, they share an alliance with Donald Trump and his “extreme” policies, including a concern about the size and power of the administrative state. While Steinzor notes that there’s no evidence that these groups are colluding, their cumulative impact has the potential to destabilize democracy; taken together, they are “a deconstructive force of awesome power…a constellation of armies fighting along parallel paths.”

People's party

End gerrymandering. 

The book Ratf**cked documents the effort of Republican legislators and political operatives to hack American democracy through an audacious redistricting plan called REDMAP. Since the revolutionary election of Barack Obama, a group of GOP strategists has devised a way to flood state races with a gold rush of dark money, made possible by Citizens United, in order to completely reshape Congress—and our democracy itself. “Sobering and convincing” (New York Review of Books), Ratf**ked shows how this program has radically altered America’s electoral map and created a firewall in the House, insulating the Republican party and its wealthy donors from popular democracy. While exhausted voters recover from a grueling presidential election, a new Afterword from the author explores the latest intense efforts by both parties, who are already preparing for the next redistricting cycle in 2020.

Geometry Solves Gerrymandering  printed in the NYT explains how to eliminate or at least regulate gerrymandering by monitoring the relative proximity index (RPI), or how far a map departs from perfect compactness. And the seats-votes curve may also help regulate the gerrymandering.

 

Revise immigration

Immigration posts here.

Tax the rich

top 1% income, increase capital gains, police and punish offshore money

Robert Reich How Wealth Inequality Spiraled out of control 

 

Change election finance laws

Limit campaign donations.

Repeal Citizens United.  

End super PACS 

End foreign money 

Mandate ranked choice primaries 

Stop treating corporations as individuals.

Corporations don't vote - they shouldn't get to fund political campaigns or lobby congress.

Corporations don't go to prison - they should be held to higher standards than individuals. 

Make Congress more representative of the people

Limit congressional pay, pension, and healthcare to be more in line what the median American gets - tie pay to the median income? 

Create strict rules about trading stocks

 

 

Don't just do something, stand there! Doing Nothing and Thriving

"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

- Blaise Pascal

Our culture constructs a reality where we are not allowed to just be. Our culture socializes us to be active, busy, entertained, constantly consuming.

Bernard McGrane's book, The Un-Tv and the 10mph Car is a Zen Buddhist perspective of sociology that uses experiments to help separate how we have been shaped by culture so that we can live more freely and authentically.  

In one of the chapters (published in Teaching Sociology, 1993), McGrane explores the idea of doing nothing in American culture as a way of being able to detach and see all that is actually going on - both in others and in ourselves. Here is the assignment.  By detaching from the social world, can you see the ways the world controls who you are? We go about our daily lives without question drifting along doing the things that we do. We never have to stop and think about why we are doing what we do and whether we want to do that. Some of the questions McGrane addresses are: How did you react and what occurred to you in being unoccupied? How did the world around you react to doing nothing? How does this relate our work to our identity? See this link for a discussion guide from Mc Grane's book for the nothing experiment. If you don't know why we did that experiment, please read it!

The last point, in the guide linked above, about work and identity reminds me of how Americans get acquainted with one another. The first question is usually "What is your name?" (usually answered very individualistically with the first name.) And the next question is usually "What do you do?" This highlights the importance of job and work identity. What does this mean for teens who might not have a job or parents who spend their days taking care of children and making a home. It is a sad message. An example of a different way that some cultures do these introductions is something someone from Australia told me. He said they get acquainted by asking "Where have you been?" So the focus is more on one's previous life experiences and travels. Another example is described in Richard Strozzi Heckler's book Holding the Center. In it, he describes a group of presenters at a health conference who were introducing themselves,

The distinguished men and women described their degrees, awards, publications, university positions, and their current research. The sixth person was an Ojibway Native American who introduced himself first by naming his tribe and family lineage and then describing in specific detail the land in which he and his tribe lived. He spoke of his relatives, many generations back on both sides of his family, who his sisters, brothers, and children married, his relationship with his aunts and uncles, and then the birds, fish and animals, the trees, rivers, lakes. He finished by saying, "this is who I am." He then politely requested that others provide the same information.

This is a marvelous example of other ways of defining their identity. Whereas Americans would define their identity based on their individuality and that would have a strong focus on their job, others (like the example above) would define their identity by their community and where they came from. It is much more communal than individual and less focused on your individual role. Finally, here is a funny video of a group that appears to do nothing, but they are actually doing "freezing". For the purposes of McGrane's experiment, they are not detached, but it is funny nonetheless to watch.

For more on the construction of the "self" and how Buddhism can help us understand it, see this 2014 article by Immergut and Kaufman called A Sociology of No-Self: Applying Buddhist Social Theory to Symbolic Interaction 

Our culture constructs a reality where we are not allowed to just be. We must be doing at all times; it is valuing personal achievement, time, work, competition, materialism and success. Note that happiness is never an apart of the equation.  The hegemonic assumption is that happiness simply comes with those values.  See this post about happiness and its relationship to money.  Contrast these values with the values that Michael Buettner writes about in his book Thrive.  What are the lessons you learned from Thrive?  How would you like to live your life differently after reading this?  What would be a message you would like to share with the rest of your classmates who don't have the privilege of being in our class?

From the NYT (2025),  Trying to Win at Doing Nothing, With a Crowd Watching

From TED, When Did You Last Take Some Time to Do Nothing?