My attention was caught by this article about the unbelievable amount of $10,000 per month spent on the hair of French president Francois Hollande. This news was released by the satirical publication Le Canard Enchaine but is supposed to be genuine.
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With each new incident where the police have killed someone, the past events get shifted to the background and even forgotten by those of us who have no personal connection to the events or are not activists. On the program Here and Now host Jeremy Hobson went through a list of nine recent high profile episodes of police killings of black people and the aftermath, with no action being taken against the police in almost all of the cases. You can read the transcript but I strongly recommend clicking on the link and listening to it even though it takes longer because it is so very powerful. There is something about the unemotional reading up of one case after another, accompanied by audio of the events, that carries great weight and makes you realize how awful things have become.
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Jeremy Corbyn became the leader of the British Labour Party largely because of the support of rank and file members. But in order to get on that ballot, he had to meet a threshold among the MPs in parliament and despite their lack of enthusiasm for a socialist, they deigned to include him among the candidates on the ballot as a sop to party left wingers that they were not being completely marginalized. The party establishment were blindsided by the degree of rank and file support for Corbyn that resulted in him becoming elected to the leadership.
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We have now reached a stage in American politics that is sadly all too familiar. Both Republican and Democratic parties are on the verge of nominating candidates that many of us progressives have reactions to ranging from dislike and distrust (in the case of Hillary Clinton) to utterly revolting (Donald Trump). We are then faced with the dilemma of whether to vote for the lesser of the two evils or say to hell with both of them and either not vote or vote for someone else who is more closely attuned to our own agenda but will definitely not win. In the current race, the Green party’s Jill Stein fills that role.
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Journalist Barrett Brown has been spending time in prison and I have written before about how he ended up in this situation. I have also linked to his articles from prison and they are always fascinating because he is a really good writer. His latest missive gets into the nitty-gritty of what life is like in solitary confinement.
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While presidential elections tend to galvanize people and focus attention, I have come to believe that too much attention is placed on them at the expense of other important political activity. The best hope for progressive politics in the long term is to organize at the state and local levels, and elect progressive people to school boards and municipal and state governments where often the issues are far more concrete and immediate than at the national level. Those lower level elected officials form the backbone of the party structure.
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