Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
On his show Patriot Act Hasan Minhaj brilliantly “dissects how the ultra-rich use philanthropy to get richer, distract from the injustices on which they built their fortunes, and dictate politics and policy.”
He interviews Anand Giridharadas, author of the book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. He has been calling for big taxes on the income and wealth of the ultra-rich as a way of eliminating the massive and growing wealth inequality.
In a recent episode of his show Patriot Act, Hasan Minhaj looked at the increased role that Asian-Americans are playing in US politics along with their rise in numbers, and that this demographic has been a key factor in changing some congressional districts from Republican to Democratic and that they could play a significant role in the 2020 elections. He says that Andrew Yang’s candidacy is one sign of this. He also talked with Cory Booker who has apparently had a lot of success reaching out to the Asian-American bloc.
But against this is the fact that their views are not homogeneous and indeed a large number of Indian-Americans have supported the Modi-Trump rightwing nationalistic program. One thing that surprised me was Minhaj pointing out that Asian-Americans tend to be below average in voter registration and actual voting.
Minhaj also traced the history of immigration laws such as the notorious Chinese exclusion act of 1882 and the 1924 law that largely shut down immigration from non-white countries before it was changed in 1965 following passage of the Civil Rights Act.
You can see the full show.
I have to say that I find the whole thing utterly depressing, especially watching the craven subservience of the Republicans to Donald Trump. To add to that is the fact that Democrats are now painting a picture of the FBI as if it were an impartial, purely investigative body of great integrity and ignoring its ugly history of multiple violations of people’s civil rights and outright racism, even if it may or may not have done bad things in this particular case.
Tomorrow is the general election in the UK where the Labour party and its leader Jeremy Corbyn have been subject to a massive smear campaign. Not being British, my views count for little but here is a cartoon by another non-Britisher, an Australian cartoonist who goes under the pen-name ‘first dog on the moon’, that quite nicely sums up my feelings.
As the cartoonist rightly points out, “You know you’re not legally required to like Jeremy Corbyn in order to vote for him right?”
Cartoonist Ted Rall has a theory about why people seem to vote against things that might benefit them.
I am a certified old guy. Just for the fun of it, I sometimes show my children how in touch I am with the younger generation by using slang that is way out of date, such as ‘far out’, ‘groovy’, ‘dig’, and ‘hip’. But even I would not stoop to using the word ‘malarkey’ and it baffles me that Joe Biden, already fighting an image that he is utterly out of touch with current times, would actually use it in his campaign slogan.
Conan O’Brien talks to Biden’s communications person as to the wisdom of this decision.
But maybe this might work. Young people may not know that this is a very old term and may think he has coined new slang and that would make him a trendsetter.
Seth Meyers is surprised that billionaires are surprised that they are being vilified by these two candidates. It seems like for billionaires it is not enough to be obscenely wealthy. They also want to be loved.
Via Frances Langum, I came across two old Thanksgiving clips.
