No comments

Escaping gravity: some reflections on organizing

  By A political memoir, Political Organizing

To see a world in a grain of sand…And eternity in an hour. Blake Caress the details. Nabokov Organizing is hard, often frustrating work. It takes an enormous amount of energy to get people to fit their personal vision into a collective effort and even more to help them focus on what matters as opposed to what doesn’t. In doing this work you have to deal with every sort of personal quirk and idiosyncrasy found in a, hopefully, large group of people. Of course, as an organizer you are also part of an broad effort to make life better for people. And if you are organizing in a democratic fashion, your goal is to empower people, to lift them and their ideals up, and give them a vision of a better world that they themselves have created. Doing that kind of work is inspiring. But sometimes the disconnect between our… Continue reading

No comments

Why Red, Yellow, and Blue Dogs are all going to support Health Care Reform.

  By Health Care, US

Everyone who favors health care reform, including me, is worried about the Blue Dog Democrats. As the state director of Health Care For America Now in PA, I’m concerned about the five blue dog Democrats in Pennsylvania and our staff, volunteers and I are working as hard as we can to keep all of them on the straight and narrow. We have a long week ahead of us dealing with the Blue Dogs. But I think we are going to win, for two reasons. One is the enormous pressure we are going to bring on Blue Dogs, from our coalition partners and the activists we identified. I’m building and talking and writing about that pressure fifteen hours a day, so I won’t say that much about it here. Instead I want to consider a second reason: given the political logic of the moment, while a lot of the Blue Dogs… Continue reading

No comments

The question remains, which side are you on?

  By Health Care, Politics, US

We are reaching a critical moment in the effort to reform health care in America this year, a moment in which we will find out who is serious about addressing the health care crisis we have we have in this country and who is not. Everyone knows problem: health insurance for the middle class is becoming more and more uncertain for two reasons. The first is that that the costs of health insurance are rising far faster than wages. Health insurance premiums have doubled over the last 9 years, going up three times faster than wages. As costs rise, health care becomes unaffordable for individuals and businesses drop health care coverage for their employees, The second reason is that insurance companies deny people coverage and care. In the fine print of insurance policies are provisions that limit lifetime benefits that enable insurance companies to decide that a treatment we need… Continue reading

No comments

Small Business and Health Care Reform

  By Health Care

NOBODY will benefit more from the health care reform bill, HR 3200, now making its way through the House of Representatives than the commonwealth’s small businesses. Yet some of the official lobbyists for small business, such as the National Federation of Independent Businesses, are fighting to block it. The NFIB doesn’t actually represent most small businesses in the country. And what’s worse—this is the dirty little secret of health-care lobbying— the leaders of this and other business advocacy organizations are fighting insurance reform out of their own self-interest, not out of a concern for their own members. Continue reading

No comments

The Republican Gang of Six and the PA State Budget

  By Federal Budget, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Budget

In Pennsylvania today, we face an budget crisis of huge proportions. In the face of drastically reduced revenues due to the recession, the state faces a enormous deficit. And there are only two ways to deal with it. The Republicans in the State Senate have proposed massive reductions in state spending that would had devastating effects on education and health care, particularly for children. The Democrats, lead by Governor Rendell, have proposed temporarily raising the state income tax, which is one of the lowest in the country. The state budget crisis is all about the Republicans in Pennsylvania being captured by the extreme anti-tax, anti-government ideology that has dominated the Republican party in the South and West for years but is relatively new here. These ain’t your grandfather’s Republicans. And, frankly, when Republicans control the Senate by ten seats, I’m not sure there is all that much we can do… Continue reading

No comments

Eros and Eternity

  By Love and Sex

Hannah Miller’s blog post, which I discussed in my previous post, also points to another way in which the urge to document our lives might be problematic, one that I actually was writing about over the weekend. To get to my point quickly, let me reference a great New Yorker cartoon. A woman is addressing the guests at what is evidently a fairly fancy party. She says, “The video of the first half of the party is now playing in the family room.” The apprehension to which this cartoon points, and that I see in Hannah’s post is this: the urge to document our lives, indeed the urge to reflect on our lives, can be a way to escape from living our lives. (I certainly see, though, why Hannah is writing about it at a family event. The urge to reflect is likely to come forward when one is hanging… Continue reading

No comments

What will survive of us is love

  By Love and Sex

My friend Hannah Miller has written a fascinating blog post that got me thinking in a little different way about some issues that I’ve been working on for a book I’m slowly finishing. Indeed, I had a two-fold reaction. This is the first. A second is in another post. Hannah starts by asking why we are so busy documenting our lives, implicitly pointing out how so much of what we do on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Picassa, among other sites, is devoted to putting down a record of what’s happened to us and what we care about. She ends by pointing out that geologists whose focus is on deep time—the changes in the planet that take place over eons–both recognize the extent to which our lives are a mere blip in time but also get a sense of connection to eternity. To see the wonderful way she gets from the… Continue reading

No comments

Why protests continue at the Valley Swim Club

  By Racial Justice

There are reports that The Valley Swim Club is offering the Creative Steps Day Camp an opportunity to return. I know nothing more than what is being reported in the Daily News at http://tinyurl.com/moea74. That’s a good first step. But I don’t know whether the club has offered an apology for its actions or is willing to take other steps to undo the harm it has caused. In the meantime, while things remain unsettled, the pastors, and people in the neighborhood, and those of us who have been organizing protests to this point, believe they should continue. Continue reading