What’s Cooking in the September Issue?
Welcome to our September issue! It’s the silly season in both politics and sports and SA is here to provide some color commentary on both. First, a view from our political perch where we spy the duopoly’s two candidates hot footing up Pennsylvania Avenue. rhetorical basket of goodies in hand —not to be confused with real promises of real bounties reserved for the heavy hitters whose checkbooks are financing the madness. Banks, private equity, arms makers, technology companies, corporations in all the major industry groupings —the promises made to them you can bet the ranch on. Think of it as the empire parceling out the goodies to their friends and the leftovers —a little tax relief here, a little health care reform there, a little (miniscule) sentencing reform sprinkled in—for the rest of us.
In the first article, we look at two women who have thrown their hats into the presidential ring. One in 1872 and the current one. We compare and contrast their strengths (certain personality attributes are de rigueur for a presidential aspirant, particularly a woman), their values, motivations —all the essentials for separating the wheat from the chaff. Read the article to find out who comes out smelling like a rose and who is pretty much all thorns.
Next comes our take on “lesser evilism.” For those of you who don’t keep up with the pearls of wisdom issuing out of the profound thinkers of ivy league universities, here’s the long and short of it. Delusionary savants —[sadly]Noam Chomsky among them —started campaigning to revive this doomsday scenario back in 2012 after Obama had come crashing off his lofty pedestal, shedding his candidate-promise-them-everything- persona to reveal a corporate driven, free trade loving, opaque, civil-liberties-destroying neo-liberal. Here’s how it shook out in 2012: Obama may not be perfect (grand understatements accompany this theory kind of like how peanut butter goes with jelly), may actually be just this side of crappy, but we sure don’t want the other guy. So in blue states (democratic through and through) vote for whomever or go fishing, but in battleground states (voters in those states decide the election as contrasted with the rest of us in states that don’t really count) a vote for Obama is essential. Lesser evilism was big news in 1972 in a futile attempt to prop up a losing candidate (McGovern). The Dems trotted it out in 2012 and lo and behold it’s back in 2016 (on the same schedule as crocuses springing up each year to herald the coming of spring). We take a hard look at the phenomenon, and take you back to the 1972 election–Richard Nixon vs George McGovern–and the ultimate put down of this self-defeating cynical advice.
Last, we roll out a new feature called “Short Takes” that will appear periodically. As the name implies, these are mostly short (sometimes the subject’s complexity calls for a little less brevity) observations on topics ranging from the inscrutable to the downright unimaginable. In this issue we serve up a witches brew of the timely, the timeless, and the tiresome among the stories of the day. Short take 1 addresses the neoliberal response (in this case democrat) to a devastating breach of the state’s responsibility to protect its citizens. It’s the Katrina nightmare all over, except in a different city, Flint; from a different party, democrat; addressing a different catastrophe, poisoned dinking water but with the same response: empty promises. Short take 2 plunges into a thorny “who’s to blame” discussion. Acknowledging a father’s grief and anger over the death of his son, we explore the history of a failed and murderous strategy and assign blame where it rightfully belongs to the dirty dealings of four –make that five– US presidents. The whole unconscionable history serves as a cautionary tale for the upcoming election. Short take 3 takes us into never-never land for a glimpse at the empire’s exceptional athletes living large in Rio. How large? Think a luxury ocean liner. [WARNING: this article may not be suitable for those of a more delicate frame of mind. some of the images it provokes might be downright disturbing. producing a kind of sleepless in Seattle moment.]
That’s it for September folks.
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