employment

A labor lawyer for the last 12 years, law was Chris Williams’ third career.  He taught school in Chicago for a decade.  For another decade he was a union organizer.  Only then did he become a social justice lawyer specializing in advocating for and with low-wage workers.   “Even though my route to law school was somewhat circuitous, I think my two prior careers help define who I am as a lawyer,” he says.
Beginnings

Now, then, in order to understand white supremacy we must dismiss the fallacious notion that white people can give anybody their freedom.
– Stokely Carmichael, “Black Power“, Voices of Democracy, 1966

May of 2012, the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Prof. Olivier De Schutter, visited his first NATO country, Canada. He found Canada’s poor generally deprived of adequate nutrition (“People are simply too poor to eat decently”). He found the Aboriginal peoples at risk.

More than two millennium ago, back when The Roman Empire ruled a hefty portion of the world, one of its citizen poets coined the phrase “panem et circenses”, or “bread and circuses”.  What Juvenal was referring to was the manner in which the local yokels were distracted and controlled by those in power.  It was simple.  Just make sure the poor bastards had three square meals daily, coupled with a dazzling array of entertainment.  By that point in history, it had already been proven time and again that the average human cares about nothing more than having a full tummy, a few thrills, and an

A Ruination
Real America is not the window dressing of a nation posed by her government or by the corporate dominated mass media. Behind that pose is an endangering and endangered “ruination.”

Earlier this month while delivering a public lecture in Kiev, “The Challenges of an Ever-Changing World,” former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made an inspiring remark for anyone who might have been thinking that life in Ukraine was bad:

You should go to Liberia where the standard of living is much lower, and then you will be thankful.

Rather than fuss, fume, and fester about the Trump phenomenon, we need to analyze the situation that brought us to this sad point in time, including what motivates his many supporters. Most have issues that anger them. They may be only slightly bruised financially by the conditions wrought by a culture hijacked by conservatism, or fed-up with no voice in how this country is run. Others are perplexed by the deteriorating comfort and well being it has brought into our midst.

The real crisis is not the influx of refugees to Europe, per se, but a toxic combination of destabilising foreign policy agendas, economic austerity and the rise of right-wing nationalism, which is likely to push the world further into social and political chaos in the months ahead.

In the 21st century Americans have been distracted by the hyper-expensive “war on terror.” Trillions of dollars have been added to the taxpayers’ burden and many billions of dollars in profits to the military/security complex in order to combat insignificant foreign “threats,” such as the Taliban, that remain undefeated after 15 years. All this time the financial system, working hand-in-hand with policymakers, has done more damage to Americans than terrorists could possibly inflict.

Basic Income is a serious proposal necessary to address many of the economic problems facing the developed world. Let us start by defining what Basic Income is. For that, the Green Party’s paper on the subject is helpful: