This is a political blog that endeavors to view today's political, economic, and social issues from a left-wing, yet (I hope) original and unconventional point of view.
This is essentially an extension of my own political blog at The Left Bank. Please feel free to check it out for more commentary than appears here.
I come from a number of generations of Lower East Side Jewish intellectuals stretching back to the first half of the 19th century (I. F. Stone was a cousin). I have been a social organizer and movement person since my parents took me to my first Civil Rights protest in 1961 at age 13.
I have, I feel, an unusual view on the politics, economics, and social issues in this country, stemming from an equally unusual set of life experiences. I hold an undergraduate degree in Political Science from a university whose PS department was headed by a (then) famous Neoconservative and Federalist Society leader whose own Doctorate was earned under Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago (along with Paul Wolfowitz, Abram Shulsky, and other PNAC and Bush-era neocons), so I am well versed in their underlying philosophy, though I passionately reject it. At the same time, I was somewhat prominent as an organizer for the anti-Vietnam/Peace Movement, Civil Rights Movement, Migrant Workers, Feminist Movement, and Union Movement (I am still a Wobbly in good standing - a member of the anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World - which I first joined in the 1960s when working as a boycott organizer for Cesar Chavez and NFWA/UFWOC).
After college, I took graduate degrees in Computer Science and have worked for well over 30 years as an independent software design and development consultant. Much of my work has been, of necessity, with the top corporations, banks, and financial institutions so intricately involved in our current economic collapse. I have had an almost unique seat on the inside to observe the moral and ethical rot and cynical psychopathy that dominates today's corporate culture and has worked tirelessly to turn America into a medieval-style plutocracy (and has almost fully succeeded so far).
So, I hope that I can bring both the outsider, leftist, social-democrat/anarcho-syndicalist political ideals and a nauseatingly inside view of the anti-democratic cancer at the heart of our system to the current issues and problems.
I hope to be able to take today's arguments on political, social, and economic conflicts into deeper and wider territories and, if I'm able, to talk about both more effective ways to resist today's systems (the Tea Party has run rings around Occupy from an organizational standpoint) and more humane and compassionate alternative systems.