Archive for 2014

Andrew W.K. might be my new hero.

He writes a letters column for the Village Voice and I’d never heard of him until yesterday when someone I know posted his response to a letter from Son of a Right-Winger.

In a recent community forum conversation, someone posted the following in a discussion about taxing the wealthy. He was describing a friend of his who owned horses and the issues this business owner faced:

Why is this amazing?

First, someone turned a $240,000 profit off of a $20,000 investment after taxes and trainer fees. That’s a 1200% return on investment. Not bad.

Second, the person involved in this tremendous profit considers this “not a good deal.”

Third, because this comment has everything to do with the recent Hobby Lobby decision.

And fourth, because I consider the author of this post an ally, not an adversary.

If any of this intrigues you, click to read on.

The subject of yesterday’s City Council Neighborhood Committee meeting was the Central Parkway protected bike lane. City council voted 9-0 to approve this during the fall and several people I know recommended attending the meeting as for some unknown reason the issue was being raised again.

I went down to show my support for the bike lane wondering if this was going to turn into another streetcar debacle.

It didn’t. At least not yet.

But it was very interesting.

A few weeks back I had the random pleasure of meeting Bruce Levine, clinical psychologist and author of Get Up, Stand Up and Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic.

As we introduced ourselves and he talked about his activism in the field of mental health, I was struck by something he said: “Making a difference was easier than I thought.”

I wanted to know more. He was kind enough to respond to a few questions.

Monday night Ohio Governor John Kasich delivered his state of the state speech.

Governor John Kasich speaking with attendees at the 2016 First in the Nation Town Hall (photo by Gage Skidmore/CC-BY-SA-2.0)

He cribbed the biblical Reagan “city on a hill metaphor” to describe Ohio:

All of these things have helped Ohio move up to higher, more solid ground, and, if you look, the clouds are moving apart and the sun is beginning to shine, and we can get a glimpse of the summit ahead. We’ve got much further to go, but the success we’ve had gives us the confidence to climb higher. We’re not hopeless, we’re hopeful. We’re not wandering, we have direction. Let’s keep going.

As an Ohioan, I’d like to tell a different story.

It’s a story that appears in bits and pieces in city & school financial reports, in letters to the editor and editorials, in economic analyses, but the full story has largely hid from public sight because it’s not a single sensationalist event.

It’s not a story about a person or administration because you have to go back further than that to see the pattern.

You have to go back further than that to see how a state gets budgeted back to the stone age.

The pattern is simple but takes place over a long period of time: shift tax burden, create deficit, blame government, defund government, repeat.

And unfortunately, it’s a story that’s not just happening in Ohio, but at a national level and in many states across the nation because it’s being pushed by influential corporate groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

The story begins in 2005 …

Still think that Occupy Cincinnati didn’t have an impact?

The media has done a great job covering the 85 people who own more than half the world statistic from the Oxfam report entitled: Working for the Few: Political Capture and Economic Inequality. Media examples here, here, and here.

What I didn’t realize until I read the report was that it has an excellent set of recommendations on how to improve the situation.

Since they’re excellent, the mainstream media seems to have ignored them, and I don’t think Oxfam would mind, here is their series of recommendations.

Go to  2237 Pennsylvania Avenue, Charleston, WV on Google Maps.

It’s right across the street from Freedom Industries. Switch to street view and you can see Freedom.

I stumbled on the following quote from economist Ha-Joon Chang over the holidays:

Once you realize that trickle-down economics does not work, you will see the excessive tax cuts for the rich as what they are—a simple upward redistribution of income, rather than a way to make all of us richer, as we were told.

Chang’s quote reminds us of the initial promise of supply-side economics, that a rising tide would lift all boats, and the subsequent failure to deliver.

It also made me think about one of the most powerful conservative frames: redistribution of wealth.

Chang turns the tables on the typical conservative argument and he gave me an idea how to take things a step further.