‘Rich People Don’t Create Jobs’


Midweek Staff Meeting – I Don’t Like Him Either


o-AMBER-570It’s true – it’s hard to like Cyclops.

You can deny workers raises and give that money to CEOs instead, but in Cali, that could cost you.

Fools! Children do not need to know poetry!

In case you had no idea what I did for a living, I worked on these two organizing campaigns.

Pretty cool, right?

Paper is still the best (for in depth comprehension, anyway).

Monday Morning Staff Meeting – Bummer


22a46bdfeI visited this bookstore while wandering Philly. Mrs coffee philosopher was working at a festival on the waterfront and I was searching aimlessly for a bookstore and ambled upon Giovanni’s Room. Nice poetry section. Incidentally, I have started, but never finished, the Baldwin novel of the same name.

Let’s play a fun game – how little does it take to get Ross Douthat’s panties in a twist? Answer: not very much. Apparently the message of love and forgiveness and His Holiness’ emphasis on the longstanding principle of the preferential option for the poor is going to cause some kind of cataclysmic schism in the Catholic church. Oh no! I hope deeply reactionary Catholics like Mel Gibson don’t respond to all this love and forgiveness by doing something crazy! Oh wait… And thanks, Ross, for trying to gin up the impression at the His Holiness is driving people away from the Church, rather than drawing people in and causing them to rethink longstanding prejudices towards the church. In the spirit of Pope Francis I, I will forgive Douthat and the fine folks at the American Conservative and not call them wankers. With love.

What? What? Do my eyes deceive me? Is skyrocketing CEO pay not actually the result of the invisible hand of the free market making the world a better place for the poors? Is it actually a rigged game, played inside a good old boys club? Perish the thought, you gosh darm, commie pinko!

We forgot about a once famous female artist. Again.

Just In Case You Forgot


The Pope and the Catholic Church are not cool with economic inequality and really aren’t comfortable with depending on an unregulated, wild west economy to fix it.

This is in no way aimed at Paul Ryan.

 204. We can no longer trust in the unseen forces and the invisible hand of the market. Growth in justice requires more than economic growth, while presupposing such growth: it requires decisions, programmes, mechanisms and processes specifically geared to a better distribution of income, the creation of sources of employment and an integral promotion of the poor which goes beyond a simple welfare mentality. I am far from proposing an irresponsible populism, but the economy can no longer turn to remedies that are a new poison, such as attempting to increase profits by reducing the work force and thereby adding to the ranks of the excluded.

From Evangelii Gaudium

The Koch-topus (Courtesy Of The WaPo)


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Monday Morning Staff Meeting


The future was then!

Still remembering Amiri Baraka.

Being an author (wordsmith) in Asheville, North Carolina is awesome. Too bad the right wing government in Raleigh is so transparently abhorrent.

Probably.

Don’t cry. Or, actually, do.

Weekend Reading – A Bad Way To View Writing


This piece about metrics for writers bugged. It bugged me on a visceral level. Maybe it’s because the author writes for Forbes. But what about art? The metrics described seem less about true craft and more about commercialism and well… I respect a certain amount of commercialism, isn’t writing good, worthwhile pieces the goal? Do these sorts of metrics contribute all that much to that goal? I’m not so sure.

The decline of public intellectuals coming from academia and contributing as broadly to the national conversation is not driven by some sort of failure of the academics themselves, but rather by dangerous changes to higher education, where poorly paid and precarious contingent faculty make up the majority of professors. Contingent faculty, let me assure you, are both too busy trying to make ends meet to spend much time contributing to all those wonderful things higher ed used to contribute, as well as suffering from a scarlet letter ‘A’ (for ‘Adjunct’) that biases journals against seriously considering their contributions.

Tampa is leading the way in something positive. Sort. I don’t know. I find it hard to believe that we’re not at the back of the class.

Midweek Staff Meeting – Bigger Than Jerry Lewis


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So… Judith Butler is a household name in France. Especially among conservatives. Ok…

Starving mid-list writers face a future of, well, starvation. Poverty, certainly.

Don’t tell me that politically engaged writers have disappeared. Actually, that conversation was about poets. They haven’t disappeared either, but this one is about a fiction writer and essayist.

Weekend Reading – It Turns Out Entrepreneurs Less Concerned About Tax Rates, More Concerned About Not Living In A Nightmarish, Ayn Rand Fantasy World


This will blow your mind, but entrepreneurs are actually drawn to cities with a high quality of life (read: investments in infrastructure, environment, arts, etc) and a pool of skilled employees (read: investments in education, k-12 and beyond). Not, apparently, the low wage wastelands with low taxes and minimal regulations (read: gutted protections for clean air and water and for labor).

Could. Not. Agree. More.

This is the sort of thing that makes me nostalgic. Bars have gotten louder and cafés have gotten quieter… and each change affects the promise of political change. I can remember when you could have a conversation and even read in a bar. I used to read in bars all the time. Not so much anymore. And how long has it been since a coffeehouse was the site of active discussion? A long time, I bet. I can remember when coffeehouses were far more boisterous, with strangers engaging in conversation. The coffee wasn’t so good, but I was actually okay with that trade off. And it probably promoted entrepreneurship. I just sayin’.

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Midweek Staff Meeting – Stop Screwing This Up!


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Darn hippies aren’t doing it right!

It means that we’re going to hell in a hand basket!

Please be wrong.

No. And (if yes), the American reader.

Book of a lost village.

Ice-T is not a fan of Dungeons & Dragons.