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The Case for Pragmatism

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A bizzy day calls for a repeat.  This one is especially timely, originally from two years ago.

You probably have a better idea about how to do something. But will it work? You’ll never know until you try. When you do give it a go, you may find that getting there requires a lot of compromises along the way before your dream is realized. Or, perhaps, you’ll simply give up – blaming your own inability to make it happen or blaming the world for being so darned unfair.

Both experiences are simply part of human nature meeting reality. We’re all idealists at heart, at least in a certain sense. Only a few people have the skills necessary to make those dreams a reality and much of the time they have to keep their eyes on the prize. A dream is one thing, but getting there requires wide-awake attention.

That is why an open, democratic political system can’t live by rigid ideology alone.

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The 1%? Try the 31%

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A lot has been made over the last decade of “The 1%”, the top wealth earners and owners in the nation. From Occupy Wall Street to the Sanders campaign there has been a call for a revolution of sorts to overthrown them and put the nation on the right path. The other 99%, the theory goes, cannot remain slaves forever.

As time has gone on, however, something strange happened to the calculus that went into describing the revolution. Those at the top of the wealth pyramid? They know there’s something wrong. Many are more than a little sympathetic, and most seem to be at least resigned to a more progressive system.

Meanwhile, genuine American fascism has risen in a boisterous and orange form. Who is the real enemy? Who do we need to rise up against? If you’re paying any attention it’s not necessarily the rich.

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The Next Economy – An 8 Point Plan

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The beauty of election season is that every citizen has an opinion and they get to voice it. Because we are a Democratic Republic, it’s usually up to the candidates running to propose very specific platforms for the voters to judge. But these are often thin on details – either because they are hard to pin down before they are fed into the complex process of making sausages, er, laws or because candidates are full of hooey.

Both are usually true. Promises are one thing, delivering quite another.

Barataria has taken the position that the economy is turning over, indeed that there is a new economy replacing the one that gradually failed. The turmoil is what has voters so angry as no one seems to be in charge. It’s also Barataria’s position that complaining without proposing a specific solution isn’t all that helpful, so here is the Barataria platform.

It leaves aside a lot to focus on one thing – turning over our economy into the next one. How do we build a dynamic system for everyone? Here are my immediate thoughts.

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Today’s Pirates – the Panama Papers

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Have you ever wanted to be a pirate? If being free on the high seas has an allure you may want to think again. Today’s pirates don’t have ships or parrots, nor do they take over other ships at sea. They’ve gone bigtime, making a lot more money off of the very lucrative practice of making money disappear even more surely than burying it in the ground.

That’s what has been shown in the “Panama Papers”, a huge stash of 11 million documents taking up about 2.5 terabytes of data. The leak of papers from Panamanian firm Mossack Fonseca is about ten times the size of Edward Snowden’s leak – and none of the secrets revealed are about security.

This is about money. Lots of it.

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Outrage

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Every day we are bombarded with information – far more than we can handle thrown at us from a perspective we don’t understand. The most common response is outrage – disbelief that this could possibly happen.

Every day we find ourselves in situations we don’t understand – things that are going crazy around us.. The most common response is outrage – disbelief that this could possibly happen.

The officers responsible for the death of Jamar Clark on 15 November was one of these incidents, and the reports and (lack of) legal proceedings comes at us in much the same way. Everything about this makes no sense if you look deep enough into it yet everyone has an opinion about it. Let me tell you the simple, clear facts that we can be sure of:

Jamar Clark is dead. Any city that has been through this and wants to be known as “civilized” has to make sure that this does not happen ever again.

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