In 1787, the Constitution was being framed in strict secrecy. Nearing the end, some citizens gathered outside Constitutional Hall, anxious to find out what had been produced behind closed doors. Immediately upon the framers’ emergence from the hall, as the story goes, a Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia asked Benjamin Franklin, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” Straight away, Franklin said, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
When I first heard this story,
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Yes, of course I’m talking about the circus of politics that was the presidential election we just had. On November 10, 2016, Carolyn Gregoire, senior writer for The Huffington Post, huffingtonpost.com, wrote an article entitled Your Post-Election Pain Is Real Grief. She states, “For more than half the nation and much of the world, we are in a period of mourning. After waking up to President-elect Donald J. Trump—what many can only describe as a nightmare—Americans face emotionally charged weeks and months ahead.”
She also states,
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After reading this lovely piece in the aftermath of the triumph of hatred and vapidity in the US election, we invited Kay Burch to offer it for this week’s post in Political Straight Talk. After all, sometimes the only thing to do is look for the biggest of big pictures.
Nobel laureate physicist Frank Wilczek has published a book-length meditation on a fascinating concept: Is beauty the driving force of the natural world?
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We’re continuing here with our discussion about the September 23, 2016, CBS This Morning show with Gayle King and Oprah Winfrey on the grand opening of Washington DC’s Smithsonian National African American Museum of History and Culture. We think it’s really important for us as white people to get a much deeper understanding of racial discrimination as it has been historically and continues to be experienced by Black Americans. We also know it is similar to but not identical to all kinds of other intolerance of many groups,
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In one of our recent blogs, we talked about the books we’ve been reading that have enlightened us about the unconscious assumption that history equals white history and that white history holds the whole truth. Turns out that is so untrue, to find out the rest of the story can be mind and heart shattering. So how can any of us, or each of us, get by our feelings of overwhelming powerlessness regarding the violent instability of our identity as a nation?
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On the CBS This Morning show, September 23, 2016, anchor Gayle King discussed the grand opening of Washington DC’s Smithsonian National African American Museum of History and Culture with her guest and friend Oprah Winfrey.
They were discussing the history of the enslavement of Africans in this country as depicted in the museum, when the TV viewers’ eyes were drawn to a plaque with a quote by Ida B. Wells (1862‑1931), an African American journalist,
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One of our Founding Fathers’ “four foundations of freedom” was Widespread Education. They felt that every generation needed to grow up learning the history of this country so that the origin of and reasoning behind our democracy would be generally and broadly understood by every schoolchild in America. And that by the time each schoolchild became old enough to vote, he (until 1920 anyway) would know who was in politics because of self-aggrandizement and who was in it to fulfill the Constitution’s mission of governing for the general welfare of all the people.
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I agree with Elizabeth Preza, a staff writer for AlterNet, the website that focuses on politics, media, and cultural criticism, when she says, “Donald Trump is a bully without exception.” What’s disturbing about this fact screams from the very lead-in (also called lede) of her excellent June 2, 2016, article, “Trump’s Childish Name-Calling Is a Time-Honored Strategy of Bullying”: “Trump’s insults may seem immature, but there’s a longstanding tradition of elevating bullies to power.” Of course she couldn’t be sure at that point that he would become the Republican candidate for president,
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The title of this post today is actually a trick question. That’s because democracy is a political system and capitalism is an economic system. They’re apples and oranges. Capitalism can operate in almost any political system—monarchy, oligarchy, fascism, communism, or democracy. Democracy can likewise operate in almost any economic system—planned systems, market systems, public systems, or private systems, though some economic frameworks are more conducive to government of the people, by the people, and for the people than others. When capitalism,
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Forbes Magazine, the “other” magazine for the owners of corporate wealth and power (you know, Fortune 500 is the premier one), reports what many have warned us about at least since both Adam Smith and Karl Marx first wrote about capitalism’s dangers. Way back in February of this year, Forbes published “Unless It Changes, Capitalism Will Starve Humanity by 2050,” by contributor Drew Hansen, who goes even further than we did in Political Straight Talk,
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