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James Goodman

Does Cigarette Marketing Count as Free Speech? - Garrett Epps - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...261680

speech cigarette politics society health

shared by James Goodman on 31 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • James Goodman on 31 Aug 12
     
    "What is terrifying is not just the radical nature of the statement: that government can do nothing to combat the single greatest public health threat of our time. The hidden message of the opinion -- a message correctly deduced from much of the Roberts Court's First Amendment jurisprudence -- is that the Constitution requires us to live in a make-believe world, where, for example, gross imbalances of wealth have no effect on political campaigns, and "smoking isn't addictive" is as protected as "I pledge allegiance to the flag." I yield to no one in my devotion to free speech. But a legal system that can't differentiate between political opinion and the sale of cigarettes has forfeited any claim to relevance to the nation it supposedly serves."
James Goodman

Café au Lait Publishing proudly presents - 0 views

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shared by James Goodman on 14 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • “I don’t believe in marriage. No I really don’t. Let me be clear about that. I think at worst it’s a hostile political act; a way for small minded men to keep women in the house and out of the way wrapped in the guise of tradition and conservative religious nonsense. At best it’s a happy delusion. It’s two people who truly love each other and have no idea how truly miserable they’re about to make each other. But…but when two people know that and they decide with eyes wide open to face each other and get married anyway then I don’t think its conservative or delusional, I think its radical and courageous and very romantic.” Spoken by Ashley Judd playing the character of Tina Modotti in the film Frida (2002)
James Goodman

Martin Luther King Jr. Would Want a Revolution, Not a Memorial - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...revolution-not-a-memorial.html

revolution memorial MLK MLK Jr. materialism military-industrial complex civil rights economy inequity povety racism

shared by James Goodman on 27 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Militarism is an imperial catastrophe that has produced a military-industrial complex and national security state and warped the country’s priorities and stature (as with the immoral drones, dropping bombs on innocent civilians). Materialism is a spiritual catastrophe, promoted by a corporate media multiplex and a culture industry that have hardened the hearts of hard-core consumers and coarsened the consciences of would-be citizens. Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists.
  • Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse. Arbitrary uses of the law — in the name of the “war” on drugs — have produced, in the legal scholar Michelle Alexander’s apt phrase, a new Jim Crow of mass incarceration. And poverty is an economic catastrophe, inseparable from the power of greedy oligarchs and avaricious plutocrats indifferent to the misery of poor children, elderly citizens and working people.
  • The age of Obama has fallen tragically short of fulfilling King’s prophetic legacy. Instead of articulating a radical democratic vision and fighting for homeowners, workers and poor people in the form of mortgage relief, jobs and investment in education, infrastructure and housing, the administration gave us bailouts for banks, record profits for Wall Street and giant budget cuts on the backs of the vulnerable.
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  • As the talk show host Tavis Smiley and I have said in our national tour against poverty, the recent budget deal is only the latest phase of a 30-year, top-down, one-sided war against the poor and working people in the name of a morally bankrupt policy of deregulating markets, lowering taxes and cutting spending for those already socially neglected and economically abandoned. Our two main political parties, each beholden to big money, offer merely alternative versions of oligarchic rule.
  • The absence of a King-worthy narrative to reinvigorate poor and working people has enabled right-wing populists to seize the moment with credible claims about government corruption and ridiculous claims about tax cuts’ stimulating growth. This right-wing threat is a catastrophic response to King’s four catastrophes; its agenda would lead to hellish conditions for most Americans.
  • King weeps from his grave. He never confused substance with symbolism. He never conflated a flesh and blood sacrifice with a stone and mortar edifice. We rightly celebrate his substance and sacrifice because he loved us all so deeply. Let us not remain satisfied with symbolism because we too often fear the challenge he embraced. Our greatest writer, Herman Melville, who spent his life in love with America even as he was our most fierce critic of the myth of American exceptionalism, noted, “Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial.”
  • King’s response to our crisis can be put in one word: revolution. A revolution in our priorities, a re-evaluation of our values, a reinvigoration of our public life and a fundamental transformation of our way of thinking and living that promotes a transfer of power from oligarchs and plutocrats to everyday people and ordinary citizens. In concrete terms, this means support for progressive politicians like Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont and Mark Ridley-Thomas, a Los Angeles County supervisor; extensive community and media organizing; civil disobedience; and life and death confrontations with the powers that be. Like King, we need to put on our cemetery clothes and be coffin-ready for the next great democratic battle.
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