Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich writes:
… a new presidential directive called NSPM-7 … may be the most sweeping attack on the First Amendment that I’ve seen in my 60 years in politics.
NSPM-7, which stands for the National Security Presidential Memorandum #7, defines a sweeping range of commonly held political beliefs as indicators of “domestic terrorism,” including “anti-capitalism and anti-Christianity,” “extremism on migration, race, and gender,” and opposition to “traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
Unless you’re completely indifferent to the Constitution of the United States, this concept of “domestic terrorism” should scare the living hell out of you.
Our Founding Fathers would be appalled.
Many of us boomers grew up in the 1960s and can remember to our astonishment that the reason we could pick up our phone and call someone in Paris was the transAtlantic cable. Speaking for myself, it blew my mind that the technology of the day enabled us to navigate a boat across an ocean and spool out 4000 miles of thick wire (with even thicker insulation around it) from the East Coast of the United States to the shores of Europe.
As if that weren’t enough, there are similar cables that went back to the age of telegraphy in the mid-19th Century. On July 13, 1866 the cable laying ship Great Eastern sailed out of Valentia Island, Ireland and on July 27 landed at Heart’s Content in Newfoundland, completing the first lasting connection across the Atlantic. It was active until 1965.
I considered myself cool when I strung two cans connected by a string from my bedroom to my best friend’s in our neighbor’s house in 1961 or ’62. See photo below. My room: house on the left, second floor.
This may be a long way of saying that the graphic at left is total bulls***. The distance is 2700 miles, and the idea of transmitting energy for no reason is stupid beyond words.
Few Americans respect the memory of Che Guevara, and the further they are to the right, the more that’s true. Still, I believe (or at least hope) that most of us would agree with what he said at left.
It’s akin to what theologist Fulton Sheen said, circa 1925, “You must remember to love people and use things, rather than to love things and use people.”
Sadly, our society is headed in the precise opposite direction.
Workers in companies owned by billionaires are being replaced by AI and other forms of IT/automation.
The various parts of the U.S. federal government that formerly provided help for those who need it are being dismantled, and the proceeds distributed to wealthy Republican donors.
Environmental deregulation is causing toxic pollution and climate change, the effects of which disproportionately are hitting the poor.
Would be great to see all this reverse course.
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