A lot of times in the rhetoric, people forget the facts. And the facts are that thousands of small businesses-Hispanically owned or otherwise-pay taxes at the highest marginal rate.
The comics that are just conversing with you up there and drawing on their own life, yeah, I guess so. I guess some do political humor, some do topical humor, but the ones that I like, the ones that are appealing to me, were guys who were just talking to you about their life.
Now consciousness, what is consciousness? Consciousness is being aware of one's surroundings, recognizing the existence, truth or fact of something; being aware of the very moment, the very instant that you are in; being aware of how you affect the human social, political, and natural ecology you are a part of and how it affects you. Consciousness is being informed and instructed through your groups peculiar culture on the effects of the varied ecologies on your immediate and distant ancestors, and to be aware of their interpretation of that experience.
Freedom of expression is no longer a political nicety, but a precondition for economic competitiveness.
The failure of the first Barack Obama administration to really deliver on a new War on Poverty and a new language to explain these societal challenges in some ways provided the fuel that led to the Occupy Movement a few years later. And, while Occupy was a somewhat transitory phenomenon, many of the activist groups that emerged during this period are still out there, and still working on reshaping the political debate around taxes, around welfare, around government assistance to the poor, around debt relief for students, and so on.
Members of Congress should be compelled to wear uniforms like NASCAR drivers, so we could identify their corporate sponsors.
What America needs is a political revolution.
Plato felt that a complete reconstruction of society's political program was needed.
The State is the altar of political freedom and, like the religious altar, it is maintained for the purpose of human sacrifice.
Those who claim absolutism is merely a myth are right that it has been misused simply as a byword for political centralisation.
Most political leaders acquire their position by causing large numbers of people to believe that these leaders are actuated by altruistic desires
Developing wisdom in community is to constantly learn and relearn that expedience in the short term - whether for efficiency or profitability - can lead to disasters in the long term in financial, ecological, political, social, and spiritual spheres.
American cities are kind of difficult contexts to work in. They are politically complex. There are a lot of different interest groups. It takes immense political skill to get anything done at all.
Within one's own family money is not the measure of things, unless the person is an absolute Scrooge. Only the most extreme kind of monster would put a price on everything. There are all kinds of other things that we are not supposed to sell - political influence being one of them. We too rarely have public conversations about the common sense of money. We too rarely talk about the human cost of putting some of these economic measures into effect.
Down the road, I'll probably have a kid or two or three. And there will probably be political events or spiritual things to comment on, and humor.
All writers who can claim to be called 'living' must be political in a sense. They must have what the Quakers call a concern to understand what is happening in the world, and must engage themselves, in their writing, to promote no comfortable lies, of the sort which people will pay well to be told rather than the truth.
From the viewpoint of political power, culture is absolutely vital. So vital, indeed, that power cannot operate without it. It is culture, in the sense of the everyday habits and beliefs of a people, which beds power down, makes it appear natural and inevitable, turns it into spontaneous reflex and response.
The trick is to steal big.
In authoritarian societies, control over the production, distribution, and circulation is generally in the hands of the government, or what might be termed traditional modes of political sovereignty. But in neoliberal societies, sovereignty is often in the hands of major corporations that now have power over not only the production of knowledge but also over the implementation of policies that bear down on matters of life and death, living and surviving.
What is especially important is addressing the question of how religion can be enforced through political means and what can be done to create a political environment that, on the one hand, acknowledges the role of religion in society, while on the other hand does not impose one religion on the populace at the expense of all others.