We were in a noisy restaurant, so it would have been difficult to pose a series of follow up questions to guide either of us in developing a plan then and there. Hopefully, there are plenty of others who ponder that very question already.
“The obstacle in the path becomes the path. Never forget, within every obstacle is an opportunity to improve our condition.”
Holiday, Ryan. The Obstacle Is the Way (p. 7). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.Seemingly a long time ago now, it was but weeks. The legislature, trying to wind down it's 2019 regular session, had a few days worth of brouhaha while some tried to force a vote on ERA ratification and very stubborn others dug their heels in to prevent it.
With the current composition of the state House and Senate, an actual vote may have passed the measure. GOP leadership in each chamber would have none of it, however, as they controlled what could be voted on and when. Rules are meant to be broken, at least sometimes. Well, Parliamentary maneuvers, like Discharge Petitions, exist to get around some rules... sometimes.
Regardless, concerning the ERA, obstacles still remain. In this case, they exist solely for the purpose of defining the path necessary to achieve the goal. Just like for two other obvious social constructs/injustices that the Founders failed to resolve at the birth of the Republic. Abolition of slavery, and women's suffrage.
The enactment of the ERA hence is as inevitable as abolition and universal voting rights. There are not enough Cathi Herrods to prevent passage forever.
But I digress.
Ridding the Republic of the scourge of Trump is just as important and urgent. Yesterday evening I met others also. People just as upset over the current condition of American federal government and politics as I am.
A couple of them were not so optimistic about whether Trump could be defeated in 2020. Because of the ascent of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, I am optimistic. About that subject, journalist Matt Taiibi a day or so ago had a story published on Rolling Stone. Here are a few excerpts,
Elizabeth Warren’s Rise Is a Plus for Issue Politics — And a Bad Sign for Billionaires
Back in 2009, I called for Elizabeth Warren to run for president. I may have been the first media figure to do so. This was early in the Obama presidency, when he was beginning to renege on some of his progressive campaign promises (closing Gitmo, drug re-importation, etc.), but more importantly already showing an unwillingness to take on Wall Street after the crash.
Warren, a rare high-finance literate among national politicians, seemed like the person needed to lead an economic reform effort after the crash:
“We need someone … to re-seize the Party from the Wall Street interests that have come to dominate it … [Someone] who will know the difference between real regulatory reform and a dog-and-pony show, and will not be likely to fill a cabinet with bankers from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.”
I believed that then and now. I’d happily vote for Warren. When she was about to launch her campaign and a string of editorialists came out with pre-emptive broadsides warning she would “not enjoy an easy path” to the nomination because of a “darkening cloud” of controversy around her, I called it out as the cheap Beltway-press manipulation it was.
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All great victories, be they in politics, business, art, or seduction, involved resolving vexing problems with a potent cocktail of creativity, focus, and daring. When you have a goal, obstacles are actually teaching you how to get where you want to go—carving you a path. “The Things which hurt,” Benjamin Franklin wrote, “instruct.” -- The Obstacle Is the Way (p. 8)
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The strength of Warren’s campaign is a series of detailed policy proposals aimed at correcting a series of corrupting inequities in American life. The first major proposal she released, on January 24th, was aimed at perhaps the biggest problem in American society: the wealth gap.
While working people almost all live off highly-taxed “income,” high net worth individuals mostly live off other revenue streams: carried interest, capital gains, inheritance, etc. Warren’s plan would create a net worth calculation that would hit households worth between $50 million and $1 billion with a 2% annual “ultra-millionaires tax.”
She has a similar plan for corporate tax, one that would wipe away the maze of loopholes big companies currently use, and force any firm that makes over $100 million in profits to pay a new 7 percent tax. “Amazon would pay $698 million instead of zero,” she says. “Occidental Petroleum would pay $280 million … instead of zero.”
Warren has also unveiled ambitious plans for cancelation of student debt and free college, universal child care and a new corporate accountability plan that would force high-ranking corporate executives to certify they’d conducted a “due diligence” inquiry, making it easier to prosecute them for misdeeds conducted under their watch.
She even created an “economic patriotism” plan that overtly targets many of the excuses for domestic job loss offered by her own party — automation, a “skills gap” or just blunt economic reality when trying to compete with cheaper labor abroad. She calls bull[shit] on it all. “No,” she writes, “America chose to pursue a trade policy that prioritized the interests of capital over the interests of American workers.”
She then laid out a series of plans that create “aggressive intervention on behalf of American workers,” create a “Department of Economic Development” and put an end to practices like corporations using public money for R&D, then eating the benefits in stock buybacks while exporting jobs. Her plan would give taxpayers an equity stake in publicly developed enterprises.
This idea has such broad appeal that it even had Tucker Carlson talking it up last week as he denounced companies that “wave the flag, but have no loyalty or allegiance to America.” She even got Carlson to rip Republicans, saying, “Republicans in Congress can’t promise to protect American industries. They wouldn’t dare.
Warren’s platform has a lot in common with some rivals — especially Bernie Sanders...
The two politicians do have some important differences, many of which were elucidated in a speech Sanders just gave on Wednesday at George Washington University. In it, Sanders explained why he calls himself a “Democratic Socialist,” a term Warren has not embraced. (She went out of her way in March to say, “I am a capitalist. Come on. I believe in markets.”)
Those inside the Sanders campaign would say the speech he gave this week — which explained his policies as a continuation of FDR’s “New Deal” — outlined the main difference between the two candidates.
An oversimplified view might describe Warren’s campaign as an effort to correct and more aggressively regulate the flaws of American capitalism, while also preserving the market-based system in which she does seem to genuinely believe.
Sanders, meanwhile, believes in “guaranteed economic rights for all Americans,” and is faster to place the solutions to problems he and Warren both identify in the hands of government. He believes health care, for instance, should be completely divorced from market considerations, and is less squeamish about disenfranchising private health insurance and other powerful lobbies. In fact, his campaign believes that any candidate who isn’t creating enemies is probably not proposing real change — as Sanders says, a Biden-esque “middle ground” platform “antagonizes no one, stands up to nobody, and changes nothing.”
The observation about the Democratic race that’s sure to be relevant when real bullets start flying in primaries is that Democratic voters are in schism: there is a corporate-funded, centrist wing and an oppositional/anti-corporate/anti-war wing.
Warren has smartly marketed herself as having a foot in both camps. She may very well prove a unifying figure — if that is possible, given how fierce the resistance would inevitably be to any real attempt to reorganize the banking, pharmaceutical and tech industries. A lot will depend on how much credibility she’ll muster with hardcore progressive voters, some of whom are already grumbling, for instance, about her unwillingness (to date) to confront the health sector via Medicare-for-All.
If she does win over those voters [and the Arizona Eagletarian believes she will], she’ll quickly end up with the opposite problem, i.e. Bernie’s current problem. If Warren is beating Biden by next January, and Sanders has fallen off, bet on this: the candidate who wants to tightly regulate banks, break up Amazon and Google and tax the hell out of the party’s biggest donors will once again find herself besieged by negative press, and questions about what the Times has already called her “difficult path to winning over moderates.”Be not dismayed my friend--the Obstacle IS the WAY. "Polls are noise. Fights over issues are real. (Taiibi)"
However, Elizabeth Warren's motto, Nevertheless WE Persist, will carry the day.
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