universal law

Isn’t about casual sex as much as unrestricted freedom and discovery. It’s like lurching into motion on a new roller coaster, where you can get a certain breathless thrill simply from having no control over what lies ahead. Being completely untethered, with only your personal instincts to answer to, is life’s big blank slate.

And without creating any illusions that I’m unsatisfied with my complex and fantastic new (young, partnered) state, I find great fondness in memories of my young, single phase— just like rolling down the windows during a solo drive down an endless stretch of desert highway. 

Back when I believed my mother had a happy marriage—and she did for quite a long time, really—she surprised me by confiding that one of the most blissful moments of her life had been when she was 21, driving down the highway in her VW Beetle, with nowhere to go except wherever she wanted to be. “I had my own car, my own job, all the clothes I wanted,” she remembered wistfully. Why couldn’t she have had more of that?

(“All the Single Ladies,” by Kate Bolick - via The Atlantic)

Two things are happening simultaneously among the key interest groups in American politics. Labor is getting weaker. And corporations, in part due to Citizens United, are getting much stronger. The electoral effect of that is obvious: It favors Republicans. But the legislative effect is, perhaps, more significant: It favors corporate interests in Congress, as Democrats will have to be that much more solicitous of business demands in order to keep from being spent into oblivion.

For a long time, a lot of the energy has been devoted to the question of “how do you revive the labor movement?” The truth is, at this point, you probably can’t. You can slow decline. And you can score isolated wins. But it’s hard to see a real turnaround in labor’s fortunes.

But if you take labor’s decline as a given, then another question presents itself: How do you limit the resulting corporate power over elections and legislators? And that’s much more possible, even in a post-Citizens United world. There’s legislation, like the Fair Elections Now Act, that could publicly finance elections. There’s legislation, like the DISCLOSE Act, that could force so much transparency on corporate spending that it ceases to be an attractive option.

Republicans have had great success arguing that organized labor has too much political power. So much success, in fact, that it seems clear that labor will soon have too little. But last night showed that Democrats aren’t going to get very far simply disputing Republican claims on this point. Rather, they should argue that all interest groups have too much political power, and unite behind legislation that would weaken them.

(Ezra Klein, via Wonkbook)

colony-of-slippermen:

ladies, you know what they always say: “once you go white, you regret it for the next 300 years of imperialist exploitation and unchanging systemic inequality”