Category: Under the Perfect Sun

By Jim Miller

Today my column falls on my birthday, and while I have never been much for formal celebrations, there is something about turning the page (in this case to 54) that makes one stop for a moment and ponder the passing of time and the meaning of this day in the stream of all the others. It is, in fact, just another day, one we arbitrarily mark in the larger collection of them that we call our lives.

For this reason, the Buddhists prefer to say things like “Happy Today’s Day” or “Happy Continuation” rather than attaching themselves to the illusion of measured time. Surely this is a wise practice.

Nonetheless, the Western temptation to measure and/ or evaluate persists, so we like to notch our belts as we go with lists of accomplishments: I got a degree, a job, a marriage, a family, a set of social or material accomplishments, etc.

By this reckoning, the birthday can become a sort of life resume check

By Jim Miller

If our morning commutes tell us anything, it’s that there are a lot of miserable, angry people out there. Sometimes on my drive to the gym, I make the mistake of counting the number of people who either cut me off, speed up to not let me change lanes, or dangerously tailgate my car.

Let’s just say the numbers are regularly dismaying.

It’s a Social Darwinist nightmare out there on the road in F-You Nation, and I have long thought that this phenomenon spoke to something larger afoot in the country—a collective darkness seems to be on the rise, and not just on the political front. We are an unhappy bunch.

As the Washington Post recently reported:

Americans are unhappy, according to the report, an annual list ranking the overall happiness levels of 156 countries — and it’s only getting worse.

All Day Conference at the DoubleTree by Hilton in Mission Valley at 7450 Hazard Center Drive from 9:00 AM until 5:30 PM.

Want a great crash course in local, statewide, and national progressive issues and politics? Then you won’t want to miss the third annual Progressive Labor Summit this Saturday, April 13th in Mission Valley. This one-day event will feature a wide range of speakers and breakout sessions on labor, the environment, immigration, housing, transit, education, local politics, organizing, and much more.

Some of day’s highlights include: the first San Diego mayoral forum with Todd Gloria, Tasha Williamson, and Barbara Bry; a discussion with leaders from the unions whose recent strikes woke up the country—the United Teachers Los Angeles and the Oakland Education Association

This post was written for April 1st.

By Jim Miller

Recently, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took an unwarranted shot at the heart and soul of American Democracy: the moderates. As NBC news reported, AOC opined that:

“Moderate is not a stance. It’s just an attitude towards life of, like, ‘meh,’” she said, shrugging her shoulders for emphasis. “We’ve become so cynical, that we view ‘meh,’ or ‘eh’ — we view cynicism as an intellectually superior attitude, and we view ambition as youthful naivete when … the greatest things we have ever accomplished as a society have been ambitious acts of visions.

“The ‘meh’ is worshiped now. For what?” she continued to cheers.

What can one say about this impudent snark other than, how dare she?

By Jim Miller

This is who we are now: a country where the criminal rich brazenly buy their kids’ ways into elite colleges while the sons and daughters of ordinary Americans scrape and claw to gain admission and then struggle to pay for the skyrocketing costs of higher education. As a recent Public Broadcasting Service story on the college admissions scandal put it:

The multimillion-dollar bribery scheme unveiled by the Justice Department this week has sparked equal parts outrage and incredulity over the astonishing lengths some wealthy parents have gone to get their children into the prestigious universities of their choice.

Labor Needs to Listen to the Next Generation and Help Craft a Green New Deal with Strong Labor Provisions

By Jim Miller

Young people across the world are making sure their voices are heard. I was proud of my son, his friends, and their classmates last week when they walked out of San Diego High School to participate in the Global Climate Strike during which over a million students worldwide in two thousand locations across one hundred and twenty-five countries stood up to call for urgent climate action .

Moments like these serve as lights in the greater darkness.

By Jim Miller

The formal beginning of spring is just around the corner, but an unusually wet winter already has visitors flooding into Borrego Springs in search of desert sunflowers, verbena, lupine, poppies, and primrose.

Thanks to a chain of storms, the desert is green and bursting with the promise of a rare “super bloom” that will likely carpet its floor with wildflowers in and around Anza-Borrego State Park. For local Borrego Springs businesses and hotels, this event is an economic boom that floods the town with a wave of commerce and full hotel rooms.

By Jim Miller

In my last column on the rocket-speed escalation of economic inequality in the United States, I noted how one of the central problems we face is that “the current neoliberal ideological hegemony finds basic economic justice unimaginable.”

Of course, America is a capitalist country where the interests of the powerful shape the ideological landscape, but there have been moments in our history when counterhegemonic forces and ideas have opened space for more egalitarian thinking and politics. For instance, the rise of both the labor and civil rights movements pushed back against and altered the status quo as have other, more short-lived but still significant eruptions of dissent. Indeed, just last week, public school teachers in Oakland

The Wages of Inequality Continue to Grow, Year after Year

Over the last few weeks, the national political discourse has been chock-full of ridiculous handwringing in what stands in for progressive circles over whether Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and “the left” will push the Democrats beyond what whoever the pundit of the moment is deems the “acceptable” political boundaries.

Apparently, Trump can flirt with authoritarianism, push the world toward ecocide, and lie through his teeth every day but Democrats cross the line when they fail to properly genuflect before our plutocratic masters.

Meanwhile, America’s moneyed elite are laughing all the way to the bank. The rich are getting richer so fast that it’s hard to keep up with them.

The Moderate Threat to Climate Action

By Jim Miller

As heartening as the emergence of the Green New Deal as a political rallying cry and litmus test of sorts for the early field of Democratic presidential candidates is, the predictably negative response in other quarters is equally dismaying.

Of course, the most obvious naysaying comes from the Republicans and the rightwing media following the lead of a president who suggests that snowstorms and cold weather are evidence that climate change isn’t happening.

But that’s not the real problem.

Last week in the State of the Union, Trump unveiled one of the pillars of his re-election campaign in the midst of his speech:

“America will never be a socialist country.”

While this line of attack is clearly a predictable jab at the rising popularity of policy ideas promoted by Democratic Socialists Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez like free college, Medicare for all, and raising taxes on the rich, it also reveals a rising fear on the part of the global elite that a populist left might be far more dangerous to their interests than the current brand of extreme rightwing populism in the United States and elsewhere across the globe.

The San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council Passes Resolution in Support of a Green New Deal

Sometimes the unexpected happens. Last year, during one of her first visits to the Capitol as a newly elected member of the House of Representatives, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made headlines by joining a group of young activists from the Sunrise Movement protesting outside Nancy Pelosi’s office and calling for a Green New Deal. Since that time, Pelosi has formed a committee to address the idea, but, even more importantly, a Green New Deal has emerged as one of the key progressive talking points in the early days of the Democratic presidential race, forcing even some reluctant candidates to at least give it a nod.

Not surprisingly, probable candidate Bernie Sanders is at the front of the line, but he has been joined by Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and even some less likely suspects who despite their “centrism” seemed to feel it necessary to voice qualified if grudging support to some form of a Green New Deal.