Please sign the petition for Sam Seder.
The reason Sam is important is that he is the only host on Air America who speaks regularly about progressive races around the country. As you all know that's #1 requirement before we can even start to talk about change in this country: a progressive Congress. So I am baffled why other hosts are not more aggressive in this regard. Nevertheless here is your chance to have a real progressive in that timeslot:
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/...
We have a serious management problem in our world.
I've thought about this a lot since the 2000 election: where are we headed, what's really going on?! Every time there is a decisive moment in our lives things tend to suddenly go very bad, it seems like it's just out of the blue that "outside circumstances" overpowered our life. Stuff that we don't control. "Soccer moms" and "security moms" suddenly feel like we were wrong all along throughout a decade of peacetime and prosperity, that we need a little national security to feel safer, that we need a "new direction" or there is this new competition creeping up in world markets and our jobs are no longer there for us to provide retirement or security. It's really hard to plan your life in a world like this.
Whatever it is it is sold to us as something inevitable, outside of our control, unpredictable, but "it's just the facts man", there is nothing you can't do about them and shouldn't even try. I recently listened to Lionel's blurb on AirAmerica: "it's not what you think it's what they think" ... of course we all hope that Lionel has a special secret line to "them" so he can tell us what "they" think because it seems we can't even have our own thoughts and opinions anymore according to the supposed last bastion of free speech.
There is a great piece in next month's Harper's by Kevin Phillips about the "Numbers Racket: Why the Economy is Worse than We Know"..... funny thing, it turns out that management is cooking the books, that unemployment, inflation economic growth, housing are not measured realistically anymore, that we are in a deeper hole than we think and all of this is to hide the incompetence of decades of failed leaders.
Reminds me of my experience in a corporation, the biggest USA brandname you can imagine..hightech, very big. Every year predictions were rosy and life was careless. Then 1 day the sh..t hit the fan, in 2001 of course. 1 thing I always found odd about the organiztion before that, even without reflecting on it: the most incompetent engineers, who did not have any responsibilities thus had the time to enroll in business classes became administrators and then managers over time. The whole leadership class was utterly incompetent, flush with glittery titles and diplomas and duely arrogant at the same time. Whenever they had very bad ideas they forced them on their teams and when the inevitable failure happened they fired the best minds the most competent guys since cost cutting in their puny minds meant fire the guy with the highest salary on the most creative (=costly) projects. Of course the time of reconinig never came because wasteful government contracts kept the giants afloat without forcing innovation or competition against foreign companies.
Air America is becoming a similar organization. I've followed their string of firings and almost without exception they tend to fire their biggest talent starting with the Unfiltered team Lizz Winstead and Mark Maron, later Malloy and now Randi. I think on the level of our society it's the same thing that's happening. Management is full of failed leaders and we sheepishly wait for the pink slip handed to us by the Planet we lived on for 150,000 years under much better management....
Why don't they fire people who say offensive stuff ON THE AIR?!
Oh, that's right, Lionel is a Hillary supporter!