Random Access Memories
Pieces "in development"
A thought from 2020:
In America, we have an Electoral College that *actually* votes for President. Crazy, I know. But the popular vote still has meaning, especially for the sake of breaking up the one-party/two-franchises monopoly that has put us in this completely fucked up situation. So, if you live in Massachusetts, as I do, Joe Biden is guaranteed to win [n.b., he did]. So why should I vote for him, when my vote for the Green Party means so much more?
Similarly, someone who believes we need to address the source of many of our problems, rather than the most recent manifestation of a symptom of the problem, and who lives in, say, South Dakota (a definite Trump state) should not throw away their vote on Biden (see what I did there?) when they can help the Green Party or some other progressive party with their vote, as well as help advance their political cause.
After all is said and done, the corporate capitalist parties look at who they "expected" votes from, but did not get. It helps set the agenda for the midterms, discovering what votes they failed to capture. This is how AOC and Omar and Pressley and other Left Democrats all WON in 2018. Because they saw that HRC left a whole bunch of progressive votes just sitting there at home, or if they voted, they went Green or DSA.
THAT is a working political strategy for voters outside the so-called Center. You don't follow leaders—You PUSH them.
Dirty on both sides.
First, Governor Ron DeSantis and then-state Rep. Matt Gaetz helped push through a tilted medical marijuana bill in Florida, establishing a near-monopoly on medical dispensaries for the multi-state cannabis license operator Trulieve.
When Trulieve decided to take the next step and run the most expensive cannabis legalization initiative ever, they failed to ‘convince’ DeSantis, who came out in opposition this time—citing the monopolistic awarding of first retail licenses to the very same medical monopoly he had allowed.
Instead, the former perceived-heir to the MAGA throne (DeSantis proved enough of a threat to Trump to warrant a demeaning nickname: DeSanctimonious) allegedly took advantage of a legal settlement against a service provider to the state and diverted $10 million to SAVE Florida, a nonprofit headed by Mrs. DeSantis, that just so happened to forward that donation to the political action committees (PACs) that were opposing Florida’s 2024 legalization ballot question. Part of the monies recouped were for Medicare costs, so there is the possibility for federal charges (assuming he fails to buy enough $TRUMP coin in the interim).
Did DeSantis grab public monies, wash a good portion of them through his wife’s 501(c) which made pass-through political contributions to help ensure the initiative DeSantis opposed would fail, since the sponsors spent record-setting money, and he did not see enough of it.
Heir to Trump, indeed.
p.s.: Trulieve spent over $19 million in Q1 of 2025, for future legalization efforts in Florida.
I did my first “Junior Preview Day” for college with el niño, at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell yesterday. Despite having been immersed in higher education from 1986 - 2015, and having taught for a dozen years at UMass-Lowell itself, I had not paid much attention to the college application process and how it has changed.
I applied to become an undergraduate so long ago I used a typewriter to fill out individual applications for each school. Now, most schools will accept the General Application, which is online and need only be filled out once. Campus visits are encouraged, though every school offers an online campus tour. While college was already quite expensive when I matriculated in 1986, sticker-price tuition at my alma mater is now almost as much per year as all four years for members of my class.
Even public universities are far from tuition-free (the only reason is the lack of will to fund them) and every parent in that room was calculating how much it was going to run. The admissions staff acknowledge it, too! A big part of the pitch was how the median income of UMass-Lowell graduates 20 years after graduation was the highest among Massachusetts state universities. This, I can tell you, comes from the choice by the administration to focus the state’s educational resources for Engineering on the Lowell campus, over 20 years ago.
The direct message is: College is an investment that is expected to return material value above and beyond the dollars spent.
Thus, the more dollars above, the better the value. Make undergraduate education tuition-free, and all of a sudden, the value of an education creeps beyond the constraints of a for-profit market.
This distinction is recognized in the colloquial understanding that college is not “the Real World.” Unpacking the box of the Real World, what is actually meant is that all of the effort a student puts into their education is value that comes back to them in full. Once out of such a setting—in the Real World—they will never again get a full return on their labors.
This is a large part of the reason our educational system is lacking—it is filtered through a for-profit lens. It results in students becoming alienated from their own educations, as it comes to appear all labor is ultimately rendered for someone else’s benefit. School is what you do to “get a better job.”
#BankruptElon