Whenever a smart article catches Bill Moyers’ eye, we share it with you on The BillBoard (Follow on Twitter via @MoyersStaff and @BillMoyers to get the #BillBoard.).
Currently pinned: articles from Alternet and Too Much.
Pin #1 “New Rules for Radicals: Ten Ways to Spark Change in a Post-Occupy World”
by Sara Robinson, a senior editor of Alternet.org
The first rule is this: The world is different now. The rules have changed.
Since Occupy, we all understand this. Nothing works now the way it did even just a couple of years ago. Political tactics that haven’t budged public opinion in years — like petitions and big street demonstrations — are suddenly working again. Narratives that seemed unassailable — like the primacy of free markets and low taxes — are being openly questioned. Doors that used to be closed to us are now opening. The media that once ignored us is now starting to listen. The conservatives are shaken and fumbling, stuck on autopilot and unable to re-route away from their old course even as disaster looms dead ahead. What’s going on here?
What’s going on is that we are (finally!) in the first giddy months of a deep-current sea change in American politics, the kind of realignment that happens once every several decades. This change has put us into a whole new political era, one that runs by an entirely new set of rules — and one in which a great many impossible things may, all of a sudden, become possible. Read more »
Pin #2 “America’s Plutocrats Play the Political Ponies”
by Sam Pizzigati, Too Much, A Commentary on Excess and Inequality
Life sometimes imitates art. Life also sometimes imitates political cliché. The cliché in this case: the notion that tunnel-vision political reporting has reduced campaigns for American public office to nothing more than mere “horse races.”
This year, in the struggle for the Republican Presidential nomination, that “horse race” analogy has essentially become a literal reflection of reality. Read more »
