Ocassional Thoughts of an Independent Progressive Atheistic Humanist
Read an article on the Washington Post about a new political party called the National Atheist Party. While I applaud the effort to get atheists more involved in the political process, trying to include a broad progressive platform into such a narrow religious belief label is the wrong way to go.
The National Atheist Party is a non-profit, 527 political organization devoted to issue advocacy. As a 527 they can’t endorse candidates. In their mission statement the NAP says:
Today in my twitter stream was someone ranting about Glenn Greenwald and Katrina vanden Heuvel writing nice things about Ron Paul. In fact the person said both were RWNJs for supporting Paul. Of course the tweeter was wrong. Neither was supporting Paul only pointing out the ideas that Paul has that liberals usually support. I agree with most of what Greenwald writes but when talking about Ron Paul I disagree with his unstated conclusion.
Singer Kelly Clarkson tweeted that she supported Republican/Libertarian Ron Paul for the GOP nomination. After some push back she clarified that she didn’t support his more homophobic, anti-woman, anti-poor, anti-minority views. Clarkson is entitled to her views but her love of Ron Paul while seeming to ignore the extreme side of him, is troubling.
Clarkson wrote:
Vanguard, on Current TV, is like 60 Minutes on steroids by focusing on one issue for the whole hour. After the Current TV special on the GOP Iowa debate held Saturday night, Vanguard showed a program titled “Two Americas” that compared and contrasted two families on either end of the income scale. One brief statement from the unemployed Dad parroted the views expressed by Ron Paul – that the social safety net should taken down and poor people supported by charity. His comments showed the disconnect I’ve seen before by poor Republicans who keep voting for cheap labor conservatives who steal from the 99% and give to the 1%.
The unemployed family of four moved to Houston, TX to get work after the Dad lost his $55,000 construction superintendent job. The Mom had just lost her $12 an hour job the previous month and the family was living on approximately $19,000 a year in unemployment – of course until it runs out. The other family of four had a Dad who is president and CEO of an energy trading company.
Some people think the Occupy movement and the issues brought up by the protests is something new. I know I’ve been talking about corporatism and income inequality for many years. While archiving some past writings, I found an essay I wrote in 2003 which has ideas in it that wouldn’t seem out of place today – unfortunately.