Rayne Today

When Treasury Secretary Paulson announced work on a bailout plan, he made some comment about wanting to help responsible homeowners, implying that irresponsible homeowners were the ones to blame for this mess and needed no help. I felt like throwing something at the television when I heard him mouth such garbage. Irresponsible homeowners -- the ones who'd been pushed to become a part of the "ownership society" to help our floundering post-9/11 economy, the ones who suffered a catastrophic illness that health insurance didn't cover, or lost their jobs due to market conditions over which they had no power. It's infuriating to hear such hints of blame from Paulson to this effect, knowing that the real problems -- the really BIG problems -- had far more to do with the irresponsible and completely amoral pirahna that populated firms like Enron. Specifically Enron, but including their corporate brothers-in-arms. Once upon a time, I worked for a Fortune 100 company,...

George Lakoff wrote in TruthOut last week about progressives' response to Gov. Sarah Palin as John McCain's veep pick. While Lakoff tends to cling too tightly to a dualistic worldview framed in the strict father/nurturing mother model, he's quite right that progressives cannot use their over-thought realist perspective to address the problem of Palin. Where Lakoff struggles is with the unconscious and subconscious that lies deep below our own relationships with parental figures. He does not have a solid grasp of Jungian archetypes -- and that's where we must go to find the tools we need. After reading his take, I think I figured it out: she is a very primitive archetype for the authoritarians, a vengeful earth mother , a veritable goddess Kali, a bringer of death. They respect that in their guts, in their tissue, at atomic level; their heads cannot engage because her being communicates like a dog whistle to the very molecules of which they are made. Our challenge is...