The United States needs a stronger labor movement. It needs something to organize workers as workers, just for the sake of acting as a political counterbalance to corporation and to large formations of capital. I think a lot of our problems right now are directly traced back to the decline of unions.
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I think it would be interesting if the President had to be a minister for a day and actually engaged with people’s spiritual bankruptcy, and think about, “Do I want to solve this by lying to them with another myth, or do I want to help them confront the truth?”
It’s not necessary for a machine gun to be able to be purchased. What is that for? How do you even have those in stores, and know that they in stores everywhere.
We have a tax system right now that creates a lot of perverse incentives. It incentivizes jobs moving overseas, incentivizes a lack of investment here at home, these inversions that are happening. And I do believe that when it comes to paying fair taxes, there’s a lot of folks who are paying large percentages of their incoming taxes, but that’s not reflected in other asset brackets.
Two out of three 8th graders in this country cannot read or do math at grade level. We are not preparing our kids for what the future holds.
Asking any author about a book the President should read immediately makes me think, “Mine, of course.” But what I would actually say is the next president should be Jamie Merisotis’ America Needs Talent.
Sure, cyberspace is about people and data. But it is also about applications. And devices. And the indirect and non-obvious relationships between all of this. It creates a very complicated and exciting ecosystem. One that is capable of dramatic innovation, and dramatic exploitation.
Just as this country did a hundred years ago, it’s time to rethink the basic bargain between workers and companies. As greater wealth is generated by new technology, how can we ensure that the workers who support the economy can actually share in the wealth?
When you think about the Internet is, the Internet is really a giant sharing machine. It’s a machine for making copies, for making derivative works, for making remixes and making mashups. For distributing those around the world instantaneously. And so there’s a very profound tension between what copyright enables legally, and what the Internet enables technically.
The people who experience broader and more pervasive forms of social inequality related to housing, education, language proficiency, occupational opportunity and so forth, are also the ones who are most likely to be under-connected to the Internet.