Dear President Obama,

I am writing to you (and to any other American who wishes to share in this) because I, like many Americans, want to help our country get back on track. Call it a cry for help or a public plea of a distressed citizen, but I digress.

My personal situation is hardly the worst it could be: I’m a graduate student living with my parents and partially self-funding my education with my own personal savings (I’m taking out loans for the rest). On the other hand, I graduated in May of 2010 and have worked a total of only five months since then at a variety of jobs, always for $12 an hour or less. Compared to other people my age, I consider myself to be incredibly lucky.

I did not know what to expect when I decided to go to New York on Saturday to check out Occupy Wall Street. In fact, I had only opted to go after seeing the now famous footage of police brutality, courtesy of inspector Anthony Bologna aka “Tony Baloney”(video). I had originally planned to go with a couple of friends, but that did not pan out. For a moment I was hesitant to go by myself because I rarely travel to New York City, let alone get involved in a protest in which people have been beaten, pepper sprayed, and arrested. But I decided to go anyway.

I avoided the enigma that is #OccupyWallStreet for nearly two weeks, despite it essentially taking place in my backyard. However, this past Friday I made my way down to Zuccotti Park around 2pm, to experience it for myself. Well, that is not completely true. I originally left work early on Friday, with a Canon 5D Mark II (with a 70-200mm 2.8 L lens) and Nikon D3s (with a 35mm f/1.4 lens) in hand (how’s that for democracy?!), at my boss’ suggestion, due to circulating rumors that Radiohead would be performing in the park around 4pm. I was to shoot the show, if it happened, for Sound and Vision Magazine. Those rumors proved false—and that is probably for the best.

Modern American Youth are notoriously referred to as Generation Y or Millennials. Attempts to name and define our generation have mostly come from those who are not members of this generation. Our identity as a group, as a demographic, as a social class: it must come from within. We cannot let the world tell us who we are; we must assert our own identity. We are Modern American Youth. I call us the MAY Generation.

Time was when your family could make something or buy the somethings your neighbors made, hang a sign on the front of your house and enough neighbors and visitors would walk by and step into your mom-and-pop store that you could make a decent living being a “merchant”.

In this edition of Inside JVP, I turn the tables on Alex and “Draine” him of some of his Draineness as I learn more about one of the Johnsonville’s more prolific contributors.

Understanding Qat is integral to any understanding of Yemen. Qat is a stimulant, however it is a stimulant unlike anything popularly consumed or documented in the United States. It gives the user an energetic rush typically associated with cocaine, but with a distinctively mellow feeling that prevents him from utilizing the energy in any real way.

As I sit here on this first cool day of my last year at Rutgers University, I can’t believe the amount of change I have seen in the world over the past ten years.

Our nation has experienced a series of devastating events, each evoking distant seeming memories of times long ago. As the Project for A New American Century (PNAC) put it, “a new pearl harbor”, found in 9/11 both shocked and energized us. The country pulled together and a feeling of nostalgic familiarity of “the just war”, last seen during WWII, made us all sure that America could rise above this crisis as it had others in the past.

Draine on Society

Recently, several pieces of legislation crafted by Congress have come under fire from politicians for their effect on the national debt. Typically these critics have been dubbed “deficit hawks” due to their conservative, or hawkish, viewpoints on the subject. But this type of behavior is not limited to one side of the political aisle. Indeed, all sound-minded and forward-looking individuals ought to agree that we must ultimately reduce the size of the national debt. Thus, a closer look into the nature of debt and deficits is warranted.

The Popular Capitalist View

A key part of the Popular Capitalist program is to reduce the cost of living. A lower cost of providing the necessities puts the rudimentary task of paying the cost of sovereignty more easily within the reach of the political economies of regions with modest resources. This allows those political economies and thus most political economies to offer its citizens opportunities to reach beyond mere survival and build capital that will benefit their communities for years to come. Also, a lower cost of the living beyond survival makes those efforts at building capital more attainable.