Sean Meriwether's Blog: The Green Economist, page 15

Keep Dreamers, Deport Racists

NY Dispatch Day 95: Today some 700,000 young people are breathing a (temporary) sigh of relief. The Supreme Court handed down another surprise decision this week which blocks 45’s plan to terminate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). This policy was supposed to be a stopgap measure to let Congress work on long overdue Immigration Reform; nearly a decade later we are still in the same place.

DACA was an expansion on the 2012 DREAM Act, a policy that covered young people who were br...

Time for Sensible Gun Legislation

NY Dispatch Day 94: When my brother and I were children, my father used to take us target shooting. He wanted to make sure we understood the power of firearms, learned to respect them, and to never take them out of the locked cabinet where he kept them. Each time we went shooting we wore protective gear and cleaned and oiled the guns. It was a ritual. I had no taste for it but my brother did and grew up to be a gun owner. I respect his right to own a gun, he is a sane adult. I took after my moth...

Dear Conservative Christians

NY Dispatch Day 93: I’ve read that some of you are upset after yesterday’s Supreme Court decision to protect LGBTQ+ people from job discrimination. After all, Gorsuch was supposed to be on your side. You lovingly supported a president you claimed was the chosen one, a thrice-married adulterer heathen who worships only money. You elected him in order to fulfill your agenda to impose your dogma and take rights away from Americans. I know, it’s a tragedy that you didn’t win this round, but can you ...

Title VII + Black Trans Lives Matter

NY Dispatch Day 92: Finally we have good news. In a 6 to 3 vote the Supreme Court ruled to include LGBTQ+ people under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This helps protect the estimated 8.1 million working LGBTQ+ Americans from job discrimination. Justice Neil Gorsuch, a conservative, writing for the court:

“An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have question in members of a different sex. Sex plays a...

Going Down the Shore

NY Dispatch Day 91: Last night I received a last-minute invitation to join my social bubble friends for a day at the beach. Normally an easy yes, but there were several variables that gave me pause. The first, we would be meeting up with two guys who have not been in our circle, but we would be outside, in the sun, and the risk of exposure  would be minimal. One of these boys is a friend of a friend who is borderline ADHD and has tested my patience in the past. The second was the weather, which ...

Turning Back the Clock on Progress

NY Dispatch Day 90: June has been celebrated as LGBTQ+ Pride month to commemorate the Stonewall Riots that began on June 28, 1969. This tradition began with a parade held a year after the riots and has continued for over 5 decades. 2020 will be the first year that the parade and many in-person events will be cancelled due to the pandemic.

In the early morning hours of June 12th, 2016, a American man walked into the Pulse nightclub in Orlando armed with semi-automatic weapons. That evening he mur...

Tulsa & Juneteenth

NY Dispatch Day 89: For those who might still be on the fence about 45 there are a couple of recent facts you need to digest before you cast your ballot in November.

After spending months claiming that COVID-19 was a hoax cooked up by Democrats and downplaying the dangers instead of organizing a federal response, and while we watch the number of new cases spike in Republican states that reopened prematurely, 45 will begin hosting his rallies. To register for tickets people must first acknowledg...

Immigration Reform

NY Dispatch Day 88: One of the big agenda items that this country has refused to take action on is immigration reform. Decades of neglect has left a dysfunctional and byzantine system that has allowed the current administration to target immigrants from Central America… they don’t call undocumented Canadians, Asians, or Europeans “illegals”. The Democrats are not innocent. President Obama was dubbed the Deporter in Chief for the record number of people returned to their home countries after over...

Invest in Education

NY Dispatch Day 87: As we plan for what’s next in this radical shift of our society, answering the overdue demands of generations of community organizers, let’s move education to the top of that list. My core belief is that investment in education at all levels will “lift all boats” as Warren Buffet once quipped. Primary education is where our society is most segregated and we are only entrenching the mistakes of the past by continuing this practice. Schools that are predominately attended by mi...

Double Down on Renewables

NY Dispatch Day 86: One of the few benefits of the global lock down is the improved air quality of our cities. As we begin to reopen the economy, particularly to travel and manufacturing, we should not rush back to the barely 200 year old fossil fuel economy of our past. We have already proven that unchecked growth is destabilizing our fragile ecosystem and this “progress” is threatening our one and only habitat. Even with the steep drop off in new carbon emissions the average for May’s carbon d...