Thanks to my many friends on Facebook (find me on FB) for nudging me into starting my own website and blog. As my audience has expanded, I realized that taking the next step meant branching out into other social media. This will be a place to collect my political posts and my central location for social media. To my FB friends: if you like something I write, please take a moment to like it in multiple places.
Who am I?
Brian Endless, PhD. Nice to meet you. I have a Masters and PhD in Political Science and am a faculty member at Loyola University Chicago, where I serve as the Director of African Studies and the African Diaspora. My background includes among other things studying and teaching about the Middle East, the United Nations, international peace and security, political economy, development, international law and most recently East and Central Africa, with a focus on Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. My interest in Africa began in grad school, and continued in earnest when I started working with Paul Rusesabagina and his Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation, educating people about current human rights and political issues in Rwanda and the region, and advocating for peace, truth and reconciliation.
I have always had an international and a domestic side of my brain, and my interests and personal focus battle between the two. In recent years I have increasingly focused on economic and political inequality in the United States. I choose not to write on this academically, but rather focus on public policy and advocacy, acting and encouraging others to find issues they feel strongly about and become active. While my domestic side doesn’t typically show up in my teaching, I recently created a class entitled “Capitalism and its Discontents” (thank you Joseph Stiglitz for the inspiration!) that takes an in-depth look at economic inequality in the US and the world.
A little more about me:
“To label me is to negate me.” (Kirkegaard or Dick Van Patten, I can never remember…)
I am unabashedly socially liberal on pretty much all political issues, domestic or international. I also realize though that we live in a world that has the potential for enormous good, but is often filled with quite nasty people grasping for power. This will sometimes temper my perspectives, especially on international political/power issues. That being said, I really don’t fit well on the US political spectrum. At the moment I’m much more likely to vote for Democrats than Republicans, but I am absolutely not a Dem — the party lost me a long time ago, and I am way to liberal for them now on many social issues. Good friends sometimes describe me as a communist, but most are joking. I certainly think Marx was right in many of his critiques of capitalism (and that will come up a lot here), but his solution was idealistic and ridiculous. And the way the Soviets and others implemented it in political dictatorship and central planning for an economy was doomed to fail. Bernie Sanders recently popularized the Democratic Socialist label, and I fit reasonably well there, but at times it is also too idealistic for me. I think we have to be quite practical in achieving sometimes idealistic goals. I’m probably closest to a variety of European socialists, but that doesn’t really apply in the US. So at the moment, I’m a person without an easy label — and I’m ok with that. Make assumptions at your own risk.
“Who Profits?” If you can’t figure out something in politics, this is a great question to ask as a starting point.
When looking at politics, I am a firm believer in following the money and power. There are often multiple things happening at one time, and modern politics can have enormous depth and be enormously confusing. The simple answer is rarely correct, and is often put out by one side or another to distract us from what’s really going on. And the richest and most powerful often play the long-game. While most of us go through life from day-to-day, some people have the money, power, time and inclination to have plans within plans in order to achieve their goals. These are the types of things that I like to explore.
“Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it’s just the opposite.“ (John Kenneth Galbraith?)
Communism. Capitalism. Racism. Sexism. Genderism. These and many other kinds of discrimination are experienced by humans every day, and they all feature one key element: exploitation. While it seems that some people are born into their isms, in fact they are always taught. And in the worst cases, those espousing the isms are actually not particularly biased — they are just using language to push others to action. And in the end, to exploit others for their benefit. When white men are paid more than black men, white women or others for doing the same job with the same experience, it’s clear that the white male in question benefits. But what’s more important is that SOMEONE else is benefiting from the money that they should be paying to those who make less. That money doesn’t just disappear, it goes to someone else’s pocket. This is just the readily visible tip of the iceberg of exploitation, from slavery through glass ceilings and much more.
The Endless Files 