marielinn
having to change,
taking the moment and
making the best of it,
without knowing
what's going to happen next...
delicious ambiguity"
~Gilda Radner
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The Patriot Act reaches far beyond terrorism prevention. In my home state of Maryland, State Police...
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The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities fact checks Paul Ryan’s claim that welfare reform was an “unprecedented success” and reveals that, in...
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“We can’t have a democracy where 11 million people are frozen in third-class status and with their families vulnerable to being deported any moment....”
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The Global Commission on Drug Policy will host a live press...
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The good news is, House Republicans unveiled a plan yesterday that’s intended to create jobs....
The 400 wealthiest families in the U.S. aren’t just filthy rich, they are downright dirty. Collectively, these households own $1.37 trillion dollars; a number so high that it’s nearly impossible to comprehend. Here are 11 shocking things $1.37 trillion can buy that you can’t.
- The richest 400 households can pay off every student loan for every single student in the entire United States. No more paying for an education, so that you can get a good job so that you can… well, pay off your education.
- The richest 400 could pay your rent, and the rent of every single renter in the entire United States for three years.
- The richest 400 could pay the mortgages of every house in the whole country for 14 full months.
- The richest 400 households can buy every single house that was foreclosed on in 2007 and 2008.
- The richest 400 households could pay the annual salaries of 19 million families for one year. So go ahead, take that year-long, family vacation around the world you’ve always dreamed of.
- The richest 400 can pay off all credit card debt for every single person in the entire United States. Imagine that! No more credit card debt looming over your shoulders!
- The richest 400 households can afford to give a $10,000 bonus to every single worker in the entire country. What would a hardworking person like you do with that extra money?
- The richest 400 can afford to buy a new car for every family in the United States. Meanwhile, many of us must ignore the flashing check engine light.
- The richest 400 can pay for 3 ½ years worth of gas for every driver in the country.
- The richest 400 households can afford to triple the number of teachers in the United States, then give every single one a $30,000 raise. Teachers are being laid off everywhere, their salaries are being cut, and they are suffering. Teacher-to-student ratios in schools are abysmal. But what can we do about it when so much wealth is in the pockets of so few families?
- The richest 400 families alone could replace 70% of all money lost in the Great Recession, for everyone! How much money did you, your parents, or grandparents lose in the Great Recession of 2008? 30%, 50% of your portfolio? Not only do the rich still have enough money to fund their wildest dreams, but they can also fund your retirements.
For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor - other people’s lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.
Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of government. The collapse of 1929 showed up the despotism for what it was. The election of 1932 was the people’s mandate to end it. Under that mandate it is being ended.
The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody’s business. They granted that the government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live.
Today we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.
These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.
The brave and clear platform adopted by this convention, to which I heartily subscribe, sets forth that government in a modern civilization has certain inescapable obligations to its citizens, among which are protection of the family and the home, the establishment of a democracy of opportunity, and aid to those overtaken by disaster.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt, Speech to the 1936 Democratic National Convention. Image from Library of Congress.
Employers are hiring again, but many salaries have stagnated or fallen in recent years and haven’t kept up with the higher costs of fuel and food.
Vermont is a land of proud firsts. This small New England state was the first to join the 13 Colonies. Its constitution was the first to ban slavery. It was the first to establish the right to free education for all—public education.
This week, Vermont will boast another first: the first state in the nation to offer single-payer health care, which eliminates the costly insurance companies that many believe are the root cause of our spiraling health care costs. In a single-payer system, both private and public health care providers are allowed to operate, as they always have. But instead of the patient or the patient’s private health insurance company paying the bill, the state does. It’s basically Medicare for all—just lower the age of eligibility to the day you’re born. The state, buying these health care services for the entire population, can negotiate favorable rates, and can eliminate the massive overhead that the for-profit insurers impose.
Vermont hired Harvard economist William Hsiao to come up with three alternatives to the current system. The single-payer system, Hsiao wrote, “will produce savings of 24.3 percent of total health expenditure between 2015 and 2024.” An analysis by Don McCanne, M.D., of Physicians for a National Health Program pointed out that “these plans would cover everyone without any increase in spending since the single payer efficiencies would be enough to pay for those currently uninsured or underinsured. So this is the really good news—single payer works.”
Obviously I won’t get through the entire list in just one summer, but here are a few books I would like to read: Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America by Barbara Ehrenreich, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Justice and Mercy by Reinhold Neibuhr and Ursula M. Neibuhr, Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life by Robert B. Reich, One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy by Thomas Frank, The Character of Our Communities: Toward an Ethic of Liberation for the Church by Gloria H. Albrecht , Rules for Radicals by Saul D. Alinsky, How the West was Lost by Dambisa Moyo, Blessed are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America by Jeffrey Stout, The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings by Friedrich Nietzsche, Dismantling Privilege: An Ethics of Accountability by Mary Hobgood, Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning by George Monbiot, Looking Up at the Bottom Line: The Struggle for the Living Wage by Richard R. Troxell. …..Also, some recommended reading for anyone interested: Where Is God? by Jon Sobrino The Moral Underground by Lisa Dodson The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon Fanon by John Edgar Wideman Gilead by Marilyn Robinson …I’ll try to post updates as I make progress on the list! Happy reading! :)
