What is labor day? And why is it a national holiday?
Labor Day is our national holiday to celebrate the contribution that regular working people make to our country and our economy. It is also a holiday that celebrates the way We, the People democracy can deliver prosperity to many, instead of great wealth to [...]
The zombies are back. It seems like only yesterday (okay, it was January) they were walking the sand hills of South Carolina.
The Nation reports from Michigan:
“Some 1,500 people voted under dead people’s and prisoners’ names from 2008-11, according to Michigan’s auditor general. Many might be clerical errors, [...]
Is this guy a Presidential candidate from a major party, or a fringe nut? He sounds like Rush Limbaugh. HuffPo: Mitt Romney: Obama ‘Takes Marching Orders From Union Bosses’,
Speaking to a crowd at a campaign stop in Lansing, Mich., on Tuesday, presumptive GOP [...]
Recent stories about the conditions of Apple’s contractors in China have opened many people’s eyes about where our jobs, factories, industries and economy have been going, and why. The stories exposed that workers live 6-to-12-to-a-room in dormitories, get rousted at midnight to work surprise 12-hour shifts, get paid very little, use [...]
Unions have been fighting the 1% vs 99% fight for more than 100 years. Now the rest of us are learning that this fight is also OUR fight.
The story of organized labor has been a story of working people banding together to confront concentrated wealth and power. Unions have been fighting to get [...]
The spiral-to-the-bottom and inequality we are suffering is not an inevitable result of globalization, it is what happens when we don’t hold cheaters and exploiters accountable and stop them. This is not just about Wall Street, it is the story of what has happened to our wages and benefits, jobs, factories, companies, industries, economy and [...]
Companies are always looking for ways to reduce the number of people they employ, and for ways to reduce the pay and benefits for the ones they keep. One way they have been doing this is to send jobs out of the country to places where the people don’t have the protections of democracy. Then [...]
What did the politicians in Washington think would happen? They forgot about the “We, the People” part of our Constitution. After bailing out the banks and bankers and interests of the top 1% they fiddled while our jobs burned and mortgages defaulted. With people losing their incomes, pensions and healthcare they worried about deficits instead [...]
Please forward this to friends, relatives, “centrists” and conservatives you know. You may have heard about the “Occupy” protests that are occurring in cities around the country. They aren’t what you are hearing. Please come to one and see for yourself. If you are young, old, white, black, brown, poor, rich, left, right, centrist, even [...]
The corporate/conservative plan for decades has been to turn people against government and democracy. Because when people stop accepting the idea of We, the People making decisions, guess who gets to make the decisions instead? Last month a retiring GOP staffer explained how it works, this month a new poll show how well it works.
[...]
This tactic of inducing public distrust of government is not only cynical, it is schizophrenic. For people who profess to revere the Constitution, it is strange that they so caustically denigrate the very federal government that is the material expression of the principles embodied in that document.
– Mike Lofgren, former GOP [...]
Just ten years ago this country was running huge surpluses and paying off its debt. But then we elected Obama and all hell broke loose. Oh, wait…
Something Happened
Between the time ten years ago when we had big surpluses and were paying off the debt and now when we are told the [...]
Step back from the day-to-day, hour-to-hour details of the debt-ceiling negotiations for a minute and look at the bigger picture. Look what we’re in the middle of. Our legislators are being stampeded by a manufactured “crisis” into profoundly changing the nature of our country and who our economy is “for,” on extremely short [...]
In the UK the News-Of-The-World/News Corp/Murdoch scandal seems to be reawakening democracy. A big, powerful corporation has been found to be engaged in criminal activity, manipulating news, paying off police and politicians, and generally getting its way. The people, press and politicians are rising up, holding the company and its executives legally accountable [...]
This is one of those instances where even typing something out does little to make it more believable: Delta charges soldiers returning home from Afghanistan an additional luggage fee of $200 each (they are allowed three checked pieces, but as you’d imagine, members of our armed forces have [...]
In 2010 Republicans and corporate front groups ran ad after ad after ad after ad claiming that Democrats had “Cut 500 billion from Medicare.” Those ads brought them the senior vote, and they took the House. Confident in their ability to “create their own reality” they came out with a plan to privatize [...]
In DC the elite are gathered around tables discussing budget cuts but not jobs to cure a deficit largely caused by a lack of jobs and by tax cuts. The last time these DC geniuses gathered around tables they extended tax cuts for the wealthy, dramatically worsening the deficits that are causing their fainting spells [...]
Part two in a series.
Forgive me for abstracting and oversimplifying a bit, but one might argue that American politics breaks along the following 10 lines:
Social Conservatives Neocons Business Conservatives Traditional Conservatives (there’s probably a better term, but I’m thinking of old-line Western land and water rights types) Blue Dog [...]
Part one in a series.
A little thought experiment for a Tuesday morning…
Over the past few years I have tried to make as much sense as I could out of the American political landscape. By nature, I’m a theoretically minded thinker, and the point of these exercises has been to [...]
One reason that Wisconsin erupted the way that it did is a long-standing disconnect between the power of the national discourse about failing schools–which people tend to buy into in the abstract–and the reality of the fact that most people feel that the schools their children go to are doing a pretty good job. 25 years of polling backs this up. Cross-posted from Mege Left
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