“Labor Creates All Wealth” “Our labor movement has no system to crush. It has nothing to overturn. It purposes to build up, to develop, to rejuvenate humanity. “It stands for the right. It is the greatest protestant against wrong. It is the defender of the weak. “Its...
social contract
Welcoming the New Year 2014
Warm good wishes to all for a healthy and prosperous new year, inwardly and outwardly. We hope your prayers will be answered, especially your prayers for peace, for a stronger, more civil nation, for understanding and cooperation between persons, parties, and nations....
In Honor of Medgar Evers and Res Publica
Conservatives’ rejection of all things “public” as “white flight” “The gifts of God . . . should be enjoyed by all citizens in Mississippi.” —Medgar Evers (1925–1963) * Fifty years ago today, Medgar Wylie Evers was killed in his driveway in Jackson, Mississippi, after returning from an NAACP meeting at a nearby church. Evers, a graduate […]
Republicans Against Medicare: A Long, Mean History
“. . . let’s be brutally honest here. The Romney-Ryan position on health care is that many millions of Americans must be denied health insurance, and millions more deprived of the security Medicare now provides, in order to save money. At the same time, of course, Mr....
Framing the Case for Infrastructure Investment, Taxing the Rich
Attn.: Pro-Infrastructure Activists and Democratic Strategists: In a Feb. 4 letter to the editor of the New York Times, Rick Stone of Madison, Wisc., makes a point that more of us should heed: If the wealthy knew with certainty that their increased taxes would make...
“There Is a Creative Force in This Universe”
The Poor People’s Campaign, 40 Years before Occupy Wall Street “Oh America, how often have you taken necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes. . . . God never intended for one group of people to live in superfluous inordinate wealth, while others...
Talk of the Social Contract Should Not Make Rightists Reach for Their Guns
Daily Kos reports: After a video of [Elizabeth] Warren talking about the deficit and the social contract went viral last week (see above), Rush Limbaugh, the Fiscal Times and Rich Lowrey all spent time attacking her. Now, Lowrey has decided to spend another column...
The Social Contract, Explained by Elizabeth Warren,
Paul Krugman, and Robert Kuttner
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htX2usfqMEs&feature=player_embedded * “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. . . . You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate.” *...
NObama! No Cuts to Social Security, Medicare;
WPA-, CCC-style Jobs Programs Now
“We put those pay roll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.” —FDR,...
Tyranny Disguised as Fiscal Discipline
* “. . . to secure these rights [including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness], governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. . . . whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is...
Republican War on Working Families
It’s Not Only in Wisconsin, America This TV ad is being launched today in Wisconsin against Gov. Scott Walker and the Republicans. Please help Democracy for America spread the word by clicking here to contribute. Thank you....
Taxing the Rich: Still a Good and Fair Idea
Budget cutting is all the rage; a recent attempt to let the Bush-era tax cuts expire was defeated by Obama’s deal with the Republican congressional leadership. (See our reaction to that regrettable deal here and here.) In this time of (unnecessary) revenue shortfalls...
No “Kumbaya” for Billionaires
$ [ cross-posted at Daily Kos ] Today when the New York Times reports “Tax Cut Timing Is Proving Problematic for Democrats,” we faxed and mailed the following letter to President Obama and sent similar messages to his economic team (Goolsbee, Bernstein, Elizabeth...
Health Care Summit Shows Sharp Contrast in Political Philosophies
We’ll soon have more to say about Thursday’s health care reform summit, but first wanted to share some good observations written by Ezra Klein of the Washington Post (a sharp, gifted young blogger-reporter who knows policy like a wonk but explains it in plain...
Department of Corrections:
About That John Edwards Endorsement
Mardi Gras has come and gone, and Ash Wednesday too, and now it is Lent: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Speaking of dust and repentance . . . Two years ago we endorsed John Edwards for president. That was before we realized how far...
“The Brown Pelican Is Back”
An Environmental Protection Success Story The brown pelican, a species that was driven nearly to extinction by use of the pesticide D.D.T., has grown back in strong enough numbers that the admirable bird has been removed from the endangered species list. The decision...
Does Believing in Social Contract Make Us Socialists? Then So Be It.
Learning What We’re Up Against, and How to Carry On If we’re learning anything from the messy struggles for health care reform and the passage of the stimulus bill back in February (how long ago that feels!)—and it’s far from clear whether anyone is learning...
Senator Kennedy’s Gulf Coast Rebuilding Plan
“For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.” While others have gone quickly online with some very affectionate and stirring tributes to Senator Kennedy, we wanted to take a...
ReNEW | ReOPEN Charity Hospital
Our friend Schroeder at People Get Ready rightly points out that in a city beset by so many problems at once, New Orleans residents have to choose their battles. Levees Not War focuses on infrastructure and coastal restoration, but we also urge our readers—in the Sunken City and beyond—to help save Charity Hospital, a towering embodiment of the social contract built with obsessive attention to detail by Huey Long in the 1930s, from an expensive, unnecessary, and largely destructive plan by the LSU Medical School and the Veterans Administration that would raze it and about 250 structures in the surrounding neighborhood (all on the National Historic Trust for Historic Preservation’s list of America’s Most Endangered Places).
The Credit Crisis and the Social Contract
It’s significant that the economic crisis threatening the U.S. and the global economy is a credit crisis, a collapse of confidence. The word “credit” derives from the Latin credere, to trust, believe. But how can financial institutions believe in each other when they’ve played Enron-like shell games to the point where no one knows what anything is worth anymore? How can anyone have confidence when regulations are legislated away and there is no adult supervision?