social contract

Labor Day Is for the Workers (the 99%)

“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...

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....

“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...

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...

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?

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