This is an interview with Jane McAlevey, a labor organizer known for her work with SEIU in the 2000s. One of McAlevey’s answers only begins to show you the good stuff to learn by reading the whole article.
Our assumptions about who’s going to think what are so often wrong. That’s why it’s so fun do an organizing conversation with just a worker on the door. You can pull up to a door, see a conservative bumper sticker or something else and start making assumptions. But then you go in there, and through the process of a good, long, face-to-face conversation, almost every time, the individual comes out pissed off at their boss, understands that their boss is connected to a bigger system, and starts for the first time to think, “I can do something about this if we act collectively.”
I can attest to the fact that I have learned a number of lessons from this article about what I, as a grassroots organizer for Bernie Sanders, can do better to further the cause of the revolution that Bernie Sanders says we need.
A large part of this documentary revolves around measuring the deviation of where a star is from where it is seems to be observed to be when the light from the star passes close by to the sun. In order to see a star close to the sun, you need to take a photograph at a total solar eclipse. That is the only time when the light from the sun doesn’t drown out the light from a nearby star.
What has bothered me for years about this experiment, and the documentary never touches on in an hour and a half, is how do you know where the star is compared to where it seems to be?
It just dawned on me how you know. You take pictures of the stars when the sun isn’t positioned between you and the stars. You then compare that picture to the one you took at the solar eclipse. The stars that are in your picture but farthest away from the sun in the eclipse picture will be least affected by the sun’s gravity. The stars closest to the sun in the eclipse picture will be the most affected. So if you align the stars far from the sun in the the eclipse picture with the ones in the non-eclipse picture, then the deviation of the stars close to the sun in the overlay of the two pictures is what you are trying to measure.
Why not get explicit about what we mean by fixing income and wealth inequality? Why leave it up to people’s imagination?
It is not taking the rich people’s money and giving it to the poor. It is taking the money the rich people stole from the middle-class and the poor and giving it back to them.
Even the people to whom the money rightfully belongs don’t think they can get it back. Some middle-class people echo the rich people’s meme that if we taxed the rich at 100% and added all the programs that Bernie Sanders wants, that it would leave a deficit.
Apparently nobody is thinking deeply enough or wants to take the effort to explain that this idea of the rich is a fallacy. The rich aren’t taking the money they stole from us as income. They manage to take it as unrealized capital gains. In other words, their wealth is going up because of the stock they own in the companies that are stealing the money. Since the wealthy have so much wealth that they cannot possibly spend all of it, they leave it invested in stocks. Not only is this increase in wealth not taxed, it isn’t even counted as income until the stock is sold. So it looks to the rest of us that there isn’t enough income to tax.
If we unrig the system, those gains go back to the people who earned it. The middle-class and the poor take a much larger fraction of their gain in wealth as income that gets taxed. The middle-class and poor still end up with a lot more money in their pockets to spend even after taxes are collected, because the tax money comes from a fraction of the money they never would have received had we not fixed the system.
Prof. Wolff is an expert on Socialism, so he does a good job explaining many things about Bernie Sanders and Socialism. The excerpt below isn’t necessarily his best words, but they are an introduction.
To see just how big the disconnect is on the surface, consider this: Although nearly half of Americans say they wouldn’t vote for a socialist, Sanders not only gained campaign contributions after the first Democratic primary debate, some online polls and focus groups declared him the winner.
In other words, plenty of people like Sanders’ ideas, if not the “socialist” label.
In a purely socialist economy, the public (read: the government) controls the means of production, and revenue is shared with everyone. In a capitalist system, individuals control the means of production and can, if they choose, keep all of the income.
Most governments, regardless of how they describe their countries, fall somewhere in between.
There are two statements in the article that I think are way off the mark however.
3. — Social Programs. While the U.S. already offers programs like Medicare and Social Security that fall outside a purely capitalist system, Sanders said he would push for more, like child-care and pre-kindergarten programs, and expand Social Security. Admittedly, the only way such programs would be approved by a Republican-controlled Congress is if Americans insisted on them, he said.
The drawback: “Congress has no resources of its very own,” said Williams. “That money coming out of Washington to pay for health care, food, housing, does not represent Congress reaching into their own pockets to send that money out.”
The last paragraph in the excerpt above quotes Dr. Walter Williams, an economist at George Mason University. There are several other ignorant statements in the article by Williams prior to this one. Dr. Williams fails to mention that money coming out of Washington to pay for health care, food, housing is created by the independent government entity known as the Federal Reserve Bank. Don’t argue with me over whether or not the FED is a part of the government. I have the evidence to prove you wrong.
The second item I take issue with Prof. Wolf is the following:
Socialism, on the other hand, attempts to create equal opportunities. It redistributes money from the wealthy to the poor and middle classes to bridge the income gap, largely by taxing the rich at a higher rate.
Under the current circumstances the redistribution of wealth is from the wealthy, who stole it from the middle-class and poor, back to the people from whom it never should have been allowed to be stolen in the first place. In other words the money being redistributed is money that rightfully belongs to the middle-class and the poor because it was taken from them by fraudulent means. Hey, middle-class and poor people, it’s your money, do you want it back, or should we let the rich keep it?
Stansberry Research LLC has the typical Wall Street con job in 12-Term Congressman Ron Paul’s Warning to Americans about the Coming Currency Crisis. Read the small fine print below that interview if you are actually naive enough to look at the interview. This guy is such a good con artist, you might come away believing what he says despite my warnings here.
Legal Notices: Ron Paul is a spokesman for Stansberry Research, LLC.
In looking for a good way to convey the magnitude of this con job, I started a Google search which led me to the WikiPedia article Stansberry Research.
In 2014, Snopes.com investigated the firm’s claim that United States currency will “collapse”, and found such claims to be false
Claim: The U.S. dollar will officially collapse after 1 July 2014 due to the implementation of H.R. 2847.
FALSE
To be certain, there are some things that Ron Paul says that are true, but the conclusions he draws from them are somewhat insane. After all, he is selling you something and he has to make a good, plausible story. I couldn’t actually last through the whole presentation to see what it was he was actually selling. They weren’t going to put a time line at the bottom of the video to give you any clue as to how long you would have to wait to hear the money proposition. There was a brief mention of gold in the part I listened to.
What is true about Paul’s presentation, is that the current stock market bubble is a product of the massive amounts of liquidity that the FED has introduced into the economy to keep it afloat. At some point the chickens will come home to roost. The collapse of the stock market in 1929 brought on a huge period of deflation, not inflation. So there is no telling what is actually going to happen when it bursts. The price of gold has been falling for years while these guys have been predicting it will rise. No doubt the price of gold will rise some day, but you have no way of telling how much it will fall before then. No doubt the stock market will fall some day, but you have no way of telling how much it will rise before then.
Ron Paul is right, that massive introduction of liquidity by the FED is not the way to solve our current economic crisis. What he doesn’t tell you about the FED’s use of this ineffective FED tool for solving the current crisis, is that this is the only tool they have. What we really need is for the massive infrastructure investment that Bernie Sanders is calling for instead of what the FED has done. The only reason the FED has to do what they have tried to do is the realization that the Congress is not going to approve the stimulus that they should have done during the Reagan, Bush, and Bush years. Instead, what Congress, Reagan, Bush, and Bush did was to give us a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class to the rich. The FED did what it could to offset this wrong policy by the legislative and executive branches. Instead of bailing out the banks, they should have nationalized them. We put far more FED money into the banks than they were worth, so there should not be any problem with a little Democratic Socialism of taking ownership of what we bought at more than fair market value.
So Ron Paul is right that recent policy has been a disaster, but he has not even a clue as to what the right policy would have been. He has not a clue about basic economics. The solution to our problems would have been the classical Keynesian prescription that eventually got us out of the last depression after every other bad policy was tried and failed. What Keynes said was that there has to be direct government intervention to get people employed. He didn’t say that the way to do it had to be a World War, but that is what the politicians chose. Think of the massive destruction of Europe and its recovery thanks in part to the USA’s Marshall Plan. Did we do some massive destruction in Japan, too? There was that atomic bomb think that we can’t have forgotten about already. Does Ron Paul have an explanation of how our government didn’t produce any wealth back then? Where does he think the recovery of Europe and Japan came from?
Bernie Sanders is saying the way to do it is with a massive government employment project that includes a rebuilding of our infrastructure. Fat chance anybody will allow that to happen. If the electorate comes to the conclusion that Ron Paul does know his ass from his elbow, we will be merrily cutting the budget, trying to run a surplus, and driving the world to the deepest depression we have ever seen. So Ron Paul is right about the possible collapse and depression, but it is not for the reasons he says. The reason for the collapse will be exactly the following of what he prescribes to prevent it or the following of our current trajectory of taking money from the middle class and giving it to the rich. The current trajectory will keep making the rich richer until the revolution comes, as history seems to say must be the inevitable outcome.
A few months before the 2010 midterms, Newt Gingrich described the socialist infiltration of American government and media as “even more disturbing than the threats from foreign terrorists.” John Nichols offers an unapologetic retort to the return of red-baiting in American political life—arguing that socialism has a long, proud, American history. Tom Paine was enamored of early socialists, Horace Greeley employed Karl Marx as a correspondent, and Helen Keller was an avowed socialist. The “S” Word gives Americans back a crucial aspect of their past and makes a forthright case for socialist ideas today.
I don’t think enough people are taking up my challenge to read this book to see what startling evidence there is for this viewpoint of our history. I am afraid that the only way I can convey to you what is in the book is to show an occasional image of a page from the book.
Sometimes you need to warn organizations that you thought were your friends when they go off the rails. If they don’t give you an opportunity to give your feedback through their contact page, then you have to use whatever means they do give you. I thought the following petition was most appropriate.
Poor and middle class people, the 99%, have no control over their rent or mortgage, no control over their bank, their utility company, their insurance company, children’s school, place of employment, or a host of other institutions that shape their life. Political parties are asking people to believe that once a year they can go into a booth, press some buttons, and materially affect their life. Nothing in their experience in life suggests that this simple act will have real consequences. So how can party activists at the local level change that? Well, it would be nice if Democrats who won elections didn’t instantly turn around and start attacking Social Security and other institutions crucial to the well being of the 99%. But even in the face of that sort of betrayal, there are things that local activists can do to drive up turn out.
If the above excerpt doesn’t give you enough incentive to follow the link to her article, then I don’t know what will.
From the NYT article by Alec MacGillis, I give you the following excerpt:
It’s enough to give Democrats the willies as they contemplate a map where the red keeps seeping outward, confining them to ever narrower redoubts of blue. The temptation for coastal liberals is to shake their heads over those godforsaken white-working-class provincials who are voting against their own interests.
But this reaction misses the complexity of the political dynamic that’s taken hold in these parts of the country. It misdiagnoses the Democratic Party’s growing conundrum with working-class white voters. And it also keeps us from fully grasping what’s going on in communities where conditions have deteriorated to the point where researchers have detected alarming trends in their mortality rates.
In eastern Kentucky and other former Democratic bastions that have swung Republican in the past several decades, the people who most rely on the safety-net programs secured by Democrats are, by and large, not voting against their own interests by electing Republicans. Rather, they are not voting, period. They have, as voting data, surveys and my own reporting suggest, become profoundly disconnected from the political process.
This is something that Bernie Sanders recognizes, and lays his hopes for the Presidency at the feet of being able to turn out these voters.
Another part of the article talks about the people who are a step up from these people who have disengaged to deal with why they do vote Republican.
The people in these communities who are voting Republican in larger proportions are those who are a notch or two up the economic ladder — the sheriff’s deputy, the teacher, the highway worker, the motel clerk, the gas station owner and the coal miner. And their growing allegiance to the Republicans is, in part, a reaction against what they perceive, among those below them on the economic ladder, as a growing dependency on the safety net, the most visible manifestation of downward mobility in their declining towns.
Many times I have run across the attitude that MacGillis describes in the article. So that really shouldn’t come as a surprise either.
I think Bernie Sanders’ address the issues, but he doesn’t state them explicitly enough. He throws out a bunch of numbers about income inequality and wealth distribution inequality from which the voter might infer reasons for liking Bernie Sanders’ program. That is assuming an awful lot about what voters may or may not know.
If he wanted to be explicit, as I think he should be, he would say something like the following:
The reason why there is income and wealth inequality is because the top 0.1% of the rich have rigged the system to get your money transferred to their pockets. You have a right to get your money back from them. The people lower down on the income and wealth scale are not the ones stealing your money. If you want to be angry at people because they don’t have the moral characteristics you think they should, then that is your prerogative. However, fixing the problem of your not having the income and wealth fairness would give you, your argument is with the people on the other end of the income scale. My programs are not intended to give a free ride to the undeserving. They are meant to claw back for you what is rightfully yours.
After he makes the point clear, he can toss in all the numbers he wants to prove that he is right in his analysis.
#NotInMyName: Young British Muslims at Active Change Foundation show their solidarity against ISIS and their actions. See how a simple message can be shared to show how ISIS is misrepresenting Islam.
“Not in My name” is a phrase I use, as a Jewish American, to decry what Israel does to its Palestinian residents and its Arab neighbors.
If you are angry that Muslims don’t speak out about the cruelty of ISIS, but ignore the instances when they do speak out, what does that say about you? How many videos have you produced against what people in some groups you are assumed to be in do stuff in your name?
