Category: Class War

We’re No. 2!

~ susie

You wouldn’t think that addressing child poverty would be such a controversial thing, would you?

According to a new report from the Office of Research at the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the U.S. has one of the highest rates of child poverty in the developed world. Of the 35 wealthy countries studied by UNICEF, only Romania has a child poverty rate higher than the 23 percent rate in the U.S.:


[The rate is] based on the definition of relative poverty used by the OECD. Under this definition,a child is deemed to be living in relative poverty if he or she is growing up in a household where disposable income, when adjusted for family size and composition, is less than 50% of the median disposable household income for the country concerned. By this standard, more than 15% of the 200 million children in the 35 countries listed in Figure 1b are seen to be living in relative poverty.


The top five positions in the league table are occupied by Iceland, Finland, Cyprus, the Netherlands and Norway (with Slovenia and Denmark close behind). All of these countries have relative child poverty rates below 7%. Another eight countries including two of the largest — Germany and France– have rates between 7% and 10%. A third group, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, post rates of between 10% and 15%. A further six, including populous Italy and Spain, show rates of between 15% and 20%. In only two countries are more than 20% of children living in relative poverty — Romania and the United States.

Quote of the day

~ susie ~ 8 Comments

James Galbraith, August 2011:

And the President too is a young man. Unlike say Lyndon B. Johnson or Jimmy Carter, when his term ends he won’t be able simply to go home. He’ll need a big house in a gated suburb, with high walls and rich friends. And a good income, too, from book deals and lecture fees. He may be thinking about that now. … [But] it won’t save him. For if and when he ventures out, for the rest of his life, the eyes of all those, whose hopes he once raised will follow him. The old, the poor, the jobless, the homeless: their eyes will follow him wherever he goes.

Very Serious People

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Digby on Tom Friedman, wanker:

Nobody but Villagers and rich people (many of whom are the same people) want this Grand Bargain bullshit. And that’s because on some level everyone else knows it’s a con of epic proportions. We don’t “need combined boldness.” We just need boldness. It’s the combined part that’s going to screw everything up.

You either believe in stimulus or you don’t. If you do, borrow the money at very cheap rates and hire a bunch of people to do something. When the economy gets going again and people are working and paying taxes, then raise taxes to pay down the cheap loans, if that’s even necessary.

This endless haranguing about deficit projections long into the future, even if it is “combined” with another inadequate stimulus, is in service of one thing and one thing only — dismantling the sad remnants of the American welfare state once and for all. We know this because the whole argument is riddled with lies and misconceptions — and fabulously wealthy celebrities like Tom Friedman are either too uninformed to understand this or are in on the con. Either way, they are accomplices to a great crime that’s being perpetrated by the American people.

So far, Americans of both the left and right, for very different reasons, have come to the common sense conclusion that none of the elites can be trusted and it’s better if these people do nothing at all than enact this plan. More power to them.

Pots and pans

~ susie

I love this:

A video of protesters banging pots and pans on Quebec streets is going viral on social networks.


Posted on Friday afternoon, the beautiful black and white film shows protesters of all ages taking to the streets to protest the emergency law Bill 78. The Vimeo video quickly began showing up all over Twitter and Facebook.


Bill 78 is being called a draconian attempt to quell massive student protests that have taken over Quebec streets for more than 100 days. The bill limits the ability to protest by requiring groups to get police approval for demonstrations and restricting where they can take place, among other provisions.


People took up the percussive protest Thursday night in several towns and cities including Sorel, Longueuil, Chambly, Repentigny, Trois-Rivieres and even in Abitibi — several hundred kilometres away from the hot spot of Montreal.


They were still loudest in Montreal, where a chorus of metallic clanks rang out in neighbourhoods around the city, spilling into the main demonstrations and sounding like aluminum symphonies.


The pots-and-pans protest has its roots in Chile, where people have used it for years as an effective, peaceful tool to express civil disobedience. The noisy cacerolazo tradition actually predates the Pinochet regime in Chile, but has endured there and spread to other countries as a method of showing popular defiance.


Thursday’s protest in Montreal was immediately declared illegal by police, who said it violated a municipal bylaw because they hadn’t been informed of the route. They allowed it to continue as long as it remained peaceful.

White people

~ susie ~ 7 Comments

So I wrote this post over at C&L, and the usual suspects are going wild.

Why? I said the very controversial thing that maybe white working class voters had reasons other than racism for not supporting Obama, and that maybe Obama should deliver something that would actually help them if he wanted their support.

There I go again!