Category: Power to the People

Mayor Bill DeBlasio: “We are called to put an end to economic and social inequalities”

~ susie

The thing I liked best about the ceremony? The inclusion of Dasani Coates, the ambitious homeless girl recently profiled in the New York Times, in the festivities. What a change from Bloomberg! I wish Mayor DeBlasio the best in the enormous task of making one city out of two:

Bill de Blasio claimed his place as the 109th mayor of New York City shortly after 1 p.m. on Wednesday, delivering an inaugural address at City Hall in front of luminaries like Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton as well as hundreds of ordinary New Yorkers.

“We are called to put an end to economic and social inequalities that threaten to unravel the city we love,” Mr. de Blasio said. “And so today, we commit to a new progressive direction in New York. And that same progressive impulse has written our city’s history. It’s in our DNA.”

Mr. de Blasio, 52, was formally sworn in shortly after midnight in a brief ceremony in front of his family’s rowhouse in Park Slope, Brooklyn. On the steps of City Hall, he was ceremonially sworn in by former President Clinton, in whose administration he served as a regional official in the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Mr. de Blasio was sworn in using a Bible once owned by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

“There are some who think that now, as we turn to governing – well, that things will just continue pretty much like they always have,” Mr. de Blasio said. “So let me be clear: When I said I would take dead aim at the tale of two cities, I meant it. And we will do it.”

A Democrat, the new mayor begins his term as an emblem of resurgent liberalism, offering hope to progressive activists and officeholders across the country — but also as an untested chief executive whose management of the city will be closely scrutinized.
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Poverty, straight up

~ odd man out ~ 1 Comment

From a blog called killermartinis, a stark account of living in poverty:

…Rest is a luxury for the rich. I get up at 6 AM, go to school (I have a full course load, but I only have to go to two in-person classes) then work, then I get the kids, then I pick up my husband, then I have half an hour to change and go to Job 2. I get home from that at around 12:30 AM, then I have the rest of my classes and work to tend to. I’m in bed by 3. This isn’t every day, I have two days off a week from each of my obligations. I use that time to clean the house and soothe Mr. Martini and see the kids for longer than an hour and catch up on schoolwork. Those nights I’m in bed by midnight, but if I go to bed too early I won’t be able to stay up the other nights because I’ll fuck my pattern up, and I drive an hour home from Job 2 so I can’t afford to be sleepy. I never get a day off from work unless I am fairly sick. It doesn’t leave you much room to think about what you are doing, only to attend to the next thing and the next. Planning isn’t in the mix…

Read the whole piece. It’s as if someone said “Just the facts, ma’am,” and the blogger said OK, here you are, and what came out was an artfully plain explanation of why poverty often feels like quicksand — the more you struggle against it, the deeper it sucks you in.

The headline is “Why I make terrible decisions,” but the piece illustrates how hard it is not ro make terrible decisions when none of your options is good. The best you can do is choose the option that seems less bad than the others. When you’re poor, this is the same thing as high-stakes gambling.

But it looks like the story might not end on a grim note. Another blogger apparently read the killermartinis post and said, damn, maybe I can help drag this woman onto solid ground. So the other blogger apparently established an online fund to help pay to have KM’s teeth fixed. Check it out.

And it seems KM’s “terrible decisions” piece may have caught the eye of a literary agent.

All of this seems to be on the up-and-up, although the cynic in me is always suspicious of Frank Capra-esque plot twists. Again, check it out.

Liberals need to fix Obamacare

~ susie ~ 6 Comments

Alex Pareene:

So what is to be done? Democrats who aren’t Obama should already be working on easy-to-grasp proposals to “reform” the ACA — to make it more public and less private. The immediate priority — and progressives running for office in 2014 and 2016 should practice saying this out loud — is fixing Obamacare. Not just the website, but the coverage gaps, the ways insurance companies will continue to exploit people and rip them off, and the potential for the cost burden on middle-class people to grow.

Liberal Democrats need to propose real, old-fashioned liberal solutions to the real problems of the ACA. Things like federalizing Medicaid, to take care of people in states where the expansion has been blocked, and lowering the Medicare eligibility age. And they need to reintroduce the public option. None of that is attainable now, but it could be in the near future. That whole package ought to be pushed for by unions and by activists in primary elections. The message needs to be nakedly populist — “make Obamacare work for you instead of the insurance companies” — and made without the fear of conservative backlash, because conservative ideas are unpopular. And Democrats in Congress ought to begin seriously agitating for Medicare-for-all, both because it is the correct policy, and because doing so will make everything else seem more “reasonable.”


h/t Nicole Naum.

Your daily pope

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Interesting:

NBC News: “Pope Francis is shaking things up again. The pontiff with a penchant for surprises is making new waves by launching a survey of his flock on issues facing modern families — from gay marriage to divorce. Very specific questions are being sent to parishes around the globe in preparation for next year’s synod of bishops, a grassroots effort that experts say is unprecedented. … Vatican watchers say Francis’ polling attempt is extraordinary on two levels: first, because it seeks input from rank-and-file Roman Catholics and second, because it touches on issues that might have been considered off-limits in past papacies. … The document sent to every nation’s conference of bishops notes that the ancient church and its members are grappling with ‘concerns which were unheard of until a few years ago.’ Same-sex unions, mixed marriages, single-parent families and surrogate mothers are all mentioned in the prelude to a list of questions that get into the nitty-gritty of 21st century life.”

A Sampling of the Qs:

“What pastoral attention can be given to people who live in these types of [same-sex] union?”
“In the case of unions of persons of the same sex who have adopted children, what can be done pastorally in light of transmitting the faith?”
“Do [the divorced and remarried] feel marginalized or suffer from the impossibility of receiving the sacraments?”
“In cases where non-practicing Catholics or declared non-believers request the celebration of marriage, describe how this pastoral challenge is dealt with.”

Progressive Bill DeBlasio on track for historic NYC win

~ susie
Democrat on track for historic win as New York mayor (via AFP)

Democratic Party candidate Bill de Blasio is on track to win a historic victory as mayor of New York next week, according to a new poll published Monday. The New York Times/Siena College poll predicted de Blasio was certain to win the November 5 election…

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Russell Brand on revolution

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

http://youtu.be/-0w6eC9I9LY

“These young people have been accidentally marketed to their whole lives without the economic means to participate in the carnival.” — Russell Brand

Russell Brand was invited to edit the current issue of the New Statesman, and this is part of a longer piece he wrote:

We require a change that is beyond the narrow, prescriptive parameters of the current debate, outside the fortress of our current system. A system predicated on aspects of our nature that are dangerous when systemic: greed, selfishness and fear. These are old, dead ideas. That’s why their business is conducted in archaic venues. Antiquated, elegant edifices, lined with oak and leather. We no longer have the luxury of tradition.

Cameron, Osborne, Boris, all of them lot, they went to the same schools and the same universities that have the same decor as the old buildings from which they now govern us. It’s not that they’re malevolent; it’s just that they’re irrelevant. Relics of an old notion, like Old Spice: it’s fine that it exists but no one should actually use it.

We are still led by blithering chimps, in razor-sharp suits, with razor-sharp lines, pimped and crimped by spin doctors and speech-writers. Well-groomed ape-men, superficially altered by post-Clintonian trends.

We are mammals on a planet, who now face a struggle for survival if our species is to avoid expiry. We can’t be led by people who have never struggled, who are a dusty oak-brown echo of a system dreamed up by Whigs and old Dutch racists.

We now must live in reality, inner and outer. Consciousness itself must change. My optimism comes entirely from the knowledge that this total social shift is actually the shared responsibility of six billion individuals who ultimately have the same interests. Self-preservation and the survival of the planet. This is a better idea than the sustenance of an elite. The Indian teacher Yogananda said: “It doesn’t matter if a cave has been in darkness for 10,000 years or half an hour, once you light a match it is illuminated.” Like a tanker way off course due to an imperceptible navigational error at the offset we need only alter our inner longitude.

Capitalism is not real; it is an idea. America is not real; it is an idea that someone had ages ago. Britain, Christianity, Islam, karate, Wednesdays are all just ideas that we choose to believe in and very nice ideas they are, too, when they serve a purpose. These concepts, though, cannot be served to the detriment of actual reality.

The reality is we have a spherical ecosystem, suspended in, as far as we know, infinite space upon which there are billions of carbon-based life forms, of which we presume ourselves to be the most important, and a limited amount of resources.

The only systems we can afford to employ are those that rationally serve the planet first, then all humanity. Not out of some woolly, bullshit tree-hugging piffle but because we live on it, currently without alternatives. This is why I believe we need a unifying and in – clusive spiritual ideology: atheism and materialism atomise us and anchor us to one frequency of consciousness and inhibit necessary co-operation.

Interview with Russell Brand

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Fucking A, Russell!

Actor-slash-comedian-slash-Messiah Russell Brand, in his capacity as guest editor of the New Statesman‘s just-published revolution-themed issue, was invited to explain to Jeremy Paxman why anyone should listen to a man who has never voted in his life.

“I don’t get my authority from this preexisting paradigm which is quite narrow and only serves a few people,” Russell responded. “I look elsewhere for alternatives that might be of service to humanity.”

And with that, the first shots of Russell’s revolutionary interview were fired.

>Over the course of the following ten-or-so minutes, Brand and Paxo volleyed back and forth over subjects ranging from political apathy, to corporate greed, to gorgeous beards.

Throughout the interview, Brand repeatedly dodged Paxman’s efforts to trivialize his message — at one point Paxman literally called Brand a “very trivial man” — until finally, even the entrenched newsman appeared to relent against the rushing tide of Brand’s valid arguments.

After Brand reminded Paxman that he cried after learning that his grandma too had been “fucked over” by aristocrats, the Newsnight host was stunned into silence.

“If we can engage that feeling and change things, why wouldn’t we?” Brand crescendoed. “Why is that naive? Why is that not my right because I’m an ‘actor’? I’ve taken the right. I don’t need the right from you. I don’t need the right from anybody. I’m taking it.”

An audacious proposal

~ susie

If only we still had this kind of political thinking:

By gathering over 100,000 signatures – which they delivered last Friday along with 8 million 5-cent coins representing the country’s population – activists have secured a vote by Switzerland’s parliament on an audacious proposal: providing a basic monthly income of about $2,800 U.S. dollars to each adult in the country. (A date for the vote hasn’t yet been set.) Such basic income proposals, which have drawn increased attention since the 2008 financial crash, offer a night-and-day contrast to the current U.S. debate over what to cut and by how much.

Salon called up John Schmitt, a senior economist at the progressive Center for Economic and Policy Research, to discuss the economics and politics of having the government send everyone in the country a monthly check.

What is a universal basic income, and why are we hearing more about it now?

The proposals that are floating around the world vary a lot. But the basic idea is, no matter what you do, if you’re a resident — or in some cases, a citizen — you get a certain amount of money each month. And it’s completely unconditional: If you’re rich you get it, if you’re poor you get. If you’re a good person you get it, if you’re a bad person you get it. And it does not depend on you doing anything other than making whatever effort is involved to collect the money. It’s been a topic of discussion for several decades. Why is it happening right now? I think it’s obvious that it’s a reaction to the high level of economic inequality that we’ve seen. Most European countries haven’t had big increases in inequality at the same scale that we [in the U.S.] have, [but] some of them have had much more than they’re used to.

Some have argued that the mass anti-austerity protests and strikes in Europe have been relatively unsuccessful at changing policy. Do you think that’s so? Is that related to this movement?

I think it’s very clearly the case that the political action that’s been taken so far has not been able to end austerity. I would say, certainly in the case of Greece, the political activism strengthened the hand of the government negotiators with respect to what the final agreement between various authorities and the Greeks would be, because the Greek government could point out the window and say, “You know, if we don’t get a better deal, there’s going to be more of what we’ve seen in the streets.”