A new report finds more U.S. children living in poverty than before the Great Recession. According to the report, released Tuesday from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, 22 percent of American children are living in poverty (as of 2013, the latest data available) compared with 18 percent in 2008.
“Our only hope for genuine change is if poor, working class, middle class, black, Latino, and white come together in a powerful movement to take back our economy and democracy from the moneyed interests that now control both.”
Dream on! Economy is about legitimising inequality, And ‘democracy’ is a political con trick. In any case, ‘we’ never had either, to take them back.
I followed the BLM protest at NN closely, moving from irritation at the protesters to a more complete understanding of how these two are intertwined. I had been of the opinion that addressing economic inequality was enough, but it is not. It needs to be a movement with both demands equally attended to. It looks like Bernie is also getting the message. Thank you.
seriously, we’re well over a year out and the partisan hackery is nearing fever pitch already.
I’m taking an internet vacation in about 6 months before this gets suicide inducing…
Here it comes. Reich is setting us up for his inevitable endorsement of The Thing With Three Names.
How expected. How disgusting.
“I just wonder who pisses in all of your cereal bowls in the morning.”
That would be the One Percent, and their meatpuppets such as Reich.
Some really clueless tribalists think it’s lemonade, and attack the truth-tellers, instead of the cereal-polluters (serial polluters?). Go, Team.
We are all suffering from low wages and the loss of income to the top one percent. Clearly, a bold progressive platform - a political revolution, including wage supplements for most workers paid for by high taxes on the wealthy, is urgently needed to mobilize voters and take back the government.
If we are fractured into competing platforms, the opportunity will be lost.
If the Dimcrat and GOP partisans who continue to support trickle down economics (that the two parties enable) were not color blind they would have seen long ago that whatever trickles down is always yellow.
Although the January 2015 Green Shadow Cabinet prediction is indeed spot on, it omits any discussion of Obama’s TPP, TTIP and TISA, legislation that will permanently consign BLM to the dust heap of slogans as blacks and other oppressed people in the US and other signatory nations experience further income and resource disparity.
When the Clintons and others started the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) in 1985 the Party’s mission was narrowed to GET MORE CORPORATE MONEY THAN THE GOP.
The price for getting more corporate money than the GOP has been to abandon “everything the party ever stood for”. Bill Clinton’s NAFTA and 8 years of decriminalizing New Deal financial and media regulations has proven to be a recipe for “unlimited wealth and greed”, even without considering decriminalization perpetrated by other administrations from 1978 to present.
Two important factors need to be taken into account in the up coming election.First the changing demographics, and second the continuing income gap between rich and poor.Now is not a time to settle with what is being offered,but to demand real solutions to the issues we deal with daily. I don’t think people are grasping how incredible it is that Bernie Sanders economic message is resonating. What needs to happen now are more leaders from all walks of life to build on the message of Sanders.Run against democrats in the primary’s,who don’t support policy’s moving toward ECONOMIC FREEDOM,who don’t support real reform of the justice system in this country. Run against republican and democrats who don’t support national health care,and an open accessible vibrant educational system for all.—All these issues most Americans agree with- The message of Bernie Sanders needs to be heard-he is planting a seed-one that was killed in the 1930’s.But the monsanto candidate will do everything she can to kill the seed.Maybe just maybe more seeds will start sprouting and a truly vibrant progressive movement will be reborn.
Reich says:
"It’s impossible to overcome widening economic inequality in America without also dealing with the legacy of racial inequality.
"And it is impossible to overcome racial inequality without also reversing widening economic inequality.
“They are not the same but they are intimately related.”
Yes, I have been saying something similar for some time now. Reich is correct in that it is important for progressives to stick together. But his post is tinged with a criticism of Black Lives Matter for stealing the show at Netroots. He should be thanking the BLM protesters, because Sanders and O’Malley’s comments indicated they were missing the racial inequality part of the argument. Fortunately, it appears that Bernie and Martin have gotten the message, at least at this point rhetorically. They are learning.
Hillary is smart enough to say the right things when it comes to race, but she will never come around on economic justice.
And let’s not forget about global climate justice, an issue of both economic and racial inequality. That must be considered for a fully transformative movement.
In an abstract sense, Reich is correct. But my guess is that he is once again pimping for the Democratic Party.
If we could resurrect Eugene Debs himself and if he joined the Democrats and won the White House, by Inauguration Day, he would willing bomb Muslims, torture whistleblowers, and build a national money pipeline straight to Wall Street.
Despite FDR and LBJ, the modern Democratic Party is a now machine that turns good intentions into badness.
If meaningful reform ever comes again to America, it will be despite the Democratic Party, not because of it.
And if reform is to come, it will be a generational project of vast energies and tremendous sacrifice and dedication. The political theater of presidential elections will be irrelevant to such a project.
Too true. It’s impossible to gain economic fairness and social equality, let alone regain it.
Unfortunately, especially for the jaded, this turns out to be the only worthwhile goal.
It’s crucial to defeat the Republicans.
But not just to elect the old GOP-lite. Again.
