progressive involvement

Graph of the Day

Click, enlarge.

Graph of the Day

Now, maybe we can get some action

Global warming is causing problems for the coffee business--too much rain in some places, increasing threats from insects, and "coffee rust."  Production has declined in India by 30%.  Coffee companies are raising their prices.

Happy Labor Day

Happy birthday, Social Security

Social Security, the most successful social program in American history, is 77 years old today.  On this day in 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law.  As he said at the time:

"The civilization of the past hundred years, with its startling industrial changes, has tended more and more to make life insecure. Young people have come to wonder what would be their lot when they came to old age. The man with a job has wondered how long the job would last.

"This law...represents a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but is by no means complete.... It is, in short, a law that will take care of human needs and at the same time provide for the United States an economic structure of vastly greater soundness....If the Senate and the House of Representatives in this long and arduous session had done nothing more than pass this Bill, the session would be regarded as historic for all time."

Such as the working class voting for the plutocrats who fleece them

"Persuading the people to vote against their own best interests has been the awesome genius of the American political elite from the beginning."- Gore Vidal

St. Francis is spinning in his grave

George Weigel, last seen strewing flowers in the path of John Paul 2 while pointedly ignoring his relationship with proto-fascist and serial sex-offender Marcial Maciel, has broken with the Vatican's teaching on social justice.  

Social justice, in Weigel's mind, was cooked up by liberal staffers at the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and not by Popes and theologians.

Everyone familiar with the situation knows that this has had far more to do with the political predilections of certain conference staff members than with the settled judgment of the American episcopate...

Weigel doesn't like welfare because government agencies push "the LBGT agenda," otherwise known as treating everyone with equality and dignity, and because "it's unaffordable."  If so, one wonders why tax rates are lower than they have been in 80 years.

Says Weigel, "The social welfare state is also dying because it is grossly inefficient."  Let's see now, the administrative overhead of Medicare, which spends half of every health care dollar, is about 3%.  The administrative overheard of private insurance, which spends the other half, ranges between 20-30%.  Inefficiency, thy name is corporate!

Weigel operates from a strikingly obtuse delusion.  Somehow, the global recession is poor peoples' fault.  We've been spending too much money on poor people, and not enough on rich people!

Someone who wrote a book on John Paul surely must have read his encyclicals, such as Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (The Social Concerns of the Church), wherein John Paul writes:

We acknowledge that earlier hopes for the development of all people, especially for those in poor countries, have not yet been fulfilled, so many still suffer the intolerable burden of poverty, hunger and disease. We see the growing gaps between the wealth of some and the poverty of the majority of people on this earth. We recognize the signs of cultural underdevelopment: illiteracy, lack of participation in policy decisions, racial discrimination, religious oppression.

Weigel is a lead columnist for the Denver archdiocesan newspaper.  In their editorial meetings, you can bet they scratch their heads over why people are leaving the church.  If Weigel would spend less time with Ayn Rand, and more time reading the social documents of the church he thinks he promotes, he might get a clue.

 

What feudalism looks like

Economic Policy Institute:  "...it is now the case that the Walton family wealth is as large as the bottom 48.8 million families in the wealth distribution (constituting 41.5 percent of all American families) combined." 

Department of the Unintentionally Hilarious

Richard Land, baptist chaplain to the religious right, says that capitalism is "the most biblical" economic system, and does so without citing a single biblical passage having to do with economics.

He did quote two biblical passages to the effect that all people are sinners, "sick," and "deceitful." 

Hardly "the biggest tax increase in history," not that that's a bad idea

Truman raised taxes three times, Johnson three times, Reagan five times, Clinton once, Bush once.