You don’t need to be an economist to see why Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan, which includes a national sales tax on food, is incredibly regressive. All you really have to do is take a gander at this chart.
“ The word “shameful” doesn’t even begin to describe it. Still, we steadfastly refuse to invest in anything that might help to keep this country’s workforce viable in a world economy, because it might also help the poor. Anything that helps give the working or middle class a fair chance at helping America succeed is branded the socialist machinations of a doomed welfare state. It is as if we would rather see our nation fail than risk letting our neighbor’s kid have it any easier than we did.
— Larry Womack on the “penny wise, dollar foolish, unconscionably cruel and supremely misguided age of austerity we’re living in.”
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Tonight in London, social order and the rule of law have broken down entirely. The city has been brought to a standstill; it is not safe to go out onto the streets, and where I am in Holloway, the violence is coming closer. As I write, the looting and arson attacks have spread to at least fifty different areas across the UK, including dozens in London, and communities are now turning on each other, with the Guardian reporting on rival gangs forming battle lines. It has become clear to the disenfranchised young people of Britain, who feel that they have no stake in society and nothing to lose, that they can do what they like tonight, and the police are utterly unable to stop them. That is what riots are all about.
Riots are about power, and they are about catharsis. They are not about poor parenting, or youth services being cut, or any of the other snap explanations that media pundits have been trotting out: structural inequalities, as a friend of mine remarked today, are not solved by a few pool tables. People riot because it makes them feel powerful, even if only for a night. People riot because they have spent their whole lives being told that they are good for nothing, and they realise that together they can do anything – literally, anything at all. People to whom respect has never been shown riot because they feel they have little reason to show respect themselves, and it spreads like fire on a warm summer night. And now people have lost their homes, and the country is tearing itself apart.
— Laurie Penny on the riots in London.
“ Your son is suffering because of a drug war declared with black folks in mind,” I say after a long pause. “White people—especially poor whites—are suffering because of the politics of racial division. Latinos are suffering, too. The drug war as we know it would not exist today, but for the demonization of black men, and now your son, a young white man, is paying the price. Poor whites are collateral damage in this drug war. But whether you’re the target or collateral damage, the suffering remains the same. Thanks to the drug war, we have the opportunity to see clearly how caste-like systems hurt us all, even though they hurt us differently or in different degrees. We must go back and pick up where Martin Luther King Jr. left off and do the hard work of movement building on behalf of poor people of all colors. Are you willing to help build a movement to end racial caste in America, a human rights movement on behalf of all of us? All of us or none?
— From “Real Justice Means Fewer Prisons” by Michelle Alexander.
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“ The U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities. When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.
— Bob Herbert’s final NYT column is depressing but true.
Yes, this is what class warfare looks like. Via the Daily Kos.
Mother Jones brings us 11 charts that show everything that’s wrong with the U.S.
