Progressive Media Advocates
Mark Naison: We must also unleash the genius of the business world into the system by subcontracting test development and evaluation to corporations with the resources to do these well and have all school employees wages and salaries targeted to performance the way virtually all business do.
Robert Reich: The President needs to deliver the same message to the public, loudly and clearly. The biggest problems we face are unemployment, stagnant wages, slow growth, and widening inequality — not deficits. The major goal must be to get jobs and wages back, not balance the budget.
Charles D. Hayes: Many full-time employees of some of America’s largest employers need government assistance, including food stamps. Guess who picks up the tab?
Mark Naison: The transformative role that Occupy activists have played in coordinating relief to the hardest hit victims of Hurricane Sandy has shown me that the Occupy networks that survived the evictions were much stronger than I realized.
Jenna Burrell: Connectivity is not a simple binary and the world cannot be neatly divided anymore (if it ever could) into the digital ‘haves’ and ‘have nots.’
Cynthia Alvarez: Occupy is actually impeding Progressives’ outreach to the general public. Progressives need new organizations based on the successful planning and leadership strategies of the civil rights movement to create an army of volunteers.
Kathleen Maclay: Research shows that cities with many college-educated workers tend to develop an innovation-based economy, which attracts even more well-educated workers, further reinforcing their edge.
Ann Robertson and Bill Leumer: This willingness to give up hard won gains in turn has resulted in the continuing decline of union membership, which now stands at 8 percent.
Sharon Kyle: Chris Rock’s reminder that slaves weren’t independent on Independence Day was only a big deal because he mentioned “white people”
Shamus Cooke: Unity in an economically polarized country like Greece is impossible, especially when the continued existence of the bankers and wealthy rests on the continued suffering of everybody else.
Robert Reich: The answer is to reform capitalism. The world’s productivity revolution is outpacing the political will of rich societies to fairly distribute its benefits.
Charles Hayes: Please rename your agency. Stop calling us consumers. We are Citizens with a capital C. In addition, please lead an effort to ask all kinds of media to follow suit.
Robert Reich: Although the nation is now producing more goods and services than it did before the slump began in 2007, we’re doing it with six million fewer people.
Nick Capo: Progressive reformers have led this country to a better state in previous decades, and they will do so again. But it has to start at the local level.
Berry Craig: Elizabeth Warren kept her cool. She swore the heckler, who said he had been unemployed for more than a year, didn’t make her mad. “There’s someone else pre-packaging that poison — and that’s who makes me angry.”
Shamus Cooke: If the national Occupy Movement fought for a massive public jobs program and against cuts to social programs by massively taxing the wealthy and corporations, the vast majority of working people would join the movement until it was capable of actually winning these demands.
Robert Reich: The Occupier movement is still in its infancy in the United States, but it cannot be stopped. Here, as elsewhere, people are outraged at what feels like a rigged game.
John Peeler: The economy, like the polity, ought to be democratically controlled. Democracy should operate at the level of the firm as well as the community: employees should be owners.
Steve Hochstadt: But neither party has tried very hard to protect the poorest Americans from the outsized greed of the wealthy. About half of all members of Congress are millionaires, and all of them are beholden to the very wealthy for donations to their constant campaigning.
We hear a lot about Ryan’s budget and the President’s budget but we’re not hearing very much about the Congressional Progressive Caucus Budget which appears to be more in line with what the average middle class American wants and needs. What’s up with that?
Jessie Daniels: We need to begin to critically examine those who hold the most power and resources in society, that is at white people, for the ways that they contribute to and benefit from the inequality in health outcomes.
Diane Lefer: A comment last week on an LA Times blog argued that “working in a restaurant is not supposed to provide a ‘living wage’. It’s a job that teenagers and students use to get started in life.” Not so according to ROC-LA co-coordinator Cathy Dang who reported that nationwide, people tend to stay in the industry for a lifetime.
Charles Hayes: Republicans are celebrating the 2010 Census because it reflects a gain in congressional seats in traditionally conservative states, but it would be wise of them to realize that a significant number of these people are moving because they can’t find work. Many of them have lost their homes to foreclosure, and if the Republican Party doesn’t get a clue pretty soon, these states may turn a brighter shade of purple with a tint of blue.
Shamus Cooke:
For all the positive things Chavez has accomplished as President, he is in danger of becoming another Salvador Allende — a martyr whose death ushered in a right-wing dictatorship.
Ann Robertson and Bill Leumer: The only alternative available to working people that offers real prospects for success are mass mobilizations in the streets and strikes – the kind of militant struggles that scored so many gains in the 1930s.
Steven Hill: So when the authorities say “a recovery is under way” or “stimulus rather than deficit reduction” or “deficit reduction instead of stimulus,” remember: These are the same experts who are unsure of how to measure, who too often substitute ideology and partisanship for broken theory, and usually have been flat wrong in their assessments.
Benjamin called on the President to use his power as Commander-In-Chief to close Guantanamo prison, release the 86 Guantanamo prisoners who have been cleared for release, and stop the killer drone program
Angola 3 News: Hidden behind the walls, huge numbers of human beings have their spirits broken daily. Secretly, many suffer false disciplinary reports, illegitimate confiscation or destruction of personal property, physical beatings, rape, and sometimes fraudulent criminal penalties.
Tina Dupuy: Because these giant corporations are getting a free pass by the very premise they create jobs, they’re in essence piling their tax burden onto their workers.
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Where Have All the Jobs Gone?
Judith Stein: If President Obama wants the United States to manufacture again, he must change foreign and domestic priorities. The United States is more committed to maintaining its open market than to providing jobs for Americans.