Progressive Media Advocates
Richard Eskow: Simpson and Bowles, those two hired pitchmen for budget-cutting hysteria, are still hawking an economy-killing product called “austerity economics,” a product that’s designed to benefit their wealthy patrons at everybody else’s expense.
Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers: From Chicago to Detroit, from San Jose to Portland, from Oakland to Newark, people are standing up and saying “NO” to austerity.
Rev. Peter Laarman: A safe society is first and foremost a just society. In that respect we have an awfully long way to go. Let’s not waste any more time.
Lawrence Wittner: Although studies have found that the United States ranks 17th among nations in education, 26th in infant mortality, and 37th in life expectancy and overall health, there is no doubt that it ranks first when it comes to war.
Tina Dupuy: The real middle-class—the actual human beings—are not getting help from the politicians they voted for. Instead, the politicians they voted for are helping the companies that the middle-class, in turn, is forced to subsidize. It’s not a theory, it’s a conspiracy fact.
Victoria Defranceso Soto: Latinos aren’t the first group that comes to mind in a discussion about unions, especially with regards to a rust-belt state such as Michigan. But it turns out that Latinos are disproportionately affected, and not in a good way, by the diminishing strength of unions.
Charley James: Newspapers and cable are filled with counter GOP demands for massive spending cuts that would almost entirely hurt the poor, the working poor, the tattered remains of the middle class and the elderly.
Leslie Radford: The best, best outcome of this would be that anybody facing eviction, being thrown out on the streets, wrongful eviction, fraudulent eviction, that they question their loan, that they put a wall, or at least show resistance.
Karen Finney: Weeks after the election, congressional Republicans are still clinging to similar bad math and bad assumptions that th eRomney campaign made, yet hoping for a different result.
Robert Reich: Excuse me for sounding impertinent, but isn’t this fear-mongering likely to buttress Republican arguments that the Bush tax cuts should be extended for everyone — including the rich?
Robert Reich: I wish President Obama and the Democrats would explain to the nation that the federal budget deficit isn’t the nation’s major economic problem and deficit reduction shouldn’t be our major goal.
Richard “RJ” Eskow: Roughly two-thirds of Americans who make $10,000 per year or less are women. The gender balance only reaches 50/50 status as it approaches the income levels we commonly think of as ‘middle class.’
Peter Laarman: Just a word about the Next Big Thing: the coming lame duck session and the “fiscal cliff” and the prospect of a not-so-grand bargain in which Democrats will yield yet more ground to Pete Peterson’s baleful “austerity for you but not for me” proposals.
Charley James: The nonsense Romney spouts as factual would be breathtaking if it was not so scary and he weren’t running for president.
Robert Reich: the President explained why the way to create more jobs and to get the economy back on track is to strengthen the middle class, in sharp contrast to Romney’s trickle-down redux.
Tina Dupuy: We’re fatter, sicker, further in debt and using the most illegal drugs in the world—all signs Americans have become overspent from bad economic policies.
Sharon Kyle: Technological advances in communications, transportation, automation and the like have changed the mutual dependencies that once existed between the American middle class and the super rich.
Madelaine Janis: It’s critically important that we build consensus among public officials across the country in the years ahead that job creation should be considered one of the primary criteria in the purchase of equipment for public use.
Walter Brasch: It’s time to retire the 99 percent. Not the people, but the slogan that identifies the Occupy Movement.
Rudy Acuña: Today the rights of Mexican Americans and immigrants are being blatantly violated by state and local officials in Arizona. Where are the voices of middle-class Latinos? Where is the fight back?
Robert Reich: Wealth percolates upward from working people who are adequately educated, healthy, sufficiently rewarded, and who feel they have a fair chance to make it in America.
Award-winning broadcaster Tavis Smiley and Cornel West, one of the nation’s leading intellectuals are touring the country addressing the issue of rising poverty in the United States.
Mark Naison: One question we must ask is why this campaign has acquired such strong bipartisan support and why the public has not spoken out more against it.
Robert Reich: Public higher education has been the gateway to the middle class but that gate is shutting – just when income and wealth are more concentrated at the top than they’ve been since the 1920s, and when America needs the brainpower of its young people more than ever.
John Hennen: Eastern Kentucky union fighters like Sam and Florence Reece, and the radical leftists of the NMU, laid the foundation for the American middle class.
David Love: If Stockholm Syndrome relates to the feeling of empathy that kidnap victims have with their captors, then certainly what we are witnessing today is a Stockholm Syndrome of those on the losing end of American capitalism.
Robert Reich: January’s increase in hiring is good news, but it masks a bigger and more disturbing story – the continuing downward mobility of the American middle class.
Mark Naison: During the 1960’s, New York city was the scene of an incredibly powerful anti-war and student movement. Like Occupy Wall Street, this movement was often attacked for being unrepresentative of the city’s working class. In reality, this movement was far more diverse in class and race than critics at the time, or historians, realized.
Sikivu Hutchinson: Black Skeptics Los Angeles spearheaded its First in the Family Humanist Scholarship initiative, which focuses on providing resources to undocumented, foster care, homeless and LGBTQ youth who will be the first in their families to go to college.
Carl Matthes: Despite the much-heralded 2008 success of Prop 8 in California to stop same-sex marriage, that vote, and it’s subsequent ramifications, provided not only 18,000 lesbian and gay couples with legal marriages, but the accelerant for the Prop 8 case currently being decided by SCOTUS.
Randy Shaw: Obama could regain young people’s support by lowering student loan rates, enacting immigration reform and rejecting the Keystone XL Pipeline, but time—and his political capital—is running out.
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Friday Feedback: “The Role of the Middle-Class Revisited”
Friday Feedback: This week, Rosalio Munoz comments on Dr. Rodolfo Acuña’s article that states, “Chicanas/os and Latinos remain political pochos because once they are out of college most do not remain politically active.”