Robert Reich writes
Why So Many Americans Feel So Powerless:
As I travel around America, I’m struck by how utterly powerless most people feel.
The companies we work for, the businesses we buy from, and the political system we participate in all seem to have grown less accountable. I hear it over and over: They don’t care; our voices don’t count.
A large part of the reason is we have fewer choices than we used to have. In almost every area of our lives, it’s now take it or leave it.
Companies are treating workers as disposable cogs because most working people have no choice. They need work and must take what they can get.
Although jobs are coming back from the depths of the Great Recession, the portion of the labor force actually working remains lower than it’s been in over thirty years – before vast numbers of middle-class wives and mothers entered paid work.
Which is why corporations can get away with firing workers without warning, replacing full-time jobs with part-time and contract work, and cutting wages. Most working people have no alternative. [...]
Our economy and society depend on most people feeling the system is working for them.
But a growing sense of powerlessness in all aspects of our lives – as workers, consumers, and voters – is convincing most people the system is working only for those at the top.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2006—You Have the Power: The 50-State Canvass:
Remember how hearing that phrase, "You have the power!" made the heart thrill? More than anything else about the Howard Dean surge, that phrase both represented us and spoke to us. All of us. Taking back our flag, taking back responsibility for our political lives, our Party, our government. We have that power. We've ceded it in far too many instances, but it is ours.
In 2004, that message was a little before its time. But let us consider it a prescient message, rather than a pie-in-the-sky one. Because the tools for taking back our power are coming together, under Governor Dean's leadership. One of them will unfold tomorrow, the Neighbor-to-Neighbor organizing day. One conversation happening in a thousand or more neighborhoods, in all 50 states and the U.S. territories. It's a grand vision, of conversations between neighbors all over the country, the beginning of bridge building, of talking about the issues that matter to all of us, of putting a friendly, neighborly face to the Democratic Party.
I'll admit freely that I'm a sentimental idealist when it comes to the best of our democracy--the people-powered democracy, with active civic engagement, and an electorate that is informed and involved. How much more idealistic can you get, huh? My first taste of it came really before I can even remember it clearly. It was 1968 and I was four years old. My parents were campaigning for Cecil Andrus for governor. Mom would load us kids in the station wagon to drive around Idaho's Magic Valley, going door-to-door (ranch-to-ranch, farm-to-farm) to talk about the campaign and the vision Cece Andrus had for Idaho, a vision that he was able to see come to realization when he won that campaign and several subsequent ones.
Since then, I've been involved in a handful of other campaigns, sometimes as a volunteer, sometimes as paid staff and once as campaign manager/scheduler/press secretary (we were pretty poor). But every time, I've taken the opportunity at least once to get out my clipboard and walking shoes and canvass. Because, oddly enough, it's fun.
Tweet of the Day
On
today's Kagro in the Morning show, Baltimore dominates the news, so
Greg Dworkin points us to Ta-Nehisi Coates. Three views on guns: scientists, the public & the gov't. Rejecting Obamacare reality. Balto. mayor botches a line, right goes bonkers. Area teacher offers alternative story of student arrests. Remarkable comments from an Orioles exec. Tulsa Sheriff finds a scapegoat. Study: Gun ownership & uncontrollable anger go hand in hand. But there's more. What if I told you that guns actually spray a powerful neurotoxin known to spark anger & impulse control issues? Crazy? What if I told you the neurotoxin was lead? New app helps gun enthusiasts pinpoint homes of "anti-gun activists."
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