Response to Mr Blair 3

I haven’t read Assets and the Poor, though I’ll give serious consideration to ordering it the next time I get a spare 25 bucks, but there is an excerpt – the first 5 pages – at Amazon which at least gave me a flavor for what Sherraden’s after and where he’s coming from. First response? [...]

Response to Mr Blair 2

What you – and a lot of other people; you’re not alone – don’t seem to realize is that poverty is not a state of mind. It’s an economic condition that’s often forced on people.
[T]here are a lot of people…who think poverty is the result of stupidity or laziness, people who simply can’t believe that [...]

Response to Mr Blair 1

This is one of those posts that started out to be a comment on someone else’s blog until I decided that a) it was too long for a comment, and b) the issue has enough resonance to deserve wider exposure.
A brand-new blog (born March 17, barely a month ago) called Asset Almanac and authored by [...]

Minimum Wage Deal Cut in Senate

The Senate has just passed the minimum wage bill which will go to the president as part of the supplemental package funding the war in Iraq. The bill, worked out in Conference Committee mainly by the Democratic majority, will cut the $$$12Bil$$$ in corporate tax breaks originally demanded by Senate Republicans under a threat of [...]

Welfare and Medicaid Cuts Raise Infant Mortality Rate

Conservatives kill babies.
Not with their own hands, of course. They don’t strangle them in their cribs. They let their anti-life policies do it for them.
For decades but especially for the last 12 years, the very same conservatives who scream that the removal of an unformed scut of cells in a womb is murder have been [...]

Environmental Change: Unless the Corporatocracy Does It, It Don’t Mean Much

From Mark Morford:
 Just look around. It feels as though your heart is being eaten by angry capitalist cockroaches. Like your id is being munched by deranged zombie architects. And your eyes, oh God your eyes, they can’t help but be burned like charcoal as they take in mile after mile, town after town, dreary suburban [...]

FEMA Replaces the Red Cross: Is Martial Law Back in Play?

After FEMA’s shameful performance in the wake of Katrina, one would have thought that nobody in their right mind would assign them the key disaster-relief role, but that’s exactly what just happened.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency will replace the American Red Cross as the agency in charge of coordinating the provision of shelter, food and [...]

Poverty and Educational Consultants

In one of its rare attempts to deal with the issue of poverty, the Washington Post takes note of an educational consultant named Ruby Payne who specializes in teaching teachers what to expect from poor kids in a classroom and how to deal with it when they get it.
The Texas-based author says in her book [...]

State Farm Tries to Change Engineering Reports to Avoid Paying Katrina Claims

E-mails are all over the news these days. First, there are the missing RNC emails (funny how evidence of criminal activity by Pubs goes missing, ain’t it?), and then there are the ones that aren’t.
Attorneys for homeowners suing State Farm Insurance Cos. after Hurricane Katrina have long accused the insurer of pressuring engineers to alter [...]

What the Corporatocracy Thinks of Its Workers

Wasserman