Happy Independence Day - Uprising
“It was as a socialist, and because I was a socialist, that I fell in love with America. In saying that I am not indulging in romantic nostalgia about youthful days on the road but rather underlining a crucial political truth. If the Left wants to change this country because it hates it, then the people will never listen to the Left and the people will be right. To be a socialist–to be a Marxist–is to make an act of faith, of love even, toward this land. It is to sense the seed beneath the snow; to see, beneath the veneer of corruption and meanness and the commercialization of human relationships, men and women capable of controlling their own destinies. To be a radical is, in the best and only decent sense of the word, patriotic.”
– Michael Harrington, Fragments of the Century
Saturday, July 7, 2012
Thursday, July 5, 2012
Saturday, June 30, 2012
Class War Update
Corporate Profits at All-Time High; Wages at All-Time Low: Can We Call it Class War Yet? | | AlterNet
Banks Making Money off Taxpayers & Backdoor Bailouts
Number of People in Extreme Poverty Up 50% Since 2000
Profits Hit All Time High, Wages Hit All Time Low (connection?)
Stiglitz: The Price of Inequality
Why The Economy Has Only Recovered for the Top 1%
Low-Wage Nation: Poverty and Inequality are Threatening Democracy
Class War and the Supreme Court
Friday, June 29, 2012
DSA Statement on SCOTUS Decision on the Affordable Care Act
Democratic Socialists of America
Statement on the Supreme Court Decision on the Affordable Care Act (aka, “Obamacare”)
The DSA National Political Committee (NPC) welcomes the 5-4 Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (“ACA”). The decision affirms the right of Congress to legislate in the interest of the general welfare of the American people.
We applaud the gains for ordinary American families that will come with the ACA. Over ten million members of moderate income families will gain coverage under Medicaid; millions of young Americans between the age of 21 and 26 will be able to stay on their parents’ insurance; children and adults with pre-existing conditions will now be covered by the same policies as those deemed by insurers to be “healthy”; and over one hundred million Americans will now be free of lifetime expenditure limits on their coverage.
DSA also recognizes, however, that the ACA will fail to curtail ever-rising health care costs driven by the profit-seeking of private insurers and private health-care providers. Only a single-payer or “Medicare for All” system would provide truly affordable universal coverage by granting a single public insurer bargaining leverage over private providers.
Therefore, DSA will work with the health care activist community to transition the ACA towards a single-payer system. We will join the fight for single-payer at the state level and for the reintroduction of a public option at the federal level.
Progressives, in the short run, must also pressure Congress to appropriate sufficient subsidies to enable uninsured moderate income families to purchase affordable insurance. Otherwise, the anti-“free rider” mandated fee will become a resented burden on those families that still cannot afford to purchase private insurance. We must also organize in favor of Congressional regulations that would prevent corporations from dropping existing health insurance coverage for their employees (in order to switch the course of coverage onto the general public).
DSA also worries that the Court’s rejection of the commerce clause as a justification for national health care legislation may be part of the conservative court’s effort to whittle away at the commerce clause’s use to justify the momentous labor rights legislation of the 1930s and the civil rights laws of the 1960s. Democratic socialists recognize that only strong federal regulation of corporate behavior can insure that the economy serves the people rather than the people serving the interests of corporate masters.
Even though Justice Roberts may have made his “switch in time” on the ACA to refute the charge that he presides over an ideological, political, and conservative Supreme Court, DSA recognizes that the overall direction of the Court (as manifested by the other decisions handed down this week in the Arizona immigration, Montana corporate contributions, and the SEIU union assessment cases) threatens to overturn 80 years of jurisprudence and declare almost all social legislation unconstitutional, including minimum wage and child labor laws.
--adopted by the Democratic Socialists of America National Political Committee, June 29, 2012
Democratic Socialists of America
DSA Flyer: Healthcare for Everyone
Healthcare-Now!
Sunday, June 24, 2012
Action Alert! Healthcare for All Rally (THURSDAY)
Healthcare for All Rally
Healthcare-Now! Will be joining Tennessee Health Care Campaign and Physicians for a National Healthcare Program and other activists at a rally/press conference the day the Supreme Court releases their veridict on the Affordable Health Act ("Obamacare")--supporting a single-payer (Medicare for All) universal healthcare plan... We expect the decision will be released THURSDAY morning, if so, meet us at the Federal Building on N. Main downtown Memphis at 5 PM
If the decision is not released on monday, check back for new day!
What: Rally/Press Conference
When: THURSDAY (June 28) 5 PM
Where: Federal Building, Downtown Memphis
Healthcare-Now!
http://
Contact: Jim Maynard
jmaynard1963@earthlink.net
(901) 619-2679
Physicians for a National Healthcare Program
http://www.pnhp.org/
Contact: Dr. Arthur Sutherland, III, MD, FACC
901 237-6440
Tennessee Health Care Campaign
Brad Palmertree
Director of Communications
Tennessee Health Care Campaign
www.thcc2.org
Office: 615.227.7500 Ext. 8
Progressive Democrats of America
http://pdamerica.org/
Memphis DSA (Democratic Socialists of America)
http://www.memphisdsa.org/
Saturday, June 23, 2012
Class War Update: Corporate Profits UP, Wages Down
Friday, June 22, 2012
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