Child Tax Credit expansions were instrumental in reducing poverty rates to historic lows in 2021
All in all, child poverty was the lowest on record in 2021, largely due to key expansions of the Child Tax Credit. Unfortunately, that’s where the good news ends—policymakers let those vital tax credits expire at the end of 2021, leading to higher child poverty rates in 2022.
Nine CA Districts to Keep or with Potential
To Flip
District 3 (likely R)—Dr. Kermit Jones--https://www.kermitjonesforcongress.com/
Opponent—Kevin Kiley
District 9 (leaning D)—Josh Harder (incumbent)-- https://harder.house.gov/
Opponent—Tom Patti—County Supervisor
District 13 (toss-up)—Adam Gray (current CA Assembly member)--https://a21.asmdc.org/
Opponent—John Duarte
District 22 (toss-up)—Rudy Salas (current CA Assembly member)--https://a32.asmdc.org/
Opponent—David Valadao
District 27 (toss-up)—Christy Smith-https://www.christyforcongress.org/-
Opponent—Mike Garcia (incumbent)
District 41 (leaning R)—Will Rollins--https://willrollinsforcongress.com/
Opponent—Ken Calvert (incumbent)
District 45 (leaning R)—Jay Chen--https://chenforcongress.com/
Opponent—Michelle Chen (incumbent)
District 47 (leaning D)—Katie Porter (incumbent)--https://porter.house.gov/-
Opponent—Scott Baugh
District 49 (leaning D)—Mike Levin (incumbent)-- https://mikelevin.house.gov/
Opponent—Brian Maryott
Reference articles
· https://calmatters.org/california-voter-guide-2022/us-house/house-races/
recommended by a committee in the seminar. Feel free to comment.
Recommended by a member of the seminar.
It Didn’t Start With Trump. The Seventy Year History of the Republican Party. How the GOP Went Crazy. David Corn. Mother Jones.
Intro to the seminar. Sept 8, 2022
The current crisis.
Defining the issues. Joe Biden.
Jan 6. Insurrection. The House Committee Hearings.
Extremism . August 2022. PBS
Crisis on the Right
Models of authoritarian take over
Psychology of authoritarians
History of authoritarian efforts in U.S.
Replacement theory
Tipping points.
“American Reckoning”. PBS. Interview.
Can democracy survive ?
Merge Left: Ian Haney Lopez.
Limiting the right to vote. -video
Groups working to protect democracy.
The dangers of a coup / Fascism
How we got here.
How economies work.
Economics of neoliberal capitalism.
Current economic situations
Inflation.
Economic concentration
Inequality; the end of the American Dream ?
Alternative views of the economic situation
What happens when 40% of the society does not believe progress is possible? Crisis of democracy ?
Homelessness
Citizens United.
Climate crisis.
Politics of our era.
Ian Haney Lopez, Merge Left.
A Progressive Agenda
Biden proposals Inflation Adjustment Act.
Prior budget proposals.
Sanders et al
Tax enforcement
The Right. Trump and his allies.
Who funds the Right? See Billionaires.
Conspiracies , how they grow
Voter suppression- video; Jane Mayer, Georgia.
The organization of Right Wing politics.
Will there be a second coup attempt.?
The armed Right
White Power Movement. video
The media.
Influencing Attitudes and Behaviors
State and local budgets.
Poverty
Homeless
Organizations and campaigns
Poor People’s Campaign
The Third Wave
Reports from seminar members. What are you doing?
How to talk with your conservative neighbors
The climate crisis
Race. Critical Race theory
Immigration. The “Great Replacement “ conspiracy.
Deep State
Voting;
What more can we do? Jan. 6.2021. practice for a coup.
Mark Engler
The US has a ruling class – and Americans must stand up to it
In the year 2022, three multibillionaires own more wealth than the bottom half of American society – 160 million Americans. This is unsustainable.
Bernie Sanders
Fri 2 Sep 2022
Let’s be clear. The most important economic and political issues facing this country are the extraordinary levels of income and wealth inequality, the rapidly growing concentration of ownership, the long-term decline of the American middle class and the evolution of this country into oligarchy.
We know how important these issues are because our ruling class works overtime to prevent them from being seriously discussed. They are barely mentioned in the halls of Congress, where most members are dependent on the campaign contributions of the wealthy and their Super Pacs. They are not much discussed in the corporate media, in which a handful of conglomerates determine what we see, hear and discuss.
So what’s going on?
We now have more income and wealth inequality than at any time in the last hundred years. In the year 2022, three multibillionaires own more wealth than the bottom half of American society – 160 million Americans. Today, 45% of all new income goes to the top 1%, and CEOs of large corporations make a record-breaking 350 times what their workers earn.
Meanwhile, as the very rich become much richer, working families continue to struggle. Unbelievably, despite huge increases in worker productivity, wages (accounting for real inflation) are lower today than they were almost 50 years ago. When I was a kid growing up, most families were able to be supported by one breadwinner. Now an overwhelming majority of households need two paychecks to survive.
Today, half of our people live paycheck to paycheck and millions struggle on starvation wages. Despite a lifetime of work, half of older Americans have no savings and no idea how they will ever be able to retire with dignity, while 55% of seniors are trying to survive on an income of less than $25,000 a year.
Since 1975, there has been a massive redistribution of wealth in America that has gone in exactly the wrong direction. Over the past 47 years, according to the Rand Corporation, $50 trillion in wealth has been redistributed from the bottom 90% of American society to the top 1%, primarily because a growing percentage of corporate profits has been flowing into the stock portfolios of the wealthy and the powerful.
During this terrible pandemic, when thousands of essential workers died doing their jobs, some 700 billionaires in America became nearly $2 trillion richer. Today, while the working class falls further behind, multibillionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are off taking joyrides on rocket ships to outer space, buying $500 million super-yachts and living in mansions with 25 bathrooms.
Disgracefully, we now have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any developed nation on Earth and millions of kids, disproportionately Black and brown, face food insecurity. While psychologists tell us that the first four years are the most important for human development, our childcare system is largely dysfunctional – with an inadequate number of slots, outrageously high costs and pathetically low wages for staff. We remain the only major country without paid family and medical leave.
In terms of higher education, we should remember that 50 years ago tuition was free or virtually free in major public universities throughout the country. Today, higher education is unaffordable for millions of young people. There are now some 45 million Americans struggling with student debt.
Today over 70 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured and millions more are finding it hard to pay for the rising cost of healthcare and prescription drugs, which are more expensive here than anywhere else in the world. The cost of housing is also soaring. Not only are some 600,000 Americans homeless, but nearly 18 million households are spending 50% or more of their limited incomes on housing.
It’s not just income and wealth inequality that is plaguing our nation. It is the maldistribution of economic and political power.
Today we have more concentration of ownership than at any time in the modern history of this country. In sector after sector a handful of giant corporations control what is produced and how much we pay for it. Unbelievably, just three Wall Street firms (Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street) control assets of over $20 trillion and are the major stockholders in 96% of S&P 500 companies. In terms of media, some eight multinational media conglomerates control what we see, hear and read.
In terms of political power, the situation is the same. A small number of billionaires and CEOs, through their Super Pacs, dark money and campaign contributions, play a huge role in determining who gets elected and who gets defeated. There are now an increasing number of campaigns in which Super Pacs actually spend more money on campaigns than the candidates, who become the puppets to their big money puppeteers. In the 2022 Democratic primaries, billionaires spent tens of millions trying to defeat progressive candidates who were standing up for working families.
Dr Martin Luther King Jr was right when he said: “We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power” in America. That statement is even more true today.
Let us have the courage to stand together and fight back against corporate greed. Let us fight back against massive income and wealth inequality. Let us fight back against a corrupt political system.
Let us stand together and finally create an economy and a government that works for all, not just the 1%.
Bernie Sanders. Labor Day, 2022
America’s mainstream media is by now comfortable talking and writing about “authoritarianism.” Maybe it should also begin using the term “fascism,” where appropriate. (Even Joe Biden, who has never been known as a rhetorical bomb-thrower, last Thursday accused the GOP of “semi-fascism.” A spokesperson for the Republican National Committee called Biden’s comment “despicable.”)
Authoritarianism implies the absence of democracy, a dictatorship. Fascism (the word comes from the Latin fasces, denoting a tightly-bound bundle of wooden rods that typically included a protruding axe blade, adopted by Benito Mussolini in the 1930s to symbolize his total power) is different from mere authoritarianism. Fascism also includes hatred of “them” (people considered different by race or religion, or outside the mainstream, or who were born abroad), control over what people learn and what books they are allowed to read, control over what had been independent government units (school boards, medical boards, universities, and so on), control over women and the most intimate and difficult decisions they’ll ever make, and demands that the private sector support the regime.
Perhaps my “just wondering” tweet about DeSantis hit the nerve of the fascism now taking root in the Republican Party?
Or is DeSantis’s own nascent presidential campaign behind the outsized reaction to my tweet? After all, if you’re seeking a presidential nomination in today’s GOP, there’s nothing like an accusation of fascism to rally Trump supporters. It might be a particularly useful strategy if your primary opponent in 2024 will be Trump.
Robert Reich.
Choosing Democracy: Is DeSantis of Florida a Fascist ? - check his sch...: Robert Reich: Is DeSantis a Fascist? By dianeravitch September 4, 2022 // 31 Robert Reich wondered out loud what many people including me...
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This is one example of mobilizations to effect the outcome of the November elections.
In the next few weeks, PPC people nationwide will plunge into a new action plan to reach at least 5 million low-income Americans in advance of the midterms. Learn more below; we also have updates on Apache Stronghold's Oak Flat case and two pro-worker state bills. And don't miss the report (written by one of our own) on a recent nuclear-weapons conference at the UN. |
National PPC kicks off the Voting is Power Unleashed Campaign This week, the National PPC announced our new effort: a 50-day nationally coordinated push to mobilize, organize, register and educate our base for a movement that votes.
Our slogan: If we ever needed to vote for democracy and justice, we sure do need to vote now!
On September 19—just 50 days from the midterms elections on November 8—the Voting is Power Unleashed Campaign will kick off. Its goal: to ensure that the issues affecting poor and low-income people and low-wage workers are at the center of the national narrative during the election season. We will be building relationships with poor and low-income infrequent voters to encourage them to participate in the election and, as Rev. Barber reminds us, “to mobilize around issues, not personalities.”
The 2020 presidential elections saw the highest voter turnout in U.S. election history, including among poor and low-income voters. Of the 168 million Americans who cast a ballot in the general election, 58 million—or 35 percent—were low-income voters. This cuts against common misperceptions that poor and low-income people are apathetic about politics or inconsequential to electoral outcomes. As the report Waking the Sleeping Giant: Poor and Low-Income Voters in the 2020 Elections shows, PPC’s nonpartisan voter outreach drive had a statistically significant impact in drawing eligible low-income people into the active voting population.
We want to continue building on the policies, mobilizing, organizing, voter education and registration work that we have done since 2020. Our 2022 goal: to contact at least 5 million low-income voters through an array of activities including coordinated national days of action, phone banking, text banking and voter canvassing.
We’ll be providing details of how you can plug into this energizing and vital work in the coming weeks, so make sure to check back—and share the information with your communities. |
Apache Stronghold’s Oak Flat case goes back to the Ninth Circuit Day of prayer next Tuesday in San Francisco The Ninth Circuit Court announced this week that it will hold a vote on whether to reconsider Apache Stronghold’s appeal to save Oak Flat, their most sacred site. This means Apache Stronghold may get a second chance to win protection for Oak Flat in the Ninth Circuit.
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