Poor People's Campaign - Sunday

 

A Memo to Democrats

A Memo to Democrats: We will win this election if we convince voters we care about their economic well-being.

Social Security is Being Looted by Private Insurance

 The New York Times just reported:¹

Private health insurance corporations are reaching into the Medicare trust fund and helping themselves to boatloads of our cash―and trying to bankrupt Medicare in the process!

When seniors retire, they have a choice between traditional Medicare, which guarantees health care, or insurance-run Medicare Advantage plans, which tempt seniors with lowered premiums and dental coverage, then turn around and deny necessary health coverage in pursuit of profit!

The Three Biggest GOP Lies of the Midterms,

 The 3 biggest GOP lies of the midterms (in addition to the Big Lie) Robert Reich,

 

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-3-biggest-gop-lies-of-the-midterms#details

Uncomfortable Truths That Could Yet Defeat Fascism

 Saving Democracy: Pro democracy forces.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/17/opinion/midterm-democracy-crisis.html

 

By Anand Giridharadas

Mr. Giridharadas is the author, most recently, of “The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy.”

Polls swing this way and that way, but the larger story they tell is unmistakable. With the midterm elections, Americans are being offered a clear choice between continued and expanded liberal democracy, on the one hand, and fascism, on the other. And it’s more or less a dead heat.

It is time to speak an uncomfortable truth: The pro-democracy side is at risk not just because of potential electoral rigging, voter suppression and other forms of unfair play by the right, as real as those things are. In America (as in various other countries), the pro-democracy cause — a coalition of progressives, liberals, moderates, even decent Republicans who still believe in free elections and facts — is struggling to win the battle for hearts and minds.

The pro-democracy side can still very much prevail. But it needs to go beyond its present modus operandi, a mix of fatalism and despair and living in perpetual reaction to the right and policy wonkiness and praying for indictments. It needs to build a new and improved movement — feisty, galvanizing, magnanimous, rooted and expansionary — that can outcompete the fascists and seize the age.

I believe pro-democracy forces can do this because I spent the past few years reporting on people full of hope who show a way forward, organizers who refuse to give in to fatalism about their country or its citizens. These organizers are doing yeoman’s work changing minds and expanding support for true multiracial democracy, and they recognize what more of their allies on the left must: The fascists are doing as well as they are because they understand people as they are and cater to deep unmet needs, and any pro-democracy movement worth its salt needs to match them at that — but for good

Continue reading the main story

 their own circles and sometimes in public, these organizers warn that the right is outcompeting small-d democrats in its psychological insight into voters and their anxieties, its messaging, its knack for narrative, its instinct to make its cause not just a policy program but also a home offering meaning, comfort and belonging. They worry, meanwhile, that their own allies can be hamstrung by a naïve and high-minded view of human nature, a bias for the wonky over the guttural, a self-sabotaging coolness toward those who don’t perfectly understand, a quaint belief in going high against opponents who keep stooping to new lows and a lack of fight and a lack of talent at seizing the mic and telling the kinds of galvanizing stories that bend nations’ arcs.

The organizers I’ve been following believe they have a playbook for a pro-democracy movement that can go beyond merely resisting to winning. It involves more than just serving up sound public policy and warning that the other side is dangerous; it also means creating an approachable, edifying, transcendent movement to dazzle and pull people in. For many on the left, embracing the organizers’ playbook will require leaving behind old habits and learning new ones. What is at stake, of course, is everything.

Command Attention

Cheers for Social Security’s Cost-of-Living Adjustment

Cheers for Social Security’s Cost-of-Living Adjustment: It will compensate seniors for the bout of inflation. Workers deserve as much.

One Union's View of the 2022 Midterms

 Defending Workers’ Interests in a Rigged System

Statement of the UE General Executive Board The situation working people find ourselves in as we approach the midterm elections — a cost-of-living crisis, broken labor law, and 

assaults on our rights and liberties — requires decisive action 

from our government. However, we are prevented from exercising democratic control over our society and economy by a corrupt two-party system that is fueled by corporate cash, 

and enabled by divisions among working people and increasing cynicism about democracy itself.

read more.

www.ueunion.org