Like many undergraduate students who came from a working class background I went through a stage wherein I adopted many of the values espoused by my “left” leaning professors. I have to admit I was also profoundly influenced by a book titled Sweden: the Middle Way by Marquis Childs that was touted to be the way of the future by many leading intellectuals in the academic world.
Daily, the job of a social worker is to inspire, to show the way, pave some sort of less bumpy path, enlighten, mentor, listen to, value, drive, serve, formulate, plan for, seek money with, engender kinship, provide case managing, and reflect upon the lives of some amazingly resilient survivors.
This is not for the faint of heart or weak in the head sort of person who believes in some magical Disney World of One-Day-I-Too-Will-Find-My-Fairy-Godmother story.
As the wizard Gandalf declared during the darkest hour: “There never was much hope… Just a fool’s hope.”
The narrow thread of hope now rests on the Justice Department investigation into Hillary Clinton’s illegal concealment of her emails from the State Department she headed from 2009 to 2012. If she’s hit by a true scandal between now and the Philadelphia convention in July, all bets could be off.
The global ecological system is collapsing and dying as humanity overruns natural ecosystems and the climate. We are entering an age of unrelenting violence and suffering, prior to biosphere collapse and the end of being, unless dramatic social change based upon a global ecology ethic arises quickly.
Ecosystem loss is biosphere collapse
I can’t take a budget that eliminates marketing, outreach and in-person assistors seriously.
— Teresa Mosqueda, member of the Washington State Health Benefit Exchange board.
You can’t afford to get sick, and you can’t depend on the present health care system to keep you well. It’s up to you to protect and maintain your body’s innate capacity for health and healing by making the right choices in how you live.
— Dr. Andrew Weil, an American physician, author, spokesperson, and sort of guru for holistic health and integrative medicine.
We have all been told a lie. The lie that says democracy can be maintained only through voting, through purely representative, parliamentarian means. When the founding fathers set up the Constitution and Bill of Rights, they were wary of any truly popular, working and middle class control of the United States. Our government was to be run as a republic, designed by elites, for the elites. Our three branches of government were not simply invented for checks and balances: another reason was to stymie any massively popular mandates that would go against the interests of the oligarchy.
That’s a question currently being asked by legislators in the halls of Congress. Without a muscular pushback from the public, the big airlines could claim the American airspace as their own to tax and regulate, without any significant compensation to the American taxpayer and no oversight from elected officials. Talk about getting skyjacked!
You Can’t Fight City Hall?
Sometimes David is Patricia and Goliath is the FCC and AT&T. If anyone has been keeping an eye on rare articles printed in the Spokane (WA) daily and weekly, the reader might have seen the news about one neighborhood – the Grandview-Thorpe – losing the fight to stop Verizon Wireless from building a cell tower in their community, while another neighborhood group –Cliff-Cannon – helped put monkey wrenches (tiny ones) into the gear work of the cell phone-telecommunication engines.
The 50th anniversary of my book, Unsafe at Any Speed, which analysts associate with the launch of the modern consumer movement, prompts comparisons between 1965 and 2015.
Candidates for public office, especially at the state and national levels, are never asked this central question of politics: “Since the people are sovereign under our Constitution, how do you specifically propose to restore power to the people in their various roles as voters, taxpayers, workers and consumers?”
