I come from a working class family. I grew up watching my father struggle, often working two jobs, just to make poverty level wages. He’d come home with calloused hands stained with oil and grease, and would be too tired to play with his kids. My mother was a full-time homemaker, with 6 kids, and she worked just as hard — and later, when I was in high school, she also took on a full time job. They both worked at Boeing, a capricious employer, that would lay them off if they didn’t get a contract one year, and then they’d have to scramble to find new jobs. They managed to keep us kids fed and clothed, but I don’t know how, as I managed to crawl up to the middle class, and I wouldn’t have been able to cope with the stress and responsibility of just 3 kids.
And that is why I can never support any Republican, and way too many Democrats, because they’re the ones making the smug statements Zinn describes here.
“I’ve always resented the smug statements of politicians, media commentators, corporate executives who talked of how, if you worked hard you would become rich. The meaning of that was if you were poor it was because you hadn’t worked hard enough. I knew this was a lie, as I saw my father and millions of others, men and women who worked harder than anyone, harder than financiers and the politicians,- harder than anybody, still struggle in poverty.”
– Howard Zinn.
Throw the rascals out in November.
Anyone who wants to avoid the lies and propaganda and that passes for history books and reporting should delve into the works of:
Dan Sjursen (it’s a long but very astute and accurate book)
A True History of the United States
Indigenous Genocide, Racialized Slavery, Hyper-Capitalism, Militarist Imperialism and Other Overlooked Aspects of American Exceptionalism
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/612519/a-true-history-of-the-united-states-by-daniel-a-sjursen/
and
The Howared Zinn Education Project (excellent work on accurate history)
https://www.zinnedproject.org/
The history I was taught in school wash ‘whitewashed’ crap, that has resulted in the rtwing destruction of the working middle-class. We’ve been making people aware of theses two sources of historical accuracy for years.
A quick note about reaching your blog. When I search Pharyngula I get a note the freethoughtblogs site does not respond. But when I go through Mano Singham, and then the sidebar menu and clicks on a link to this thread, it works.
????
I’m not sure that makes sense. The problem is with DNS; it should not make a difference which sub-blog you access on the website. I suspect that the domain propagated the old information briefly, and it started working for you at that time. Are you still able to connect? (I realize that you may not be able to see the question to answer it)
Anyway, if you get another brief window of access, know that you can edit your hosts file to have:
104.21.234.50 freethoughtblogs.com
104.21.234.51 freethoughtblogs.com
And that should let you access the site “permanently” (that is, until the IP address of the site changes).
Thank you!
Everybody out there;
Get off the couch and be prepared to crowdsource in case PZ needs a cash infusion to pay for fixing the site! This seems more serious than previous outages.
(Also, “preview” does not work)
birgerjohansson @5
PZ – We live, under the dead hand of Ed Brayton (Feb 28)
This outage has lasted six days so far. And lack of money hasn’t been the issue.
HJ Hornbeck: “Something’s up with the DNS entries for freethoughtblogs.com . I’m not exactly sure what, as the domain doesn’t expire until 2031, but yet again DNS resolvers are being told to pretend we don’t exist.”
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain @ 6
.
Thank you.
I still feel bad about Ed Brayton (and not just because his death caused inconvenience, he seemed to be a great person).
When he mentioned his poor health I did not pay attention to the crowdsourcing effort to help pay his medical bills, because #1 I live on the wrong continent, 2# my economy is not great, but most important # 3 USA is the wealthiest country on earth, surely they are not going to just let people die.
It turned out the double struggle with his health and the struggle with his medical insurance companies wore down Ed Brayron. I mean, I know the insurance system sucks, but I had no idea…
The more I learn, the more I appreciate the guy who gunned down that CEO.
.
Fuck, if I had known I would have taken out a loan and learned how to transfer money safely [back then, I had not learned anything about international money transfer].
And we’re back! Yay!
The ultra rich Epstein class needs to keep this meritocracy lie going so that people don’t demand basic stuff in a proper developed democracy such as universal healthcare or social safety net, or ask pesky questions such as why those people deserve that obsessive amount of wealth and keep asking for more.
Unfortunately this lie works to a lot of people. And for a significant number of people, an addition of ” is stealing your jobs” makes it work even better.
Update, tag fail: should be “[Minority population X] is stealing your job”
Congratulations to Freethoughtblogs for their resurrection.
They were missed.
We need all the media outlets not yet owned by billionaires we can get, in these dangerous times.
Great that you’re back. And, on topic, if hard work made you rich, third world farmers would be the richest people in the world.
There is a lot of data that says upward mobility in the USA has been steadily declining since 1950.
“We find that rates of absolute mobility have fallen from approximately 90% for children born in 1940 to 50% for children born in the 1980s. ”
This paper is from 2016 but I’m sure nothing has changed since then.
I’ve been saying that life is harder for people growing up today than it was when I was growing up in the Dark Ages of the 1950s and 1960s. The data backs up that assertion.
And, the era when the Boomers grew up and especially in the place where I grew up, life wasn’t all that easy to begin with.
We’ve gone from difficult to a whole lot more difficult.
This paper gives the reasons as slower GDP growth and rising inequality. I’d guess that rising inequality is the main reason.
Have you ever gotten a compliment/insult? My dad who worked as a maintenance man at the only union house around these parts, gave me one, once. We were doing one of his weekend projects and I wanted to help. We were searching for a solution to a problem and he told me, “You think like an engineer.”
Tuesday, late afternoon–you’re back! Welcome!
My dad, a Navy veteran of WW2, originally went to community college in Utah in the late 30s, majoring in pharmacy. Pharmacists were just beginning to be trained in math, chemistry, biology, and physics back then, but most practicing pharmacists of the older generation were trained as apprentices and inherited their masters’ recipes for remedies. (My dad, in the 1950s and early 60s knew some of them.) Coming back from the war, dad could have gone to pharmacy school, but most pharmacies then were also small businesses and he didn’t want to do that–so instead he went to a trade school to become an architectural drafter. (Yes, using the GI Bill.) In the middle of his course, in 1947, the Taft-Hartley bill passed Congress. That bill made union organizing and membership for about 1/3 of US job classifications illegal, on what would today be called “national security” grounds. Included was drafting. About a third of American workers lost their union organizing and bargaining rights, which they’d only won in in 1938 after a long struggle. Wages among these classifications plummeted to just above minimum wage. People training in those fields, like my dad, who had been expecting good-paying white-collar jobs were consigned to lifelong poverty. I remember, when Food Stamps were first instituted in 1965, dad was only making one dollar per month more than the maximum a family of nine could bring in to be eligible for that program. In 1954, my medical care was paid for by a charity that covered medical bills for children with orthopoedic disabilities who were from impoverished families. In the late 1970s, when I got my first post-college job, at a university library, I was making better pay and had better benefits than my dad, who had worked 30 years in his profession. This country has never been good for the poorest workers.
@10:
That doesn’t quite work. Contrary to their bloviation/whingeing and dominance of the media, straight white males born on US soil (even leaving religion out of it) are already a minority.
(I don’t think I need a <sarcasm> tag there, do I?)
Jaws, the usage of ‘minority’ there is jargon.
In standard political and sociological discourse, “minority” does not merely signify a raw numerical value below 50%; it denotes a group’s historical and institutional relationship to systemic power and social equity.