Guarantee Living-Wage Jobs (plus more)

Please sign and share the Guarantee Living-wage Jobs petition. It is addressed to “activist organizations” and reads:

We urge you to work together to persuade the government in Washington to see to it that everyone who wants to work can find a living-wage job.

To sign the petition, click here.

I’ve launched this campaign with valuable assistance from the economist Dean Baker and the Internet strategist Michael Stein.

For more information, you can review the campaign’s website and read “Guarantee Living-Wage Jobs: A Call for Action.”

I consider this effort very important and timely, so I hope you support it.

+++++++

I’m posting one item each day to Wade’s Wire. To subscribe and receive those posts via email, click here. Following is some information about recent posts there:

PopularResistance.org: An Evaluation

My evaluation of that website, which was prompted by a recent newsletter. It prompted the following exchange with Margaret Flowers, one of the sites editors:

Thanks for checking out the website. If you want to know who we are, our names are on the articles we write, which you cited. And there is a list of contributors on the “About” page. 

There is more to our strategy than what you’ve read, so I wouldn’t jump to conclusions. We advocate for participatory democracy, not top-down strategies. We highlight groups that are on the ground doing work to challenge the system. 

As far as reforms go, we personally celebrate those victories but also encourage people to recognize that we mustn’t stop at partial steps. We must keep pushing until policies reflect the desires and needs of the people. That means shifting the balance of power. Of course the situation is more complex than what we can include in our weekly newsletter. 

PopularResistance.org is a website that provides information and tools for people to get engaged in ways that work for them. We do support and organize campaigns that fit into the strategy (one currently is focused on the TPP). If we had more resources, there is much more we would offer, but this is what we can offer for now. We hope that you find it of some value.

My reply:

Thanks for the clarification, Margaret. Given the fact that you’re doing so much good work, it’s reassuring to hear that you do celebrate partial victories, for as I discussed, that matter was not clear to me due to the passages that I quoted. I agree with how you formulate the need to keep them within the context of the need to keep pushing. 

My comment about transparency was in reference to the administrators, or editors, of the website. Who decides what is published, including the content of “Our Mission” and “Our Philosophy” on the About page? I recommend that those individuals be identified on the About page. 

I agree that our situation is complex, but I believe that concise statements of core beliefs, such as your “Our Philosophy,” need to be as accurate as possible and I do not believe it as accurate to say that large transnational corporations control our social system. A system consists of interdependent elements. No one element controls a system. You can read more about my thoughts on this issue in Our Vision: Transforming the System (12/26/11 Draft) 

Thanks much for your good work, which I follow and respect. It’s just that some of that newsletter provoked me. Take care, Wade

++

Bubbles, the Multiverse, and Humility

“Bubbles form in the expanding universe, each developing into a big or small bang, perhaps each with different values for what we usually call the constants of nature. The inhabitants (if any) of one bubble cannot observe other bubbles, so to them their bubble appears as the whole universe. The whole assembly of all these universes has come to be called the ‘multiverse.’”

from Physics: What We Do and Don’t Know 
By Steven Weinberg

++

Ronald Dworkin on Law, Morality, and Economics

My essay about a remarkable summary of Dworkin's intellectual development, written by Dworkin..

++

On Electronic Eavesdropping 

A quote by Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg, who was appointed to the District of Columbia Circuit by President Ronald Reagan:

A person who knows all of another’s travels can deduce whether he is a weekly churchgoer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups — and not just one fact about a person, but all such facts.

++

Thoughts for the New Year

Posted on New Year's Day, following a wonderful party the night before (check out the photo!)

++

Reflections on 2013

My spontaneous thoughts looking back.