What combination of factors are likely to produce a “sea change”, the term for a shift in an entire culture’s beliefs, values and practices?
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Hi Folks. A combination of moving home, resulting in physical injuries and a lot of pain, surgery on my hand, along with some feelings of despair and hopeless regarding the state of the world resulted in my not having the energy to pull together another issue of my Good, Hopeful, and hopefully Inspiring Newsletter. But I’m back.
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I hope many of you have – or will – reading the latest essay from my partner, Bob Hartman, Part 1 of an insightful series. The whole piece is called Gatekeepers and Cornerstones. And if you’ve already read this piece, please send me/him your honest feedback, as some folks have done, as that keeps Bob feeling his writing is of value. Criticism and negative comments are valuable too. Part 2 is in process.
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Aren’t we are all delighted when something we see as important is voted into law? But all too often the overturning of a bad law or signing of a good one fails to produce a shift in the population’s attitudes or beliefs or behaviors. Take the fact that a growing number of countries now have laws on the book criminalizing the abuse of women and children. Yet the figure for such things as rape shows the numbers to be increasing across the world!
In the training for the Peace Corps (which I completed but never did go to another country, for I’d started a descent into depression) I learned that when 3 things are introduced into a culture in fairly rapid succession, that a cultural shift can occur.
It takes a sea change in a culture to create something positive or stop something harmful – such as the foot-binding of girls in China, or the gang-raping of girls in India. Legislation isn’t enough. It’s just one piece.
EXAMPLE: When 3 consumer goods suddenly began to appeared in Addis Ababa, Ethiopa, one of which was touted on the city’s first billboards. What were they: Coke, transister radios, and a brand of sneaker (I can’t recall which). The importation of all 3 of those consumer goods, began a sea change in that very poor developing country: public demand for consumer goods. I was there when it began. And not only was Coke being advertise blatantly in a city that still had dirt roads. It was made cheaper than bottled water.
We need to think about that, and strategize together how to create sea changes the world over that will result in dramatic actions on behalf of slowing the heating up of our planet and the 6th Great Extinction of creatures.
I believe we can do this. But it takes creative thinking and collective effort. Coordinating public demonstrations and getting them wide media coverage, lawsuits, and …..?
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I was delighted to see a photo in the February 26, 2023 issue of the New York Times Sunday Magazine, read by millions, of a U.S. Congressman named Jimmy Gomez “wearing” his baby son, Hodge, on his chest, strapped into a soft baby carrier on the floor of the House. And he also changed his son’s diapers in the House cloakroom. Wish I’d had that image. Gomez was making this important symbolic statement on behalf of getting the U.S. Congress to pass a Child Tax Credit and more.
Few of Gomez's colleagues paid any attention; but the media did! And that is really significant. A few weeks later, Gomez stood outside the Capitol to announce the formation of the Congressional Dad’s Caucus. He followed it with a video clip on Instagram. Of course, there was already a Moms in the House Caucus. Laws and funding for such things as:
universal paid maternity and paternity leave
universal free childcare and pre-K
support for small businesses and companies that permit parents to work at home or job-share
These are a few of the critical pieces needed to shift the U.S. away from its focus on warfare and placing more military weapons in the hands of police. I had a close friend who worked hard in the 1960s to get a child care center set up in the Congressional building, so legislatures and their staff could have their young children and toddlers near them during the work day, where they could visit them on breaks and for lunch. Of course, her idea was way ahead of its times.
But having fathers get behind legislation like paid family leave, but that hadn’t garnered public attention. Can legislation be far behind? It will as soon as the Right Wing embraces these values instead of looking upon them as “sucking off the tit” of government and being examples of men becomes sissies!
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From the July 13th issue of one of my major sources of reliable commentary on events and history – Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American.
Whether or not you live in the U.S., I think you’ll care about the following heartening news, since this country is a leading culprit in the spread of disinformation (i.e. lies) that undermines the possibility of any real democracy. Democracy requires an informed population that votes.
In April, the Fox Corporation settled a lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems for defamation after Fox News personalities falsely claimed the voting machine system had switched votes meant for Trump. Fox paid $787.5 million.
Fox and several of its on-air personalities are still facing a $2.7 billion lawsuit from another voting company, Smartmatic, for their disinformation campaign involving that company. Both Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic are also suing MyPillow founder and Trump promoter, Mike Lindell, who used his fortune to promote the idea that the last election was stolen. Lindell vowed, “I’ll spend everything I have to save the country I love.”
Tuesday, James Bickerton of Newsweek reported that Lindell claims he has lost $100 million and is selling off equipment after major retailers stopped carrying his products. [That’s good news in my book.]
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In Reliable Sources, CNN journalist Oliver Darcy reported that three men associated with Rupert Murdoch in the early days of creating the Fox Corporation have now expressed their “deep disappointment for helping to give birth to Fox Broadcasting Company.” Preston Padden, Ken Solomon, and Bill Reyner wrote that they “never envisioned, and would not knowingly have enabled, the disinformation machine that, in our opinion, Fox has become.” [Let’s hear it!]
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As reported in the fine online news source, The Conversation, on July 16th The FDA has approved the 1st U.S. over-the-counter contraceptive pill, and it will be available. It’s been named Opill. It was actually approved back in 1973 but only by prescription. It will be available in 2024. By allowing this proven safe and effective form of contraception to be sold over the counter, it avoids pharmacists refusal to fulfill contraceptive prescriptions on the basis of moral or religious grounds, which many of them cite for refusing to give out contraceptives.
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Jim Hightower and his Newsletter is now on substack.com – You can subscribe to his newsletter that way AND also listen to his frequent very brief podcasts that he speak with his great Texan twang. Each one is on a single issue. I just listened to one where he gave the history of the term “woke”. I think Hightower is a national treasure.
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From LiveScience – You can sign up to get a daily dose of science. The one from June 26th is an article by Ben Turner Wind and solar power combined generated more electricity than coal in January, February and March of this year. For the first time ever in the U.S. LiveScience.com
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My 2 cents about Voting: I voted for Bernie in the 2020 primary and feel that, in the primary election, it’s VITAL that we vote for whom we actually desire to see President, rather than for the person we feel is most likely to win or “the lesser of 2 evils”.
In the election itself, we may want to be practical and vote for the candidate we feel is “the lesser of 2 evils”. But the primary's debate stage is the right place to get liberal and also progressive values and visions for this country across to the American public, REGARDLESS of how “winnable” they are right now.
Just as the white conservative Christian nationalists have wisely and strategically taken a long view regarding getting their values and vision across to Americans and working their way up from getting elected to school boards and city and county councils to state officials, starting before Reagan was president, we liberals and progressives must take the long view, make a long-term plan, walk the path, and be willing to stay in the struggle…however long it takes.
To that end, I heartily support Marianne Williamson, a very intelligent practical visionary for what this country should and could be. She belongs on the debate stage, as she did in the 2020 Democratics. It’s time we brought spirituality into politics. Without it, and without a connection the land and indigenous wisdom, we will not survive. I will continue to envision there being created a Department of Peace and also a Department of Children and Youth. And I'd very much like to see Biden appoint Marianne Williamson to run one of those.
I also wish Winona LaDuke would run again, an indigenous woman with intelligence and great good sense and wisdom. In the meaning, we can support (and donate to) Marianne Williamson. Please join me.
As for our current president, I’ve watched Joe Biden these past 3+ years accomplish a good number of amazing things nationally and internationally that are seldom mentioned in the media. He and his administration have accomplished those things, despite attempts of Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell, to block everything, just as they tried (and mostly succeeded) with Obama, when he was President.
Please take a look at Politics Girl on Youtube for intelligent political commentary.
Joe Biden is an astute political animal and he understands the workings of Congress. Yes, he makes some deals and compromises I am opposed to. But he’s got a string of little-reported 1st term accomplishments, I think he deserves a second term and hope you’ll look more deeply into what he’s done and tell others to do that as well.
But let’s not stop there: we the voters MUST push Biden and the Democratic leadership to take seriously the progressive wing of the Democratic party – AOC and her compatriots – and talk up “The Green New Deal”. Of course, we must face the fact that a tide of extreme nationalism and anti-government sentiment is sweeping the world. It exists because of the huge numbers of people who rightly feel they’ve been left out of decisions and never had gotten their fair share. And they are right!
However, it’s also true that anger isn’t enough: for a democracy we need an informed (i.e. educated) public. And, in the U.S., after decades of allowing the defunding of public education and granting the wealthy more wealth and power, many folks don’t even attempt to think deeply about the issues facing this country and this planet.
They’re too mired in despair and hopelessness or just overwhelmed with putting food on the table. NOTE: Thank heaven the youth of this country are increasingly progressive, not afraid of the word “socialist”, and are against the moneyed political machines that have always dominated – and continued to hold power over – BOTH the Democratic and Republican parties.
Would you, like me, want to see a multi-party system in this country, where all factions have a voice because they are represented? In that system, everyone has to talk to one another, must come together and form coalitions in order to pass bills.
Sound more like a democracy? It’s time for those of us who have a positive vision and practical solutions, or even see a way forward, to speak out wherever we can and dare to have conversations.
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Saddened, disgusted by the mass of single-use plastic bag waste in our oceans and landfills around the world? A new form of “plastic” bags for trash, as ziplocks, as sandwich bags…that when composted break down into nutrient-rich fertilizer. It can’t get better than that! (And I don’t get anything for plugging this product). Please tell others about it: https://about.cleanomic.com/bags/zipbags/yt/yt-bst(stp)-120122/images/1-Hero-Image_1.jpg
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Great News from GRIST, an online publication Apr 17, 2023
After a nearly two-decades-long permitting process, a 732-mile transmission line capable of sending power from what will be the largest onshore wind farm in North America to western states was approved by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM). It’s a high-voltage transmission line that will send wind energy to grids in Arizona, Nevada, and California and will carry enough energy to power about 2 million homes.
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More from Time Magazine’s October 10-17th 2022 issue that highlighted amazing innovation leaders from around the world:
1) Donel Baird, 41, started and runs a Brooklyn-based climate-tech company (BlocPower) that retrofits buildings in low-income neighborhoods with solar panels, electric heat pumps and other “green tech” to lower energy bills and reduce planet-warming emissions. He’s partnered with the city of Ithaca, New York, to decarbonize 1,600 buildings and more than 36 other cities have expressed a desire to work with him.
Baird's financed his work by crowdfunding and venture capital and his company pays back investors via savings on energy bills and selling back to the grid excess power generated by newly green buildings. Oh, and I should mention, he’s black.
2) Eugenia Kargbo is the 1st Chief Heat Officer in Africa. She’s building up the city of Freetown’s capacity to adapt to climate change, with innovative, nature-based solutions, such as planting 1 million trees there, to lower temperatures.
3) Dana Tizya-Tramm is chief of the tiny and remote Gwitchin First Nation tribe in Canada, a community battered by global warming as the permafrost thaws and the salmon and caribou his people depend upon for food decline. So he pledged to take his community, which has been dependent on imported diesel to carbon-neutral by 2030. And he’s doing it, first by overseeing one of the largest solar projects in the Arctic and now by planning wind towers and a biomass plant to provide electricity through the dark Arctic winters. As he’s said, “If we can go carbon-free, why shouldn’t the rest of the world!”
4) Wally Adeyemo became the 1st Black American to serve as Deputy Treasury Secretary. He’s admired by people across the political spectrum and was confirmed by the Senate with broad bipartisan support, for having a knack for cutting through division and building trust on both sides of the U.S. political divide.
5) Bogolo Kenewendo was appointed Minister of Investment, Trade, and Industry in Botswana in 2018, as the youngest minister in that country’s history, and a woman to boot! She’s joined forces with a group of women in Africa who are transforming the landscape.
And early in 2022 she was made Africa Director and special advisor to the U.N. Climate Change High Level Champions, which is putting the voice of women and young people at the heart of climate action.
6) When Nalleli Cobo was just nine she made the connection between her family’s Los Angeles apartment and an oil well close by. She was having severe symptoms: nausea, asthma, severe nose bleeds. So she knocked on doors and started a campaign and joined with STAND-L.A. and other community-based organizations working to shut down that drilling site.
Nalleli got cancer but survived and, at the end of 2022, the L.A. City Council voted unanimously to ban the drilling of new oil and gas wells and to phase out existing ones over 20 years.
7) Momoko Nojo is female activist and grad student in Japan who founded No Youth No Japan, to get Japanese youth to vote, because so many of them don’t. Having become well known for her activism, she used her position to ignite an online campaign to hold the powerful Tokyo Olympic chief, Yoshiro Mori, accountable for sexist public remarks. That campaign eventually led to his resignation.
Nojo feels gender equality and civic engagement are inextricably linked and she went on to start Fiftys Project, a campaign to support female and gender-minority candidates under the age of 40 in Japan’s 2023 election. They have their work cut out for them, as evidenced by only 1 in 3 Japanese under age 20 in March were even aware that there were local elections would be held this past April.
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An Innovative Intergenerational Housing Project in Montrose, Colorado reported in The Colorado Sun Apr 8, 2023 Carlton Mason has spent 10 years working on a project that will make life easier for youth who have spent the better part of their childhoods in foster homes: 45 homes, clustered in trios, with front porches and walking paths between them.
Most of these units will to house young people 18-24 struggling to find their way into adulthood after unsettled and often traumatic childhoods. Other interspersed housing units will be for older adults who don’t have stable housing. In addition, three units will be set aside for those experiencing a short-term housing crisis.
A community center will tie the development together. A bus stop will be located for easy access to public transportation. To the north, recreation paths winding through a dry wash on 8 acres to be placed in a conservation easement. Montrose City Council formally approved the development plans.
Funding for the $10 million project is coming from a mix of 14 grants, loans and donations. This will be Colorado’s first intergenerational supportive housing community.
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Hopeful news from The Conversation online newsletter April 4, 2023 [theconversation.com] Edible forests are bringing shade to, and bringing shade to cities:
Think of “food forests” as edible parks. They are often located on vacant city lots, growing trees, vines, shrubs and plants that produce fruits, nuts and other edible products. Unlike community gardens or urban farms, food forests are designed to mimic ecosystems found in nature, with many vertical layers. They shade and cool the land, protecting soil from erosion and providing habitat for insects, animals, birds and bees.
The largest food forest in the U.S. is the Urban Food Forest, located at Browns Mill in Atlanta, Georgia.
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Very Good News on the re-cycling front, from PEERS online news March 13, 2023 edition “Dead” Electric Car Batteries Find a Second Life Powering Cities https://reasonstobecheerful.world/electric-vehicle-batteries-reused...
A small warehouse in Nottingham, England, received the crucial final components for a project that leverages the power of used EV batteries (batteries for electric cars) to create a new kind of circular economy. Circular economies are very important to our future: Instead of resources being mined, made into products and the thrown out as waste, those products are redesigned and use in the manufacture of new products.
Here’s how it works in Nottingham. 40 two-way electric vehicle chargers connected to solar panels and a pioneering battery energy storage system, which will together power a number of on-site facilities and a fleet of 200 municipal vehicles.
Each day the city will send a combination of solar-generated energy — and whatever is left in the vehicles after the day’s use — from its storage devices into the national grid.
NOTE: The problem with electric vehicle batteries has been that, after a decade, an EV battery no longer provides sufficient performance for car trips. However, they still can retain up to 80 percent of their original capacity, and with this great remaining power comes great reusability. This plan gives batteries a 2nd life and will save 450 tons of CO2 per MWh over its lifetime.
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Again, from PEERS April 15, 2022, reprinted from The Guardian (a leading UK newspaper, now available online) https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/apr/15/farm-metal-from-plants...
Researchers in northern Greece are literally “farming” metal. They are experimenting with a trio of shrubs known to scientists as “hyperaccumulators”: plants which have evolved the capacity to thrive in naturally metal-rich soils that are toxic to most other kinds of life. The plants do this by drawing the metal out of the ground and storing it in their leaves and stems, where it can be harvested like any other crop.
As well as providing a source for rare metals – in this case nickel, although hyperaccumulators have been found for zinc, aluminium, cadmium and many other metals, including gold – these plants actively benefit the earth by remediating the soil, making it suitable for growing other crops, and by sequestering carbon in their roots.
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Good news about efforts to create a fair U.S. judicial system*. I can't remember where I got this from:
In the last 12 months, 129 of President Biden's nonpartisan judicial nominees were confirmed to lifetime seats in U.S. federal courts. They include: Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on our nation’s highest court, Judge Alison Nathan, the second openly LGBTQ+ woman ever to serve on a federal appellate court, and Judge Nancy Maldonado, the first Latina woman ever to serve on a federal court in Illinois.
Did you know that in these first 2 years of Biden’s presidency, the Senate has confirmed 97 judges he’s appointed across the country. This is especially hopeful in light the large number of extremely right-wing judges who Trump appointed and got confirmed. Remember: Judges are given lifetime appointments.
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This, piece of important racial history, from the Daily Kos, online news source Dec. 24, 2022
Nearly a century after her birth, Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman whose name became internationally synonymous with cancer research via her “immortal” HeLa cells, will be immortalized in bronze in her hometown of Roanoke, Virginia this year. Fittingly, Lacks’ statue will replace a monument to racist slaver and Confederate General Robert E. Lee!
The back story: Henriette Lacks received treatment for cervical cancer in 1951 at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland – one of the few medical facilities that treated Black patients at the time. The gynecologist treating her removed some of her cells from a tumor in her cervix without her consent and sent them to a lab looking for cells that could quickly and continually reproduce.
The cells taken from Henrietta Lacks became the first human cells to be successfully cloned and this led to advancements in 75,000 studies, as well as treatments for influenza, leukemia, AIDS, Parkinson’s disease, polio, chemotherapy treatments, gene mapping, and in vitro fertilization.
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This, from CommonDreams online news, About protecting the world’s oceans
Finally, after 2 decades of work, a far-reaching global treaty has been signed that will protect the world’s oceans for biodiversity. Global Ocean Treaty, formally referred to as the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction treaty (BBNJ).
Protecting the world's high seas, which refers to areas of the oceans outside the jurisdiction of any country, is part of the larger push to protect planetary biodiversity and seen as key if nations want to keep their commitment to the UN-brokered Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework—also known as the known as the 30x30 pledge—that aims protect 30 percent of the world's natural habitat by 2030. China is one of the signers.
"This is huge," announced Greenpeace in a social media post, calling the agreement "the biggest conservation victory ever!” https://www.commondreams.org/news/global-ocean-treaty-2659502274
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I feel this short film (12”), starring the incomparable Sir John Hurt, called Love at First Sight, will make you smile and cry. It did me. Mmm. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0weamgxy24
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More from PEERS online news source, which so often shares good news: Villages of tiny homes (and even “micro homes) have sprung up as temporary housing for the homeless in cities such as Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle and St. Louis. And even in the Republican state of South Carolina. The first 3D-printed home in Austin, Texas will house 70-year-old Tim Shea, who was previously homeless.
This year, a growing number of homeowners opening up their backyards to house homeless strangers-turned-friends. Some have extended this care into the animal kingdom, like an architect in Istanbul who began creating homes to house stray cats.
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I can’t recall where I read this. Time Magazine? What to do with the worn-out wind turbine blades has presented a serious problem. Now there is a solution. The Danish wind turbine maker Vestas has developed a chemical mixture that breaks down wind turbine blades so that they can be recycled.
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Challenge Day: Breaking Down Barriers Among High School Students a 15-minute documentary abut a program sweeping across the U.S. https://www.personalgrowthcourses.net/video/challenge_day
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True philanthropy Reported on CNBC TV News September 14, 2022
Patagonia founder, Yvon Chouinard, his spouse and two adult children are giving away their ownership in the apparel maker he started some 50 years ago, dedicating all profits from the company to projects and organizations that will protect wild land and biodiversity and fight the climate crisis.
Patagonia is a U.S. for-profit company focusing on outdoor wear. It’s worth about $3 billion and will now be owned by a climate-focused trust and group of nonprofit organizations, called the Patagonia Purpose Trust and the Holdfast Collective respectively.
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Positive changes in U.S. states regarding higher education Free college is now a reality in nearly 30 U.S. states
Reported on CNBC News April 8, 2022 Even though the Biden administration’s plan to make community college tuition-free for two years was stripped from the federal Build Back Better bill, many states have been quietly moving forward with plans to pass legislation of their own to make some college tuition-free, inspired by that bill.
Most recently, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed the New Mexico Opportunity Scholarship Act, establishing the most extensive tuition-free scholarship program in the country. Like New York’s Excelsior Scholarship, it will cover 4 years of tuition, including career training certificates, associate and bachelor’s degrees. AND it will open up access to returning adult learners, part-time students and immigrants, regardless of their immigration status, in addition to recent high school graduates.
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Sweet news! A Toronto Canada startup is using a fleet of drones to “carpet-bomb” a forest with tree seeds in a project called “Flash Forest.” The goal is to be able to rapid-fire seedpod blends from drones onto rugged, inaccessible landscapes of deforested areas. While it would always be ideal to have plantings done by the human hand, in inaccessible areas that’s not possible. So technology was brought in.
Their hopes: to produce 1 billion new trees by 2028!
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In the same issue of The Week is a piece of science answering the question: Why do ducklings swim in a line right behind their mother? There’s a “sweet spot” right behind the mom which propels the duckling forward to ride the waves without effort. The hope is that shipping firms might design their vessels to be able to travel in such a “train” to reduce fuel consumption. Nice!
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Here’s something that may become a positive trend: Maine’s Governor has proposed a plan to make 2 years of community college free for recent high school graduates. If passed, that would bring the total number of statewide free-college programs to 30, which means 60% of U.S. states would have free tuition opportunities.
Free college is now a reality in nearly 30 states
Even though the plan to make community college tuition-free was stripped from Build Back Better, the number of statewide free-college programs is growing.
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AND... Here’s a partial, very practical partial solution to the U.S. homeless population
From Truthout online news source November 30, 2022
With nearly 60,000 unoccupied units, San Francisco has a significant housing crisis, in addition to an acute affordable housing shortage. In the mid-term elections, voters approved Proposition M, a local measure aimed at addressing the housing crisis by levying a tax on landlords of multi-unit buildings who have allowed rooms to sit vacant for an extended period of time.
Advocates for the Prop M tax hope it will dis-incentivize large landlords from leaving units unfilled, while the revenue it brings in will go towards homelessness prevention and affordable housing.
Despite opposition from real estate interests, Proposition M passed handily (54.5 to 45.5), thanks to the diligent campaigning of 2 organizations: the San Francisco chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America and the interfaith social justice organization, Faith in Action Bay Area.
Housing and tenant advocates have long pointed out the frustrating fact that the number of vacant properties in San Francisco vastly exceeds the number of unhoused individuals (true both in San Francisco and the U.S. as a whole!).
NOTE: There are quite a few reasons why landlords allow units to sit empty. Owners might be waiting for real estate markets to improve so that they can charge higher rent, or may be disinclined to rent to anyone with a lower income. Attracting a certain kind of clientele is part of the feedback loop of gentrification: A higher-priced area attracts wealthier renters, whose higher incomes drives up prices, and so on — a boon to luxury developers, and less so to the people of color and the working class who soon find themselves priced out. Soon after, investors will take advantage of cheap, emptied-out properties with the intention of improving and “flipping” them for profit.
If that’s their aim, a developer might prefer to keep the place empty so as not to have to deal with evicting their tenants before sale. For all these reasons and more, viable units across the city sit empty, while thousands of people huddle in tents or sit and lie on sidewalks and are then punished for doing so.
Opponents of the measure claimed that the tax would place an undue burden on “mom-and-pop” landlords but there are exceptions in Prop M to address that, as the tax is explicitly designed to target only large property owners. Yet is actually the corporate landlords with significant real estate holdings that harbor the most vacancies:
Data from the American Community Survey cited by the Prop M campaign indicates that 33.2 percent of vacancies are found in buildings with more than 50 units, with another 28.9 percent in buildings from 5 to 49 units. And, while exact numbers are not yet clear, Singh said a sizeable number of the units that sit vacant are rent-controlled. Opening them to renters would bring some much-needed easing of the acute affordable housing shortage.
If an owner needs to repair a unit that’s in bad shape and not habitable, and they get proper city permits to do so, the tax won’t apply to them. Prop M targets speculators and speculative behavior.
San Francisco’s Controller has estimated yearly revenue from the tax will raise an estimated $20 million, which will go into a fund to pay for 2 crucial pillars of the city’s homelessness prevention strategy: 1) subsidizing rent for seniors; and 2) buying up vacant housing and putting folks in them.
According to a recent analysis by the Financial Times, if millennials were following previous trends, someone who is now 35 years old would be about 5 percentage points less conservative than the national average and would gradually become more conservative as they aged. *****
Heather Cox Richardson’s
Letters from an American so often offers valuable and sometimes hopeful lessons in U.S. history.
This, excerpted from her March 26, 2023 letter.
“On March 25, 1911, in NY City, a fire, known as The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, broke out in the upper floors of a shirt factory that killed 147 young men and women. The only elevator was not working and the owner had locked the door to the roof, claiming to prevent workers from stealing the shirts they made.
A woman named Frances Perkins was nearby when it happened. Perkins was already a social activist, working to get consumers to use their buying power to demand better conditions and wages for workers. She had few illusions about industrial America, having worked in a settlement house in an impoverished immigrant neighborhood in Chicago and as the head of the New York office of the National Consumers League, which pushed for consumers to use their buying power to demand better conditions and wages for workers.
Note: The Democratic majority leader in the New York legislature, Al Smith (who went on to be elected for four terms as New York governor and was Democratic presidential nominee in 1928) personally visited the families of the dead to express his sympathy and his grief.
New Yorkers did create a commission to stop factory fires. But, as chief investigator for it, Perkins envision much bigger things: removal of unsanitary and unsafe conditions in factories, ending low hours and low wages, including child labor and the overwork of women – including having to take work home to do. Much of what that Commission did became law.
When President Herbert Hoover claimed that unemployment was ending, Perkins made national news when she repeatedly called him out with figures proving the opposite, calling his “misleading statements” “cruel and irresponsible.”
She began to work with leaders from other states to figure out how to protect workers and promote employment by working together.
In 1933, President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Perkins to serve as Secretary of Labor in his administration. She accepted only on the condition that he back her goals: unemployment insurance, health insurance, old-age insurance, a 40-hour work week, a minimum wage, and abolition of child labor.
Once in office, Perkins then used her considerable power and was a driving force behind the administration’s massive investment in public works projects to get people back to work. She urged the government to spend $3.3 billion on schools, roads, housing, and post offices.
Those projects employed more than a million people in 1934. In 1935, FDR signed the Social Security Act, providing ordinary Americans with unemployment insurance; aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children; funds to promote maternal and child welfare; and public health services! Then, in 1938, the U.S. Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established a minimum wage and maximum hours. It banned child labor.”
Thank you, Frances Perkins and thank you, Heather Cox Richardson, for educating us. heathercoxrichardson@sub
I hope this issue of my Good, Hopeful and Inspiring Newsletter has brightened your day
With Love, Suzanne Arms 