Category: Uncategorized

Rich people are the f**king worst: The 1 percent’s vile new war on us all – Salon.com

The wealthy and their GOP apologists talk about poor people as the takers. They have it completely backward

Source: Rich people are the f**king worst: The 1 percent’s vile new war on us all – Salon.com

This article is a fairly direct takedown of the entitlement culture shared by many wealthy people. I disagree with its conclusion though:

Wealth, it’s worth noting, isn’t the enemy. The problem is the attitude of the wealthy, the contempt, the indifference, and the lack of anything resembling civic virtue.

No, that’s not the problem. Here’s the dirty little secret about money and wealth: it is a social construct. We have a socially trained impulse to recognize hierarchy and class. We have a socially trained impulse to defer to wealthy people.

The same way racism rests on the social construct of white superiority, the problem of class entitlement rests on the social construct of wealth. Stop recognizing wealth and watch the corresponding privilege vanish.

RNC2016 in Cleveland: Corporate funding still not clear

It’s the Cleveland Way: engage in a plan to spend a hundred million dollars and commit to it before you know the funding is available. The New York Times called it in March: Corporations Grow Nervous About Participating in Republican Convention.

Well of course. What did you think was going to happen? Most recently, Crain’s Cleveland Business posted a story that the Plain Dealer media company completely ignored: “Cleveland Convention is $7 million short.” Characteristically and unapologetically, Joe Roman says “The last five, six, seven million of anything is always the slowest.”

University of N. Texas College of Law: For Lawyers Who Want to Do Good

I personally like this a lot. Quite a while ago, I started to think (again) that it would be cool to go to law school, but I was already over 40 and couldn’t realistically take that much time (and money) away to study any time soon. After a while I realized my main motivation was “to go to bat for others,” as the founding dean of UNT Law put it.

It still isn’t a practical career change for me, but I appreciate that younger and less encumbered people will have one more path to pursuing a similar vocation.

There’s a story that Judge Royal Furgeson likes to tell, about a young boy whose brother was killed in an accident with an 18-wheeler. The parents spoke no English, so it fell to the boy to navigate the aftermath. He sought out a lawyer, who shepherded the family through the tragedy. Now, years later, the […]

Source: University of N. Texas College of Law: For Lawyers Who Want to Do Good

Church arson: what you can do

Surely you’ve heard of the recent string of fires at (mostly) predominantly Black churches in the South. It’s tragic, and no thinking person believes it’s a coincidence after what happened in Charleston, South Carolina.

There is a thing you can do to help! Nothing will replace the precious physical objects that were destroyed and the memories that went with them, but at least these congregations can get back on their feet financially and rebuild their homes: How you can help rebuild and speak out!