When you login first time using a Social Login button, we collect your account public profile information shared by Social Login provider, based on your privacy settings. We also get your email address to automatically create an account for you in our website. Once your account is created, you'll be logged-in to this account.
DisagreeAgree
23Comment threads
34Thread replies
0Followers
Most reacted comment
Hottest comment thread
7Comment authors
Recent comment authors
Connect with
I allow to create an account
When you login first time using a Social Login button, we collect your account public profile information shared by Social Login provider, based on your privacy settings. We also get your email address to automatically create an account for you in our website. Once your account is created, you'll be logged-in to this account.
I know you are working just as hard on your birthday, as you do most days, to push for more both in the Congress and in the streets. You are a blessing to this world.
Early in Nickel and Dimed, the great Barbara Ehrenreich offered up a blunt observation. “There are no secret economies that nourish the poor; on the contrary, there are a host of special costs,” she wrote. “If you can’t put up the two months’ rent you need to secure an apartment, you end up paying through the nose for a room by the week,” she explained. “If you have only a room, with a hot plate at best, you can’t save by cooking up huge lentil stews that can be frozen for the week ahead. You eat fast food or the hot dogs and Styrofoam cups of soup that can be microwaved in a convenience store.” For the poor this is no revelation, merely a description of daily life. For many others, though, it was something else, a glimpse into a world that could feel distant. Yet it was not so far away, as she understood: The poor were all around. They worked, they loved, they tried to make do. The poor carried America on their backs and debunked its self-mythologies. So, too, did Ehrenreich, who showed no patience for pretense. She always looked for the truth of a thing, and for decades, she shared her search with all of us.
Now Ehrenreich is gone at the age of 81, and only her work remains. It would be unfair to reduce her long career to Nickel and Dimed, which is probably her most famous book. I begin with it, though, because it’s how I first learned of her — not from school, or from another writer, but from my mother when I was a child. Nickel and Dimed had become a sensation for its incisive and empathetic exploration of working poverty in the U.S. My mother explained the premise to me: Ehrenreich put aside her middle-class life as a writer and undertook a series of low-wage jobs waitressing in Key West, cleaning houses in Maine, and working at a Walmart in Minneapolis. My mother, too, had once cleaned houses in Maine, though she was careful to say that she was treated well by her employers and was a teenager who did not have to support herself on her income. Our own story was not all that far removed from the stories Ehrenreich recounted in her book. My family was headed by two college-educated adults, yet it occupied a strata somewhere between the secure middle class and true poverty. A blow or two could knock us out of position and sentence us to free fall.
What I gleaned from Ehrenreich via my mother was a kind of class consciousness. Later, when I read Nickel and Dimed for myself in my early 20s, I learned from Ehrenreich the possibilities of journalism: the stories that could be told, the lives that could be brought to the fore, the minds that could be changed. Decades after she first picked up Nickel and Dimed, my mother can still remember in detail the tale of a Walmart associate trying to cobble together the money to buy a stained polo shirt with her employee discount. At $7 an hour, the shirt cost as much as her hourly wage at the time. Ehrenreich, working as an associate in ladieswear, is prepared to offer a 20 percent discount until Howard, a manager, interferes. The woman “looks crushed and I tell her, when Howard’s out of sight, that there’s something wrong when you’re not paid enough to buy a Wal-Mart shirt, a clearanced Wal-Mart shirt with a stain on it,” she wrote.
Ehrenreich illuminated corners that many would prefer to ignore. Trained first as a scientist, she sought to pull back the layers of the world, looking for the truth underneath. The term “seeker” has acquired a New Age valence, but strip that away and it can describe the atheist Ehrenreich, who had a seeking mind. Marxism and feminism, she wrote in her 1976 article, “What Is Socialist Feminism,” “are critical ways of looking at the world.” As such, they “rip away popular mythology and ‘common sense’ wisdom and force us to look at experience in a new way … They lead to conclusions which are jarring and disturbing at the same time that they are liberating.” That must have appealed to Ehrenreich, herself a socialist feminist — both the possibility of liberation and the promise contained within a new way of seeing. Sight, in fact, may be her greatest gift to us. In book after book, column after column, she invited us to see along with her: into the inner lives of middle-class Americans in Fear of Falling; into the lives of the poor in Nickel and Dimed; into the persistent attraction of war in Blood Rites.
What astonished me early about Ehrenreich’s work wasn’t just that she, as an individual, cared about the working poor, but that she could get others to do the same. From my vantage as the daughter of a precarious family, it looked like Ehrenreich had performed a magic trick. With time, though, I came to understand something about how she managed it. Ehrenreich’s power as a social critic is a reflection of her talent as a writer. Her sentences can alternate between plainspoken and poetic. In Living With a Wild God, a memoir of her scientific and metaphysical explorations, she described the universe “as seen from high school physics class, enriched by rumors of relativity: everything reduced to particles rolling around on the wrinkles of space-time, the billiard table of classical physics augmented by Einstein into some vast funereal topography, like the gently furrowed surface of a sunless sea on the distant planet of a dying star.”
She wrote, too, with wit and humor. “Maybe they should be confined to one big locked room stocked with high-tech sex toys and left to fuck themselves sick,” she once wrote of Me Too’s “dethroned patriarchs.” One of my favorite passages in Nickel and Dimed concerns shit and pubic hair, the banes of any house cleaner. She meditated on the differences between various shit stains and observed, “You don’t want to know this? Well, it’s not something I would have chosen to dwell on myself, but the different kinds of stains require different cleaning approaches.” Onto the short and curlies, which she found everywhere. “Once I spent fifteen minutes crouching in a huge four-person Jacuzzi, maddened by the effort of finding the dark little coils camouflaged against the eggplant-colored ceramic background but fascinated by the image of the pubes of the economic elite, which must by this time be completely bald.” Ehrenreich was funny, but she always had a point. Nobody contemplates shit or pubic hair out of delight, but people who clean houses for a living don’t have any other choice. Their experiences matter. Once considered, they reveal certain truths not just about the daily activities of the working poor but also about the upper class. Someone has to clean up all their shit.
To walk the trail she marked out is to know, as she did, that there are stories worth telling and fights worth waging. It is to believe, as she did, in liberation, and truth, and joy. “My political instincts were, and remain, resolutely populist,” she wrote in Living With a Wild God. The daughter of a copper miner from Butte, Montana, who went to college and pulled himself up the corporate ladder, Ehrenreich understood there was a fight on and positioned herself early on the right side of it. She inherited this sensibility from her parents, and from the generations before them, she wrote. “So when the sides were drawn up between the powerful and the downtrodden, there had never been any question about where I stood,” she explained in Living With a Wild God. Thank goodness for that, and for her.
Aint Supposed to Die A Natural Death
Very nice tribute to a life well lived. Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales did a nice tribute also on 2 shows of DemocracyNow!
TODAY at 11am ET: I’ll be LIVE on the floor of the U.S. Senate to speak about how climate change is already ravaging our planet and why now is not the time to fast-track the construction of a natural gas pipeline in West Virginia. Tune in.
I'm not going to lie. There's virtually no place I'd rather be on Bernie's birthday than being on the Senate floor listening to him give a great speech in opposition to the "side-deal" written by the American Petroleum Institute to make it easier for them to destroy the planet.
Besides the obvious corruption of the "party of the working class" taking corporate & dark $$, the Mountain Valley Pipeline is one of the most dangerous "natural gas" pipelines that would be placed underneath steepest slopes in America along the Appalachian Trail..
In response to an opponent of the Mountain Valley Pipeline & permitting deal, @Sen_JoeManchin says community input is holding up energy projects, including renewable projects. 👀 https://t.co/I5zSDOH0bs
Sen. Bernie Sanders said in a fiery floor speech Thursday that he opposes a “dirty side deal” that would allow faster approval of fossil fuel projects such as the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a major priority of industry-friendly Sen. Joe Manchin.
“We have got to have the courage to finally tell the fossil fuel industry that the future of this planet is more important than their short-term profits.”
The agreement in question was negotiated behind closed doors by Manchin and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) in an effort to secure the West Virginia Democrat’s support for the Inflation Reduction Act.
While the text of the side deal has not been finalized, it is expected to propose major federal permitting reforms that would weaken environmental review laws and clear the way for pipelines and other polluting fossil fuel infrastructure. The proposal could be included in a must-pass government funding bill set to receive a vote later this month.
Sanders (I-Vt.) said in his floor remarks Thursday that the deal presents a “fundamental choice” between prioritizing the “short-term profits” of the fossil fuel industry and securing a livable planet for future generations.
“We can listen to the fossil fuel industry and the politicians they pay,” the Vermont senator said, “or we can listen to the scientists and the environmental community to reject this side deal and eliminate the $15 billion in subsidies Congress is already providing to big oil and gas companies each and every day.”
Sanders, who indicated he would vote against government funding legislation that includes industry-friendly permitting reforms, specifically warned against final approval of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a Manchin-backed project that—if completed—would spew tens of millions of tons of greenhouse gas pollution into the atmosphere each year.
The senator’s remarks came as climate activists and frontline community members prepared to mobilize on Capitol Hill in opposition to the permitting reforms, which they say would endanger waterways, further pollute the air, and undercut U.S. efforts to rein in runaway carbon emissions.
Sanders emphasized that he’s hardly alone in opposing the deal, quoting environmental groups that are mobilizing against the agreement as well as a yet-to-be-released letter from nearly 60 House Democrats criticizing the proposal.
“You got 650 environmental and social justice organizations representing millions of people, you got the entire scientific community saying you got to cut carbon emissions,” Sanders said. “And then on the other side, we have the fossil fuel industry and all of their campaign contributions. Today, I ask my colleagues to stand up for our kids, for our grandchildren, and for future generations.”
“We have got to have the courage,” he added, “to finally tell the fossil fuel industry that the future of this planet is more important than their short-term profits.”
In a rare move, the group of all 50 states' Supreme Court chief justices wrote to SCOTUS, urging them to shoot down the argument NC Republican lawmakers are making–that there should be no checks and balances for election laws–in their "Independent State Legislature" case #ncpolpic.twitter.com/jGlPRXEoB0
Read this soon if you are a person working in political organizing, at an advocacy organization, or on a campaign. It will help you understand what you are up against. https://t.co/AQzDISglfj
Dr. Oz said the uninsured “don’t have the right to health,” but should be given “a way of crawling back out of the abyss” with “15-minute physicals” provided by the government “in a festival like setting.” pic.twitter.com/YMyhpZfEFI
It's embarrassing that Doctors without Borders gives these types of clinics in the US when their job is to provide it to low income residents of global south.
Ah to be able to play this sound bite in a disquised voice with No bloody R or D and ask: Would you vote for this guy if he ran for office after hearing this?
After an investigation by my office and @ManhattanDA, Steve Bannon has been indicted for stealing more than $15 million from thousands of Americans for his sham effort to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico.
“The Queen died peacefully at Balmoral this afternoon,” the Royal Family announced. “The King and The Queen Consort will remain at Balmoral this evening and will return to London tomorrow.”
Looks like two things: the new PM was fortunate that the Queen was still accessible to start a new government, and Charles is no longer prince of Wales.
According to the Guardian, it will be another 10 days before the funeral service and burial at Windsor.
Hubster informed me of her death as I started reading the Nest for today. She lived a very good, looonngg and healthy life. Have to hand it to Elizabeth: she was a woman of class.
Tip Jar for Bernie’s Birthday..
Hadn’t seen this mashup previously.
Working the 2015-2016 Campaign brought me a boatload of favorite moments.🙂✊☮️👍
A classic !!!!
Hey Bernie
The Magic of Barbara Ehrenreich
Very nice tribute to a life well lived. Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales did a nice tribute also on 2 shows of DemocracyNow!
Thank you Benny.
Link to FB video.
So much for Bernie’s speech, shook up the DNC:
Then there is this..
Yes, pardon us all for wanting to breathe. And drink the water. I know it must be such an inconvenience.
Maybe someone from MS should send Manchin some of their water.
along with his lobbyists
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/09/08/fiery-floor-speech-sanders-condemns-manchins-dirty-side-deal
Good synopsis.
🙂👍🚀
Slacker barista turned Congresswoman.
Looks like a painting. AOC has always been extremely photogenic.👏👏
Stunning! I can see her presidential portrait, now…
D###ed GOPukes never give up!💩🤮💩
Chances are Manchin and Sinema are drumming up GOP votes for the CR.
Ah to be able to play this sound bite in a disquised voice with No bloody R or D and ask: Would you vote for this guy if he ran for office after hearing this?
Let them eat cake. Way to go, extremist GOPPER senate candidate.
pardon doesn’t cover state crimes.
And how are we going to pay for that?
💩🤮💩🤮and how!
CHARGE IT!!!!! the Taxpayer CC of course. Money for the MIC for war-any time any place.
Queen Elizabeth II is dead at 96, bringing her unprecedented 70-year reign to a close
“The Queen died peacefully at Balmoral this afternoon,” the Royal Family announced. “The King and The Queen Consort will remain at Balmoral this evening and will return to London tomorrow.”
Looks like two things: the new PM was fortunate that the Queen was still accessible to start a new government, and Charles is no longer prince of Wales.
According to the Guardian, it will be another 10 days before the funeral service and burial at Windsor.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/sep/08/the-queens-funeral-what-we-can-expect-over-the-next-10-days
Hubster informed me of her death as I started reading the Nest for today. She lived a very good, looonngg and healthy life. Have to hand it to Elizabeth: she was a woman of class.
T and R x 2, Ms. Benny!! ☮️🙂👍Happy Birthday to the Bernster, too.✊🎂