I want schools that work, a transportation system that can deliver the goods, a health care system that values people more than profit, and a world we will want to live and grow in and jobs that can support a family in a healthy economy. We have a lot of work to do and we have learned policies that do not reflect an understanding that the cost of a good society must be met with proper investments or we are doomed to fail.

Increased job losses and home foreclosures are not positive signs of hope. This is why I think we need a different approach. An amendment to our constitution to protect our middle class society would go a long way toward assuring the kind of recovery we need. A recovery that would make sure local economies can once again be strong and vibrant.

This is exactly what my project organized to save the middle class attempts to do.

You can join my facebook group too to help spread the word.

We need a new way to look at our country and our economy to bring us back to that time when we all had opportunity and the potential to improve our lives.

The middle class amendment would put the people first. For too long we have been governed by the notion that profits at the top would trickle down to the rest of us. But as we have seen this does not happen and instead of restoring commitments made to workers we are seeing those promises broken by the need to rebuild the old wealth structure. We see a retreat from the very investments we need to maintain our equal opportunity society. Transportation, education, health care etc. all the things we need to sustain our middle class.

My amendment project is about securing a recovery that benefits everyone and ultimately strengthens our democracy and our future by laying out a roadmap for recovery. I discovered a similar sentiment in a recent blog entry.

Robert Reich in his blog wonders “When Will The Recovery Begin? Never.”

The so-called “green shoots” of recovery are turning brown in the scorching summer sun. In fact, the whole debate about when and how a recovery will begin is wrongly framed. On one side are the V-shapers who look back at prior recessions and conclude that the faster an economy drops, the faster it gets back on track. And because this economy fell off a cliff late last fall, they expect it to roar to life early next year. Hence the “V” shape . . . (Read more)

Commissioner Tom Hanson provided the July 2009 Economic Update. Here are pdf files of July 09 and July 08 by clicking on the dates. You can compare if you wish. We don’t know what this means down the road for our future but clearly this recession is not over though it may be slowing. Visit the website for more info.

update-july09.pdf
update-july08.pdf
FY09 collections 8 percent below a year ago

The pillars Jacobs lists as threatened are: 1) community and family, 2) higher education, 3) science and technology, 4) taxes and government responsive to citizen’s needs, 5) self-policing by the learned professions. Although, these pillars do not match up directly with what I have described as the five building blocks of a middle class society, she describes in convincing detail what a society is like that can’t deliver what it needs to survive. She quotes Jared Diamond’s work on cultural survival and makes the case that without proper investment in the very things that cultures need they will decline and fall into decay. She describes the loneliness and desperation of families that are over worked and unsupported by the loss of community and neighborhoods that have a cohesiveness and care. Schools, cities and communities are stretched too thin and don’t have the resources to provide for parents and their children.

A reviewer summarizes her thoughts:

Community and Family
People are increasingly choosing consumerism over family welfare, that is: consumption over fertility; debt over family budget discipline; fiscal advantage to oneself at the expense of community welfare.
Higher Education
Universities are more interested in credentials than providing high quality education.
Bad Science
Elevation of economics as the main “science” to consider in making major political decisions.
Bad Government
Governments are more interested in deep-pocket interest groups than the welfare of the population.
Bad Culture
A culture that prevents people from understanding/realising the deterioration of fundamental physical resources which the entire community depends on.

This I fear is where we are headed unless we can figure out how to bring about a recovery that will benefit all of us and not just those at the top of the income scale. We have been on a twenty year path of divesting ourselves from the things that truly support our survival as a democracy. I believe if we achieve a recovery that does not address the concerns that Jane Jacobs mentions we will have no recovery. How can we call it a recovery if Wall Street is swimming in the black again and yet wages are low and the economy stagnant? How can we call it a recovery if we get things moving and do so at the expense of our environment or health because we have taken a short cut and further polluted our earth? We may need some way of assuring that the recovery will be shared by all.

Perhaps we need an amendment to our constitution to assure that we all have a part in the recovery

The 2009 Legislature appropriated significant funding for a variety of history programs. These important programs will continue and extend the educational benefits of learning about our past to a variety of state and local history organizations.

In order to update history organizations and citizens, as well as to gather input on implementation of Legacy programs, the MN Historical Society is organizing a series of public meetings across the state.

The history section of the Legacy Act appropriations also calls for the creation of the Historic Resources Advisory Committee to assist in setting policy for grants programs, as well as to make recommendations for grant expenditures to the Society’s Executive Council. An announcement for membership applications, which was recently published in the State Register, is attached. This announcement has been circulated to history organizations across the state, but please help us to spread the word about this important committee. The deadline for applications is July 31, 2009.”

For more information, contact: Matt Hill, Educational Outreach & Governmental Relations, Minnesota Historical Society at 651-259-3428 or by e-mail: matthew.hill@mnhs.org

The link to this week’s Emerald Ash Borer Bulletin is found here. City and county officials, or, if you are in charge of an organization that would benefit from the information contained in this bulletin, please forward this email along to your staff and members.

Last week’s can be found here (pdf)

He concludes the book with, “It was Bismark who said that divine providence protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America. The republic has faced worse challenges, and one must be optimistic that it will survive this one. But if our society is to reclaim broadly shared prosperity, we had better revive our democracy.”

This is exactly the point of my effort to promote a Middleclass Amendment to save our middle class society, the core of our democracy. After the last thirty years of a steady retreat from the efforts of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s to bring an economic bill of rights to the American People with his New Deal we need to restore that sense of what Sen. Wellstone used refrain, “we all do better when we all do better.”

If you haven’t read my little book on the Middleclass Amendment you can read it online here