Tag: economic security

‘Ides of Trump’ Action Aims to Send More Mail Than White House Can Ignore

Posted on by kathiemm
Published on Monday, March 13, 2017 by Common Dreams

We “will overwhelm Washington…and we will bury the White House post office in pink slips, all informing the president that he’s fired!”

by
Nadia Prupis, staff writer

“So sharpen your wit, unsheathe your writing implements, and write from the heart,” the organizers say. (Photo: Ides of Trump)

A new movement is aiming to mail at least 1 million postcards to President Donald Trump on Wednesday, March 15—historically dubbed “the Ides of March” and known as the day Julius Caesar was assassinated—to show “the man, the media, and the politicians how vast our numbers are…to make it irrefutable that the president’s claim of wide support is a farce.”

“He may draw a big crowd with empty promises, but the crowd of those that oppose his agenda is exponentially larger. And we will show up to protest, to vote, and to be heard. Again and again and again,” the group, which calls itself the Ides of Trump, explained on its website and Facebook page.

The group outlines five steps to participate:

  1. Write one postcard. Write a dozen! Create your own cards, buy them, share them, it doesn’t matter as long as you write #TheIdes or #TheIdesOfTrump on them somewhere.
  2.  Take a picture of your cards and post them on social media (tagged with #TheIdesOfTrump or #TheIdes, please). This will help us verify our numbers.
  3. Spread the word! Everyone on Earth can let Washington know their opinion of the President. They can’t build a wall high enough to stop the mail.
  4. Then, on March 15th, mail your cards to:
    The President (for now) 
    The White House
    1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
    NW Washington, DC 20500
  5. Get ready for the NEXT postcard campaign, and the next, and the next—because we’re not going away. We will make ourselves heard by joining together. And together, we will wield the kind of political clout that can’t be ignored.

As Leslie Evans, an artist and printmaker who produced about 900 postcards for the event last week in Watertown, Massachusetts, told the Boston Globe on Monday, “Obviously, numbers matter a lot to [Trump.]” Her postcards feature slogans that paraphrase chants commonly heard at anti-Trump protests, such as “Compassion, not fear, immigrants are welcome here,” and “Hear our voice, you are not the majority choice.”

The Ides of Trump also makes clear that while the basis is comical, the impetus is not.

“So sharpen your wit, unsheathe your writing implements, and write from the heart,” they write. “All of our issues—DAPL [the Dakota Access Pipeline], women’s rights, racial discrimination, religious freedom, immigration, economic security, education, the environment, conflicts of interest, the existence of facts—can and should find common cause. That cause is to make it irrefutable that the president’s claim of wide support is a farce.”

“[W]e, in vast numbers, from all corners of the world, will overwhelm Washington,” the organizers write, “and we will bury the White House post office in pink slips, all informing the president that he’s fired!”

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THE UNITED STATES OF AMNESIA, CONCLUSION

Posted on by kathiemm
H Street Festival DC 2013. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. Author: S Pakhrin from DC, USA.

by Stefan Schindler

To paraphrase George Santayana: Those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it.

Not only is America the most militarized and largest debtor country in the world, it remains the only technologically advanced country lacking universal health care and still clinging to the death penalty.

Since 1985, middle class income in Germany has risen five times faster than middle class income in America.  German workers have two months paid vacation per year; guaranteed, taxpayer financed, universal health care; and a higher quality, more egalitarian national education system than America, with generous funding for the arts.

Meanwhile, among the advanced industrial nations of the world, America has one of the highest infant mortality rates, the highest percentage of citizens in prison, and more than 40 million American families deprived of health insurance (a number recently mitigated by Obamacare).

In addition to his militarization and deficit spending, Ronald Reagan’s most profound domestic legacy was the vast expansion of two segments of the American population: billionaires and the homeless.

Instead of being the most militarized, debt ridden, fundamentalist, stupefied, historically illiterate, consumer driven, energy gulping, empire building, sports and celebrity obsessed, advertising drenched, and dangerous nation in the world today, the U.S.A. could, as it once was, be a beacon of hope.

This could easily be accomplished by instituting: a four-day work week, a five-hour work day, universal health care, affordable child care, guaranteed economic security and a living wage, taxpayer-financed life-time educational opportunity, global interfaith dialogue, nuclear disarmament, demilitarization, democratic pluralism with multi-party choice, supremely well-paid full-time teachers across the educational spectrum, a sane and modest teacher-student ratio in classrooms, the teaching of real history instead of mythic mush, the de-monopolization of the media, the “greening” of ecological sustainability, and vastly increased funding for the arts in schools and beyond, with daily street fairs and festivals for everybody and time enough to enjoy them.