Matt Stoller: “Corruption Responsible for 80% of Your Cell Phone Bill“ (via Susie)
Americans continue to have a small number of expensive, poor quality cell phone providers. And how much does this cost you? Take your phone bill, and cut it by 80%. That’s how much you should be paying. You see, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, people in Sweden, the Netherlands, and Finland pay on average less than $130 a year for cell phone service. Americans pay $635.85 a year. That $500 a year difference, from most consumers with a cell phone, goes straight to AT&T and Verizon (and to a much lesser extent Sprint and T-Mobile). It’s the cost of corruption. It’s also, from the perspective of these companies, the return on their campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures. Every penny they spend in DC and in state capitols ensures that you pay high bills, to them.
Faith in Public Life: “Stop Distorting Church Teaching to Justify Immoral Budget“
Rep. Ryan claims his budget reflects the Catholic principle of “subsidiarity.” But he profoundly distorts this teaching to fit a narrow political ideology guided by anti-government fervor and libertarian faith in radical individualism. This is anathema to the Catholic social tradition. In fact, ever since Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum, Catholic social teaching has recognized a positive role for government and our collective responsibility to care for our neighbors. It was another Ryan — Msgr. John Ryan — who in 1919 worked with Catholic bishops on a visionary plan that called for minimum wages, insurance for the elderly and unemployed, labor rights and housing for workers. The “Bishops’ Program for Social Reconstruction” recognized that free markets and self-reliance alone were not enough. These proposals eventually helped inform historic New Deal programs that for the first time sought to buffer families from the cruel vagaries of profit-driven markets that had little concern for human dignity. Subsidiarity recognizes that those social institutions closest to the human person — families, communities, churches — can effectively respond to human needs. But subsidiarity, according to Church teaching, also insists that government has a responsibility to serve the common good when these institutions are unable to address the more systemic issues of poverty, inadequate health care, environmental degradation and other societal challenges.
Jill @ Feministe: “A Few Thoughts on Hilary Rosen, moms and work“
So this “motherhood is the most important job in the world” thing is an outlier. And it’s a tool used to not give actual mothers their due. It romanticizes what motherhood actually looks like; since the job is So Important, it’s positioned as something that women should be happy to sacrifice for. Of course motherhood should be tedious and financially stressful and uncompensated — your compensation is the smile on your child’s face! And that’s invaluable. If you think otherwise, you are probably some sort of witch.
None of which is to say that parenthood doesn’t have incredible emotional benefits — the smile on your child’s face is invaluable. But that smile doesn’t mean that you should have to forgo healthcare or basic financial stability.
… It’s easy to talk about what you value. But when Republicans value things, they put money behind it. And I’m not seeing many dollars spent on mothers.
Alan Bean: “Connecticut abolishes the death penalty, but does it matter?“
If you want to know if a person is likely to pull the blue or red lever at election time, ask for an opinion on the death penalty. It’s as good a single issue indicator as you are likely to find.
… Unfortunately, the death penalty is so popular in the South that we are unlikely to see abolition anytime soon. Although southern states are executing fewer people since the advent of life without parole laws, our prisons are filling up with old men who have lived most of their lives in prison and will die there. A growing number of lifers are still in their teens. Abolishing the death penalty is a laudable goal; but capital punishment isn’t the only symptom of a punitive consensus that has controlled American public policy for half a century.
The popularity of capital punishment in the states of the old Confederacy suggests there is more in play here than murder rates. In fact, if you take a map highlighting the rate of lynching during the Jim Crow era and superimpose it over a map showing the frequency of executions in the United States, the correspondence is almost exact. States that lynched a lot of people are now executing a lot of people. Is this merely a coincidence? Alas, it is not.
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