Best reads
This week, try these three.
Harold Myerson at the American Prospect, on a new labor alliance in California. L.A. Story, The Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy: a new model for American liberalism?
From reporters at the Arkansas Times, working with InsideClimate News, The path of the Pegasus pipeline in Arkansas, Exxon’s pipeline cuts across the watersheds that provide drinking water for 770,000 Arkansans.
And James Fallows at the Atlantic presents an analysis of the situation in Syria, Your Labor Day Syria Reader, Part 2: William Polk. An in-depth, step-by-step account of how we got here and what might come next.
All are well worth your time.
Equality Day
On August 26, 1920, women were at last granted the right to vote. Today is Women’s Equality Day. The picture below is from 1918. In a time when voting rights are under constant attack, I hope we show the same courage as those who fought for our rights so many years ago.
Irin Carmon at MSNBC’s site has an interesting round-up from those days, predicting the evils that would befall if women were allowed to vote.
Shameful
That in the richest country on earth we refuse to feed poor, hungry children.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports that SNAP benefits will be cut automatically in November of this year, as the additional funding that had been allocated to feeding people will not be renewed by this Congress.
The amount this saves is miniscule, as you can see in the graphic below. But these small amounts make a lot of difference in the lives and the nutrition of the families who need them. I know, because my mother raised us on welfare (AFDC it was, back then). What this says about us as a country (and particularly about the Republicans in Congress, who hate poor people passionately) is shameful.
