The wealthy are different from you and me:
A new social networking site bills itself as “the online country club for people with more money than time.” The Daily Mail has a more succinct description: “Facebook for the rich.”
Netropolitan, as the site is called, costs $9,000 (U.S.) to join. The initiation fee is $6,000, plus a $3,000 annual fee.
New York-based composer James Touchi-Peters came up with the idea when he realized he and his well-heeled friends needed somewhere to discuss their (rich-person) problems without the typical reactions they might get on traditional social networking sites. "I saw a need for an environment where you could talk about the finer things in life without backlash - an environment where people could share similar likes and experiences," he told CNN.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2011—High school textbooks shortchange kids by excluding labor history:
A new report (PDF) by the Albert Shanker Institute and the American Labor Studies Center argues that history textbooks exclude labor from the history that American schoolchildren learn. Their review of four leading high school history textbooks finds that the books:
• often implicitly (and, at times, explicitly) represent labor organizing and labor disputes as inherently violent;
• virtually ignore the vital role of organized labor in winning broad social protections, such as child labor laws, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Occupational
Safety and Health Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency;
• ignore the important role that organized labor played in the civil rights movement; and
• pay scant attention to unionism after the 1950s, thus completely ignoring the rise of public sector unionization, which brought generations of Americans into the middle class and gave new rights to public employees. |
Textbooks are incredibly political documents, as the recent Texas textbook controversies have reminded us. But by the time Texas got busy trying to write Newt Gingrich and the Moral Majority into high school history books and Anne Hutchinson and Thurgood Marshall out, the struggles of working people and the contributions of their unions to foundational pieces of today's society such as the 40-hour work week and Social Security had already been largely written out. |
Tweet of the Day
“The United States went from first in the world in degree-holders to 11th in the course of one generation.”
http://t.co/...
— @hellotumo
On
today's Kagro in the Morning show, technical issues kept us off the live stream for the first few minutes of the show, but not to worry, it's all here on the podcast. Twitter and social media users help crack the case on a hate crime attack in Philadelphia. A former MA police chief is arrested on gun charges, and you won't believe the gun trouble he's been in before.
Joan McCarter joins us to discuss the Philly case, an update on net neutrality actions, this fun new pope, the state of play in the elections in Kansas, Senate action on appointments, and the difficulties of getting to a vote on action against ISIS. Afterward, we reviewed the writing on the politics at play on that issue.
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