Betsy Dernbach at Mother Jones writes—How the 2010s Brought Back Strikes, School Walkouts, and Social Movements. In the last decade, we rose up:
With economic inequality at the highest levels in decades, the climate in crisis, and a political system often unable to address popular demands or even elect the people’s choice, the last decade was shaped by the resurgence of social movements. From the 2011 occupation of the Wisconsin Capitol over collective bargaining rights to 2019’s Puerto Rico protests that pushed out ex-governor Ricardo Rosselló, more and more Americans took their politics to the streets in the 2010s.
Labor journalist Sarah Jaffe, author of Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt, traces the explosion in movement politics to the financial crisis of 2008. People who lost their jobs and retirement savings in the crash still haven’t recovered. And though the unemployment rate has fallen over the decade, lower-paying service sector work has supplanted many of the middle-income jobs lost in the recession.
“The 2008 financial crisis killed capitalist realism,” Jaffe says. “We can’t quite imagine what comes next, but we know that the thing that we have been living under doesn’t work anymore. And so we’ve seen movement after movement that is some form of reaction to that.” [...]
“The question of what you do about that inequality, I think, is the one that drives people to the left or the right,” Jaffe said. “Do you want to get rid of that inequality, or do you just want to regain your place in it?”
These are some of the movements for justice that shaped the 2010s.
Occupy Wall Street [...]
The Movement for Black Lives [...]
Standing Rock [...]
The Women’s March and #MeToo [...]
Teachers’ Strikes [...]
The Youth Climate Movement
TOP COMMENTS
QUOTATION
“Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else.”
~~Theodore Roosevelt, Metropolitan Magazine (1918)
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2010—It's Not a New Decade. Yes, It Is! No, It Isn't!
The late Stephen J. Gould and the late Arthur C. Clarke got into a good-hearted dispute about whether the new millennium started January 1, 2000, or January 1, 2001. Gould even wrote a wonderful, tidbit-filled book called Questioning the Millennium: A Rationalist's Guide to a Precisely Arbitrary Countdown.
"Precisely arbitrary" captured it exactly right. But we can be counted upon to argue about when each decade and each century starts right up until the fourth millennium begins on January 1, 3000 3001 3000. [...]
At its root, the argument stems from the fact that the creators of the Western calendar were not Mayans or Hindus, peoples with both the concept and a symbol for zero. Hence, our calendar recognizes no year zero. Every decade begins not in the year ending in a 0, but ending in a 1, 2011, not 2010.
The only problem being, that in popular parlance, it doesn't make sense to call the decade of the '90s, 1991-2000. And how does 2011 fit into the decade of the '00s?
Advocates of the no-year-zero approach argue that the 6th century priest-scholar Dionysius Exiguus forces us to accept that the new decade won't start until 2011. It was he who first calculated in AD 532 (by means not wholly clear) the time when Jesus Christ was conceived and born. Exiguus apparently knew about the concept of zero, but he didn't have the symbol and wrote his conclusions with Roman numerals. He went directly from 1 BC to AD 1, dates now scientifically notated as 1 BCE and 1 CE. No zero in between […]
When astronomers count, they do include a year zero, thanks to the work of Jacques Cassini in 1740. Many countries have legally adopted this approach to counting the decades and centuries. For astronomers, the new decade begins in 2010.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Happy New Year! Our embassy in Baghdad is attacked, while Trump golfs. An American oligarch's secret plan to shelter the Shah. The future of Trump's corrupt courts. Trump paints his face orange; Carter says he's not legit. Who's the crazy one?