Tagged social class

Driving Mr. Bubble

Champagne bubbles, dot-com bubbles, credit bubbles, and bursting dreams.

After a lecture in Poughkeepsie in mid-November I had take a car down to the White Plains airport at 3 AM in order to meet my class in Atlanta. The driver—let’s call him Don—was a big, burly, solid man around fifty with a New York accent that made me feel right at home.

He turned out to be a retired police officer, pro-Obama, a classic New York Democrat like his father and grandfather before him. Don could care less about Obama’s name or race, but as a struggling entrepreneur with two daughters in college he was very, very worried about the economy.
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Republican Socialism, Part Deux: Dressed-up Greed, Naked Fear

animal-farm-graphic-big-pig-close-mouth-713368They manipulate fear, reward greed, and give new meaning to the term “Orwellian.”

They’re not bailing out the single mom who works checkout at Wal-Mart, has a diabetic son, and no health insurance.

They’re not bailing out the guy in Michigan whose job on the factory line got shipped to Mexico with the blessing and subsidies of their administration, and who now kicks cans in the afternoons and wonders how to face his wife.
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Republican Socialism

"Conservatives" nationalize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, mocking their own market mantra

Anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists are fascinated by two poles of human behavior: cooperation and competition. You've got to get your own in terms of reproductive success, but you're in a relentlessly social species, so you often have to do well by doing good.
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In Sickness and In Wealth

"Maladaptive" habits help the poor cope with their stressful lives, and the best healers don't blame them.

I recently had the privilege of "shadowing" one of the best docs I know as she made hospital rounds at Grady. Grady is one of those places-like Los Angeles County Hospital, Cook County Hospital in Chicago, and Kings County in Brooklyn where I volunteered as a high school kid-
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