According to Florence Lowe, Founder & CEO of SQBlueSky, the commonality all start-ups need to succeed is a long enough runway – the resources needed to ramp up to full flight when they’re getting started. The resources won’t be the same for every company. Some teams will need a lot of money to burn through while in the start-up phase, others (like Florence) count heavily on personal experience and a fabulous team, others benefit simply from applying themselves 100% to the task of getting their business fully operational. And, Florence says,
Voting Rights Timeline in the US
Voting rights in the US are closely tied to other important social issues: the right to own property, First Amendment free speech rights, rights to assemble and to be the master of one’s own destiny. These resources show when the right to vote was obtained by various populations of American society.
Timeline by Center for Democracy
Timeline by the ACLU in graphic format and as a pdf file
The voting rights timelines does not address two other serious voting rights issues being played out in the US: using felony disenfranchisement as a mechanism to prevent Black men (plus some women) and Latinos from exercising their voting rights, which has become a type of apartheid in these communities. 
Michelle Alexander writes about this in her book, The New Jim Crow and the concerted Republican effort put in place since the first GWB election in 2000 which seeks to purge legitimate voters from voting rolls in targeted communities and otherwise restrict voting rights across the country.
To students of real history, corruption doesn’t look worse today
People who believe widespread social problems are new to the United States come from ethnic backgrounds of privilege, or didn’t learn true history at home or in school. A Facebook friend and Green Party member thinks he is trying to explain to me that ethnicity does not affect a person’s belief about whether there is more corruption today than in the past. But, what Mark is really doing is demonstrating that he hails from a background where White male privilege is so much part of his personal culture that he is unaware that any other reality exists.
Black and Latino borrowers victims of mortgage red-lining
The announcement on July 12 that Wells Fargo had agreed to a $175 million dollar settlement to avoid prosecution by the U.S. Justice Department for race bias in its lending policies follows a settlement with Bank of America Corp. last December to pay $335 million to avoid similar charges. Unfortunately, this amount is just a wee drop in the bucket when compared with the destruction these financial institutions’ policies have wreaked in the lives of Latino and Black families. Thanks to the exploitative lending policies they’ve been much harder hit by our harsh economic climate specifically because housing has cost them hundreds more each month than White families paid, even when the Black and Latino borrowers had equally good jobs and purchased properties valued at the same price.
NJ shares in historic $25 billion fed-state mortgage fraud settlement
President Obama has responded to the injustices and fraud enacted by banks upon mortgage borrowers with the negotiation of a massive, wide-spread assistance program for one of America’s greatest ills – the home foreclosure crisis. Visit the website National Mortgage Settlement which is maintained by Attorney Generals from every state in the country (except Oklahoma) to learn more about the $25 billion dollar settlement that America’s five largest banks will pay over the next three years.
New study released: Who austerity hurts
Friend and civil rights attorney Bennet D. Zurofsky posts a link to an extensive new 84 page study of the detrimental effects of austerity entitled Prosperity Economics: Building An Economy For All. “Worth reading,” he says.
Friend and iconic politician Jack Drakeford dies at age 75
I just learned that the man who came very close to being my stepfather when I was a girl, passed away early this morning (Aug 2) at Holy Name Hospital in Teaneck. No wonder all day long I’ve felt a powerful sense of loss all that I wasn’t able to shake off. In all the world, Jack Drakeford is one of the people whose presence in my life has most touched me, and whose friendship I have most valued.
Who was the towering man with soulful eyes and a huge bear hug always ready for his favorite friends? Jack Drakeford was champion of the new Jersey Black community, friend and mentor of young people preparing to take flight into the world, lover of iHop, speaker of truth, formidable politician and a man possessed of an extraordinary grasp of the struggle for racial and social justice in the United States and what it takes to build the rights that make equality happen. And an amazing friend.
Fire Demarco for underwater mortgage relief and $1 billion in savings
The good people at Rebuild the Dream tell us,
DeMarco is the Bush appointee who has been dragging his heels and blocking Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from engaging in targeted principal reductions (resetting home loans to fair market value) for struggling, underwater homeowners on the grounds that it would cost the taxpayers too much.
Today, two things happened. First, FHFA produced a study that said principal reductions would actually save taxpayers more than a billion dollars. And then DeMarco announced that he still wouldn’t allow any principal reductions!
As NJ poor get poorer, rich get MUCH richer
Legal Services of New Jersey’s (aka Legal Aid) Poverty Research Institute income disparity study
entitled “Income Inequality in New Jersey: The Growing Divide and Its Consequences,” found the distribution of income between 2000 and the end of 2009 was heavily one-sided, with more than three quarters of the income gains going to the well-to-do in just 20 percent of the state’s households. That left little for everyone else, and some backtracked.
Significantly, more than a quarter of the gains went to just the top or richest one percent of the populace – an estimated 75,000 people living in households with incomes of at least $570,000. On the other end, those in the 40 percent of the state’s households with incomes under $34,300 – roughly 3 million people – actually saw their incomes take a hit during the decade.
Giving thanks may make you happier
Did you know there’s science to being happy? Watch Harvard researcher Nancy Etcoff’s TED talk on The surprising science of happiness.
A study administered by two scientists whose work focuses specifically on how gratitude affects happiness – psychologists, Dr. Robert A. Emmons of the University of California and Dr. Michael E. McCullough of the University of Miami – proved that expressions of gratitude (you thanking someone else, or G-d, or yourself) increased people’s own happiness and enhanced their lives in various ways.
When they understand what it is, people love Obamacare
A Truthout op-ed article explains the real benefits of Obamacare. Once people understand how much benefit they provide, they love the new healthcare provisions. They’re also going to love the $500 rebate checks that will soon be sent out from insurance companies to compensate policyholders for the price gouging their insurers have been subjecting them to, and the $100 billion our government is going to save this decade because of the bill. Here’s an excerpt:
What the decision does do, using the taxing authority of the Constitution, is assure that everybody gets covered for health care – no one can be turned down. The President’s bill guarantees that everyone is now covered for pre-existing conditions, preventive care, mammograms, colonoscopies, seniors’ drugs, children on parent’s plans through 26, no lifetime caps, and this is a key part, requires that 80 percent of the benefits go to patients, not to administrators, prohibiting insurance companies from overcharging for their salaries and administrative costs. The insurance company overcharges – paying them as middlemen — were one of the factors that made us pay twice as much for health care as any nation on earth.
Quotes from the Dalai Lama
Here’s a compendium of the kind of deep quotes we love from the Dalai Lama (whom we also love). This is just a small sampling of what you’ll find there.
Social-media-users-should-leverage-our-own-power
I am beyond disturbed that much greater resources are being spent on finding ways to “leverage” the power of the internet to exploit users, than we users are investing to find how we can harness our own power to use for our own good. This makes no sense when you consider what leverage means: to use a small object and a small amount of force to control a more massive object. In this analogy, the small force are the exploiters, the small tool is social media and the massive object represents the vast base of social media users: us.
Kimi’s disappearing coffee cup
Oh, this is a riot. Look what happened to me: the other day I got a waitress at the Golden Grill all confused. I interrupted a very intense conversation with my breakfast mates about ways to get more Latinos and Blacks involved in Englewood Public library activities, to point out to the waitress that I still wanted more coffee, but someone had already removed my cup. It wasn’t sitting on the table near my right hand, where I had last seen it.
“Why is this lady looking at me so strange,” I wondered to myself. And she was motionless, just standing there with the coffee pot in her right hand, kind of frozen almost. She asked me a couple of time what I meant, and then I wasn’t sure what to do. Suddenly I became afraid that maybe she was having a stroke and had lost her power of comprehension. Finally, the waitress pointed at the coffee cup sitting right in front of me – the one practically touching the front of my shirt – and she asked me gently, “Could you be talking about that coffee cup, maybe?”
Save the free internet hashtag #stfi
I couldn’t find a hashtag for “save the free internet” or “save the open internet” so I made one up: #stfi.
Take a look at
http://thewei.com/kimi/we-must-keep-the-internet-open/
http://thewei.com/kimi/fight-for-internet-freedom-and-the-open-web/
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Save the Internet, a Free Press initiative
epic.org
National Urban League supports the open internet
President Obama supports an open internet
Speed Matters (universal broadband support org)
Broadband Opportunity Coalition