Movie: Explicit Ills

I watched this last Friday and thought it was inspiring. Not necessarily while I was watching it, but it all kind of came together at the end

It’s a movement too, called the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign (linked to below). I took the liberty of typing out the "Get Involved" portion that was on the special features, and will probably be more interesting after having seen the movie (and liked it).

There’s a good synopsis of the movie here.

The special features text is rather long, so I'm including only the first paragraph after the trailer, the rest is on my other blog and linked to below.

Then comes an interesting and relevant Rachel Maddow clip and it’s corresponding transcript on the minimum wage.

I think a lot about what can be done to combat the hell on Earth that is life for much, if not most of humanity. Shortly before watching the movie I had been thinking, despondently, about what really can be done to help save the world. The segment from the special features answered it for me---end poverty. If we could end poverty, we could have the closest thing to heaven on Earth that is possible. Not that achieving that would be easy, but it’s a very simple and easy to remember solution.

Unfortunately, about 30% of the US population are united in their unreachable brainlessness, so we have our work cut out for us. I am not hopeful, but it's movies and movements like this that at least give me something to grasp onto.



EXPLICIT ILLS
1. Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign
http://old.economichumanrights.org/index.shtml

Mission Statement - The Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign is committed to unite the poor across color lines as the leadership base for a broad movement to abolish poverty. We work to accomplish this through advancing economic human rights as named in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, such as the rights to food, housing, health, education, communication and a living wage job. Continue...

And here's Rachel Maddow on the minimum wage increase and the cost of health insurance @ the 2:16 mark (transcript here):

Transcript @ 2:16:

And finally, thanks to the Democrats‘ midterm election promise in 2006, the minimum wage in America went up today. If you make minimum wage, your annual salary just went from about $13,600 to just over $15,000. Of course, that‘s if you work eight full hours every single freaking week day of every single freaking week and you never get sick and never sleep in once and never leave early ever in the whole entire year. $15,000 grand for the year.

Are you, by any chance, supporting a family on that salary? And by any chance, does your minimum wage job not offer you health insurance? If so, here is the telling awful math about being poor in America today.

The minimum wage annual salary just went up to $15,080 a year, right?

The annual average cost of family health insurance this year is $13,150. Which means if you have a minimum wage job and you want to live the fantasy of buying health insurance for your family, on average, America expects you to live off a grand total of $1,930 for everything else you need for the year - food, shelter, everything. Oh, also, we‘re the richest country on earth.

And here's one to drive the point home for we masochistic blubberers...