Tag Archives: economics

The comments underneath this article, justifying cutting off “freeloaders” and “moochers”, give me pause.

I think we’re soon to be at the point of secession – internal or external – when the rage against government assistance becomes a conflict over our very values as a nation.

It is now a character flaw to be on public assistance. The able-bodied middle class suburbanite who loudly professes on the Internet to owe no debt (“because I saved money and worked hard!”) is now our ubermenschen over the lives of the lowly, “lazy” “freeloader”.

May these days and these sentiments pass quickly.

It’s a trap.

Sullivan’s piece, rife with generalizations about a group as vastly diverse as Asian-Americans, rightfully raised hackles. Not only inaccurate, his piece spreads the idea that Asian-Americans as a group are monolithic, even though parsing data by ethnicity reveals a host of disparities; for example, Bhutanese-Americans have far higher rates of poverty than other Asian populations, like Japanese-Americans. And at the root of Sullivan’s pernicious argument is the idea that black failure and Asian success cannot be explained by inequities and racism, and that they are one and the same; this allows a segment of white America to avoid any responsibility for addressing racism or the damage it continues to inflict.

via ‘Model Minority’ Myth Again Used As A Racial Wedge Between Asians And Blacks : Code Switch : NPR

CityLab: Pay Teens To Attend School or Keep Losing Them

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Interesting idea about #BasicIncome:

The problem: Suspending kids who don’t go to school isn’t “different.” That’s what they did when I was there. At risk of stating the obvious here, suspension is no punishment for those who are already voluntarily suspending themselves. Suspension is better than criminalizing truancy, but it won’t necessarily inspire kids to start coming to homeroom. For that kind of inspiration—and inspiration is truly what’s needed here—educators will have to come up with something more creative, and competitive.

And here it is: We need to pay high school students to go to school. I don’t mean some punk-ass weekly or monthly allowance, or a gift card for Dave & Busters. I’m talking about a deposit of somewhere in the ballpark of $50 to $100, every school day. That’s not for making honor roll; it’s just for making it to school in the morning and staying until the end of the day. Yes, compensated just for showing up. Think Universal Basic Income—but for kids.

via Pay Teens To Attend School or Keep Losing Them – CityLab

Trump’s Protectionism

Politics, Uncategorized,

The deep protectionism which Trump is signifying with his executive orders is a manifestation of a long history of perceiving ethnic competition for jobs in the United States.

The same people who support Trump’s trade-first supremacy over the national security-first supremacy which has shaped our post-WW2 policy are the same people who rage against undocumented immigrants “taking” jobs. Their ancestors raged and engaged in race riots against Negroes, Asians and even Eastern Europeans “taking” jobs in big cities.

The ethnic majority in this country, or at least those who take “America First” seriously, will now proceed to screw over or remove anyone who gets in the way of their economic security. Anyone.

I wonder if there is historic precedent in other countries for this trade-first emphasis.

worker cooperatives and unions

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I’m interested in the work between worker cooperatives and unions.

Cooperatives are, arguably, the more democratic for-profit structure than your “regular” corporation. Labor unions are the foremost advocate for workers’ rights.

And the Basque-Spanish #Mondragon Co-op has been heavily investing with the USW to build unionized worker co-ops in the U.S. for the last few years.

But I also wonder about the role of the unionized worker co-op in the age of automation.

If automation is touted as this inexorable force for extraction of more resources, the production of more products and the provision of more services at the expense of existing human labor roles, while co-ops are for-profit entities entailed to the equal provision of shares of the profit to those who are members, how can automation be made to work equally for a co-op’s shareholders without the co-op losing member-shareholders?

Should the worker-shareholders own the robots, even if that means that the worker-shareholders do less of the work? And if the worker-shareholders are doing less or even little of the procedural work while they share the revenue from those robots, does the co-op degenerate from worker-type to consumer-type co-op, or does the co-op retain the worker as the primary shareholder by way of cooperatively owning the devices used in the operation of the business?

Models like Amazon Go’s cutting-out of human cashiers in brick-and-mortar grocery stores work to the benefit of the few shareholders and executives at the top of Amazon because their corporate structure is built to favor those at the top. But that same model can also be applied to benefit cooperative member-owners without undermining the worth of human labor.

If greater automation/digitization, co-op membership and worker-shareholder democracy can all be made to work in tandem, I think it would make life easier for a lot of people while avoiding reactionary tendencies against civil rights, labor rights and robots.

#1u #coop

Standing Rock

Politics, Uncategorized, , ,

#StandingRock is an example of a protest movement which knows what it is protecting, its tactic of protection, and how it would not be externally policed in its tone.

Standing Rock is an example of a small, manageable protest target becoming a flash point for news media.

It’s not a grand, terrifying arch-target like police brutality, mass incarceration or income inequality. The protection is centered around a piece of land, and the goal is to stop something from happening to that land.

And it is not a frustrated reaction against a grievous incident, but a proactive protection against grievous plans.

And until the directive from the Army Corps of Engineers is made flesh before President Obama leaves office, those plans remain prone to reversal.

But Standing Rock is possible and proactive. As violent and scandalous as the suppression has been (and as scandalous and glib as the denial of Standing Rock’s claims have been), Standing Rock has been small enough to attain and big enough to attract citizens and logistical support from all walks of life. Nothing more, nothing less than this specific goal.

If the Standing Rock movement survives the winter and DAPL is permanently rerouted after Trump takes office, this will be a hard-fought victory for nonviolent protest akin to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. This victory will be studied for years to come.

This is where #Occupy failed, and why it didn’t survive the winter of 2011. This is what many in the #BlackLivesMatter movement can learn about, so that we can stop people from becoming hashtags.

Goals matter. Name the future that you wish to protect, what you will do to protect it, and the outcome which you will go through hell and high water to prevent.

#NoDAPL

Shaming of the Poor

Politics, Uncategorized, ,

I am poor.
I am working class.
I receive government benefits.
I dropped out of my first attempt at college in Atlanta, and returned home shamefaced.
I used a Pell grant to go to community college and then a 4-year college.
I took a Stafford loan to pay off my final year of college.
I live with my mother.
I only look for jobs at which I am adept, in which I have a strong interest and for which I do my best.
I’m paying my college debts.
I live on military housing as a civilian visitor.
I have a lot of privilege that many other people do not.
I help Mom pay bills, and vice versa.

Do I feel bad? Yes. Often.
Do I feel like this will make me a political target? Yes. I fear that.

It was not long ago, just when I was coming out of college, that I was asked by some of my own family members why I was still living with Mom in my late 20s without a job. I felt targeted over this due to other family passions in which I was not involved.

Am I financially illiterate? I frequently feel like that, even as I try to save money. I still feel guilt over past spending from 3, 5 or 6 years ago. I still feel like an idiot over past spending habits, feeling regret over things I’ve bought.

I wrestle with the “temporarily embarrassed billionaire” feelings a lot. Knowing that I don’t make a living income is sometimes a frightful knowledge.

But I feel like I need to own this, and to not let this status get control of my emotions.

So I will never tell you to pull yourself up by your own economic bootstraps. Not only is that a dick move, but I refuse to propagate the “wealth as a blessing/mark of character” fraud which turns so many people against each other in Middle America.

I own up to being poor. I own up to depending on others. And I’m committed to paying it back by working to make life easier for others.

With the partisan-tinged anti-union sentiment in Wisconsin, I wonder if a lot of the opposition to unions has to do, ultimately, with anti-black racism.

Sure, the primary victims of this tend to be white union members in both public and private sectors, but the rage against unions from people who previously benefited from unions has a visceral, irrational tone to it. The “union thug” caricature gained greater currency during Obama’s presidency and the Tea Party reaction against both him and his initial Democratic congressional majority.

The right-to-work and other anti-union laws being drafted over the last 8 years, however, have an extremely-racist history, and a lot of it took place in the South.

You know what’s funny? When Democrats, liberals and big gubmint are accused by Christian conservative-libertarian folks of “using poverty to stay in business,” of “keeping poor people poor.”

Doesn’t Matthew 26:11 (KJV) say the following?:

“For ye have the poor always with you; but me ye have not always.”

How does the government “keep poor people poor” when the poor are declared by your “Lord and Savior” to “always” be with us, despite whatever the government does to alleviate the general condition of poverty?