Class Struggle

The People Versus The Billionaires

September 11, 2024 Betsey Piette, Workers' World. Resist! Chinatown, Class Struggle, Gentrification, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Stadium, Worker Rights and Jobs

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - Several thousand people turned out for the Save Chinatown Coalition rally on Sept. 7 to protest the Philadelphia 76ers’ proposal to build a new $1.55 billion arena near Chinatown called “76 Place.” While the National Basketball Association team’s billionaire owners repeatedly say a new arena at 10th and Market streets would provide “economic opportunity for surrounding areas,” community residents, who have been fighting this proposal for over two years, argue that it would be an “existential threat” to this historic Philadelphia neighborhood. The impact studies commissioned by the city, released in late August, support the residents’ arguments.

Radical Municipalism Is Paving The Way For Direct Democracy In LA

August 24, 2024 Justin A. Davis, Waging Nonviolence. Organize! California, Class Struggle, Democracy, Grassroots, Homelessness, Housing, Los Angeles, Municipalism

Home to almost 10 million residents in 2022, Los Angeles County can sometimes seem like a vast political paradox. Known as a quintessential example of urban sprawl, it is also the most overcrowded county in America. Over the past 20 years, robust grassroots organizing built multiracial movements for organized labor, immigrant rights and housing justice while electing multiple self-identified leftists to L.A. City Council. At the same time, brutal overpolicing, ethics scandals and rising gentrification have been constant challenges for organizers and activists there. This summer, L.A.’s controversial efforts to reduce homelessness have reentered the national spotlight.

Science Should Save All, Not Just Some

August 12, 2024 Madhukar Pai and Seye Abimbola, Portside. Strategize! Class Struggle, Ethics, Science, Universality

Discussions around global equity and justice in science typically emphasize the lack of diversity in the editorial boards of scientific journals, inequities in authorship, “parachute research,” dominance of the English language, or scientific awards garnered predominantly by Global North scientists. These inequities are pervasive and must be redressed. But there is a bigger problem. The legacy of colonialism in scientific research includes an intellectual property system that favors Global North countries and the big corporations they support. This unfairness shows up in who gets access to the fruits of science and raises the question of who science is designed to serve or save.

Who Would Want To Grow Old Only To Grow Poor?

July 30, 2024 Eleni Schirmer, In These Times. Strategize! Class Struggle, Poverty, Retirement, Seniors, Worker Rights and Jobs

Despite the California sun in the summer of 1933, 66-year-old Francis E. Townsend’s mood was gloomy. He had just lost his job working as a physician for the Long Beach Health Department. Although the work itself had been bleak — attending to the city’s sick and poor was soul-wracking — not having a job was worse. Townsend, like millions of older adults during the Great Depression, found himself without savings, without work and, most of all, without hope. Who would ever want to grow old, Townsend wondered, only to grow poor? Townsend was not alone in his despair; suicides among 65- to 74-year-olds reached levels higher than at any time before or since.

Student Debt: It’s A System That’s Rigged

July 24, 2024 Maddy Clifford, In These Times. Educate! California, Class Struggle, Debt, Los Angeles, Student Loans

Leimert Park has long been one of the main hubs of Black life in Los Angeles and an innovative foil to the glitz, glam and paparazzi that many associate with the City of Angels. But anyone who knows better knows that LA’s working class, vibrant neighborhoods and excep-tionally creative locals actually make the city run. LA’s Juneteenth celebration emerged from Leimert Park in 1949; Tavis Smiley has production studios there; one of the city’s best haunts for book lovers, Eso Won Books, was there for more than 30 years; genius musicians like John Lee Hooker and Kamasi Washington could be found playing cheap shows at Babe’s and Ricky’s Inn or the World Stage; and Issa Rae used the television show Insecure to draw attention to how special the area is.

The World’s Richest Just Got Extraordinarily More Wealthy

July 13, 2024 Max B. Sawicky, In These Times. Educate! Class Struggle, Finance and the Economy, Taxes, wealth inequality

In every measurement of economic inequality, personal wealth is found to be more unequal than income. Naturally, this state of affairs invites attention and criticism, along with demands for a reduction of that inequality by various means, including to reduce the stubborn racial wealth gap. The latest World Wealth Report for 2024, published last month by The Capgemini Research Institute, brings this level of inequality into stark relief. We learn from the report that very high net-worth individuals (“HNWI,” defined as those with at least $1 million of investable assets) have been doing quite well, which is probably not a surprise.

To Best Understand Inequality, Think Class, Not Generation

July 7, 2024 Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org. Educate! Class Struggle, Multigenerational, Public investment, wealth inequality

How much does the generation we belong to define the comfort of the lives we lead? Just about nothing impacts our comfort, suggests a recent spate of major media news analyses, more than our generation. “Millennials had it bad financially,” as a Washington Post feature put it last month, “but Gen Z may have it worse.” Demographers typically define millennials as those Americans born between 1980 and 1994. Gen Z covers the cohort that came on the scene between 1995 and 2012. The tens of millions of Americans in both these generations, goes the standard analysis, enjoy precious little of the good life that has blessed America’s baby boomers, those lucky 60- and 70-year-olds born right after World War II between 1946 and 1964.

Under-Resourced Neighborhoods Can Be Incubators For Future Entrepreneurs

July 2, 2024 Walter Mendenhall, Next City. Create! Chicago, Class Struggle, entrepreneurship, Illinois, Low Income, Youth, Youth Workers

In 2016, I walked into a school’s career day on the west side of Chicago and met a great young man. This honor roll student played basketball and was respected by his peers. But despite these wonderful qualities, he sold drugs to pay for the things he desired. He was one of thousands of young Black men in Chicago who have the ambition, intelligence and leadership acumen to become successful, legitimate entrepreneurs but have no idea how to find that path, let alone follow it. There are tens of thousands more like him in cities across the country. Some put their entrepreneurial drive and leadership skills to destructive, and illegal, use.

British Foreign Policy: The Elite Vs The Public

July 1, 2024 Ian Sinclair, Morning Star. Strategize! Antiwar Movement, Class Struggle, Ruling Class, Social Movements, United Kingdom (UK)

Two polls published earlier this month make interesting reading. Asked by YouGov “Do you think the UK was right or wrong to take military action in the following wars…?”, just 26 per cent of respondents answered it was right to take military action in the 1991 Gulf War, 29 per cent in Kosovo in 1999, and only 20 per cent in Afghanistan and 16 per cent in Iraq in 2003, while 48 per cent and 54 per cent said it was wrong to take military action in Afghanistan and Iraq, respectively. Another poll by Focaldata for news and opinion website Unherd found 44 per cent of respondents thought Britain should be less engaged in overseas conflicts, compared to just 7 per cent who said the nation should be more engaged.

A Practical Prescription For Taxing Our World’s Richest

June 29, 2024 Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org. Create! Class Struggle, Finance and the Economy, Tax the rich, Taxes, wealth inequality

Ever wonder why the divide between the world’s richest and everybody else keeps getting wider? Gabriel Zucman, one of the world’s finest young economists, has just produced a report that riffs on one key reason: Our super rich pay next to nothing in taxes. Just how close to nothing? This close: Over the past four decades, the world’s “ultra-high-net-worth individuals” have seen their fortunes increase, after taking inflation into account, an average 7.5 percent per year. How much annually have these rich paid in taxes? They’ve been paying, Zucman calculates, an effective tax rate “equivalent to 0.3% of their wealth.”

The Missing Inner Dimension Of System Change

June 27, 2024 Jamie Bristow and Rosie Bell, DeSmog. Create! Class Struggle, culture, Environment, History, Report

In 1972, the Club of Rome published the world’s first advanced computer modelling of projected climate impacts. The Limits to Growth would become an iconic critique of unbridled economic growth on a finite planet, and a foundation for the global sustainability movement. Yet 50 years later, its sequel — Earth for All — reckons with a host of lessons not learned. Released by the Club of Rome in 2022, the report is a sobering account of the radical socio—economic transformation now required to prevent ecological and societal collapse.

Newsflash: Inequality In Neoliberal America

May 31, 2024 David Schultz, Counter Punch. Educate! Class Struggle, Finance and the Economy, Inequality, Neoliberalism

If anyone is perplexed or surprised why Americans are so upset about the economy, they should look no further than the Income Distribution and Dynamics in America (IDDA) recent report by the Federal Reserve Board of Minneapolis and its data site that looks at the stagnation of American income and economic mobility in America. It unfortunately confirms what we already know—the neoliberal state benefits unevenly and in ways that confound an ability to challenge it.. America is built upon two myths, the myth of equality and the myth of the American dream. The myth of equality is the idea that we all have an equal opportunity to succeed.

During Red April, MST Restates The Importance Of Agrarian Reform

April 17, 2024 Mariana Castro, People's Dispatch. Resist! Brazil, Class Struggle, Food and Agriculture, Food Sovereignty, Rural Workers

Under the slogan “Occupy to feed Brazil,” the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST), is organizing across the country for the National Day of Struggle in Defense of Agrarian Reform, which takes place during what organizers call Red April, a month which includes marches, occupations, training activities, solidarity activities, and opposition to land concentration in Brazil. The month marks April 17, when the International Day of Peasant Struggle is celebrated to remember the 21 rural workers murdered by the military police in the 1996 Eldorado dos Carajás massacre in Pará.

To Trim Richest Down To Democratic Size, We Need To Think Big

April 16, 2024 Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org. Educate! Class Struggle, History, nonprofit industrial complex, Wealth Divide

How rich have America’s super rich become? The annual compensation of Steve Schwarzman, the chief exec of the private-equity colossus Blackstone Inc., offers up one telling yardstick. In 2023, we learned earlier this year, Schwarzman’s take-home actually fell some 30 percent off what he collected the year before. But Schwarzman’s overall payday for that year, even after that tanking, still amounted to a jaw-dropping $896.7 million. The current personal net worth of Blackstone’s CEO? The Bloomberg Billionaires Index puts that figure at a sweet $42.3 billion.

From Layoffs To Lawsuits, Billionaires Are Crushing Worker Power

April 6, 2024 Chris Hedges, The Real News Network. Resistance Report Class Struggle, Democratic Party, Fascism, Worker Rights and Jobs

The resurgence of the labor movement in 2023 galvanized and emboldened unions around the country—and sent capitalists scrambling to squash the nascent militancy of their workers. Among the attempts of the billionaire class to retaliate is a major legal challenge to the National Labor Relations Board, the government body that has protected the right of workers to collective bargaining for 89 years. This latest attack on the rights of workers is the culmination of a decades-long assault on the working class in the US, which has been caught between an economic system hemorrhaging jobs and a political system that refuses to address their problems.

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