Class Struggle

Austin Becomes 1st City In Texas To Mandate Paid Sick Leave

February 17, 2018 Philip Jankowski, Statesman.com Create! Austin, Cities, Class Struggle, Texas, Workers Rights and Jobs

The Austin City Council voted early Friday to make paid sick leave a mandatory requirement for all non-government employers, making Austin the first city in Texas to regulate sick leave. The highly anticipated vote came after more than 200 people testified at City Hall, with a large majority in favor of the ordinance. It passed 9-2 with council members Ora Houston and Ellen Troxclair against. “For me, so much of this is about widening inequality and our fight against it,” said Council Member Greg Casar, the author and lead proponent of the ordinance. The vote was greeted with thunderous applause and singing as the council adopted a compromise ordinance Casar offered Thursday that addressed many concerns brought forward by Council Member Jimmy Flannigan and others earlier this week.

Why We’re Underestimating American Collapse

February 16, 2018 Umair Haque, Informationclearinghouse.info Educate! Class Struggle, Crisis, US Imperialism

February 15, 2018 "Information Clearing House" - You might say, having read some of my recent essays, “Umair! Don’t worry! Everything will be fine! It’s not that bad!” I would look at you politely, and then say gently, “To tell you the truth, I don’t think we’re taking collapse nearly seriously enough.” Why? When we take a hard look at US collapse, we see a number of social pathologies on the rise. Not just any kind. Not even troubling, worrying, and dangerous ones. But strange and bizarre ones. Unique ones. Singular and gruesomely weird ones I’ve never really seen before, and outside of a dystopia written by Dickens and Orwell, nor have you, and neither has history. They suggest that whatever “numbers” we use to represent decline — shrinking real incomes, inequality, and so on —we are in fact grossly underestimating what pundits call the “human toll”...

The Strategy Of The 1% And Ours

February 15, 2018 Raúl Zibechi, Chiapas-support.org Strategize! Class Struggle, Inequality

In recent days two facts illuminate the strategy of the richest 1 percent of humanity. Towards the end of January the media divulged an Oxfam study, wherein is asserts that of all the wealth generated in 2017 in the world, 82 percent went into the hands of the richest 1 percent, while half of the population received absolutely nothing. The economy only functions to benefit a tiny minority that concentrates more and more power. The second fact comes from the Davos Forum, where the sector that represents the interests of the 1 percent meets. All the chronicles assure that the CEOS of the multi-nationals and the world’s most powerful men (there are few women), were happy and converted the annual gathering in the Swiss Alps into a real party. Almost all of them arrived in private jets; they paid $245,000.00 for the four days of meetings and conferences and access to the private sessions.

Youth Activists And Catholic Lay Leaders Organize For DRC Without Kabila

February 14, 2018 Phil Wilmot, Wagingnonviolence.org Resist! Class Struggle, DRC, Protests, Youth Activism

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is home to 80 million people. Its land is so vast that a peat bog the size of England was discovered just four years ago. Yet, despite geographic distance, road inaccessibility, language diversity and internet blackouts, Congolese activists across the country — with the help of Catholic lay leaders — have coordinated dispersed marches and prayers against dictator Joseph Kabila, who continues to lead the country despite his last term having expired in December 2016. Since the final days of 2017, Kabila’s security personnel have been filling churches with tear gas and administering bloody crackdowns, resulting in hundreds of cases of politically motivated arrests, torture and assassinations. Following a Mass last Saturday, Rev. Sebastian Yebo was beaten and kidnapped by police.

How Rich Are The Rich? If Only You Knew

February 14, 2018 By Gil B. Manzon Jr., Theconversation.com Educate! Class Struggle, Inequality, New Economy, Ruling Class

“If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets.” Actor and comedian Chris Rock made this astute statement during a 2014 interview with New York magazine, referring to the yawning gap between rich and poor. In so doing, he stumbled upon a key challenge in the study of inequality. What’s the best way to measure it? Most inequality studies have focused on income – measures of which are widely available. However, being rich is not about a single year of earnings but rather about the accumulation of wealth over time. In the past, quantifying that has been tricky. The wealthy would probably prefer we stay in the dark about how rich they are, presumably to avoid the aforementioned riots.

The Deadly Rule Of The Oligarchs

February 12, 2018 By Chris Hedges, Truthdig.com Educate! Class Struggle, oligarchy, Ruling Class

Oligarchic rule, as Aristotle pointed out, is a deviant form of government. Oligarchs care nothing for competency, intelligence, honesty, rationality, self-sacrifice or the common good. They pervert, deform and dismantle systems of power to serve their immediate interests, squandering the future for short-term personal gain. “The true forms of government, therefore, are those in which the one, or the few, or the many, govern with a view to the common interest; but governments that rule with a view to the private interest, whether of the one, of the few or of the many, are perversions,” Aristotle wrote. The classicist Peter L.P. Simpson calls these perversions the “sophistry of oligarchs,” meaning that once oligarchs take power, rational, prudent and thoughtful responses to social, economic and political problems are ignored to feed insatiable greed.

South Africa’s Shack Dwellers See Politics Very Differently Than Average Westerner

February 12, 2018 By Vijay Prashad, AlterNet.org Educate! Class Struggle, Housing, Land, South Africa

Walking into the settlement at Kennedy Road in Durban, what one is confronted with is the familiarity of the place. I’ve been here before. Not to this settlement, but to others like it. To bastis in India and favelas in Brazil, to Mexico’s Neza-Chalco-Izta to Bangkok’s Klong Toey. The United Nation’s agency that monitors housing - UN Habitat - has said that there are a billion people in informal settlements (slums). A demographer at the UN tells me that within a few decades, he assumes that the number might easily double. In fact, he says, given how bad the data is, two billion people might already live in these kinds of vulnerable settlements. ‘We just don’t have the numbers,’ he said. The residents of Kennedy Road do not use the word ‘slum.’ They find the term dismissive and pejorative. Words aside, the residents would agree that they live in informal settlements. Kennedy Road is only one of Durban’s such habitats. A million of Durban’s citizens live in such places.

Iowans Fight Back Against Factory Farms–So Can You

February 8, 2018 Staff, Organicconsumers.org Create! Class Struggle, Factory Farming, Iowa

“We are pro agriculture. We support responsible, respectful and regenerative livestock production that poses no harm to communities and the environment. And we call for a moratorium on new and expanding CAFOs until there are less than 100 water impairments in Iowa. We are here today to support and announce a slate of bills introduced by Sen. David Johnson to close many of the loopholes that weaken protections for people and the environment from factory farms.” After Rosenberg spoke, a local farmer whose family farm is under threat thanks to two new CAFOs in her neighborhood, explained how her community did everything to stop these factory farms, but “the system in Iowa failed us. The DNR regulations failed us. All we want is clean air and water. We want to continue to live on our family farms.”

My Unlearning Journey: An Interview With Manish Jain

February 7, 2018 Claude Alvares, Shikshantar.org Create! Activism, Class Struggle

When I was a kid in high school, I was bounced back and forth between honors classes and remedial classes in schools due to my rebellious questioning nature and boring classes/unispired teachers. I started to notice that the ‘dumb’ kids were not really dumb. In fact, they had many gifts which the school system was not able to see or appreciate. I noticed that many of those being labelled as ‘dumb’ were either from minority or low income backgrounds. Once you put kids into a track, it was very difficult to get out of it. I felt this was very unfair from a social justice perspective as a new kind of academic caste hierarchy. Later, I realized that using IQ tests and labelling millions of innocent children as ‘failures’ is one of the greatest crimes against humanity.

7 Reasons Your Economic Insecurity Isn’t Your Fault

January 30, 2018 Matt Stannard, Cowboysonthecommons.org Educate! Class Struggle, Economic inequality, New Economy

The sobering assessment at the end of 2017 by Philip Alston, the UN’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, concerning the 40+ million Americans living in poverty, left a question unasked: Why have there been so few effective grassroots political revolts against inequality and material deprivation in the United States? The seeming lack of class consciousness is even more surprising when we consider that economic insecurity doesn’t just affect those below the poverty level: over 215 million Americans–which I count as 66 percent of the population–couldn’t cover a $1000 emergency with the money in their savings account. That’s over five times as many of us who technically live in poverty, and it suggests that economic insecurity is now an intrinsic feature of the American identity.

Unions Widen Who They’re Fighting For

January 30, 2018 By Katherine Barrett & Richard Greene, Governing.com Organize! Class Struggle, Labor, Unions

Historically, public-sector unions have focused their attention almost entirely on negotiating for higher wages and better benefits. These days, though, many are showing up at the bargaining table to fight not just for themselves but also for the people they serve -- like students, foster children and taxpayers. “Unions in past decades were largely in the habit of servicing their members,” says Dan McGrath, executive director of TakeAction Minnesota, a progressive advocacy group. “Now they’re asking themselves to be at the edge of social change.” Many cite the 2012 strike by the Chicago Teachers Union as a seminal moment in what's called bargaining for the common good. That’s when the union began to use its power to push progress beyond pay and benefits. By 2015, the union’s new contract included several requirements to help students, such as access to medical or mental health services and the expansion of after-school programs.

Thinking Freedom: Achieving The Impossible Collectively

January 27, 2018 Michael Neocosmos, Roarmag.org Resist! Class Struggle, Ideology, Left Politics

I don’t think we should make power the starting point for thinking emancipation, particularly a binary notion of power. Whether you are talking about power or counter-power, you are starting from an idea of people’s interests and identities rather than from an idea of universal emancipation. And you end up talking about states and how we relate to them rather than defining human universality in our own terms. Of course, power is always involved in the arenas and sites where politics takes place. I am concerned, however, that once we use categories of power, even if it is to think about a different way of addressing power, we end up using words and thinking through categories that are not helpful because they are categories through which the state itself thinks.

US Capitalism Lets Children And Mothers Die

January 26, 2018 W. T. Whitney, Counterpunch.org Educate! Capitalism, Children, Class Struggle, Mothers, US Imperialism, Women

One of the authors of a recent study of U.S. children’s deaths told an interviewer that, “The U.S. is the most dangerous of wealthy, democratic countries in the world for children … Across all ages and in both sexes, children have been dying more often in the U.S. than in similar countries since the 1980s.” The report was published online January 8 in Health Affairs. Ninety percent of the deaths analyzed there were of infants and older adolescents. According to the authors, “we examined mortality trends for [20] nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) for children ages 0–19 from 1961 to 2010 using publicly available data.” They discovered that, “Over the fifty-year study period, the lagging US performance amounted to over 600,000 excess deaths.”

Davos: Inequality Rocks The Magic Mountain

January 25, 2018 By Pepe Escobar, Telesurtv.net Educate! Class Struggle, Inequality, Tax havens, World Economic Forum

A major cause of such inequality is tax havens – which in the current casino atmosphere stand no risk of being regulated. The so-called globalized elites meet at the World Economic Forum in Davos this year under the specter of extreme turbulence. The WEF Global Risks Report is hardly reassuring. The top five most likely risks for 2018 all range from extreme weather/climate change disturbances to cyber-attacks. Yet, according to the report, in terms of impact, they are superseded by weapons of mass destruction – a direct consequence of the Korean peninsula standoff. Global elites are somewhat paralyzed by political inaction facing the most pressing questions of our time, just as the global economy is inundated by liquidity. Quantitative easing was actually the only concrete response to political inaction, adhered to by every Central Bank, from the ECB to the Japanese.

Freedom Rider: Oligarch Jeff Bezos

January 20, 2018 By Margaret Kimberley, Blackagendareport.com Educate! Amazon, Capitalism, Class Struggle, Inequality, Ruling Class

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has a net worth of $105 billion and is the richest man in the world. But he is not just the richest man at this moment in history. He is the richest person who has ever lived. As of 2017 he and seven other billionaires had a collective net worth equal to that of the poorest 3.6 billion people on earth. These figures have been in the news of late but without much useful analysis. The corporate media refuse to state what is obvious. Namely that inequality is worse around the world precisely because these super rich people demand it. While pundits and politicians go on breathlessly about oligarchs in Russia, they seldom take a look at the wealthiest in their own back yard and the control they exert over the lives of millions of people.

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