Research published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association estimated that poverty was linked to at least 183,000 deaths in the United States in 2019 among people aged 15 or older, making inadequate income the nation’s fourth-leading mortality driver that year behind heart disease, cancer, and smoking. “Poverty kills as much as dementia, accidents, stroke, Alzheimer’s…
Archive for category: Uncategorized
John Westmoreland looks back at the Jewish fighters who fought their Nazi oppressors On 19 April, we remember the 1943 uprising in Warsaw’s Ghetto. It is an inspiring story of heroism in the face of overwhelming odds that has been immortalised by Marek Edelman in The Ghetto Fights: Warsaw, 1941-43 (1995). The heroic fighters of […]
Grace Larson, a nurse who was recently fired by Minnesota’s Planned Parenthood, alleges she lost her job for organizing and blowing the whistle on a toxic work environment.
For more than 50 years, theologians, scientists, environmentalists, scholars, and activists have sounded the alarm over the dire consequences of continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels and the massive increases in production and consumption that have threatened the well-being of soil, air, water, and all living species on Earth. Until recently, those warnings were largely ignored or undercut by huge global corporations and billionaires protecting their profits and wealth. Even now, when there is a widespread agreement among scientists that we have only seven years to reduce carbon emissions enough to prevent the most horrific effects of climate change, no nation is on track to make the necessary changes in time.
The ecological crisis we face, left unchecked, will lead to social, political, and economic chaos and civilizational collapse leading, ultimately, to the extinction of the human species, along with most life on earth. Simply put, we cannot wait for a transition to socialism to force the five nations that are the biggest emitters to take the drastic steps required. We need stop-gap compromises such as the 2022 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and we need to continue to advocate for a Green New Deal, among other measures.
Even if we could get the capitalist U.S. government to pass a Green New Deal, the results would fall far short of what is required. Moreover, it might serve to prop up the capitalist economic and political system for a while longer. There is no doubt that capitalism and a living Earth are incompatible.
Replacing fossil fuels and reducing carbon in the atmosphere won’t be enough, because climate change is only the most pressing threat among many. We must shift the aims of social, economic, and political systems from ever-increasing Gross Domestic Product (increasing wealth for the wealthy and impoverishment for the majority) to focus on promoting the common good, a radical redistribution of wealth, and living in harmony with the rest of the natural world. We need to end the destruction of topsoil and restore soil to health, where possible. This would help to promote the natural absorption of carbon from the atmosphere. We will have to shift food production away from industrial agriculture that focuses on growing one or a small number of crops and relies on pesticides that poison the soil and kill off the pollinators. We must protect the remaining forests of the world. (Links — by no means exhaustive — to possible resources and examples can be found at the end of this article.)
We will need to reorganize society–especially urban areas–so that fewer people want or need automobiles and more food is produced and distributed locally. We will need to provide incentives for people to move out of sprawling cities and into small cities, towns, villages, and rural areas. We will have to shift to local food production and distribution, as much as possible. This requires much less energy, shortens supply chains, and promotes community resilience and self-reliance. Therefore, we need, also, to make power and decision-making much more local and regional.
We need a new kind of human civilization in which we humans live in loving community with the rest of the ecosphere. That work cannot wait. We need to begin now to promote the vision and establish the foundations for a new kind of civilization in which humans see ourselves as part of a living earth community. Alongside of this, we will begin to grow into a new consciousness and a transformed philosophical grounding that undermines anthropocentrism. The rise of capitalism greatly accentuated a human-centered ideology and provided the justification for human exploitation of the rest of nature as well as the exploitation of most human beings for the benefit of small ruling classes.
Justin Heinzekehr and Philip Clayton argue that the alternative to rapacious and destructive capitalism is not a more “humane” or “green” capitalism, but “a hybrid system that limits market forces within the context of socialist communities structured for the common good.” They call this an “ecological civilization” and describe it as follows in Organic Marxism:
It is inevitable that global climate change will produce social and economic collapse on many parts of our planet. Out of the dust of that collapse, a new ecological civilization can arise. It’s far better for humans and for the planet, however, that we act now, rather than waiting for the full force of the calamity to strike.
Ecological civilization will, undoubtedly, be implemented in a variety of ways according to local and regional conditions, cultures, and sensibilities. Heinzekehr and Clayton note that this raises the probability of the rise of “local socialisms” and “local Marxisms,” adapted for varying local and regional conditions.
Whatever you might think about the exercise of power by the Chinese Communist Party, the People’s Republic of China is the only nation in the world that has adopted the goal of ecological civilization, and both the party and the government take this very seriously (while still implementing this vision haltingly and inconsistently). Both the government and the CCP include the goal of ecological civilization in their constitutions. The fact that ecological civilization is even seriously discussed is an opening for more fundamental transformation to happen and is a source of hope. A 2021 report by the International Energy Agency asserts that China has a roadmap to achieving carbon neutrality by or before 2060. In a 2022 speech published simultaneously in the United States and China, socialist scholar John Bellamy Foster stated, “The notion of ecological civilization is inconceivable in any meaningful sense outside of a society engaged in building socialism, and thus actively engaged in combating the primacy of capital accumulation as the supreme measure of human progress.”
Even as we fight for reforms within the undemocratic political system of the United States, we are compelled to look to the future, to imagine, and to prepare for what will come next. We know there is already deep distrust of capitalism and openness to socialism, especially among youth and young adults. There is also a deep passion for radical solutions to address the ecological crisis. If we can make the connection between economics for the common good (of humans and beyond humans)–i.e., socialism–and ecological civilization, we can provide a vision and worldview with which millions of people will resonate.
Resources:
Rainforest Organizations: https://www.worldrainforest.org/rainforest-organizations.html
Worker Cooperatives: https://medium.com/fifty-by-fifty/mondragon-through-a-critical-lens-b29de8c6049
https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/how-mondragon-became-the-worlds-largest-co-op
Compassionate Communities movement: https://charterforcompassion.org/shareable-community-ideas/what-is-a-compassionate-community
Agroecology: https://www.fao.org/agroecology/overview/en/
The post Ecological Civilization and the Road to Socialism appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
A group of rich Americans marked Tax Day on Tuesday by calling on the U.S. Congress to aggressively tax wealthy people like themselves, warning that the U.S. will remain in a state of “perpetual chaos” until lawmakers boldly confront the worsening inequality crisis.
“Tax Day isn’t just a filing deadline—it’s also an annual reminder that the ultra-rich exist in an entirely separate world when it comes to taxes,” said Morris Pearl, chair of the Patriotic Millionaires, an advocacy group that supports progressive taxation.
“For us, the loopholes are bigger, the rates are lower, and many rules are entirely optional,” Pearl, a former managing director at BlackRock, continued. “The tax code has been contributing to growing inequality for decades, and we’re reaching a point where the concentration of wealth is simply unsustainable. We need a change, or our economy and our democracy will not survive. For my future, my grandchildren’s future, and our country’s future, we need to tax the rich.”
Ahead of a Tuesday morning event on Capitol Hill, which will feature Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and other progressive lawmakers, Patriotic Millionaires released a tax reform agenda that calls for, among other changes, a 90% top marginal tax rate for people with annual incomes above $100 million and a federal tax exemption for people who earn less than a “cost-of-living wage.”
The group also proposed legislation titled the Oppose Limitless Inequality Growth And Restore Civil Harmony (OLIGARCH) Act, which would create a progressive wealth tax structure aimed at countering the vast concentration of fortunes at the very top.
Patriotic Millionaires explained that the bill would establish “wealth tax bracket thresholds based on multiples of median American household wealth.”
“The bracket thresholds are set at 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, and 1,000,000 times median household wealth, with marginal rates at 2, 4, 6, and 8 percent respectively,” the group said. “It will wax and wane with wealth concentration, intensifying during periods of extreme inequality when wealth at the top is increasing faster than wealth in the middle, and tapering off to near non-existence when median household wealth increases and inequality moderates.”
Watch the group’s Capitol Hill press conference, which is scheduled to begin at 10:30 am ET:
Erica Payne, founder and president of Patriotic Millionaires, said in a statement Tuesday that the heavily skewed U.S. tax code contains “the seeds of our destruction.”
A massive trove of Internal Revenue Service documents obtained by ProPublica last year showed that the 25 richest Americans—including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Tesla CEO Elon Musk—paid an average true tax rate of just 3.4% between 2014 and 2018 in large part because unrealized capital gains from stock appreciation are not taxed.
Patriotic Millionaires on Tuesday called for a Billionaire Minimum Income Tax that would “impose a minimum tax on a wealthy household’s true economic income, including unrealized capital gains, thereby eliminating the incentive for billionaires to hoard assets and avoid selling, and instead live on low-interest personal loans.”
“Elites over decades have broken the social contract,” said Payne. “The only way to restore stability to this nation, the only way to fix this country, is to tax this country appropriately. That includes 90% tax rates on centi-millionaires and an aggressive wealth tax designed to make billionaires less rich.”
According to an Oxfam America analysis published last week, U.S. billionaires have gotten 86% richer over the past decade, with $37 of every $100 of wealth created between 2012 and 2021 going to the top 1%. The bottom 50% only received $2 for every $100 of wealth generated during that period, according to Oxfam.
“Tax Day is a reminder that the tax system isn’t working for ordinary Americans. It’s built to favor the richest in our society,” said Nabil Ahmed, Oxfam America’s Director of Economic Justice. “The ultrawealthy are sitting on mountains of wealth that remain largely untouched by taxes, and their wild riches are in no small part a result of intentional public policy.”
“We need to implement strategic wealth taxes if we want to stand any chance at reining in this kind of Gilded-Era wealth inequality that allows the super-rich to have a stranglehold over our economy,” Ahmed added.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that every major advance in physics for more than a century has turned on revelations about symmetry. It’s there at the dawn of general relativity, in the birth of the Standard Model, in the hunt for the Higgs. For that reason, research across physics is now building to a crescendo. It was touched off by a 2014 paper, “Generalized Global Symmetries…
Members of Vortex Group share and reflect on their recently published collection of writings from one of the biggest uprisings in half a century—discussing the revolutionary spirit of 2020, its composition, its internal limitations, the impact of rumors, and the role of tactics and guns.
Website: https://firestorm.coop
Community Sustainer Program: https://patreon.com/firestormcoop
Community Calendar: https://firestorm.coop/calendar.html
Street Rebellion: https://firestorm.coop/products/19516…
Written during the riots, “The George Floyd Uprising” is a compendium of the most radical writing to come out of that long, hot summer. These incendiary dispatches—from those on the frontlines of the struggle—examines the revolt and the obstacles it confronted. It paints a picture of abolition in practice, discusses how the presence of weapons in the uprising and the threat of armed struggle play out in an American context, and shows how the state responds to and pacifies rebellions.
Arturo Castillon is a writer and substitute teacher living in Philadelphia. With Shemon Salam he is the co-author of “The Revolutionary Meaning of the George Floyd Uprising” (Daraja Press, 2021), has published work in “The George Floyd Uprising” (PM Press, 2023), as well as in “Black Quantum Futurism: Space-Time Collapse II” (The AfroFuturist Affair/House of Future Sciences Books, 2020).
Ryan is an artist, writer, and international woman of mystery.
Vortex Group is a collective of writers who desire an end to this world and the beginning of a new one.
The post Abolition In Practice: The George Floyd Uprising appeared first on PM Press.
Photo: Getty Images/iStockphoto
A few years ago the then-boss of
Goldman Sachs
explained to me the main reason he thought the firm had risen to such a dominant position in global investment banking over the previous half century. At the start of that period, banking was still dominated by a blue-blood class. In London especially, where I began my career in finance, the City was a place in which, in a still heavily regulated market, a slot in one of the big institutions was a coveted ticket to a life of riches.
But the tickets were available mainly to men from the right sort of background. The rules for identifying and selecting these men were opaque. There was no formal bar on anyone from a particular socioeconomic status being admitted to the magic circle—that would have been crass and, even then, illegal. Instead a complex system of semiotics did the job of weeding out the riffraff. A flattened vowel pronunciation, a vulgar word for lavatory, the wrong sort of shoes, and you were excluded without even understanding why. In Britain, the system’s overseers had an acronym by which the untouchables were designated: NQOCD, for “not quite our class, dear.”
Goldman came along and cut through this thicket of asinine, self-perpetuating privilege. It simply hired the best people for the job, however they spoke, whatever they looked like. As long as you were smart, driven, ruthless and committed to making money and beating the living daylights out of the competition, you were in. It worked.
I was reminded of this when I read last week that employees at Goldman have recently been encouraged by their leaders to embrace a full rainbow range of “pronouns” when identifying themselves in communications, including such neologisms as “ze,” “zir” and “zemself.”
It’s a small thing, another little step down in the long, steady descent of Goldman, which I’m told still hires a good number of people of genuine talent, alongside the rising numbers of identity-box-checking drones who help enforce the unspoken rules of woke compliance. We might dismiss it as another piece of ludicrous public-relations messaging designed to keep social-media storm troopers at bay. But I prefer the story I heard recently of a British army officer who, finding zemself seconded to a suitably modern government department and faced with a similar instruction to identify zis pronouns, promptly circulated a memo to colleagues with the declaration that his preferred pronouns were “colonel” and “sir.”
In its small way the Goldman memo colorfully captures the deepening mess the precepts of contemporary ideological orthodoxy are making of our society, our economy and our democracy. It highlights how the real progress made over decades toward a fairer and more equal society is being thrown away under the authority of a new set of rules and rulers as elitist and privileged as the old ones.
For those ancien régime aristocrats, it was having the right shoes or the proper accent. For today’s, it is adherence to the constantly changing rules of ideologically approved thought and language.
Read More Free Expression
-
The World Is Ending, but It’s Been Ending Many Times Before
April 10, 2023 -
Trump Indictment Keeps New York Safe for Accountants
April 3, 2023 -
Employers Need to Put the Squeeze on Woke Intolerance
March 27, 2023
It was thanks to the radical meritocracy and audacious dynamism of institutions like Goldman that we were able to dismantle so much of the authority of elite power structures that restrained us from fulfilling our potential. The past 50 years have been marked by the genuine eradication of barriers to opportunity for the underprivileged regardless of ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation or anything else. This is how we were genuinely starting to fulfill the promise of equality.
But the cultural revolution that began in the past decade is re-erecting those barriers and creating new elite power structures, elevated not by talent or hard work, but, curiously, by membership of the self-approved class, signaled by the right luxury beliefs and articulated by the right “inclusive” language.
Adrian Wooldridge,
who has written a book on the rise of meritocracy, frames this in a recent article in the Spectator. The left, he says, is “creating a new social order based on virtue, rather than ability.”
Bear with me because I am going to extrapolate from these baneful developments to a much larger worry about the geopolitical conditions we confront.
As we survey the competition between global civilizations in the multipolar world we now inhabit, we see that the West is challenged as it hasn’t been in centuries. It’s axiomatic that a rising China and perhaps other powers look like formidable contenders for global leadership—with implications for our own security and prosperity.
But if we are losing that struggle, it isn’t because of the superiority of authoritarian, communist or autocratic systems. We know that liberal capitalism has done more for human prosperity, health and freedom than any other economic or political system.
If we are losing, it is because we are losing our soul, our sense of purpose as a society, our identity as a civilization. We in the West are in the grip of an ideology that disowns our genius, denounces our success, disdains merit, elevates victimhood, embraces societal self-loathing and enforces it all in a web of exclusionary and authoritarian rules, large and small.
Journal Editorial Report: Paul Gigot interviews Wall Street Journal columnist Andy Kessler. Images: Zuma Press/WSJ Composite: Mark Kelly
The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition
Creating a U.S. central bank digital currency pits national security against individual privacy concerns.
Getty; Marianne Ayala/Insider
Ever since COVID began to recede, America’s CEOs have been waging a determined campaign to haul their employees back into the office. Big banks led the charge, ordering everyone back to their cubicles and threatening to fire those who refused to comply. In recent months, even holdouts like Disney and Salesforce, which just two years ago declared that the “9-to-5 workday is dead,” began pushing many employees to report to the office four days a week. And after a yearlong fight to get workers on-site full time, Goldman Sachs now boasts attendance rates that are pretty much back to where they were before the pandemic.
Ask these executives why they’re pushing the office so hard and you’ll get some HR-concocted jumble of “productivity” and “creativity” and “culture.” But their less-filtered peers will tell you what they really think. Jamie Dimon declared that working from home “doesn’t work for those who want to hustle.” Elon Musk demanded that employees commit to an “extremely hardcore” schedule consisting of “long hours at high intensity.” And in a recent op-ed article in The New York Times, the finance executive and professional blowhard Steven Rattner railed against working from home as evidence that America has “gone soft.”
I mean, they might as well just say it: They think working from home is for sissies. Even after their employees proved they could work just fine away from the office, the country’s old, white, male CEOs want to go back to the way things were. And the old way was clear: The office is for work, and the home is for — well, for whatever unpaid stuff it is that women do while their men are at work. In the minds of many bosses, work from home is an oxymoron.
“These are men with very traditional views, who see the home as their wife’s domain and work as men’s domain,” says Joan Williams, the director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California College of the Law. “These are people like Elon Musk, for whom everything is a masculinity contest, and the workplace is the key arena. They have no desire to continue to work from home. This is not about workplace productivity. It’s about masculinity.”
Three decades ago, Williams gave this masculinity contest an academic-sounding name: She called it the norm of the ideal worker. “The ideal worker,” she explains, “is seen as someone who starts to work in early adulthood and works full time, full force for 40 years without a break, taking no time off for childbearing, child-rearing, or really anything else.” It’s better known to the rest of us by a catchier phrase: hustle culture.
Outdated? Yes. Sexist? Definitely. The norm emerged, after all, at a time when men worked and women didn’t. The whole reason men could devote themselves so fully to their jobs was that they had wives at home to take care of the family. Even as more women began to stream into the workforce in the 1970s, the expectation of total devotion to the job didn’t budge. Women tried to live up to the norm, but they couldn’t — unlike their husbands, they didn’t have wives of their own to whom they could outsource all the caregiving and the housework.
There were two obvious solutions to this dilemma: Either men could do more laundry and childcare, or employers could make jobs flexible enough so women could juggle the obligations of both work and home. Many well-meaning companies offered employees the option to work from home or go part time. But the flexibility came at a steep price. Skeptical that work — real work — could be done at home, bosses quietly penalized the women who opted for flexible schedules by sticking them with boring assignments and denying them promotions. Studies suggested that egalitarian-minded men who asked for flexibility paid a price as well: As they were shunned by their bosses and coworkers for violating masculine norms, their careers took a serious hit.
Work from home became a “feminizied ghetto” that trapped women in dead-end jobs.
So women who started families found themselves forced to step back from their jobs. They wanted to lean in, but what could they do? With young kids, they couldn’t stay late at the office or fly to Hong Kong every other month or be reachable 24/7 — the price of admission for what Claudia Goldin, an economic historian at Harvard, calls “greedy jobs,” the ones that pay more and get you on the management track. Someone had to stay home to take care of the children, and that someone was almost always the wife. Working from home became, in the words of Williams, a “feminized ghetto” that trapped women in dead-end jobs.
Then the pandemic hit, and things changed in two big ways. First, in many professions, everyone — men and women, parents and nonparents, old and young — was suddenly working from home. That meant flexible work stopped being a “woman” thing. And second, once everyone tried it, it wasn’t just mothers who liked working from home — fathers discovered they loved being around the kids, and young workers found they focused better without the distractions of an office. In a national survey conducted by economists at Stanford, the University of Chicago, and ITAM, two-thirds of workers said that, among the people they knew, perceptions of remote work had improved during the pandemic. Virtually overnight, flexibility lost its stigma.
Second, even “greedy jobs” became more flexible, because many of them no longer required full-time office attendance or frequent business travel. Remarkably, they also became less labor-intensive. A recent study found that the top-earning 10% of men worked 77 hours less in 2022 than they did in 2019. And according to another analysis, married men used their new free time to help out around the house. It looked as though it might be the beginning of a virtuous cycle — one in which a whole new world of jobs would open up to women with families, while their husbands would take on a more equal share of responsibilities at home.
But instead of locking in these gains and enabling women to get ahead in the workforce, some CEOs are striving to re-stigmatize flexibility by outlawing work from home. They’re so busy trying to get back to the way things were that they’re missing an opportunity that took something as huge as a pandemic to crack open. “To go back to where we were before is to not make any gains at all,” says Goldin, the economic historian. “To say that we can’t do anything better is a mistake.”
So what does doing better look like? It’s not as simple, unfortunately, as going fully hybrid. Embracing remote work is a good start, but it comes with risks of its own. Surveys have found that women are more likely than men to prefer a predominantly remote schedule — as do people of color, who prefer to avoid the daily microaggressions they experience in the office. If white men are the only ones coming into the office all the time and hobnobbing with the bosses, they’re likely to have a leg up over everyone else. Companies that encourage and support working from home need to ensure they don’t treat remote workers as second-class citizens.
On a practical level, it’s understandable that so many CEOs long for the days of office-only. After all, it’s easier to manage large operations when you take a “one size fits all” approach. Everyone needs to be at their desk from 9 to 5 every day — no whining, and no exceptions. It can start to feel crazy-making when you try to cater to all the wildly different preferences among employees of varying demographics and personalities. Plus, different jobs require different levels of collaboration: Product managers often get together with other stakeholders to hash out their disagreements, while software engineers mostly code on their own. Since the pandemic hit, I’ve heard a few CEOs liken remote work to opening Pandora’s box. Lift the lid, and there’s no telling what kind of employee demands will come streaming out. (The distressed CEOs are likely unaware that Pandora, in Greek mythology, was the first human woman.)
CEOs liken remote work to opening Pandora’s box. Lift the lid, and there’s no telling what kind of employee demands will come streaming out.
But turning back the clock and chaining the box shut is no longer an option. Whether America’s chest-thumping CEOs like it or not, a new normal has been established. Women working from home are no longer the aberration — tradition-bound executives are. Steven Rattner, in his Times op-ed article, even went so far as to praise China — where many workers are expected to toil from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week — for its “extraordinary” work ethic. The old white men who lead corporate America may long for the good old days when every employee had to show up, in person, to toil in the mines for 72 hours a week. But the pandemic has disproved the myth that work and home function best as separate, gender-divided domains.
“The ideal worker in most industries has changed from ‘full-time onsite plus overtime’ to hybrid,” Williams says. “That’s a huge change. It’s better for women. It’s better for men who actually want to show up at home. It’s better for people of color.” It’s better, in short, for everyone — even, ultimately, the corporate executives who are desperately trying to force their employees back to the office. Perhaps it would help if they knew that Pandora’s box, in the earliest telling, was full not of evil plagues, but of gifts bestowed on her by the gods, at the order of Zeus himself. The more America’s CEOs can unlock the gift of remote work, however “soft” or insufficiently “hardcore” it may feel to them, the stronger and more profitable their companies will be.
Aki Ito is a senior correspondent for Insider.
Read the original article on Business Insider