Robert Reich writes:
‘…At the start of the 2016 election cycle, this power structure proclaimed Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush shoo-ins for the nominations of the Democratic and Republican parties. After all, both of these individuals had deep bases of funders, well-established networks of political insiders, experienced political advisers and all the political name recognition any candidate could possibly want.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the White House. The presidency was won by Donald Trump [….]
Median family income is lower now than it was 16 years ago, adjusted for inflation. Workers without college degrees – the old working class – have fallen furthest. Most economic gains, meanwhile, have gone to top. These gains have translated into political power to elicit bank bailouts, corporate subsidies, special tax loopholes, favorable trade deals and increasing market power without interference by anti-monopoly enforcement – all of which have further reduced wages and pulled up profits.
Wealth, power and crony capitalism fit together. Americans know a takeover has occurred, and they blame the establishment for it.
The Democratic party once represented the working class. But over the last three decades the party has been taken over by Washington-based fundraisers, bundlers, analysts, and pollsters who have focused instead on raising campaign money from corporate and Wall Street executives and getting votes from upper middle-class households in “swing” suburbs…’
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/10/democrats-working-class-americans-us-election
Antiwar Movement Spreads among Tech Workers
– Engineering students join Google and Microsoft workers in protesting the tech-industry’s enabling of U.S. militarism
The protesters state:
‘…Many Microsoft employees don’t believe that what we build should be used for waging war. When we decided to work at Microsoft, we were doing so in the hopes of “empowering every person on the planet to achieve more,” not with the intent of ending lives and enhancing lethality. For those who say that another company will simply pick up JEDI where Microsoft leaves it, we would ask workers at that company to do the same. A race to the bottom is not an ethical position…’
Meanwhile more than 100 engineering students at Stanford and other schools released a letter pledging that they will:
‘…First, do no harm.
Refuse to participate in developing technologies of war: our labor, our expertise, and our lives will not be in the service of destruction…
Abstain from working for technology companies that fail to reject the weaponizing of their technology for military purposes. Instead, push our companies to pledge to neither participate in nor support the development, manufacture, trade or use of autonomous weapons; and to instead support efforts to ban autonomous weapons globally…’
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/antiwar-movement-spreads-among-tech-workers
US Wages for the 1% just reached their highest level ever
‘…The 1% has never had it so good.
The average wage for the top 1% of income earners hit $719,000 per year in 2017, up 3.7% on the year, exceeding their peak of $716,000 per year just before the Great Recession, according to a report released Thursday by the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive, nonprofit think tank, citing data from the Social Security Administration. The average wage for the top 0.1% reached $2.7 million in 2017, the second-highest level ever, just 4% below their level in 2007. However, wages for the 0.1% rose 8% on the year in 2017.
Income inequality has soared in the U.S. over the last five decades, despite increases in worker productivity, the report said. “Incomes for most Americans have been stagnant for four decades,” according to a separate report released earlier this year by the staff of Keith Ellison, a Democratic congressman for Minnesota. “Instead, this increase in income inequality was almost entirely driven by soaring compensation levels for the top 1% of income earners.”…’
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/wages-for-the-1-just-reached-their-highest-level-ever-2018-10-18
How Big Data Is ‘Automating Inequality’
‘…We assume technology and the information it yields is making everyone’s life easier, freer and more comfortable.
Virginia Eubanks begs to differ, with the authority to do so. For the poor, she argues, government data and its abuses have imposed a new regime of surveillance, profiling, punishment, containment and exclusion, which she evocatively calls the “digital poorhouse.” While technology is often touted by researchers and policymakers as a way to deliver services to the poor more efficiently, Eubanks shows that more often, it worsens inequality. Data can’t provide what poor people need, which is more resources. Indeed, as with the 19th-century poorhouse, she argues, the shiny new digital one allows us to “manage the individual poor in order to escape our shared responsibility for eradicating poverty.”…’
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/books/review/automating-inequality-virginia-eubanks.html
Allergies: the scourge of modern life?
‘…Before the 1990s, peanut allergy was so rare that barely any data on it was collected. In a 2015 article in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, Paul J Turner noted that even though admissions to hospital for anaphylaxis increased between 1992 and 2012 by 615%, the incidence of fatal anaphylaxis did not. Turner and his colleagues believed that “increasing awareness of the diagnosis, shifting patterns of behaviour in patients and healthcare providers” might be contributing factors. Even though peanut allergy is much more common, its associated fatalities have not increased. [….]
The first is the delayed introduction of allergens. For years, throughout the world, allergy specialists had been advising that infants avoid the consumption of potentially allergenic foodstuffs. Not only was this incorrect but it may have played a role in driving the food allergy epidemic that we are seeing today.
Prof Gideon Lack of King’s College London, lead investigator on Learning Early About Peanut Allergy (the LEAP study) found that “of the children who avoided peanuts, 17% developed peanut allergy by the age of five years. Remarkably, only 3% of the children who were randomised to eating the peanut snack developed allergy by age five.” The children involved in the trial already had severe eczema and/or an egg allergy (both strong predictors for nut allergy)…’
Post-Cold War U.S. Foreign Policy Has Been A Near Total Failure. Two New Books Look At Why.
by Murtaza Hussain
‘…Emerging as the world’s sole superpower at the end of the Cold War, the U.S. had two possible futures to choose from. It could either cash in a peace dividend at home by gradually scaling back its Cold War-era alliance commitments, or it could embark on a bold project of “liberal hegemony,” intended to spread its own system of government and a rules-based international order across the world. Flush with confidence after the the collapse of communism, American elites chose the latter course.
[….] Rather than define victory in these reasonable terms, the war against the Taliban was instead characterized as a moral crusade on behalf of human rights, feminism, and an array of other causes about which there can be no negotiation. Rejecting any compromise with an enemy it had defined as evil, the U.S. helped its local allies pursue a campaign of total annihilation against the Taliban and its supporters. Years later, Afghanistan is no closer to being a liberal democracy and the war is still raging there, at horrific human cost. The U.S., for its part, has given up on even defeating the Taliban and is instead simply trying to negotiate a face-saving exit. After flirting with a utopian idea of transforming Afghanistan in its own image and killing tens of thousands of Afghans in the process, the U.S. belatedly realized that the entire horrible endeavor has been essentially pointless…’
Too socialist for the suffragettes: the UK left’s forgotten women
– Early female socialists never figure in any roll-call of great suffragettes, because they objected on principle to a campaign that would leave so many disenfranchised.
‘… it was a schism that descended into deep rancour when the two sides also found themselves bitterly divided over support for the First World War, where the pragmatic, patriotic fervour urged by the elder Pankhursts was viewed by the female socialists as another betrayal of the working classes doomed to do the bulk of the dying.
Albeit in a much less offensive way, those passages reminded me of the arguments that persist to this day in the United States, where the original campaign for women’s suffrage is tainted by its promotion in the southern states as a means of reinforcing white supremacy in the Jim Crow era…’
What is Dual-Carding?
http://organizing.work/on-dual-carding
‘The Genghis Khan Equestrian Statue in Mongolia. This is the largest equestrian statue in the world’
The Rule of the Uber-Rich Means Either Tyranny or Revolution
by Chris Hedges
‘…It is essential to understand the pathologies of the uber-rich. They have seized total political power. These pathologies inform Donald Trump, his children, the Brett Kavanaughs, and the billionaires who run his administration. The uber-rich cannot see the world from anyone’s perspective but their own. People around them, including the women whom entitled men prey upon, are objects designed to gratify momentary lusts or be manipulated. The uber-rich are almost always amoral. Right. Wrong. Truth. Lies. Justice. Injustice. These concepts are beyond them. Whatever benefits or pleases them is good. What does not must be destroyed.
[….] Political theorists, from Aristotle and Karl Marx to Sheldon Wolin, have warned against the rule of the uber-rich. Once the uber-rich take over, Aristotle writes, the only options are tyranny and revolution…’
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-rule-of-the-uber-rich-means-either-tyranny-or-revolution/