How to Put a Stop to Sweatshop Abuse
Yves here. Notice how American retailers for the most part continue to put profit over lives.
Read more...Category Archives: The destruction of the middle class
Budget Brinksmanship is Baaack!
Here we go again. Washington, and to a lesser degree, Mr. Market are all a twitter over the display of macho in the latest round of the Team Dem versus Team Republican professional wrestling bout budget battle.
Read more...Why Didn’t OWS Transform Into a Political Movement?
Yves here. I’ve not weighed in on the second anniversary of the start of the Occupy Wall Street anniversary because, truth be told, the movement has gone so local and has so many different faces that I’m not certain it’s possible to make good generalizations without doing a lot of investigation.
This short interview seeks to address one of the expectations for OWS, that it become a political force, and why it was never met
Read more...Egypt for Sale
Yves here. This piece provides an intriguing analysis and a lot of detail to support its thesis that Egypt’s inability to generate the income needed to make payments on IMF loans means the country is likely to have its assets stripped.
Read more...RJ Eskow: 11 Questions to Ask Libertarians to See if They Are Hypocrites
Yves here. It is all too easy to goad libertarians, since their ideas are internally conflicted and they get prickly when you point out the flaws in their dogma.
Read more...Ilargi: No Vigilantes Or Vultures Need Apply
With media and technology becoming faster and more pervasive at a rapid clip, it shouldn’t perhaps be a big surprise to see the ease with which war-mongering news flashes come to dominate the story of the day. But maybe this should be received with an increasing dose of skepticism…
Read more...Internalization of the Death of the American Dream: A Maine Microcosm
It’s odd to be going about one’s vacation and, like stepping on a rake and having it whack you in the face, stumble into a vignette that apostrophizes how much young people have internalized the fallen state of the American worker.
Read more...Why the US Economy Won’t Fully Recover
Yves here. It almost seems quaint to think that someone (in reality, large swathes of the investor and orthodox economics community) thinks the US economy will someday bear a passing resemblance to its former bubble-stoked vigor.
Read more...David Dayen: Productivity Rose 7.7% Post-Great Recession; Workers Have Seen None of It
I’ve said this before in other venues, but this really is the chart that explains modern America:
How Milton Friedman’s NAIRU Has Increased Inequality, Damaging Innovation and Growth
Yves here. Advocates of Galtian “winner take all” markets frequently invoke both moralistic and efficiency-based arguments for more income inequality. The problem with their argument that “creators” should get to hoard their winnings is that their success does not take place in a vacuum, but is built on the back of generations of cultural, technological, and procedural advances, as well as public-provided infrastructure. And as the post below describes, the idea that a more Darwinian economic order produces higher growth is also spurious.
Read more...The Rise of Bullshit Jobs
Yves here. I’m going to reverse my normal convention when I have a cross post but have something to add. Here I first offer you a MacroBusiness post (which in the layered ways of the Web relies heavily on an article by David Graeber) and natter afterwards.
Read more...Why Progressives Are Lame
Yesterday, we ran a post by Bill McKibben on leadership in social change movements. McKibben argued for a “small l” leader model versus a “big L” leader, which readers debated. Some argued that the Leader model was really code for “Great Man” that was a less viable approach than it once was due to assassinations. Others were struck by the emphasis on distributed leadership, which is an obvious analogy to modern computer and communications networks, and how political commentators to frame their ideas of social order in terms of the technology of the day. Some pointed out that the idea of minimal oversight and control of communities was a long-stading Utopian line of thought, often espoused by people who wound up implementing the exact opposite.
However, I was particularly struck by Dan Kervick’s remark, which came late in the thread:
Read more...Barbara Garson: How to Become a Part-Time Worker Without Really Trying
Yves here. This post by Barbara Garson, which originally appeared at TomDispatch, describes how big companies squeeze down even more on workers by turning what were once full-time jobs into part-time positions to avoid providing benefits and to push pay even lower (workers who are desperate to get more hours will also accept reduced wages, working off the clock, and abusive work conditions).
Read more...Bill McKibben: Movements Without Leaders
Yves here. The 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is ten days away. Brace yourself for the reminisces, most of which will be genuine, heartfelt, and insightful, while others which will treat the occasion as an opportunity for brand identification.
McKibben, a well-known and effective climate change activist, raises the question of leadership in movements to promote social change. He argues that the charismatic chieftain is out, and the model now is that of distributed leadership, with lower level “leaders” being more critical to movement success than ever before.
Read more...A Disturbance in the Force?
Perhaps I’m just having a bad month, but I wonder if other readers sense what I’m detecting. I fancy if someone did a Google frequency search on the right terms, they might pick up tangible indicators of what I’m sensing (as in I’m also a believer that what people attribute to gut feeling is actually pattern recognition).
The feeling I have is that of heightened generalized tension, the social/political equivalent of the sort of disturbance that animals detect in advance of earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, of pressure building up along major fault lines.
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