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How Cities Can Do Better Than the Fight for $15 |
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Tuesday, 10 October 2017 08:34 |
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Excerpt: "The implementation of the Fight for $15
minimum wage campaign is indicative of an offensive strategy, but it is
not nearly bold enough. It still leaves many workers unemployed or out
of the workforce altogether."
The implementation of the Fight for $15 minimum
wage campaign is indicative of an offensive strategy, but it is not
nearly bold enough. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
How Cities Can Do Better Than the Fight for $15
By Alan A. Aja, William A. Darity Jr. and Darrick Hamilton, YES! Magazine
10 October 17
It’s time for cities to reverse a shrinking workforce and build resilience in the face of climate change.
 s we head into election season for municipal offices, candidates running for local city councils and mayor’s offices need a bold offensive strategy in order to reverse a shrinking workforce, growing pools of contingent workers who are vulnerable to volatile and low wages and reduced work hours, and to curb persistent labor market discrimination.
This will require transformative state and local policies to counter the hostility of the Trump administration, which has issued threats to defund cities that do not cooperate with draconic executive orders, pursued increasingly invasive and insidious deportation tactics by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, developed budget plans that drastically cut or eliminate essential public services, promoted tax plans that would exacerbate our trajectory toward rising inequality, and paid subtle (and not-so subtle) homage to white supremacist ideology and other threats to economic, ethnic and sexual orientation inclusion.
The current anthem on the left in response to this simply has been to “resist.” Resistance is vital but not enough. The time is now for the creation of full-employment cities through municipal job guarantees (MJG).
The implementation of the Fight for $15 minimum wage campaign is indicative of an offensive strategy, but it is not nearly bold enough. It still leaves many workers unemployed or out of the workforce altogether, particularly those stigmatized by race, disability, or former incarceration status. Nor does it address the volatility of work hours and employment duration associated with an increasingly precarious labor economy.
Also, it does not address our 21st-century physical and human capital infrastructure needs, which will require substantial public investment, especially in the context of the need for more sustainable, resilient cities as we suffer the adverse effects of global climate change. A local strategy that would address these needs is implementation of a municipal job guarantee.
To be clear, an MJG is more extensive than local government job training or search-assistance programs, which do not ensure employment, and temporary civic job corps, including those geared toward youth summer employment.
Our proposal is for a permanent “public option” employment program with public purpose that offers a living wage plus benefits to any worker who cannot find decent employment in the wider labor market.
The MJG could employ people across different public service sectors, especially in light of an ailing national infrastructure, under-resourced commons and growing elder care needs. Jobs can range from construction, education and health services, supportive housing, libraries, child and elder care, sanitation, parks and recreation to projects generally designed to transform cities toward green, emission-free, municipalities.
An MJG program also would include training programs and professional development, provide physical and mental health coverage, family leave options and a vested pension, and promotion opportunities via an internal job ladder. It would ensure a participant all the rights to collective bargaining, or to affiliate with a public sector-based union similar to other municipal workers.
As an example, given shrinking fiscal support for public education, the MJG could employ trained, qualified, living wage earning, full-time workers to serve as auxiliary support alongside veteran teachers, staff and administrators of under-resourced schools, or help build more public educational facilities altogether through a larger “green infrastructure” corps.
An MJG also could work with disability-centered advocacy groups to facilitate more long-term solutions toward dignified employment, livability and financial independence. The same aims could be incorporated into programs designed to employ the formerly incarcerated. Current programs targeting unemployed groups often focus on skill building and training, but leave intact numerous structural barriers to gainful employment, including direct discrimination.
An MJG could be fiscally implemented in many ways, with a genuine life-changing effect on the unemployed to those who currently are earning poverty wages ($24,600 per year for a family of four) or less. For example, a smaller southern city like Durham, North Carolina (with approximately 306,200 total population), currently has about a 4 percent unemployment rate (about 6,400 people), and about one-fifth of its population makes less than $25,000 per year.
If we were to focus on the jobless only, at an average expense of $55,000 per MJG employee (which would include an individual’s salary, benefits, materials, supplies, supervisory costs, and training costs), the program would cost about $352 million per fiscal year. This alone would represent a sizable portion of the city’s yearly $430 million budget.
Thus to produce a full-employment city, a smaller municipality may have to be creative relative to needs, costs, and demographic trends, perhaps implementing the job guarantee first on a smaller scale by targeting the neighborhoods with the highest unemployment rates.
Such a phased version of the program could be combined with initial targeting of individuals earning poverty-level wages. Residency requirements would be necessary at the local level to determine who is eligible for the MJG; we recommend at least five years of consecutive established residency in the municipality. If a person were displaced (by eviction, for example) from an MJG-focused low-income neighborhood in the municipality, specifically one recently or undergoing rapid gentrification, the length of residency requirements could be waived.
Larger urban contexts have greater resource for full local funding of a job guarantee. For example, New York City’s latest unemployment rate in June was 4.4 percent, representing roughly 185,000 people. To enable all of those persons to work, the cost of the MJG would be around $10.1 billion annually, representing about one-eighth of the city’s $85.2 billion budget for 2017-2018. Not incorporated in the calculus are all the psychological and social benefits that come along with a job to recipients, their families and their communities.
Regardless of plan for budgetary expenditure, phasing in access to the program for all residents should be in place at the outset, providing space for the mobilization of future tax revenues to simultaneously focus on the unemployed to those working in dead-end, low-paying jobs without health benefits.
It is important to point out that in Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel has announced a policy that high school degrees will be withheld unless young people have documented plans via college acceptance, military service, or a job offer. Similarly, in New York state, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has implemented the new Excelsior Scholarship, guaranteeing a tuition-free enrollment at the City University of New York if students meet a set of merit-based criteria. The policy requires a graduate to live in New York state for four years post-graduation or pay back their tuition.
Withholding degrees for the jobless or forcing residency requirements post-graduation is punitive and nonsensical without guaranteed employment. It is a public responsibility to provide free, quality education as it is to provide quality jobs through a permanent, livable-wage, municipal job guarantee.
At present, the Trump administration’s jobs and infrastructure plan cajoles the private sector into hiring more workers and rebuilding the nation’s crumbling infrastructure via deregulation and tax incentives. Such an approach leaves workers vulnerable to the whimsical nature of “trickle-down” employment and the instability of contingent work. It will transfer the value of our public infrastructure assets to corporate interests with no guarantee that the infrastructure will actually be built in the first place.
The other side of the federal government, the minority Democratic Party, has called for a plan for a “Better Deal…(to) creat(e) millions of good-paying, full-time jobs by directly investing in our crumbling infrastructure and prioritizing small business and entrepreneurs, instead of giving tax breaks to special interests.” Such ideals are consistent with a federal job guarantee, but the party has not yet gone so far as to make the official call for one. Regardless, an MJG has little chance of passage given the current Republican control of the House, Senate, and Oval Office.
But, in the interim, we can do more than wait and “resist.” At the local and state levels we can add precision and teeth to the mantra for a “better deal” with an MJG. America can and should have full-employment cities. They are the gateway to a full-employment nation.
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Poll: Americans Hope Trump Follows Pence's Example and Leaves Early |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9160"><span class="small">Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Monday, 09 October 2017 13:23 |
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Borowitz writes: "A poll taken after Vice-President Mike
Pence made headlines on Sunday with an abrupt early departure reveals
that a broad majority of Americans hope that Donald Trump follows
Pence's example and leaves early, as well."
Mike Pence. (photo: Rex/AP/Shutterstock)
Poll: Americans Hope Trump Follows Pence's Example and Leaves Early
By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
09 October 17
 The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report." 
poll taken after Vice-President Mike Pence made headlines on Sunday with an abrupt early departure reveals that a broad majority of Americans hope that Donald Trump follows Pence’s example and leaves early, as well.
In a striking result, the poll shows that Trump’s early exit would be approximately a thousand times more popular than the one Pence participated in on Sunday.
While Pence defended his decision to leave early on Sunday by saying that he did it out of patriotism, a substantial majority of Americans agreed that a premature departure by Trump “would be, by far, the most patriotic thing he could ever do for his country.”
And while the price tag of Pence’s departure on Sunday, estimated by some to be approximately a quarter of a million dollars, raised eyebrows across the country, poll respondents overwhelmingly said that they do not care how much Trump’s departure costs, as long as he leaves.
Finally, in one of the poll’s more negative findings, a broad majority of Indiana residents said that they were “angry and upset” that Pence did not leave early when he was governor of that state.
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The 15th-Century Doctrine That Let Columbus 'Discover America' Is Now the Basis of Indian Policy in the US |
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Monday, 09 October 2017 13:21 |
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Nagle writes: "The Supreme Court turned a backwards,
racist papal bull into American law. It's preventing this country from
confronting a genocide."
The Christopher Columbus Statue at Columbus Circle in Manhattan, NYC. (photo: Bebeto Matthews/AP)
The 15th-Century Doctrine That Let Columbus 'Discover America' Is Now the Basis of Indian Policy in the US
By Rebecca Nagle, ThinkProgress
09 October 17
The Supreme Court turned a backwards, racist papal bull into American law. It’s preventing this country from confronting a genocide.
 n October 12, 1993, I sat in my first-grade classroom with a mountain of Popsicle sticks on my desk. I had just been taught that Columbus was a super great guy, and we would be building models of the Pinta and Santa Maria out of the sticks. Because he was very brave and knew he was right about the earth being flat, the lesson went, he sailed all the way across the Atlantic Ocean and “discovered” America. I raised my hand. “If Columbus had never come here, my family would still have our land.”
The fight to change the elementary school version of Columbus’ story isn’t just a symbolic fight. For us as Native Americans, it is the fight to reject the incredibly racist legal framework under which we still live. The same 15th-century doctrine that allowed Columbus to “discover Hispanola” (and gave his army license to rape, murder, and enslave Taino people) is the basis of U.S. federal Indian policy today. The Doctrine of Discovery has been cited in Supreme Court Cases as recently as 2005 and by 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2014.
While the international Indigenous community has been calling for the denouncement of the Doctrine of Discovery for decades, most Americans don’t even know what it is. It first appeared in 1455 as a papal bull giving Portugal permission to invade and colonize West Africa. After Columbus’s infamous voyage to the Caribbean, a similar papal bull was extended to Spain in 1493.
The Doctrine of Christian Discovery asserted simply that Christian Nations became the rightful owner of any land they found occupied by non-Christian people. Europeans used this international law, grounded in the racist presumption of European superiority, to colonize most of the earth. What followed was the kidnapping and enslavement an estimated 12.5 million African people and the systematic genocide of an estimated 90 million indigenous people (90 percent of the pre-genocide population of the Americas). In 1982, when Spain proposed to the UN General Assembly that the 500-year anniversary of Columbus’s voyage should be marked by celebration, the entire African delegation walked out.
The Doctrine of Discovery was codified into U.S. law by the Supreme Court the same decade my tribe was forcibly removed from our homelands to “Indian Territory” on the “Trail Where They Cried”, now known as the Trail of Tears. In the 1832 Johnson v. M’Intosh decision, Supreme Court Chief Justice Marshall wrote that “discovery gave title to the government” and that “the Indigenous inhabitants were then left with only a ‘right of occupancy,’ which United States courts have ruled, could be terminated at will by the federal government.” In other words, Native people are tenants.
As recently as 2005, Justice Ginsberg — a liberal icon of the left — cited the Doctrine of Discovery in City of Sherrill v. Oneida Nation of Indians, stating that the Oneida Indian Nation could not exert sovereignty over land within their 1794 treaty territory the tribe had bought back. In the first footnote of her decision Ginsberg cites the Doctrine of Discovery stating “…the lands occupied by Indians when the colonists arrived became vested in the sovereign – first the discovering European nation and later the original States and the United States.”
The attack on tribal sovereignty and the diminishment of the rights of Native Nations has real and current consequences for the lives of Native people. Today, four out of five Native women in the U.S. will be raped, stalked, or abused in their lifetime, and one in three of us are raped, stalked, and abused every year. The majority of perpetrators (9 out of 10) are non-Native, but because of a Supreme Court decision that cited the doctrine of discovery (Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, 1978), Native Nations are prohibited from prosecuting non-Natives who commit crimes on our lands.
My tribe, Cherokee Nation, has its own constitution, citizens, land, and government. Our right to self-govern pre-dates the existence of the United States. Our right to our land pre-dates the creation of the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and even Columbus. In Christian mythology, humans were kicked out of the Garden of Eden. Our creation story tells us how the mountains where we lived were first formed. We were living in our Eden at the time when Europeans came to claim it.
When discussing the genocide of Native Americans, the most important thing to remember is that it didn’t work: We are still here. As the late Wilma Mankiller, principal chief of Cherokee Nation from 1985 to 1995 stated, “One of the most powerful countries in the world as a policy first tried to wipe us off the face of the earth. And then, failing that, instituted a number of policies to make sure that we didn’t exist… as a culturally distinct group of people, and yet here we are. Not only do we exist, but we’re thriving and we’re growing, and we’re learning now to trust our own thinking again and dig our way out.”
I am currently working with leaders from the Baltimore American Indian Center and Native American Lifelines to change the name Columbus Day to Indigenous People’s Day in Baltimore. When we sit down with our City Council representatives, we hand them a fact sheet detailing Columbus’ known abuses. In his own journals, Columbus graphically describes raping indigenous women and sex-trafficking children (“those from nine to ten are now in demand.“) His men would cut of the hands of Taino people who did not bring them the required amount of gold, tying their severed hands around their necks. Within 50 years of Columbus landing on the island, 95 percent of the Taino population had died. A genocide.
Last week, an Italian-American man told me flatly I was wrong about Columbus, because the man holds a Ph.D in history. After the Nazi holocaust, Germany passed laws that prohibited denying that genocide happened. In contrast, in the United States, people are still afraid to confront the truth about this country’s own genocide of Native Americans. The laws that limit our rights as Native people and Native Nations are only possible in a country whose public denies what has happened to us.
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It Shouldn't Surprise Anyone That Breitbart Had Help From Mainstream Media |
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Monday, 09 October 2017 13:15 |
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Jones writes: "The simple fact is that Cernovich is a
bigot, and Yiannopolous is a bigot, and Breitbart News has always been a
bigoted website. They can reject the alt-right label all they want;
their politics are no less malicious for the disavowal. The main reason
they've been able to get away with this cynical bait-and-switch maneuver
for so long is that too many journalists just don't care."
Milo Yiannopolous. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
It Shouldn't Surprise Anyone That Breitbart Had Help From Mainstream Media
By Sarah Jones, New Republic
09 October 17
 he password for Milo Yiannopolous’s email is, or at least was, LongKnives1290. Another password for another one of Yiannopolous’ online accounts began with the word “Kristall,” as in Kristallnacht. He once sang “America to the Beautiful” to a room full of people giving Nazi salutes, with the now-notorious white supremacist Richard Spencer in attendance.
So reports Joe Bernstein in a stunning investigative piece for Buzzfeed. Documents obtained by Bernstein reveal that while Yiannopolous publicly disavowed the alt-right, he and his colleagues at Breitbart News worked steadily in concert with a wide array of alt-right propagandists to represent their views on their website. And a number of mainstream journalists helped them do it. From Bernstein’s report:
A long-running email group devoted to mocking stories about the social justice internet included, predictably, Yiannopoulos’s friend Ann Coulter, but also Mitchell Sunderland, a senior staff writer at Broadly, Vice’s women’s channel. According to its “About” page, Broadly “is devoted to representing the multiplicity of women’s experiences. … we provide a sustained focus on the issues that matter most to women.”
“Please mock this fat feminist,” Sunderland wrote to Yiannopoulos in May 2016, along with a link to an article by the New York Times columnist Lindy West, who frequently writes about fat acceptance. And while Sunderland was Broadly’s managing editor, he sent a Broadly video about the Satanic Temple and abortion rights to Tim Gionet with instructions to “do whatever with this on Breitbart. It’s insane.” The next day, Breitbart published an article titled “‘Satanic Temple’ Joins Planned Parenthood in Pro-Abortion Crusade.”
Reporters Dan Lyons and David Auerbach also allegedly suggested stories to Yiannopolous and Breitbart’s Allum Bohari; on Twitter, Auerbach claimed, unconvincingly, that he did not send the emails Bernstein included in his piece.
As Splinter’s Libby Watson also noted on Twitter, Sunderland didn’t exactly keep his friendship with Milo a secret:
Meanwhile, his pal publicly degraded women, trans people, and people of color, over and over again. In light of Yiannopolous’ tireless cultivation of his bigot-for-hire brand, there are just two ways a person can be friends with someone like him: You either share his views; or you don’t think about politics in terms of meaning or conviction. If the latter’s true, you’re a useful idiot to Yiannopolous and the alt-right— and a bad journalist into the bargain. And a horse-race-fueled vision of politics as just a game certainly makes you more likely to believe that when figures like Yiannopolous or Mike Cernovich disavow the alt-right, they mean it, and aren’t acting out of self-interest:
(See also, in this same connection, the handiwork of The New York Times’ designated alibi-generator for the right, Bari Weiss, as she seeks to defend the demagnetized moral compass of Patriot Prayer organizer Joey Gibson, who maintains ties to alt-right figures like Kyle Chapman while professing to decry the movement that counts Chapman among it most enthusiastic apostles.)
The simple fact is that Cernovich is a bigot, and Yiannopolous is a bigot, and Breitbart News has always been a bigoted website. They can reject the alt-right label all they want; their politics are no less malicious for the disavowal. But as the Buzzfeed scoop reminds us, the main reason they’ve been able to get away with this cynical bait-and-switch maneuver for so long is that too many journalists just don’t care.
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