“One manifestation of systemic inequality was a two-track welfare system rooted in a “family wage” ideal that figured the worker as a full-time breadwinner who supported children and a dependent, non-wage-earning wife at home-an ideal from which most people of color were excluded. When unemployment insurance was enacted in 1935, for example, it did not extend to agricultural and domestic workers, whom reformers did not see as independent, full-time breadwinners, and on whom the South’s low-wage economy depended. As a result, 55 percent of all African American
workers and 87 percent of all wage-earning African American women were excluded from one of the chief benefits of the New Deal.”

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall                                   

(via willnotgoquietlyintothenight)

(via sociolab)

“Their cause is really straightforward, as is ours: One percent of the population holds [much] of the wealth in this country, and people’s benefits are getting slashed and people are losing their homes. On our reservations, we are mired in the deepest poverty. The idea is to have some equality in this country … economic equality.’”

Moonanum James, United American Indians of New England (via solitaryforager)

(via socialworky)

“We pretend that “almost everyone has food and can scrape by, and anyone who can’t is just a shiftless waster, anyway” is good enough, and we pretend that the government and upper classes in wealthy countries aren’t constantly conspiring to wage a civil war of economics and access against people living lives of quiet desperation who are accused of being irrational and crazy and savage and uncivilized by their oppressors if they have the temerity to object to their oppression, and we pretend that a sustained campaign of marginalization and denial and subjugation doesn’t amount to a lifetime of abuse committed against vulnerable people by their own government. And we pretend that a government in service to an ideal that ostracizes many citizens by virtue of poverty and others by virtue of indifference to its ostensible rewards is a functional government and not simply a tool of privileged elites. Those pretenses are going up in smoke across the UK.”

Shakesville: On the UK Riots, Part Two (via robot-heart-politics)

(via socio-logic)

“

Business executives understand as well as other educated elites that the world is heading toward environmental catastrophe if no serious steps are taken to avert it. Nevertheless, they are dedicated to bringing about this result. They put huge efforts into convincing the public to reject what they know to be true and ominous. And they are successful, as polls illustrate. An enormous business-backed propaganda campaign is surely a factor in the very sharp decline of concern among Americans over global warming, to the point where by late 2009, barely one-third believe that it is influenced by human activity.


The standard explanation for the willingness of business executives to dismiss the fate of their grandchildren and even to destroy what they own is that short-term profits outweigh long-term considerations. But the answer is incomplete. Once again, the choice results from fundamental market inefficiencies: the pressure to ignore the impact on others in undertaking transactions, if one wants to stay in the game. In this case, the externalities happen to be the fate of the species, but the logic is the same.

”

Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects (via solitaryforager)

(via pamalamela)

stfuhypocrisy:

Crazy Facts On Income Inequality, Bank Bonuses (by TheYoungTurks)

(via marvelous-merbutler)