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10 ways that mass incarceration is an engine of economic injustice

September 3, 2024 by Joe Leave a Comment

Eric Seligman (JJay Economics MA ’22) and Brian Nam-Sonenstein write on the relationship between economic justice and mass incarceration.

“Money is power in the United States, and mass incarceration plays a major role in determining who can wield power and who can’t. As we’ve noted repeatedly over the years, it is no coincidence that the poorest and most vulnerable communities are also the most policed. The criminal legal system erects significant barriers to employment and the ballot box, economically and politically weakening entire communities. The criminal legal system erects significant barriers to employment and the ballot box, economically and politically weakening entire communities. Importantly, this arrangement impacts all workers: employers use this massive class of disadvantaged people to threaten all workers with replacement and increasingly risky unemployment if they dare to demand better wages and conditions. Mass incarceration also weaves a narrative that pits people with similar economic interests against one another, reducing systemic inequality to matters of individual choice. Fortunately, understanding mass incarceration as the wealthy’s preferred economic policy clarifies that ending it is necessary for all movements for justice and equality — all working people benefit from solidarity with criminalized people.”

Read the full article at the Prison Policy Initiative.

Professor Zhun Xu on Sustainability, Industrial Agriculture and the Case of North Korea

March 18, 2024 by Joe Leave a Comment

“It is fair to conclude that the lessons from North Korea, Cuba, and the other models of agriculture strongly suggest that industrial agriculture—though seemingly productive and even “scientific”—is unreliable and unsustainable. We must acknowledge that twentieth-century socialists have usually taken the industrial agriculture model for granted. This was clear in the vision of a future socialist society shared by Kim. Socialism, or any attempts to sustainably feed the working people, must move beyond the model of industrial agriculture.”
– Professor Zhun Xu

Read the full text at Monthly Review.

Economist Magazine Quotes Professor Michelle Holder on Black Workers in Current Labor Market

February 20, 2024 by Joe Leave a Comment

“One reason that a strong labour market is valuable for black Americans is that many work in highly cyclical sectors such as freight delivery. That makes them vulnerable to recessions but also well placed during periods of growth (a similar dynamic exists for Hispanics). A tight labour market also blunts some of the discrimination that black applicants may face when looking for jobs. “During cyclical downturns employers can afford to pick and choose, but when workers are really needed, they are penalised for their biases,” says Michelle Holder, an economist at John Jay College, City University of New York.”

Read full article at: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/02/14/black-workers-are-enjoying-a-jobs-boom-in-america

The Left Shouldn’t Get Too Excited About Joe Biden’s “Supply-Side Liberalism”

July 21, 2023 by Joe Leave a Comment

Pundits have lauded the Biden administration for replacing the free-market consensus with supply-side liberalism. But it is geopolitical tensions with China and labor’s weakness that have made elites feel comfortable with a milquetoast industrial policy.

ANDREJ MARKOVČIČ & NICK FRENCH

Even prior to his inauguration, there was talk that Joe Biden’s administration would mark a break with the neoliberal orthodoxy that has dominated both parties since the Ronald Reagan era. During the height of the pandemic, the president claimed that the “blinders have been taken off,” and his administration would have to address challenges that “may not dwarf but eclipse what FDR faced.”

The unexpectedly generous, albeit frustratingly temporary, COVID-19 relief package that Biden signed into law in March 2021 and, later, his passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill (BIB), the CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) seemed to confirm these initial estimates of his ambitions. The president has been, if not the second coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt, at least a Democrat in a different mold from that of either Bill Clinton or Barack Obama.

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of “Bidenism” is its embrace of what pundits have called “supply-side liberalism” or “supply-side progressivism”: giving the state a prominent role in directing investment in the form of tax incentives, direct subsidies, and tariffs to encourage domestic production of goods deemed strategically necessary. The IRA, for instance, offers subsidies for building renewable energy and green manufacturing; the CHIPS Act uses tariffs and subsidies to encourage domestic manufacturing of computer chips.

In April, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, outlined this new approach in remarks he delivered to the Brookings Institute think tank. The current administration, Sullivan claimed, was rejecting faith in “tax cutting and deregulation, privatization over public action, and trade liberalization as an end in itself” and instead “restor[ing] an economic mentality that champions building.”

What should socialists make of this turn away from neoliberal orthodoxy and the emergence of industrial policy? Biden’s ambitions do mark a step in the direction of rebuilding infrastructure and encouraging economic activity through government intervention. But this move away from the economic orthodoxy of the past forty years has not occurred as a result of the strength of the Left or any other progressive bloc. Despite the recent uptick in worker militancy, it is the weakness of organized labor and working-class political organizations that characterize the current moment.

Read full article at: https://jacobin.com/2023/07/joe-biden-supply-side-liberalism-industrial-policy/

It’s Time for Black Women to #AskForMore

April 15, 2023 by sstoker Leave a Comment

By demanding equal pay for equal work, and by practicing #AskForMore, Black women can take action to begin narrowing centuries-old income and wealth deficits.

Michelle Holder

In an area of study dominated by elite, white men, I am one of a small number of Black female economists in the United States. Black and Women’s History Months in the U.S. present an opportunity to uplift the issues that I am forced to grapple with as a Black woman and that I have chosen to study out of desire for change. Economists often ignore the double gap Black women face when it comes to salaries and wages; this group loses billions of dollars of what I term “involuntarily forfeited” compensation each year due to sexism and racism within the U.S. workplace.

The double gap endures not only due to sexist and racist employment practices, but also because proving this inequity is extremely challenging. While Black women may suspect they’re being underpaid compared to their white and/or male colleagues, it’s extremely difficult for most of us to know for sure, and if we don’t know, we can’t attempt to fix it.

I propose we stop waiting for our leaders to step up and instead flip the script ourselves: In this world of asymmetrical information and lack of national policies around pay transparency, Black women can turn among ourselves and begin to ask for more. I’m not suggesting it’s our problem alone to solve; we didn’t create it. I’m also not suggesting that you stick up your boss, since research shows when Black women assertively negotiate, employers don’t react well. I suggest that, when negotiating, you ask for 10 to 20 percent more than you would have. And keep doing this throughout your career.

I have a personal and professional investment in understanding why so much inequality pervades the economy. In the last few years, I’ve researched the salaries of white men and Black women with similar levels of educational attainment and experience in popular professions, and what I found was sobering.

Read the full article at: https://msmagazine.com/2023/03/29/black-women-equal-pay-work-ask-for-more-salary/

Trump’s Real Crime Is Opposing Empire

April 15, 2023 by sstoker Leave a Comment

Christian Parenti

Within 24 hours of former President Donald Trump’s arrest on 34 overhyped felony counts related to hush-money payments made to conceal an extramarital dalliance, his re-election campaign raised $4 million, and he widened his lead in the Republican primaries to almost 30 percentage points. Yet a CNN poll also found that 60 percent of Americans approve of the indictment. These numbers are probably less important than they might appear. The trial will likely mobilize the base in both parties and pull swing voters in both directions—for a net effect of zero.

“The indictment does real harm to the American body politic.”

Even so, the indictment does real harm to the American body politic. It has already set off another Trump-centric media feeding frenzy, at the expense of issues far more serious than the former executive’s half-remembered infidelities, and it creates a dangerous precedent, further politicizing the judiciary and inviting escalation. Above all, it is a reminder that Trump has been investigated, impeached, and indicted not because of the crimes of which he is accused, but because he has dared to oppose the imperial foreign policy favored by elites.

Fans of the indictment insist that no man is above the law, not every case creates a precedent, and other countries indict their leaders. For example, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was sentenced to jail, and France is still a democracy. But the Trump indictment is of a piece with other developments that should be cause for worry. Just to name one example, a few weeks before the former president’s arrest, Internal Revenue Service agents visited the home of journalist Matt Taibbi while he was testifying at a hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

The IRS’s visit to the home of a prominent critic of the establishment on the same day he was testifying about government overreach is a highly unusual occurrence, and almost seems like the Biden administration flipping the bird to its critics. Outrageously, the mainstream and left media by and large have ignored the IRS bullying of Taibbi. Federal law enforcement has long been deployed in blatantly political ways against the activist left. Heterodox critics like Taibbi are now also targets, and there is ample evidence that it is also being wielded against the MAGA right.

Read the article at: https://compactmag.com/article/trump-s-real-crime-is-opposing-empire

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