Class Not Race Is The Dividing Line In American Politics

realclearpolitics  |  Batya Ungar-Sargon, the deputy editor of Newsweek and author of the new book, Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women, speaks with RCP Washington bureau chief Carl Cannon on Thursday's edition of the RealClearPolitics radio show.

"People don't talk about it like it is an outrage," she said about the transformation of the Democratic Party into something other than a party for the working class. "It is such a fait accompli at this point that we forget that it is outrageous for a party that used to represent labor, the little guy against big corporations and the rich, completely abandoned that constituency to cater to an over-credentialed college elite on one hand, and the dependent poor on the other. And it is double outrageous because that party still masquerades as the party of the little guy, even though it is not the case anymore."

"It started with the handshake agreement between both parties that we're going to become an economy that embraced free trade," she said. "That was Bill Clinton's contribution to this, signing NAFTA into law and trade agreements that resulted in the offshoring of 5 million manufacturing jobs to China and Mexico."


"And then President Obama showed up and said repeatedly those jobs are not coming back, and pioneered this idea that everyone was going to go to college and become part of the knowledge industry, and that was going to be the pathway to the American dream. And then it became the only pathway to the American dream!"

"Joe Biden played his part by effectively opening up the border, decriminalizing illegal border crossing, and welcoming in 11 million new migrants to compete with working-class Americans for the jobs that remained here," she said.

"It's true that immigration raises the GDP in the aggregate. The problem is nobody lives in the aggregate. GDP is not equally distributed across the nation. We know the top 20% now has 50% of the GDP at its disposal. The very people who love to rail against the 1% are the people who have made the largest gains in the last 50 years, and they are the consumers of low-wage migrant labor, which is why, of course, they want more of it. It is an upward transfer of wealth from the working class to the elites who consume that labor."

"If you bring in 11 million people and you know they are going to be employed as cleaning people, landscapers, and in construction, you have effectively stolen wages from the Americans who were employed in those jobs. It is just obvious supply and demand."

Carl Cannon asked: "Do they really hate the working class, or are they just in their politically correct bubble and don't see what they're doing?"

"They can not stand the idea that they will lose, even if they lose in a very obviously democratic way," Ungar-Sargon said. "They are very comfortable when they can sit there on cable news making millions of dollars to sneer at the working class. They're comfortable when the working class can't clap back."

"This was really Obama's revolution, the idea that the 'smart set' should run things. We should have an oligarchy of the credentialed. But when the working class has their audacity to vote in their own interest and clap back by putting somebody like Donald Trump in power, that sneering contempt turns to hate."

The Class Factor In Journalism

caitlinjohnstone  |  Iraq war cheerleader David Brooks has an article in The New York Times titled “What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?“, another one of those tired old think pieces we’ve been seeing for the last eight years that asks “golly gosh could we coastal elites have played some role in the rise of Trumpism?” like it’s the first time anyone has ever considered that obvious point (the answer is yes, duh, you soft-handed silver spoon-fed ivory tower bubble boy).

One worthwhile paragraph about the media stands out though:

“Over the last decades we’ve taken over whole professions and locked everybody else out. When I began my journalism career in Chicago in the 1980s, there were still some old crusty working-class guys around the newsroom. Now we’re not only a college-dominated profession, we’re an elite-college-dominated profession. Only 0.8 percent of all college students graduate from the super elite 12 schools (the Ivy League colleges, plus Stanford, M.I.T., Duke and the University of Chicago). A 2018 study found that more than 50 percent of the staff writers at the beloved New York Times and The Wall Street Journal attended one of the 29 most elite universities in the nation.”

Brooks is not the first to make this observation about the drastic shift in the socioeconomic makeup of news reporters that has taken place from previous generations to now.

“The class factor in journalism gets overlooked,” journalist Glenn Greenwald said on the Jimmy Dore Show in 2021. “Thirty or forty years ago, fifty years ago, journalists really were outsiders. That’s why they all had unions; they made shit money, they came from like working class families. They hated the elite. They hated bankers and politicians. It was kind of like a boss-employee relationship — they hated them and wanted to throw rocks at them and take them down pegs.”

“If I were to list the twenty richest people I’ve ever met in my entire life, I think like seven or eight of them are people I met because they work at The Intercept — people from like the richest fucking families on the planet,” Greenwald added.

Journalist Matt Taibbi, whose father worked for NBC, made similar observations on the Dark Horse podcast back in 2020.

“Reporters when I was growing up, they came from a different class of people than they do today,” Taibbi said. “A lot of them were kind of more working class — their parents were more likely to be plumbers or electricians than they were to be doctors or lawyers. Like this thing where the journalist is an Ivy League grad, that’s a relatively new thing that I think came about in the seventies and eighties with my generation. But reporters just instinctively hated rich people, they hated powerful people. Like if you put up a poster of a politician in a newsroom it was defaced instantaneously, like there were darts on it. Reporters saw it as their job to stick it to the man.”

“Mostly the job is different now,” Taibbi said. “The fantasy among reporters in the nineties about politicians started to be, I want to be the person that hangs out with the candidate after the speech and has a beer and is sort of close to power. And that’s kind of the model, that’s where we’re at right now. That’s kind of the problem is that basically people in the business want to be behind the rope line with people of influence. And it’s going to be a problem to get us back to that other adversarial posture of the past.”

 

WSJ Attacks The Railway Labor Act As "Semi-Fascist"

WSJ  |  To make life easier for the algorithms that will be coming for our jobs, we in the journalism business apply a template to labor disputes: management is bad, labor is good. Joe Biden molds his administration to simple stereotypes too. He defines himself as the most pro-labor president in history. The favor is not returned, apparently.

In the wee hours of Thursday, after anticipatory ripples of destruction were already spreading through the economy, an all-night effort by the White House barely averted a national rail strike, supposedly. The deal was dubbed “tentative,” but expect the unions to approve it. Leveraging the president for one last squeeze of the fruit, after all, was how they planned it from day one.

Mr. Biden’s skin in the game was real, and not just the risk to the economy and inflation but fear of voters going to the polls in a few weeks believing the country was slipping into 1970s-style chaos. But something else about this episode should also be plain: its nuttiness. The angst was absurdly disproportionate to the dollar value of the employee benefits at issue, which concerned sick days. A national crisis was spawned for no better reason than an 88-year-old legal throwback to a bygone era of (to borrow a recent Bidenism) semi-fascist corporatism, which is the exact flavor of the Railway Labor Act amendments of 1934.

This obsolete law forces big government, big labor and big business into bed in a way that hardly makes sense anymore in a mostly free-market economy. If not for the law’s legacy, a nationwide strike encompassing the whole of the rail transportation system (33 private companies) would be all but unthinkable, much less the industry’s leverage to force the White House to dance to the industry’s exceedingly penny-ante economic disputes.

In the briefest recap, under the antiquated railroad law, a Biden-appointed emergency board had already tried to split the difference between the 12 unions and 33 carriers, recommending a 24% pay hike and $5,000 in bonuses.

But rejecting the deal were the important engineers and conductors, who insisted on trying further to leverage Mr. Biden over something called attendance policy, which the board considered outside the negotiation’s statutory ambit.

Trains can’t run if crews don’t show up, at least until algorithms take over their jobs, which is not at all farfetched.

There Is No Contract, Hence No Agreement, Hence No Deal....,

smart-union  |  Since the announcement of the tentative agreement (TA) yesterday morning, a number of posts purporting to reveal the finalized contents or finalized components of the TA have spread rapidly and are being presented as factual.

They are not.

Anyone who states that they have seen a final copy of the TA, have a copy of the final TA or knows the final contents of the agreement is not being truthful. The final documents have not been fully reviewed by both parties’ legal counsel as is required before it can be presented to the SMART-TD District 1 General Chairpersons, nor has it been distributed to officers or membership.

Per the SMART Constitution, the TA’s language, when finalized, will first be released to General Chairpersons engaged in national handling for their review. This is anticipated to happen as soon as sometime next week.

Once the proper steps with our SMART-TD District 1 General Chairpersons have occurred, factual information will be released on the union website for members for them to evaluate and to carefully consider the tentative agreement.

In the meantime, please do not draw conclusions on the information concerning this agreement from what is being circulated on social media until such time that it comes from our official sites.

We thank you for and appreciate your patience.

Greedy Immoral Treasonous Oligarchs Abusing American Workers

slate  |  If you were planning to spend Thursday stocking up on toilet paper in advance of a seemingly imminent freight-railroad strike or lockout, you woke up to welcome news. President Joe Biden has announced a tentative agreement to avert the disruption and the body blow it would have caused the economy and our supply chains. The deal isn’t final—workers will soon vote on it—but, nonetheless, it’s a relief following a week of headlines warning about the potential of $2 billion a day in economic loss, including disruptions to passenger trains, grain shipments, carmakers, and refiners.

What was missing from these headlines? The actual reason for the conflict between railroad workers and their employers. The potential strike or lockout was not because of any dispute over pay, but because of inhumane attendance policies that currently mean railroad engineers and conductors are either working or “on call” 90 percent of the time. When they’re on call, they can be summoned to work on two hours’ notice or less, and then may be away from home for days at a time. Workers report that they have no sick days, paid or unpaid. If they have to take time off unexpectedly, even because of illness, they lose points in a convoluted, points-based attendance system. That means workers are at risk of being disciplined or fired for getting sick, going to a doctor’s appointment or a family funeral, or for any other absence that can’t be planned far in advance.

As railroad worker Hugh Sawyer told the American Prospect, this meant that on his 65th birthday this year, he got home at 7:30 in the morning after working 12 hours the day before, slept for five hours, and then spent the day refreshing his computer to see if he was being called back to work. Another worker, describing the onerous requirements for scheduling off-time in advance, wrote on Facebook, “How do you schedule a funeral in October if it’s only February?” He also noted that he gets 30 days fully off for the entire year, no weekends. And the wife of an engineer told Vice, “They go to work sick, they miss funerals of loved ones, they miss final goodbyes to parents on hospice, they miss holidays, birthdays, all of it.”

As the unions put it in a statement on Sunday, “these policies are destroying the lives of our members.” The unions initially pushed for paid sick leave, but later sought only unpaid sick leave. Yes, really: They’ve had to fight in order not to be punished for taking unexpected, urgently needed unpaid sick leave. It appears that the tentative agreement between the parties would address these attendance and leave policies by creating “voluntary assigned days off,” granting one additional paid day off, allowing workers to attend medical appointments without penalty, and creating exemptions from attendance policies for hospitalizations and surgeries.

It should not be controversial to say it, but: People should have sick leave so they do not have to come to work when they get sick. They should be able to take leave to attend doctors’ appointments or deal with family emergencies without risking their jobs. Workers should also have regular time off, not be on call almost every day of their lives. This strike or lockout was threatened because of the railroad companies’ refusal, right up until the last minute, to accept these basic human needs, and their willingness to bring an already weary country to the brink of yet another economic disaster, all in the name of ever more profits.

The United States, unlike many countries, does not have a national law guaranteeing sick leave; if we did, the railroads’ attendance systems would be clearly illegal. The kind of point-based attendance systems that railroads employ can still be considered unlawful retaliation if workers lose points for taking leave that is legally protected, such as for absences guaranteed by the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, or state or local sick-leave laws. Apart from questions of legality, it is grossly irresponsible to punish people for unexpected illnesses ever, and especially during a pandemic.

 

Do You Imagine That A Rebellion Of The Belly Would Support (Or Even Spare) Trump?

trysterotapes  |  Bacon begins with this highly relevant, relatable point: “when discords, and quarrels, and factions are carried openly and audaciously, it is a sign the reverence of government is lost.”3 This briefly touches on a point made over at John Ganz’s Unpopular Front, namely the liberal fear of “going too far,” trepidation around the optics of “looking political” that has become associated with Barack Obama on Russia and Comey on “her emails.” If we follow Bacon’s logic here, then the liberal tolerance for these kinds of abuses carries its own dangers, not only of demoralization (when we witness powerful people committing the worst kinds of crimes openly, especially in contrast with the Reality Winners of the world), but of a loss of respect or “reverence of government.” There’s no question that we live in the kind of world that Bacon describes: various forms of revolt are at least discussed openly, and until recently with very little fear of reprisal at least on the MAGA right. And yet, conditions are not ripe for widespread revolt, for the material reasons that Bacon discusses next:

Concerning the materials of seditions. It is a thing well to be considered; for the surest way to prevent seditions (if the times do bear it) is to take away the matter of them. For if there be fuel prepared, it is hard to tell, whence the spark shall come, that shall set it on fire. The matter of seditions is of two kinds: much poverty, and much discontentment.4

No question: the current conjuncture positively requires Baconian “discontentment,” and as I have argued elsewhere, the widespread, systemic sense of disillusionment with the neoliberal experiment happened first on the “nationalist” MAGA right. But what Bacon says next clinches the point I want to make 

(I)f this poverty and broken estate in the better sort, be joined with a want and necessity in the mean people, the danger is imminent and great. For the rebellions of the belly are the worst.5

Translated into contemporary language, Bacon here is making the (Machiavellian) point that if leaders of state are concerned with sedition and revolt, they need to watch out for interclass alliances between those “in the better sort” and those whose lives are ruined by scarcity and precarity, the truly marginal and damned. In the end, in other words, we always come back to the politics of thumos, belly-politics, the visceral, gut-level reaction to material deprivation as a primal “danger” to sovereign control over territory and order.6 Bacon’s point that “(r)ebellions of the belly are the worst” is a warning to those in power, but it should also remind us that the MAGA phenomenon remains one of relatively comfortable, white, middle-class men and women. MAGA is an ideology which breaks from neoliberal globalism, in order to prioritize the values of a heartland petit bourgeoisie.

 

As Goes Blackness - So Goes America...,

blackagendareport |  The Black Misleadership Class continues its descent into utter political irrelevance, dragging 48 million African Americans ever deeper into the abyss with them. Like a soap opera whose central pathologies endure through decades of changing casts of characters, the misleaders cling to their demeaning subservience to the Democratic Party in hopes of one day becoming honored and respected partners. The Black supplicants are always betrayed, of course, but prefer a bad marriage to no relationship at all. Indeed, the Black misleaders and the Democrats have been locked in what Malcolm X would describe as a house Negro/slave master   relationship for so long – certainly since the late Sixties – that the Black junior partner knows no other way to behave.

In the latest installment of “The Black and the Powerless,” the usual gaggle of national Black civic organizations are awarded a closed-door meeting with their love-object, president-elect Joe Biden. The civic leaders respectfully requested that the Party protect the voting rights of its most loyal constituency, and use the powers of the executive branch to curtail the police violence that has plagued the Black community since the days of the slave-disciplining “paddy-rollers” – in addition to their perennial concern that more Black faces be elevated to high places in the new administration.  However, as senior editor Margaret Kimberley recounts in this issue of BAR, Biden immediately put the house Negroes in their place:

“In a loud voice and in the manner of a bullying boss Biden dashed any hopes that he would use executive orders to enact policies that he can’t get passed because of Republican congressional opposition. He accused Melanie Campbell of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, of not reading his policy paper because she disagreed with him. He was vehement about not using the power of executive orders to thwart congressional Republicans and claimed concerns about constitutionality as an excuse for doing as little as he possibly can.”

“Biden immediately put the house Negroes in their place.”

As Margaret Kimberley observes, it is unclear who leaked the Zoom meeting – either one of the Black participants or Biden, himself, to demonstrate his eagerness to put the Black notables in their place and warn them not to encourage Black Lives Matter’s demand to de-fund the police. “We’re not,” said the Great Incarcerator, ruling out any rollback of the cops. “We’re talking about holding them accountable. We’re talking about giving them money to do the right things.”

Melanie Campbell, president of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation and convener of the Black Women’s Roundtable, wrote the letter that requested the lopsided confab, which included NAACP President Derrick Johnson; former Department of Justice Civil Rights Division leader Vanita Gupta; National Action Network founder Rev. Al Sharpton; Sherrilyn Ifill, NAACP Legal Defense Fund; Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League; Kristen Clarke, executive director of the National Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law; and New Orleans congressman Cedric Richmond, who will serve Biden as director of the White House Office of Public Engagement  .

Clearly, Biden was not impressed by these would-be power brokers, knowing that the Black misleaders have no bite and have not even dared to bark in the half a century since they collaborated in shutting down the Black Liberation Movement to become operatives of the rich man’s duopoly. In the 21st century, the misleaders have so debased themselves at the feet of Democratic power, it is impossible for the Party’s leaders to pretend they represent a constituency beyond their own dark faces.

These Foreign Policy Jaw-Jackers Need To Up Their Economic Multi-Polarity Games...,

munkdebates |  Be it resolved, ending the world’s worst geopolitical crisis in a generation starts with acknowledging Russia’s security interests.

By any measure, the Russian invasion of Ukraine represents a profound security risk for the world. It raises fundamental issues about the basic principles that underwrite the current international order and it threatens the specter of an entrenched, high-risk Great Power conflict. How is this fast-evolving crisis best addressed? Does it demand a resolute and relentless push by the West to punish, isolate and degrade Putin’s Russia economically, politically and militarily? Or is a solution to be found in acknowledging Russia’s security needs and finding ways to mutually de-escalate the war, sooner not later? Which of these different strategies stand the best chance of success? And how ultimately is this conflict best resolved?

Janice Gross Stein, the Founding Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto, will moderate the panel discussion portion of the debate.

The debate video is available to our Curator and Supporter Members. To view the video, log-in to your member account and go Russia-Ukraine War Debate page here. 

Summary: Michael McFaul was in Toronto yesterday for the Munk Debate: Russia-Ukraine War, with Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer v Michael McFaul, Radosław Sikorski, the resolution being debated was Yay/Nay "ending the world's worst geo-political crisis starts with acknowledging Russia’s security interests", For those who don't follow the Munk debates, about 4 yrs ago there was a similar debate with Stephen Cohen where the Munk debates reversed the results when they came out "wrong". Anyhow the Munk debates made sure to pepper the results well in advance this time with an 63% nay vote (ok, well if your not willing to acknowledge Russia's security interests to stop a war, that can ONLY mean you want to continue the war in the hopes of "winning" the war against Russia).

Anyhow, I bring this up because McFaul was a hysterical mess during the debate, talking over the other debaters, interrupting them, shouting, at one point he even said that YES, US diplomats lie to other nations (ok Michael, then why the hell should Russia believe YOU when you give these worthless security assurances!) McFaul looks like he realizes that the US's ambitions in Ukraine are collapsing and he's hoping for a miracle to save them. But listening to these people (even Mearsheimer) makes it obvious how out of touch all of them are with the global situation. Globalism is dead, Russia will never reintegrate with the West, the theft of the 300 billion dollars, will not be forgiven or forgotten, what most people dont remember is that this is the 2nd time in 100 yrs where the West has seized Russia's foreign reserves, they did it before after the Russian Revolution and it took more than 60 yrs before Russia was willing to trust the West with their money again. How long will it take this time, 80 yrs, 100yrs? But listening to these "experts" they talk as if once Russia is expelled from Ukraine and Putin is removed from power, Russia will beg to be integrated into the West. No, Russia and the West have undergone a bitter divorce and never again the twain shall meet.

Gini Coefficient by Country 2022

Botswana

Gini % - World Bank: 53.3

Data Year (World Bank): 2015

Gini % - CIA World Factbook: 53.3

Data Year (CIA): 2015

The Gini coefficient, also called the Gini index or Gini ratio, is the most commonly used measure of income distribution—simply put, the higher the Gini coefficient, the greater the gap between the incomes of a country's richest and poorest people. A country's Gini coefficient is important because it helps identify high levels of income inequality, which can have several undesirable political and economic impacts. These include slower GDP growth, reduced income mobility, greater household debt, political polarization, and higher poverty rates.

Explaining the Gini coefficient

Developed by Italian statistician Corrado Gini in 1912, the Gini coefficient ranges from 0 to 1, but is often written as a percentage. To offer two hypothetical examples, if a nation were to have absolute income equality, with every person earning the same amount, its Gini score would be 0 (0%). On the other hand, if one person earned all the income in a nation and the rest earned zero, the Gini coefficient would be 1 (100%). Mathematically, the Gini coefficient is defined based on the Lorenz curve. The Lorenz curve plots the percentiles of the population on the graph's horizontal axis according to income or wealth, whichever is being measured. The cumulative income or wealth of the population is plotted on the vertical axis.

Limitations of the Gini coefficient

While the Gini coefficient is a useful tool for analyzing the wealth or income distribution in a country, it does not indicate that country's overall wealth or income. Some of the world's poorest countries, such as the Central African Republic, have some of the highest Gini coefficients (61.3 in this case). A high-income country and a low-income country can have the same Gini coefficients. Additionally, due to limitations such as reliable GDP and income data, the Gini index may overstate income inequality and be inaccurate.

Countries with the highest and lowest Gini coefficients

South Africa ranks as the country with the lowest level of income equality in the world, thanks to a Gini coefficient of 63.0 when last measured in 2014. That said, in 2005, the Gini coefficient was even higher, at 65.0. In South Africa, the richest 10% hold 71% of the wealth, while the poorest 60% hold just 7% of the wealth. Additionally, more than half of South Africa's population lives in poverty.

Top 10 Countries with the Highest Gini Coefficients (%) - World Bank:

1. South Africa - 2014 - 63.0
2. Namibia - 2015 - 59.1
3. Suriname - 1999 - 57.9
4. Zambia - 2015 - 57.1
5. Sao Tome and Principe - 2017 - 56.3
6. Central African Republic - 2008 - 56.2
7. Eswatini - 2016 - 54.6
8. Mozambique - 2014 - 54.0
9. Brazil - 2019 - 53.4
10. Belize - 1999 - 53.3

Now for the good news:

Top 10 Countries with the Lowest Gini Coefficients (%) - World Bank:

1. Slovenia - 2018 - 24.6
2. Czech Republic - 2018 - 25.0 (tie)
3. Slovakia - 2018 - 25.0 (tie)
4. Belarus - 2019 - 25.3
5. Moldova - 2018 - 25.7
6. United Arab Emirates - 2018 - 26.0
7. Iceland - 2017 - 26.1
8. Azerbaijan - 2005 - 26.6 (tie)
9. Ukraine - 2019 - 26.6 (tie)
10. Belgium - 2018 - 27.2