Sunday, June 4, 2023
The Burned-Out Bulb of Bright Ideas
Sunday, May 14, 2023
Clear Air At Last?
Sunday, April 23, 2023
A Short Spring Break, and a Few More Observations on Precarity
Sunday, April 16, 2023
The Educated Precariat - A Preview
- What was the original purpose of college? Note that the word "college" comes from the Latin word collegium, defined by Wiktionary as "colleagueship (connection of associates, colleagues, etc.", guild, corporation, company, ... (persons united by the same office or calling or living by some common set of rules), college (several senses), school ..."
- What did the world's first colleges look like? You may not know this, but one of the world's oldest continuously operating universities is the University of Ez-Zitouna, which was founded in Tunisia on the African Continent. What was the mission of the world's first and earliest universities, and how was that mission funded and carried out? How did the roles of education and research interact?
- What was the origin of the system of public universities in the United States? (For instance, what was the role of the presidency of Abraham Lincoln in the birth of American public universities?)
- What are the origins of the for-profit college or university, and how did these institutions cause the purpose of college to mutate over time?
- How has the decline in public and private funding for basic research affected the employment landscape for academics? (You may not know this, but the United States no longer has any major corporately-funded laboratories dedicated to pure research. Bell Labs, which was responsible for the discovery of radio astronomy and many other scientific breakthroughs, is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Nokia, a Finnish corporation.)
- What is the impact of declining numbers of youth and declining college enrollment on universities and colleges?
- How will the defunding of public colleges and universities affect the future of those nations such as the United States which pursue rabidly conservative "free-market" principles? See, for instance, "Modeling research universities: Predicting probable futures of public vs. private and large vs. small research universities", 2018.
- What can college-educated members of the precariat (especially those college-educated who have been historically marginalized, such as people of color) do both individually and collectively to create a better situation for themselves? For the present-day contraction of opportunities for the college-educated is being orchestrated by the present masters of our society in an attempt to maintain and amplify existing inequality. What steps can we therefore take to create our own alternative spaces of collective self-reliance?
Sunday, April 9, 2023
Precarity, American-Style: The American Enterprise Institute and Small Businesses
This post is a continuation of my series of posts on economic precarity and the precariat. Past posts explored the manifestation of precarity in Russia and China, two nations which returned to the capitalist fold at the end of the 20th century after abandoning free-market capitalism during the early and middle decades of the 20th century. More recent posts have explored the spread of precarity in the United States, a nation which has been characterized from its birth by a cultural emphasis on laissez-faire, free-market capitalism and the defense of the "property rights" of those who are wealthy. This post continues the exploration of precarity in the United States.
"It is a common belief among entrepreneurs and policymakers that small businesses arethe fountainhead of job creation and the engine of economic growth. However, it hasbecome increasingly apparent that the conventional wisdom obscures many importantissues. It is an important consideration because many government spending programs, taxincentives, and regulatory policies that favor the small business sector are justified by therole of small businesses in creating jobs and is the raison d’etre of an entire governmentagency: the Small Business Administration (SBA). This paper concludes that there is noreason to base our policies on the idea that small businesses are more deserving ofgovernment favor than big companies. And absent other inefficiencies that would hindersmall businesses performances, there is no legitimate argument for their preferentialtreatment. Hence the paper suggests ending all small businesses’ subsidies." [Emphasis added.]
The paper sought to make a case for eliminating all government agencies and programs that support or incubate small businesses, both at the Federal and State levels. It twisted a number of statistics in its attempt to make its case, attempting for instance to convince readers that the net gains in job creation should be ignored in favor of gross job creation when analyzing the impact of small businesses during any time period of analysis. This position, by the way, is proven false by the fact that reputable agencies such as the World Bank do count the impact of net job creation in evaluating economic performance. For an example of the paper's mishandling of statistics, consider the part where the author tries to use gross job gains and gross job losses to "prove" that employment in the small business sector was much less stable than in large companies during the year 2000. The author neglected to notice that during the time period in question, the net addition of jobs by small businesses was always positive, and for firms between 1 and 49 employees, exceeded 10 percent. Lastly, I would point out the laughably false claim made by the paper that "... larger employers offer greater job security. For both new jobs and the typical existing job, job durability increases with employer size." (That has definitely not been my experience as a working stiff and cubicle rat! I guess the author of the paper never heard of the words "downsizing" or "redundancy"!)
"... the real job growth comes not from people dreaming of being small business owners but from people committed to building big companies." [Emphasis added.]
"The paper will examine whether the pervasiveness of the belief that small businesses are the economy’s main source of job creation is warranted. Section 2 will show how this belief is the foundation for many government policies. Section 3 will expose the statistical fallacies that lead people to see job creation patterns where none exist. Besides it shouldn’t matter. Although job creation receives enormous attention in policy discussions, it is rather misplaced. The mere creation of jobs is not by itself an appropriate economic policy objective. Economic growth whether it takes the form of additional jobs or increase of productivity in existing jobs is all that matters. The paper concludes that there is no reason to base policies on the idea that small businesses are more deserving of government favor than big companies." [Emphasis added.]
In other words, the AEI has backed a policy which favors the continued growth of large companies, and the continued growth of American economic productivity even when that growth is not accompanied by the growth of jobs. We have already seen the results of such a policy in action, namely, in the jobless "recoveries" from economic crises which occurred during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and both Bushes. Such "recoveries" left a lot of people out of work for a long time, while those who still had jobs were subjected to ever-increasing demands on their time from their employers in the name of increasing productivity. To put it another way, these "jobless recoveries" resulted in ever-increasing concentrations of wealth among the richest members of society while drastically increasing economic precarity among everyone else. It is quite telling that the AEI has pushed so hard for the elimination of all government help for small businesses even though large corporations are the biggest recipients of corporate welfare from both Federal, State and local governments.
- How many really big companies can exist in a society whose economy is of finite size?
- Why should most people rally behind continued economic growth if the fruits of that growth are not fairly and equitably distributed?
- Who wants to volunteer to be one of the many poor, disenfranchised, and unemployed who are produced by a system in which the fruits of increased productivity are not fairly distributed?
- Who wants to volunteer to be a member of the salariat in such an economy if the only way to be a member of the salariat class is to work 80-hour weeks?
Sunday, March 26, 2023
Precarity, American-Style: Causative Factors
- The decline of small businesses in the U.S. This has been due to "the tilting of the playing field to favor massive companies over small businesses," as reported in a 2020 article by Business Insider. (See also "Monopoly Power And The Decline of Small Business" for a 2016 snapshot of the problem.) Note that the laws passed by the U.S. Congress and the executive orders issued under the Trump administration only made this worse. However, the Biden administration has begun taking steps to reverse small business decline by helping small businesses compete for Federal work, as reported by the Federal News Network in a 2023 article.
- The shifting of tax burdens from the rich to the poor. A striking case in point is the number of states (red states, particularly) whose legislatures and governors have turned them into tax havens for the rich. (See also, "How the Ultrawealthy Devise Ways to Not Pay Their Share of Taxes," NPR, August 2022.) Thus these states have come to resemble enclaves of dirty money that are found in the Cayman Islands. Note that the U.S has recently surpassed the Caymans to become the "world's biggest enabler of financial secrecy" as reported by the international Consortium of Investigative Journalists in May 2022. But these are merely one part of the overall shift of tax burdens away from the rich which began in the 1980's under Ronald Reagan.
- The use of monopoly and oligopoly power to create monopsony and oligopsony labor markets. We all know that a monopoly is a state in which there is only one supplier of a particular good or service which is needed by many buyers. The monopolist can therefore charge whatever price he wants, even if the price is horribly unfair. Oligopoly is the condition in which there is more than one supplier, yet the total number of suppliers is very small. Examples of oligopoly include Airbus and Boeing among aircraft manufacturers, or Microsoft and Brave and Alphabet (owner of Google) among Internet search providers, or CVS and Walgreens and Rite-Aid among drugstores and pharmacies. A monopsony, by contrast, is a situation in which there is only one buyer of a good or service which is offered by many suppliers. An example of this is a situation in which there is only one employer who can offer jobs to people in a large geographical area. Thus the many people in this area become horribly dependent on the one large employer, and if that employer uses his power maliciously or suddenly goes out of business or decides suddenly to cut costs, many people will be devastated. Oligopsony works the same way. Monopsony and oligopsony are the natural outcome of monopoly and oligopoly.
- The shifting of regulatory burdens from large businesses to small businesses. A prime example of this is the case of trying to use your own personal car to earn money by giving people rides. Most cities and states have laws that prevent you from doing this as a private individual. In this case, there are only two legal ways you can earn money by giving people rides: go to work for a taxi company, or become an "independent contractor" for a multibillion-dollar ride-hailing service such as Uber or Lyft. The regulatory burden on these ride-hailing services is very small, as seen in the cases of ride-hailing drivers who are injured on the job, or passengers who are sometimes assaulted by the ride-hailing drivers. Regulatory burdens are now crafted by state and local legislators for the purpose of expanding opportunities for big businesses by smothering small businesses who can't afford the costs of regulatory compliance.
- The innovation-depressing strategies of big businesses. It can be argued that once a monopoly or oligopoly economy is established, the big players in such an economy will tend to fear innovation, since innovations can be disruptive and can even destroy the pre-existing monopoly or oligopoly arrangement. Thus it is no surprise that large businesses (and wanna-be large business owners) have evolved egregious strategies to stifle any potential innovations that might threaten their interests. One such strategy is the misuse of the "non-compete agreement." These are agreements which employees force new hires to sign, in which the new hire typically agrees not to work for any other business or start their own business within a certain time frame and within a certain geographical area. Certain versions of these non-compete agreements also force the employee to give up all rights to any invention or intellectual product which the employee may devise while employed by his employer and for a certain time period after the employee stops working for the employer. (If you work for such an employer, I can understand why you would not be motivated to think very much while on the job!) The abuse of non-compete clauses in employment contracts has moved the Biden administration to start taking steps to ban them (see this also), which should provide immediate relief from employers who want to try to turn their employees into personal property.
Sunday, March 19, 2023
Precarity, American-Style: Introduction
The Journal of Cultural Anthropology describes precarity as ". . . an emerging abandonment that pushes us away from a livable life . . . [It is] the politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks . . . becoming differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death." The University of Georgia has an article on its "Neoliberalism Guide for Educators" webpage which describes precarity in concrete human terms, starting with the questions "Have you ever or do you currently live paycheck to paycheck? Do you work 40 hours a week or more and still can't afford rent?"
The University of Georgia webpage cited above describes how precarity was not always a feature of modern American life. That page describes how under President Lyndon Johnson, the United States began to construct a social safety net that actually worked to bring economic advancement to all Americans and not just the rich. The page also describes how wealthy business interests organized from the 1970's onward to begin to unravel that safety net in order to protect and expand their dominance over the American economy. Today's post will explore how the resulting increase in precarity spread throughout the United States. We will see that, to use a word picture, many of those who thought that they would make out all right by being friends of wolves wound up becoming lamb chops themselves.
- Material rewards - that is, the relative adequacy or inadequacy of wages
- Work time arrangements - that is, how long a person has to work as well as how much control the worker has over his or her own schedule
- Stability - that is, whether the job has a stable employment contract or whether it is unstable (as in temporary, seasonal, contracted limited-time, etc.)
- Workers' rights - that is, whether the employer offers benefits such as health insurance or retirement, as well as protection of workers from exploitation
- Collective organization or empowerment - that is, whether employees are helped or hindered in their attempts to organize themselves for collective bargaining power
- Interpersonal relations - that is, whether workers have to deal with toxic bosses or bosses who don't allow the workers to control how they do their jobs
- Training and employability opportunities - that is, whether there is room for growth and advancement in the job
"The guilt of falling into . . . predatory hands . . . [lies] in the oppressed society and, thus, the solution and liberation need to come from that society transformed through its work, education, and civility. Victims and the seemingly disempowered are thus their own liberators as long as they pursue self-organization, self-attainment, and development of their communities."
Or, to quote from Alex Soojung Kim-Pang,
"Collective action is the most powerful form of self-care." (Emphasis added.)
Saturday, March 4, 2023
Precarity in the United States: A Preview of Coming Attractions
- The Educated Underclass: Students and the Promise of Social Mobility, Gary Roth, Pluto Press, 2019.
- Immigrant Labor and the New Precariat, Ruth Milkman, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020. (Note: Try not to order an e-book copy of this through the John Wiley website. Wiley has e-book download policies that will make you want to kick furniture and punch walls...)
- "Not 'Just' a Barista: The Story of Portland's College-Educated Baristas, Ned William Tilbrook, Portland State University, 2020. (Now this sounds interesting!)
Tuesday, February 28, 2023
Another Expose of An Evangelical Cult
Here is a link to a couple of interviews of another former member of the Assemblies of George Geftakys, who describes the horrible upbringing she experienced as a child of one of the main leaders in this group. The interviewer is also a survivor of the Assemblies. These interviews were very interesting to me because of my former involvement in this unhealthy group. They are also interesting because of how they illustrate the influence of bad men from the toxic evangelical mainstream, men such as James Dobson. As I said a while back, all the assertions of the American Religious Right are utter crap. A caution about these interviews: they contain strong language and deal with triggering experiences.
Saturday, February 25, 2023
A Dogfight Against Putin's Flying Monkeys
This will be a short post. I am trying to get my weekly schedule under control. However, there is continuing news about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and there is therefore need to provide commentary to put it into context.
First, it appears that Vladimir Putin has begun to launch extra squadrons of flying monkeys in order to spread disinformation and to influence world opinion in his favor. Several thousand such monkeys organized a protest in Germany to oppose the German government's decision to send more effective arms to Ukraine to help drive out the Russian invaders. And the government of China's Xi Jinping has also tried to pressure the people of Ukraine into accepting a false "peace" which would do nothing to protect them from continued Russian aggression. There are also the usual highly-placed mouthpieces in the West who are trying to cast doubt on the rightness of the West's continued support of Ukraine. However, ordinary citizens in the West have begun to organize their own rallies to demonstrate their continued support of the people of Ukraine and their continued opposition to the thuggish Russian invasion. And Poland has begun openly supplying Ukraine with military aid.
The Russian government knows that if the West supplies Ukraine with adequate weaponry, the Russian invasion will be decisively defeated. Therefore the voices of Putin's flying monkeys may well represent a cry of desperation. For anyone who is genuinely confused about the character of Russia or of the thug named Vladimir Putin, please read the posts I have linked on the sidebar of this blog under the heading, "Russia."
P.S. I still need to do research before I write the next post in my series of posts on precarity and the precariat. In future posts in this series, I hope to illustrate the connection between the oligarchs who rule Russia and China and some of the oligarchs who have taken root in the West. Also, there is a bright bit of good news: the Russian invasion of Ukraine has motivated Europe to engage in a massive build-out of renewable electricity generation capacity. This has resulted in a situation in which today Europe produces more of its electricity from renewables than from natural gas. If Russia was hoping to use its oil and gas reserves as a tool to enslave the rest of the world, hopefully the Russians are now starting to realize that they have shot themselves in the foot.
Sunday, February 12, 2023
The Precariat In The East: The Chinese Case
But the precariat has also arisen outside of the West. What has been striking is its origin and spread in those regions which withdrew themselves from global capitalism in the early 20th century only to return to the capitalist fold near the end of the 20th century . . .
- Starting in 1958, all people had to be registered according to birthplace.
- The person's birthplace was the determinant of whether the person received State welfare services and what kind of services would be received.
- Those whose birthplace registration was urban received State services.
- Those whose birthplace registration was rural received no State services. Any welfare services they received had to come from communal social arrangements in their village of registration.
- Those whose birthplace was urban were categorized as non-agricultural. Those whose birthplace was rural were categorized as agricultural.
- The children of the people registered in 1958 inherited the hukou status of their parents. The children of these children, in turn, inherited their parents' hukou status. Thus even if you were a child born in the 1990's in a city, if your parents had a rural hukou status, you inherited the same rural hukou status.
- Restrictions on physical movement under the Maoist hukou system have been relaxed somewhat but definitely not eliminated.
- Hukou status has largely remained unchanged in the sense that it is still difficult for holders of rural hukou to change their status to urban.
- Legal migration of rural residents to urban centers is more possible now than in Maoist times. However, rural residents who do migrate are still denied access to the social welfare services and legal citizenship rights granted to holders of urban hukou.
- This arrangement has therefore created a very large class of migrant workers who are paid very cheaply and have few or no rights.
- Those who migrate legally are more likely to be integrated into the formal economy of the cities to which they migrate, whereas those who migrate illegally tend to wind up in the informal economy.
- Whether formally or informally employed, these migrant workers are not granted stable, long-term employment contracts. Therefore they comprise another very large sector of the Chinese precariat.
- Many of these people are forced to work like dogs, as evidenced by the "996" schedule imposed by many employers, a schedule which was only recently ruled illegal by the Chinese Supreme Court.
- Those who migrate illegally are subject to the threat of violence either by the State or by their employers.
Thursday, February 9, 2023
Christopher Caldwell's Sympathy for Vladimir Putin's Point of View
Thursday, February 2, 2023
The Desperate Need For A Distributed, Peer-to-Peer, Open-Source Search Engine
Sunday, January 29, 2023
How Decent People Should Respond To The Murder of Tyre Nichols
I wasn't planning to write another blog post this weekend. And I have grown to dislike regular exposure to the news. But the police murder of Tyre Nichols came to my attention within the last few hours. Tyre Nichols was an unarmed African-American man who was brutally beaten to death by the police in Memphis, Tennessee. Tennessee is a red state ruled by Republicans and I am sure that many of its citizens are white evangelicals who loudly proclaim the name of Jesus even though they have no intention of doing anything He actually commanded them.
The question that naturally arises after yet another White murder of unarmed Black people is how we who are people of color should respond. I wrote an extensive series of blog posts on that subject a little more than two years ago. Those posts can be found on the sidebar of this blog, under the headings, "From Dictatorship to Democracy" and "Resistance In The Age of Trump." These posts deal with the subject of strategic nonviolent resistance as a means of liberation of historically oppressed peoples. Let me summarize some key points from those posts as follows:
- Strategic nonviolent resistance is an effective means of liberation - especially when it is guided by wise strategy.
- Strategic nonviolent resistance does not consist of trying to convert the oppressor by appealing to the "better angels" of the oppressor.
- Strategic nonviolent resistance works best when an oppressed population withdraws its cooperation from a system of oppression in ways that impose coercive costs on that system and its masters.
- The best kind of coercive costs which an oppressed people can impose are economic costs. Think of things like the Montgomery Bus Boycott, for instance.
- A key component of effective strategic nonviolent resistance consists of the oppressed population building their own structures for individual and communal self-reliance. This way they will not need to rely on the structures of the oppressor.
- Effective resistance does not rely solely or even primarily on mass protest marches.
- Mass protest marches are not as effective now as they were in the past, because oppressors have learned how to discredit the protests by sending agents provocateurs into the marches to cause violence and vandalism.
- One of the main strengths of strategic nonviolent resistance is its nonviolent character. Therefore beware of any people (especially from the white community) who try to persuade you to mix violence (including vandalism or property damage) of any kind into your struggle. If you listen to them, you will give the oppressor a ready-made excuse to increase his oppression. That is why the oppressor sends such people to try to infiltrate your struggle. The oppressor will use any means to try to force your struggle to turn violent. If the oppressor can successfully tempt you to use violence or to destroy property, then he can justify using force to violently crush you. Maintain nonviolent discipline! If you maintain nonviolent discipline, then any violence which your oppressor inflicts on you will backfire on him instead.
- This means that you should probably not listen to anything said by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict from 2016 onward or to anything said by Erica Chenoweth from 2019 onward. These people used to give good advice up to 2016. After Trump entered the White House, the advice of the ICNC began to turn to garbage. (I wonder - was that change deliberate?) And in my opinion, Erica Chenoweth's recent book titled Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs To Know is a continuation of that garbage.
- Effective strategic nonviolent resistance requires people to develop the art of strategic thinking and of learning to work together in long-term projects of collective self-reliance. Start developing these skills.
Saturday, January 28, 2023
Research Week - End of January 2023
Thursday, January 26, 2023
Why Nuclear Threatening Won't Work
It appears finally that the West is going to get off the dime and send Ukraine the heavy weapons it needs to defeat the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Putin has responded by using his flying monkeys to send a message to the West that if Russia loses, the result will be nuclear war. There's just one problem. Putin's Russia has shown what it will do to all those whom it conquers by its treatment of Ukrainians in Russian-occupied territory. By the pronouncements of not only Putin, but of fascist thugs like Aleksandr Dugin, Russia has shown what it wants to do to the entire world. If Russia is allowed to win, Russia will turn the entire world into the toilet bowl of Russia. That is unacceptable. Given a choice between this option and nuclear war, frankly, I'd rather take my chances on nuclear war. I do not say this lightly. Because of my moral stance, I would much rather see a nonviolent solution, especially if that nonviolent solution was achieved through the coercive use of nonviolent economic power to destroy Russia's ability to make war. But allowing Russia to have its way is not an option. Russian power must be destroyed. And those in the West who continue to make excuses for Russia or to play telephone tag for Russia or to be sock puppets for Russia must learn to shut their mouths.
The West must stop allowing its fight against Russian imperialism to be dictated by the rules the Russians seek to impose on us. In other words, we must do whatever it takes to destroy Russian imperialism. Whatever it takes.