Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Pope Francis Is No More A Socialist Than Is...: Living In The Age of Francis of Buenos Aires
Thursday, December 26, 2013
Bah! Humbug! I Divested Myself From The Culture Of Consumption That Surrounds Christmas
"The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life. Not only is the relation to the commodity visible but it is all one sees: the world one sees is its world. Modern economic production extends its dictatorship extensively and intensively... In the advanced regions, social space is invaded by a continuous superimposition of geological layers of commodities. At this point in the “second industrial revolution,” alienated consumption becomes for the masses a duty supplementary to alienated production."
Monday, August 5, 2013
Learning To Win: Fighting Institutional Racism in the Schools
I was invited to the play by a friend, Arlene; her daughter Asia was a member of the cast
I found this play on institutional racism so powerful and timely because in this so-called Age of Obama, many people believe with the election of the nation’s first black President, that racism is no longer a problem. Some people even go as far as to suggest that America is a post-racial society.
Without a doubt, teachers cannot teach and students cannot learn in a chaotic educational setting. However, kicking kids out of school rather than providing them with the counseling, mentoring, or perhaps family intervention they need does more harm than good. Research shows that students that are suspended or expelled from school tend to either be held back a grade, drop out, or find their way into the juvenile or criminal justice system.
Part of the reason schools turn so frequently toward such harsh disciplinary tactics, as the play aptly demonstrates, is because of the seemingly insurmountable challenges and pressures many teachers face in racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically isolated urban public school systems: inadequate resources, growing pressure to have students perform well on high stakes tests, unmanageably large class sizes, students with serious behavioral problems, a lack of proper training in classroom management, a lack of good mentoring, and administrators, staff, and school board members who function more like adversaries than colleagues.
Wednesday, July 3, 2013
To be Young, Black, and Male in America: Guilty of Something until Proven Innocent

The decision not to charge Zimmerman that night was likely influenced by the fact that the victim was young, black, and male, the same reasons why I do not believe that Zimmerman will be found guilty of the murder that he committed that night but should be punished for.
Saturday, April 6, 2013
Black People Are Like Canaries In A Coal Mine
On Monday, April 8, President Barack Obama will be visiting the University of Hartford. The buzz around campus since the email went out announcing that POTUS will be coming to our little campus has been electric. As I start typing this blog post, hundreds of students, faculty, and staff have been standing in line for hours in front of the student center to get one of the highly coveted tickets to hear him speak.
Although I like President Obama, I'm not a fan of how he marginalizes the impact of white supremacy in contemporary American society or his preference for colorblind solutions to socioeconomic inequalities that are deeply rooted in longstanding racial and economic hierarchies. His pending visit to campus made me think about a book I read about 10 years ago by Critical Race Theory scholars, Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres, The Miner's Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy.
In their very excellent book, Guinier and Torres, cogently and forcefully argued that race is like the canary in the coal mine.
If you are not familiar with the phrase, "canary in a coal mine" is often used to refer to a person or a thing whose ruin or suffering is an early warning sign that danger is around the corner.
Historically, coal mining is one of the most dangerous occupations anywhere in the world. For minors working underground, the potential for death from suffocation, gas poisoning, roof collapse and gas explosions, is very real.
In order to prevent a disaster, coal miners need an early warning system to let them know if conditions are unsafe. Before the widespread use of gas detection technology, caged canaries were used by coal miners because of their very sensitive respiratory systems. Their distress or death usually signaled that dangerous levels of toxic gases such as carbon monoxide, methane, or carbon dioxide were building up in the mine.
A dangerous buildup of these toxins would kill the canaries long before the miners would be affected. As long as the bird kept singing, the miners were led to believe that everything was fine.
Guinier and Torres persuasively argue in their book, "Those who are racially marginalized are like the miner's canary: their distress is the first sign of a danger that threatens us all. It is easy enough to think that when we sacrifice this canary, the only harm is to communities of color. Yet others ignore problems that converge around racial minorities at their own peril, for these problems are symptoms warning us that we are all at risk."
Black people are America's canary in the coal mine, with the exception of Native Americans, it's most marginalized racial group. Due to centuries of racial bias and structural inequalities, our collective respiratory system leaves us particularly vulnerable. Unfortunately, the nation does not fully recognize black people's vulnerability nor prioritize the interests and needs of black America, not even the nation's first black President.
Indeed, this President is making some decisions that will do more harm than good when it comes to the interests and needs of black people.
According to media reports, the President's budget proposal that he plans to unveil next week will include cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Politico reports: "The most controversial element of Obama's proposal is the inclusion of "chained CPI," the adjustment that would over time reduce cost-of-living increases to Social Security and other federal benefit programs – effectively, a cut to Social Security benefits by tying them to inflation."
Obama is the first Democratic President to propose cutting his party's signature New Deal Program, Social Security. This will be especially disastrous for blacks who are recipients of Social Security.
According to a factsheet produced by the Social Security Administration (SSA), in 2011, the average annual Social Security income received by black men 65 years and older was $13,458 and for women it was $12,173.
Although blacks have a lower life expectancy than other races at age 65, SSA suggests that blacks tend to benefit more from Social Security than other racial or ethnic groups. One reason for this is because low-wage earners tend to receive a greater return on their investment in the program than do higher-wage earners. The yearly median earnings of black workers (about $35,000) are significantly lower than the yearly median earnings of all other workers (about $42,000).
SSA's factsheet also makes the point that blacks depend on social security benefits more than any other racial or ethnic group. In 2011, among blacks, 23 percent of elderly married couples and 56 percent of unmarried elderly persons depended on a check from the Social Security Administration for 90 percent or more of their income. Moreover, in 2011, although blacks only made up 12.6 percent of the nation's population, they were 19 percent of disabled workers receiving benefits.
The President's decision to switch to the chain CPI is not a minor issue for black people who depend on their Social Security checks for survival. My mother is one of those people. According to Obama's own SSA, "African Americans receiving benefits are helped by Social Security's cost-of-living protection which guarantees a benefit that is annually adjusted for inflation." His proposal will make black recipients less secure.
Black people, in particular, should be outraged by what the President is proposing to do to Social Security (and Medicare) in an effort to win bipartisan support in Congress. Black people should also be unwilling to submerge their interests and needs and political voice because the first black President is wedded to the idea that America is a post-racial society and that people need to ignore their differences and simply find common ground and everything will be okay.
It might also be easy to believe that although cuts to Social Security may harm blacks more than other racial and ethnic groups, the long-term benefits that may come from reducing the deficit and debt far outweigh any costs to black retirees and blacks that depend on disability insurance.
This is myopic thinking. Just like the canaries that alert miners to a dangerous situation, the problems black American face are not simply their problems, they are America's problems.
Thursday, April 4, 2013
Time To Dismantle, Not Tinker, With Political And Economic Hierarchies
David H. Ikard and Martell Lee Teasley write in their book, Nation of Cowards, that "structural inequalities are systemic material, social, political, and economic factors that individually or in combination facilitate individual and group disadvantages."
Structural inequalities are firmly entrenched in American society. According to Ikard and Teasley, they "manifest themselves in inferior housing, health services, education, and employment opportunities."
The continuing problem of joblessness is an appropriate place to start in trying to understand how structural inequalities work in America. Nationally, the unemployment rate is 7.7 percent, down from its Great Recession peak of 10 percent in October 2009. This figure only tells part of the story; roughly 20 million Americans are either out of work or underemployed. To make matters worse, the Federal Reserve reported last year that US corporations are sitting on about $1.7 trillion which they keep in treasuries, other bonds, and bank accounts that could be used to hire and train unemployed and underemployed Americans But, that only covers money they are sitting on domestically. If you look at worldwide holdings, a more realistic figure is that they may be hording an unprecedented $5 trillion in cash since the Great Recession.
The tenacity of structural inequalities also manifest themselves in the way wealth and income are disproportionately concentrated in the hands of a small segment of the nation's population.
Last week, The Wall Street Journal published a story about how the S&P 500 – the stock market index of 500 large US companies – rose to a new high of 1,569.19, recouping all of its loses from the global financial crisis which, as we all remember, was sparked largely by the rapacious greed of the folks who run Wall Street and their enablers in Washington.
The other major indicator of economic activity, the Dow Jones Industrial average, had already reach a record high last year, recovering all of its loses from 2007.
Most Americans, however, do not directly benefit from this "buoyant economy." Indeed, according to a recent PEW survey, the stock market rally has had a "limited effect on the public's economic outlook because they are not what affect people's personal financial situation." Of those surveyed, 73 percent said the rising price of stocks had "very little" or "no effect at all."
Instead, 64 percent said their household finances were impacted by gas prices, and 58 percent said they were impacted by the prices of food and other consumer goods.
In the real world, while Wall Street is breaking records, ordinary folks are becoming increasingly dependent on food stamps to feed their families. According to an article published last week in The Wall Street Journal, as of December 2012, a record number of Americans – 47.8 million people – were enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
Structural inequalities in the US are about as bad as they have ever been in the history of the nation. Combating inequalities as stark as they have become in the US will require dismantling, not tinkering with, political and economic hierarchies. Unfortunately, many of the well-intentioned solutions being touted today by some on the left – such as, higher taxes on the rich, or a financial transaction tax – may do little more than prop up the status quo.
We need a much more radical solution. The problem is capitalism. It must go.
Sunday, February 10, 2013
The World Has A Growing Inequality Problem And The U.S. Is No Different
The "Great Recession" officially ended three years ago in the second half of 2009. The unemployment rate is down from its double-digit peak in October 2009. The Wall Street investor class is dancing for joy because the Dow Jones Industrial Average has doubled in value since its recent low in March 2009. With home prices, sales, and construction up, the housing market seems to be recovering quite well.
The American economy appears to be on the rebound, but, not everyone is benefitting because America has a growing inequality problem that has many Americans staring either into the economic abyss or watching over their shoulder for a pink slip as they live paycheck-to-paycheck.
Inequality is a global problem. Let me start with the world first and then work my way back to America.
In a new report, The Cost of Inequality: How Wealth and Income Extremes Hurt us All, a leading international philanthropy organization, Oxfam, argues that inequality caused by extreme concentrations of wealth and income is economically damaging and inefficient, harmful to human progress, undermines efforts to end poverty, environmentally destructive, and may fuel civil unrest and political instability.
How bad is it? Oxfam research shows that growing wealth and income inequality is a global problem. There are roughly 1200 billionaires in the world. In 2012, the top 100 billionaires increased their wealth by $240 billion, enough to end world poverty four times over. Almost half the world's population could live just off the net worth of the world's 250 richest people.
In the U.S., since 1980, the richest 1 percent has doubled their share of national income, rising from 10 percent to 20 percent. For the uber-rich (0.01 percent), their share of income quadrupled to levels never seen before. The richest five Americans made almost $7 billion each last year (if you are counting in your head, that's $3,500,000.00 per hour) just from their investments. If the top 400 wealthiest Americans pooled their investment profits from last year, they could pay the in-state tuition and fees for every college student in the U.S.
According to data released late last year by the U.S. Census Bureau, 46.2 million people (15 percent) lived in poverty – an annual income of $22,811 for a family of four with two children – which was about the same percent from the year before.
While the number of people living in poverty stayed about the same, the number of families struggling with poverty despite parents working for a living increased during the same period. A growing number of Americans returned to work after the Great Recession, but mostly to low-wage, service-sector jobs, not the middle-class jobs they held before the boys and girls on Wall Street and the U.S. financial sector nearly ruined the nation's economy with their reckless profiteering.
According to a new report by The Working Poor Project, a privately funded nation-wide initiative aiming to develop policies that assist low-income families achieve economic security, the ranks of the working poor is growing. The number of working families struggling to survive on low-wages – defined as below 200 percent of the official poverty threshold – increased from 10.2 million in 2010 to 10.4 million in 2011. Their data show that in 2011, the total number of individuals living in low-income working families was 47.5 million. The number of children living in low-income working families stood at 23.5 million.
These low-wage jobs – about one in four adults in low-income working families held jobs in just eight occupations, as cashiers, cooks, health aids, janitors, maids, retail salespersons, waiters and waitresses, or drivers – "typically offer limited opportunities for advancement, few (if any) benefits, and create challenges for parents trying to balance work and family responsibilities."
In 2011, the 20 percent of working families that sit at the top the social structure hauled in an impressive 10.1 times the total income of the bottom 20 percent of working families, up from a formerly impressive 9.5 percent in 2007. Now, sit down if you are reading this while standing. To put another way, the richest one-fifth of working families took home 48 percent of all income, while the bottom one-fifth of working families took home less than 5 percent of all income.
If it wasn't for the nation's social safety net, poverty and inequality would be even worse. Specifically, in 2011, if it wasn't for Social Security an additional 21.4 million people (including 14.5 million seniors) would have slid into poverty. In 2011, if it wasn't for unemployment insurance, 2.3 million people would have slid into poverty. In 2011, the earned income tax credit and child tax credit kept 5.7 million working people out of poverty. In 2011, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program kept 3.9 million people out of poverty.
A rising tide does not lift all boats. America cannot end poverty unless we strengthen (not weaken) our social safety, create greater economic opportunities for struggling working families and, most importantly, do something about inequality to close the gap between the rich and the poor. A permanent class of uber-rich Americans is dangerous for democracy.