Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant

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KshamaPortrait

Kshama Sawant is not a career politician. She is an activist who brings a passion for social justice to her work as a public servant. As a member of the City Council, Kshama pledges to be a voice for workers, youth, the oppressed and the voiceless. She only accepts the average workers’ wage and donates the rest of her six-figure salary to building social justice movements.

Alongside being a teacher, Kshama is an activist, organizer, and socialist, and is a member of Socialist Alternative, in solidarity with the Committee for a Workers’ International, which organizes for working-class interests on every continent.

Kshama Sawant is a rare bird, an American politician who is avowedly socialist and electable. The Cold War, which made red-bating a normal part of politics in the U.S., is long gone. It’s more than time for leftist politicians to come out into the open. Let’s hope it spreads. Doug Henwood has an interview with her here.

Posted in: Economics, Online Places

Right Irony

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Americans are highly attuned to the abuse of government benefits. Yet the larger scandal is that people don’t use these benefits enough. Programs such as the earned-income tax credit, SNAP, child care subsidies and health insurance can pull people out of poverty. But only 5 percent of low-income families with children use all four of them. Of working people below the poverty level, one in four receives no support at all. A McKinsey analysis done for Single Stop estimated that $65 billion in government benefits for low-income families goes unclaimed every year.

“For Striving Students, a Connection to Money” Tina Rosenburg

This might be one of those stories that an English teacher could use to teach irony. Or, rather, to show students that the richest forms of irony are like onions, you can peel away layer after layer after layer. Right wing ideology insists that the poor are poor only because they lack enterprise and that they are overly dependent wards of the state robbed of their agency by an over-reaching Nanny state. As it turns out, the welfare state is so oblique and confusing– that’s no accident– that billions of dollars go unclaimed. Single Stop sets up shop at places where they can reach the poor– in this case at the Borough of Manhattan Community College– and helps them figure out what sorts of aide they can get. A simple, smart idea.

Posted in: Economics, Online Places, Professional

Revolution Without the Revolution

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A series of shifts are happening in our economy: A record of number of millennials are trading in conventional career paths to launch tech start-ups, start small businesses that are rooted in local communities, or freelance their expertise. We are sharing everything from bikes and cars to extra rooms in our homes.

Globally recognized entrepreneur and founder of Taproot Foundation, that helped create the $15 billion pro bono service market, Aaron Hurst argues in his latest book, The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community is Changing the World, that while these developments seem unrelated at first, taken together they reveal a powerful pattern that points to purpose as the new driver of the American economy.

The Purpose Economy

I heard about this book from one of those irritating NPR stories in which the reporter swallows a marketing plan whole and then treats it as if it were social science. I can just see the publisher’s PR guy checking one more item off the list. Next up, “Good Morning America!” In any case it struck me as a perfect example of the bourgeois desire for a revolution– profound and lasting social change– without the revolution– that is, with no notion of justice and collective struggle. This is what the internet was suppose to do as well.

That’s not to say that the internet didn’t change many things; it did. The internet as such, though, isn’t a revolution: it leaves the basic social structures of capitalism, worker and capitalist, private property, and so on, intact. Arguably, the internet and its attendant technologies reinforced capitalism and extended the reach of the market. Hurst’s ideas are, in effect, an attempt to convince us that the loss of benefits and a pension plan and any job security is, in fact, the best thing that every happened to you and to the world. Got it.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Economics, Online Places

Capital, It Fails Us Now

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The core message of this enormous and enormously important book can be delivered in a few lines: Left to its own devices, wealth inevitably tends to concentrate in capitalist economies. There is no “natural” mechanism inherent in the structure of such economies for inhibiting, much less reversing, that tendency. Only crises like war and depression, or political interventions like taxation (which, to the upper classes, would be a crisis), can do the trick. And Thomas Piketty has two centuries of data to prove his point.

“The Top of the World,” Doug Henwood

Here’s a breath of fresh air, to wash that bourgeois economics right out of your hair. I mean Doug Henwood’s review, not the book, which I haven’t read yet. After centuries of capitalism and several rounds of redistribution you’d think that this simple idea would be a part of our collective common sense. Maybe it soon will be, at least for a time, before the great obfuscation forces work their magic once again.

Posted in: Economics, Online Places