Co-published by The Guardian.
Precariousness is not just a working-class thing. In recent interviews, dozens of academics and schoolteachers, administrators, librarians, journalists and even coders have told me they too are falling prey to an unstable new America. I’ve started to think of this just-scraping-by group as the Middle Precariat.
I turned off onto a long dirt road about 15 miles outside of Montevideo, Uruguay and drove towards a wooden guard shack that stood across from a small farmhouse hidden by a long row of trees. Usually, if you want to meet a country’s president – or even ex-president – you have to fight through layers of bureaucracy, confirm that you are not a threat and have a very good rationale for being considered worthy to talk to. But in the case of Uruguay’s former head of state, José “Pepe” Mujica, you simply find your way to his home – something that apparently 30 or 40 people do every day.
Interview translated from the Spanish by Celia Brugman. Video camera by Jose Maria Ciganda.
Some come to ask for help – after serving four years as president of his country, Mujica is still a powerful member of the Uruguayan senate – some to offer advice,
» Read more about: A Morning with Former Uruguayan President José Mujica »
Maria Bustillos and Elizabeth Fladung debrief their day reporting on inequality in Silicon Valley, including their experiences visiting with some groups and leaders helping local people left out of the tech boom.
This podcast is an encore posting from our State of Inequality series.
Maria Bustillos is a journalist and critic living in Los Angeles.
Elizabeth Fladung is a Brooklyn-based, CalArts-trained photojournalist. Her work has appeared in The Nation, La Repubblica, The Fader and Wax Poetics Magazine.
» Read more about: Podcast: Silicon Valley's Stark Contrasts »
Elizabeth Fladung’s photos of San Francisco in the midst of the tech boom offer a study in contrasts.
This slideshow is an encore posting from our State of Inequality series.Elizabeth Fladung is a Brooklyn-based, CalArts-trained photojournalist. Her work has appeared in The Nation, La Repubblica, The Fader and Wax Poetics Magazine.
The chord progression of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ song “Otherside” plays on the south end of the Venice Beach boardwalk. The middle-aged man strumming his acoustic guitar is Gary St. Germain, who spends afternoons performing songs in Venice, Burbank and Hollywood, a black pork pie hat always perched on his head. When he has free time, St. Germain plays in Venice for two or three hours at a time.
This is an encore posting from our State of Inequality series
“I don’t have an amplifier,” St. Germain says. “So I set up where there isn’t too much music blasting and I just play what I love.”
Ironically, the more busy days at Venice seem to benefit him less. It’s the days when curious people stroll by that St. Germain makes 20 to 40 dollars after a few hours. According to St. Germain,
» Read more about: The Way We Live Now: Singing for Supper »
Click on the right arrow button to go to the next slide.
Data and research for this story were provided by Charlie Eaton of U.C. Berkeley’s Department of Sociology and DebtandSociety.org.
This is an encore posting from our State of Inequality series.
» Read more about: Affluent Private Universities Are Tax Shelters For the Rich »
As this series has made clear, “The California Chasm” is a challenge that threatens to transform the state into a shadow of its former self. Once a place where people came together to realize fortunes, remake their lives and attain their piece of the American Dream, we have become a state saddled with sharp differences in social, economic and health outcomes due to race, place and class.
This is an encore posting from our State of Inequality series
The resulting division is damaging to our sense of community but it also leaves the potential of our residents untapped. With research increasingly demonstrating that more equitable strategies can produce more sustainable growth, we need to create a conversation about how California can lead the nation not in inequality but in opportunity.
We have the know-how —
» Read more about: Twelve Ways to Reverse Inequality and Close the "California Chasm" »
I recently interviewed one of the country’s unabashed progressive leaders, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. Our discussion ranged from Ronald Reagan’s legacy to the failures of contemporary Democrats to stand up for their values. “We have an income inequality crisis in this country that will endanger the future of the entire United States of America,” de Blasio told me. We present here the first in a series of clips from that interview. (Full transcript here.)
» Read more about: Watch Now: Bill de Blasio on the Leadership Role of Cities »
Capital & Main: Do you see risk in Democrats running away from a populist progressive agenda?
Mayor Bill de Blasio: Absolutely. I think the biggest development we saw [in the midterm election] was Democrats not standing up for the ideals of the Democratic Party, not talking to the economic realities of our people, not being willing to offer real progressive solutions. I think there’s another model of Democrats who actually addressed these issues, who were willing to take on big corporations, who were willing to challenge the status quo, who were willing to ask those who are wealthy to pay their fair share, who were willing to talk about how we create living wage jobs and better benefits….
People are looking for answers to what is now a fundamental structural economic crisis. The middle class has been collapsing, people’s earning power has been declining rapidly…. I love that the conventional wisdom [about the recent election] is about a conservative tidal wave.
Sunday’s extreme heat didn’t prevent some 200-plus Angelenos from gathering in the Ann and John Nickoll Family Sanctuary at Temple Isaiah for an informal economic summit. The audience for this Westside event, partly sponsored by Bend the Arc, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, included District 5 Councilman Paul Koretz.
The crowd saw a screening of economist Robert Reich’s 2013 film Inequality for All. Narrated by Reich, this documentary provides some of the most incisive analyses of the causes of the income gap yet found in the popular media. The film is recommended viewing for anyone wanting to learn how the American middle class has become an endangered species.
But many in the audience had already seen the film and after the lights came up emcee Serena Zeise brought out the guest speaker and Reich friend, Harold Meyerson. The affable yet acerbic Myerson is a native son of Los Angeles who years ago moved east to become a Washington Post columnist and American Prospect editor-at-large.
» Read more about: Harold Meyerson on Economic Inequality’s Tipping Point »
In this uncertain post-recession era, economic inequality seems to be the only thing you can count on being in full supply. It’s certainly a subject that’s increasingly on people’s lips – thanks in no small part to Jacob Kornbluth’s 2013 documentary, Inequality for All. The film, wryly narrated by economist Robert Reich, lays out Reich’s astute perspective on how our country has arrived at the point where 400 Americans own more wealth than the entire bottom half of the country combined.
Sunday the Southern California Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union will screen Inequality for All, an event that will serve as a refresher course for some and an eye-opener for others who have not seen the film. Afterwards, Harold Meyerson, American Prospect editor-at-large and Washington Post columnist, will offer his always lively insights into what’s happened since the documentary’s premier, along with a discussion of commercial property tax reform.
» Read more about: Harold Meyerson Speaks on ‘Inequality for All’ »
It might surprise many to learn that business people all over America have joined the fight against economic inequality. Here are 10 notable, wealthy individuals who have advocated for ending tax cuts on the rich and increasing programs for the poor:
» Read more about: 10 Business Leaders Who Just Say No to Economic Inequality »
America’s education system is unequal and unfair. Students who live in wealthy communities have huge advantages that rig the system in their favor. They have more experienced teachers and a much lower student-teacher ratio. They have more modern facilities, more up-to-date computer and science equipment and more up-to-date textbooks. They have more elective courses, more music and art offerings and more extracurricular programs. They have better libraries, more guidance counselors and superior athletic facilities.
Not surprisingly, affluent students in well-off school districts have higher rates of high school graduation, college attendance and entry to the more selective colleges. This has little to do with intelligence or ability. For example, 82 percent of affluent students who had SAT scores over 1200 graduate from college. In contrast, only 44 percent of low-income students with the same high SAT scores graduate from college. This wide gap can’t be explained by differences in motivation or smarts.
» Read more about: California’s Public Schools: Separate and Definitely Unequal »
Two and a half years after the Occupy Movement jolted the country, America is once again abuzz with talk about poverty and inequality. Of course, along with a heightened focus on the problem come lots of ideas for fixing it. Some are smart, others are not, but nearly all of them share one thing in common: They are complicated.
The status quo “solution” isn’t complicated – at least on paper. It’s the one proposed by former Reagan official Herbert Meyer, who, on his website The Cure for Poverty, offers a three-word remedy: the free market.
Meyer, who worked at the CIA, may have been too busy warding off the enemy to notice that market forces have enjoyed one of the most unfettered periods in recent American history, even as poverty and inequality have risen inexorably. But he is surely onto something with his one-step prescription.
So I have my own,
The conventional wisdom of capitalism is encapsulated in the phrase “trickle down.” This means the money that some very rich people have accumulated gets invested in ways that create jobs, and the money dribbles down the social pyramid, first to administrators, then white collar managers and bureaucrats, then to the assembly line or shop floor workers, then to the janitors. General Motors used to be the quintessential capitalist corporation. “What was good for General Motors,” it was believed during the Eisenhower years, “was good for the country.”
Then in the 1980s, an economist from USC sold Ronald Reagan on a re-constructed version of this model. He called it “supply side economics.” This notion claims that the more goods are available for people to buy, the more money will concentrate in the upper reaches of the rich, and somehow, this is good for the country. The Walton family heirs to the Walmart fortune are a good example of this business model.
» Read more about: Trickle Down Profits Don’t Raise Any Boats »
How will the 2016 election be framed? What will be America’s choice?
If the coverage of last week’s two big winners offers a guide, the choice will be between “pragmatism” and “ideology.”
The Washington Post called Chris Christie’s huge gubernatorial victory a “clear signal in favor of pragmatic, as opposed to ideological, governance.”
But the mainstream media used a different adjective to describe Bill de Blasio, last week’s other landslide victor. The New York Times, for example, wrote of “the rise of the left-leaning Mr. de Blasio.”
Again and again, Christie is described as the pragmatist; De Blasio, the lefty.
But these appellations ignore what’s happening to an America in which almost all the economic gains are going to the richest 1 percent, median household incomes continues to drop and the number of Americans in poverty continues to rise.
It is widely recognized that economists are not very good at economics. That is why we are looking at a decade of economic stagnation with tens of millions of people being unemployed or underemployed in Europe and the United States.
If economists were better at economics, central banks in the United States and Europe would have recognized the housing bubbles that were driving economies in the last decade. They would have taken steps to rein them in before they grew so large that their inevitable collapse would sink the world economy.
We recently had the opportunity to see that economists are no better at moral philosophy than economics. In a recent paper, Harvard economics professor Greg Mankiw, the former chief economist to President Bush and one of the country’s most prominent conservative economists, compared progressive taxation to forcefully removing a person’s kidney for a transplant.
That is probably not how most people would view imposing a high tax rate on rich people.
» Read more about: Economic Inequality: The Heart (and Kidney) of the Matter »
Last Friday, my wife, Susan, was out where Santa Monica meets Brentwood to tell the President not to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. No one caught a glimpse of him, of course. What she did see were scores of expensive cars moving down San Vicente – black, big SUVs, as usual, and top-of-the-line Mercedes and BMWs but also Jaguars, Ferraris, a Rolls, even a Lamborghini, plus others she couldn’t name. These cars begin at $75,000 and go to the mid-six figures.
Also trying to wind though the traffic maze were the workers, gardeners in small, beat-up Toyota pickups, house maids in compacts from 20 years ago, bunches of Latinas waiting at the bus stop for public transportation and delayed by the President’s presence at a fundraiser in a nearby home. The juxtaposition of the vehicles of the very wealthy and those of their servants was what she found remarkable about the experience.
» Read more about: Santa Monica’s Lethal Shootings and the Culture of Economic Desperation »
In the previous week we reposted this fact-packed, viral video (more than four million views at last count) about economic inequality in America. Its deft use of graphics makes this a handy resource — and worth a second look.