Criminal Minds, S2E1, Quote 1

"Facetime Fools" by Jen Sorensen

Hector and the Search for Happiness, Quote 4

The Function of Police in Modern Society: Peace or Control?

A good read on creation of modern police force. Before the creation of police forces, & their resultant brutality, societies used to take care of miscreants in their midst through a mix of force & rehabilitation. Then came the modern police force, which was created by elites to control the poor masses of the society. I will extend it even further & say that then those elites started to control the government to control the masses, too, & hence, laws are made & enforced in today's society, all over the world, to effectively control the poor public.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BL-Hn_XjlS0

JAISAL NOOR, TRNN PRODUCER: The ongoing debate and protest around police brutality and how best to hold law enforcement accountable generally have one underlying assumption: the police’s role is to serve and protect the population. Police reform advocates are demanding reviewing police practices and increasing accountability through body cameras or civilian review boards with teeth.

A lot of people have told us in Baltimore and around the country that they need police, because the same people that are being affected by police brutality also live in high-crime areas, where policies have created a cycle of violence and the war on drugs is raging, there’s mass incarceration. And these areas are dangerous. People are driven to violence and desperation. And they need police to protect themselves. How do you respond to those arguments? And why do you think it’s important to bring up the history of police when having these discussions today?

SAMUEL MITRANI, ASSOC. PROF. HISTORY, COLLEGE OF DUPAGE: Well, I don’t think that people are wrong to say that we need police. We live in a very violent society with a lot of poverty, with increasing inequality, and all the problems that the society creates lead to more and more violence, the people who are ground up by the system. So I can totally understand people’s desire to be protected from those problems.

But I think the problem is the way that the police system that exists in this country was created isn’t actually to solve those problems. And I think the reason people say they need police is because that’s the only thing we can conceive of, it’s the only answer we’re given to the problems of crime, of violence, and really, I think, ultimately of poverty. But I don’t think the police are a very good solution to those problems. I think we really need to think about other kinds of systems. And I don’t think you could have a society like ours that grinds up so many people and that doesn’t defend itself with something like the police. But I think we need to understand where they come from.

NOOR: And so talk about where they come from, because I think a lot of people will be surprised to learn that the modern police force is only about 150 years old. There was no police force as we know it until the middle of the 19th century. Talk about where they came from and why they were instituted. And also I think people will be interested to know what form of police and law enforcement existed before the modern police force.

MITRANI: Well, I think there’s two different systems, if you’re talking about the United States, that existed in the 19th century. One was a system in the South which was really designed to control slaves, and it came out of slave patrols. In the North, in cities, you got police as a wage labor economy developed.

So I actually want to start by talking about the system that existed before, which is more or less a system of elected officials responsible for enforcing order. But they didn’t have a lot of separation from the population. So you’d have a constable elected in a small town, but that person would make their living by having their own farm. And they’d be called on when necessary. They could raise a posse. But the whole tradition of having a posse was a tradition of having the population itself be organized to deal with a specific, immediate problem–there’s a murderer loose, you know who did it, you have to catch the person.

That’s very, very different from the system we have now, with a military force of people whose professional training makes them separated from the population. They wear uniforms. They are full-time police officers. That’s something which really emerged as you got huge numbers of people in big cities, like New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, starting in the 1820s, ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, who we re no longer linked to the elite.

At an earlier time in the cities, you’d have a whole idea that people could move up. You started off as an apprentice. You could become an artisan. There was a much smaller group of people who were totally separated from that path and the people who were separated from that path, but there was some idea of controlling, didn’t live that far from other people, who were much more embedded in the society. But by the 1850s especially, you got more and more people who really had very little chance of moving up, who were going to be workers their whole lives. And this is especially true of immigrants coming from Ireland, coming from Germany, coming from other parts of Europe at that time in the northern cities.

And so people who were business people, wealthy people, were really scared–oh, man, in this city, there’s a whole huge number of people over there. We don’t know what they’re doing. They’re totally out of our control. They don’t necessarily like what’s going on, because they’re paying them extremely low wages. Many of them are forced into prostitution. So in that situation, elites develop the idea of a police force to put some control on those people.
...

Definitely true. And also there’s plenty of racism against free people of color in the North during this time period, who had a better situation than slaves, but it’s not like they were treated equally to the white population, or even to the immigrants at that time. But in the cities like Chicago, their numbers are very small at the time period I’m talking about.

NOOR: And so talk about what was happening. Talk about the social turmoil, especially in the later half of the 19th century, in big cities like Chicago. And even in Baltimore, we had huge strikes here as well, and in New York, of course. So talk about what the turmoil revolved around and why the elites felt so threatened during this time period.

MITRANI: Well, there’s a basic truth, which is nobody really likes having a job. I mean, basically, having a job kind of sucks if what you’re going to do all day every day is go to work for somebody who pays you just enough to survive. You have no chance of owning your own business, which increasingly became true at all these cities–in Baltimore, for sure.

So people resented that, and they organized. And they had a preconceived idea that they were citizens of this republic, especially the white people who had been raised this idea, and they had the idea that they had the right to some better situation.

So coming out of the Civil War you had big organizing campaigns, big strikes, big conflicts over this new wage labor economy. In 1867 in Chicago there’s a general straight strike for the eight-hour day. Then, in 1877, there was a huge strike, which started on the railroads, and it reached big proportions in a bunch of cities across the country.

Actually, Baltimore is one of the cities where it get the most violent. And Baltimore at that time basically didn’t really have a modern police force. And so the strikers were put down with the National Guard. The National Guard came into Baltimore, shot down quite a few people ... . Chicago already had a police force that had been created in the few decades before, with a lot of violence put down those strikes. And after that, the business people who had been suffering from the strikes, who’d been struck, they raised from their own pockets enormous sums of money. In Chicago they bought the police Gatling guns, they bought them artillery pieces, they bought them muskets in order to make sure the population could be kept under control, because they were really scared.
...

Now, what’s interesting is, ... , because as this wage labor economy was developing, that was also the time when you had a big increase in crime and you had a big increase in the numbers of people who were more or less pushed out of the system, who had no easy place, no easy way to make a living. So you had more petty crime, you had more prostitution, you had more street crime of all kinds in the late 19th century then you had in the first half of the 19th century in all these big urban cities. And so people also felt the need for some protection from this kind of disorder at that moment.

So, in Chicago, at least in the 1880s, some liberal politicians made an attempt to make the police more serve the population a little bit, reestablish some legitimacy. They did this by providing some services, like taking people to the hospital. They really publicized the things they did that were needed. And they especially developed this new ideology of order, which said what everybody says today: we need the police. They’re the thin blue line protecting civilization from anarchy. And we can’t possibly live without them; otherwise, things will go out of control. And this is something that got reinforced, especially after this Haymarket bombing in 1886, when there was another huge strike wave across the country and in Chicago. There was a bomb that went off that killed seven police officers. The aftermath of that: this idea of the police as the defenders of order and civilization against these crazy anarchists who are class conscious became implanted in a lot of the population’s mind. But there were still lots of people who resisted that, who organized in unions, who organized to resist police brutality (they didn’t use the term then, but that’s what they were resisting), and these people pushed the police back time and again.
...

I think it’s a deep problem that there’s no easy solution to. We have a society that rests on violence in 100 different ways, starting with the military overseas with all the people in prisons. And how to keep this huge, violent system in place? Well, you have thousands and thousands of men with guns who are armed and trained to do so. But you also have to make them legitimate.

NOOR: And so, tying this back to today, there’s a lot of well-intentioned, serious activists around this country that want to live in a more peaceful society, and they want police to be held accountable. What lessons of the past do they need to understand to move the conversation forward? ‘Cause right now we’re stuck in a system where people are trying to, some would argue, put Band-Aids over a gaping hole that is the issues we have with law enforcement today, the killing of unarmed black men around this country and the numerous cases of brutality that are ongoing.

MITRANI: ... I think the problem is we live in this kind of society.

I think really that the needs of working-class people and of poor people need to be put first. This country has plenty of money that people shouldn’t be pushed on the streets, which need to have afterschool programs and very fully funded public schools all over the country that can get kids off the streets and give them a decent job. I think it, actually, everybody in the country should have the right to a job that provides enough money that you can live a decent life. This country is perfectly rich enough to have that.

That’s not on the table right now, unfortunately, but if you really want to talk about solving the problem of crime, you’ve got to address the problems that create crime. And I don’t think that the police do that. The police are a system that has violence to deal with the immediate problem created by a criminal right now in front of you.

So what I would say for activists is to push for all these issues and see how they’re related. I think that the more that the needs of working-class people, the needs of ordinary people can be pushed and put first, the more that we can demand the things that we actually need and not accept that the needs of business people and of bankers should come first, the more we have a chance of dealing with the problems in front of us. But that’s not so easy to do.

NOOR: ... I wanted to end with bringing up two points. One is the racial, the historical racial animosity law enforcement has to people of color, especially African-American people. And there were moments where police acted in solidarity with striking workers and the working class, and those police officers were either fired or removed from the police force in other ways. Can you briefly touch upon both those points?

MITRANI: Those are two very big points. The first point, I think, is central to the problem today. I think we had a situation where the police that I first started talking about, that developed in the 19th century, really developed in reaction to the development of a wage-labor economy with immigrant workers. But in the 20th century in the North–in the South the story is somewhat different–really the key story is a great migration of black people into the northern cities to form a key section of the American working class, and then to be the people who are the last hired, the first fired, who face all the problems created by the society first of all. And so the police have been used to keep that population in line, really since the 20 century. And you’ve seen this time and again with the rights in Chicago in 1919 through the ’50s, through the era of the black movement in the ’60s and ’70s, when in Chicago–I’m sure people know about the police murder of Fred Hampton, led by the state’s attorney, to really try to put a lid on that movement. I think the current system of mass incarceration is in part a reaction to that movement and an attempt to get young black people, especially young black men, off the streets. So I think that’s absolutely central to any discussion of this.
...

And on the one hand, police are workers. They’re hired to do a job. And that creates all kinds of problems for the police themselves, the same kinds of problems that other workers can face. They can face very difficult working conditions, etc. But the nature of their job kind counterposes them to the population every single day. And I think many police officers start a few people through a very negative, almost cynical lens. I don’t think most police officers don the uniform thinking, what I’m going to go do is brutalize people. No. But what you’re forced to do every day kind of counterposes you to the population. And I think in that context it’s too much to expect very many police officers to side with the population. It would take a real act of bravery for a police officer to do so, and they would face some real repercussions, although it’s happened before. The Afro-American Patrolmen’s League in Chicago is an example of that, when you had a big mass movement and the man named Renault Robinson challenged a lot of what was going on with police brutality in Chicago. I know this story in Baltimore less. But it’s possible. But I don’t think we can ... expect it to be the rule.

Criminal Minds S01E22 Quote

Identity and Collective Denial - Lia Tarachansky on RAI (3/3)

Nothing much to say for this piece of the interview. I only wanted to put this interview here to show how much Israel is a racist society, devoid of any & all social mobility among people. There are many Jewish groups in Israel, who are treated just like caste system in India, and at the same time, Israel needs Palestine & this ongoing conflict with Palestine to keep itself alive.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS36Io_3LOA

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: How does it get to that point? What is it about–where, in terms of the evolution of the Israeli identity, does this absolute overt racism come from? ...

LIA TARACHANSKY, ISRAEL-PALESTINE CORRESPONDENT, TRNN: As an Israeli Jew, this is the stuff that keeps me up at night. Also, literally, I’ve been robbed of my anonymity on many fronts. And there’s a lot of it that creeps into your life.

But the way I understand it is, like, it’s a combination of two things. I think what you’re seeing on the streets today in Israel, with the constant street-level violence and racism and attacks on anyone who questions anything, attacks on leftists, attacks on Palestinians, that it is the natural conclusion of the Zionist idea coming to its most screeching, screaming peak in having to defend itself. And this is part of the ethnocracy we’re talking about. This is the natural conclusion.

What is Zionism? Zionism is the idea that the Jews have a homeland in historic Palestine, in the ancient land of Canaan. That’s spiritual Zionism. Practical political Zionism means that the Jews have more right to be on this land, and then they must be a Jewish majority on this land. How do you do that in a place that was never empty, in a place that, first of all, was already home to competing national movements, that was already engaged in very rich and ancient culture, both from the Ottoman Empire and the Arab invasions, and was–this place is the crossroads of human migration. How do you come to this place, which is in the middle, between Asia, Europe, and Africa, and you say, no more, here’s our walls, and we’re building a wall with Syria and Lebanon and Jordan and Egypt, and no one but Jews can get in? As I’m sure you know, there’s no immigration to Israel unless you’re a Jew. You can’t immigrate, you can’t come in. It’s a state for Jews and only Jews, and we will eventually get rid of anyone who is not a Jew. That is political Zionism today.

And the disparity between understanding that this is what it is here in North America as I’m touring my film and I’m realizing how few people understand what it is and the reality on the ground, this idea playing itself out to its screeching peak, is–the disparity is astounding and playing itself out is incredibly violent and intense. And so, today, if I was to talk to you on the bus or I was out walking down the street with you and I was saying all these things, there’s a very good idea that we would be beaten by the time we get to the end of the street, because there is now so much threat to that idea surviving. So that’s the first thing.

The second thing is colossal disappointment over the so-called peace process finally completely dying. There was a little bit of hope with Obama, Kerry, a little bit of hope with George Mitchell. It was kind of like no one really believed that they would do anything. A lot of people said, well, at least something’s happening. America, having taken the side of Israel on all of the peace negotiations, having put all its capital on the side of the Israeli negotiators, all of its weapons on the side of Israel’s negotiators, and then sat in the middle calling itself the unbiased mitigator in this negotiation, which we’re doomed to end, gave us a false sense of hope. It has built endless institutions in Palestine. It built a government called the Palestinian Authority. It gave that Palestinian Authority billions in donations. And it’s based on hot air and nothing else.

And that thing finally collapsing now, over the last year, and the taking root of nonviolent movements, effective nonviolent movements, such as the fight of the Palestinian political prisoners with ongoing hunger strikes, such as the boycott movement and the antifascist movement inside of Israel, and the most important of which, the rising of national identity amongst Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and inside Israel, and the linking of these three peoples irregardless of who are their leaderships, this is the most important element in the picture.

So the total disappointment with the peace process and the collapse of hope that the conflict will ever end gave rise to a new kind of wave of understanding the conflict is never going to end. The generals and the capitalists that are sitting over there and are making money off the war don’t give a shit about us. Israel saw a huge social justice movement that we’ve covered here on The Real News for two years. That social justice came and fell, and nothing changed except there was a huge change in the public identity, in the public, the way people see Israel, and the way that the people see that their fight is not just with the Palestinians, it’s also with the government, and it’s also with each other. It has further segregated us inside Israel.

And so all these things together burst out. And ... people look at this war that happened this summer, this attack on Gaza, and they say, oh, it was really the worst attack on Gaza so far. They were right. But this attack was not just this summer. What happened this summer was, yes, 51 days of war, but it actually started not even with the teenagers getting kidnapped; it started with the Palestinian hunger strikers in the beginning of the year.

What we were seeing in January a year ago is that the African refugees were rising up, demanding freedom, because they were being shipped off to a massive prison in the south of the country, something very similar to a concentration camp for African refugees. So they were rising up demanding freedom. The Palestinian hunger strikers went on a hunger strike and were very close to getting achievements with that hunger strike. Hamas was on the verge of signing unity with Fatah, which would’ve been the last thing that would’ve saved it. And this was when we went to war.

So, since then, and if you were actually following what’s happening on the ground like we were on The Real News, that’s when the street-level violence started. And the war ended at the end of August, but the street-level violence never ended. In fact, it’s getting worse day to day to day. You know, a few weeks ago, a Palestinian bus driver, who drives an Israeli bus in an Israeli bus company called Egged, was beaten to death and hung in the bus that he was driving, because he’s Palestinian. This is one of the things.

Now, there’s no doubt in any Palestinian’s mind that I’ve met that he was beaten to death and hung. But the police was claiming that he killed himself, and most Israelis believe that he killed himself. And this sparked a wave of bus drivers rising up against insecurity on the job, demanding that the bus company either separate them from the people who get on the–the passengers, or get a security guard, because the Palestinian bus drivers in the Israeli bus come company were saying that they were experiencing daily racist attacks, daily racist assaults. And the company refused. And forty of them have quit. So a third of the Palestinian workers who worked in the Israeli bus company quit because of racism and violence.

That’s where we are today. So six months of endless street-level violence.

JAY: Are there internal factors that you can see amongst Jewish Israelis that will change things? I mean, like, I interviewed quite a few families who lost people in 9/11 in New York, and I was told at least half the families either joined or supported the Not In My Name campaign. They didn’t want revenge. There were saying, don’t start another war, this is not going to bring my loved ones back. And they started getting their head around the context of why it happened. And there’s other examples in the world, including Palestinians, who have lost children, but they get the context. They don’t just want blind revenge.

But one gets the feeling that in Israel there’s been kind of a tipping point where the majority, even a preponderance of people are saying, they’re out to kill us, let’s kill them first, kind of end the conversation.

TARACHANSKY: Yeah. The consensus in Israel has now gotten so bad that the general consensus debate’s between expel the rest of them or kill the rest of them.

JAY: It’s a real fascistization of public opinion.

TARACHANSKY: Well, we saw, during the war, protests where ... people holding up signs during the protest, reading “one nation, one army, one leader”.
...

So I think that in America, in North America, there’s a lot of this mentality of there’s a problem, what’s the solution. We are light years away from resolving the conflict. I think a lot of people here in North America think that we’ve always been in conflict. But if you look at the history of Israel-Palestine, the history of this specific geographical spot, conflict over the centuries has actually been an exception. Peace and coexistence has been the rule. And our conflict is only about 70 years old, and we’ve already gone through huge changes as societies. And so let’s think a little bit before we start talking about solutions.

But what I can tell you is that profound changes are happening inside Israeli society, putting aside the Palestinian conflict for a second or the conflict for the Palestinians. Israel ... is a very segregated society. You have the Russians here, you have the Ashkenazis there, you have the Mizrahim here, and then you have the Orthodox there, and Ethiopians here, and so on and so forth. And inside the Mizrahim you have the Persians, and then you have the Iraqis, and you have the Moroccans. And there’s very little mixing. Israel has almost zero social mobility. If you are born poor, you will die poor. You will not come out of the ghetto. And the media in Israel focuses on a couple of neighborhoods in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. And that’s it. What happens outside of these communities, what happens of Haifa, what happens in Palestinian majority towns, what happens in poor peripheral Mizrahi neighborhoods–completely absent.

That doesn’t mean that nothing’s happening. What is happening is that these segregated communities–and I think it’s a result of the social justice movement that was in 2011, 2012, when we saw the biggest protests in the country’s history, half a million people on the streets in Tel Aviv one night in a country of 7 million people. That’s a lot of people on the streets. As a result of that, people started looking around them, and for the first time identity politics is becoming something that is on the fore. So the Mizrahim are saying that–the Jews that came from Arab countries are saying, we’ve been oppressed all along for the Zionist Ashkenazi project. What about us? To the level of forcing the president of Israel, Reuven Rivlin, to apologize for Ashkenazi European condescendence towards the Mizrahim, something that would have been unimaginable. We’re seeing the Orthodox digging their heels further as new laws inspired by Yair Lapid’s party are forcing the Orthodox to go to the army, makes them more united and further in conflict with the society.

So a lot of these groups, for various complex reasons that we don’t have time to discuss here, are getting more insular and more against each other. And so this is–I think this is a very important change. It’s because for so many years, with the illusion of the peace process, we were not looking at the real problems inside Israel.

JAY: Well, I was going to say, somebody once told me, ... that if it wasn't for the external fight with the Palestinians, Israel would rip itself to shreds, especially the secular-Orthodox split.

TARACHANSKY: Yeah. And this is what we’re seeing. Israel is now ripping itself apart. And fascism is celebrating in the ruins.

Hector and the Search for Happiness, Quote 3

We have to go through hardships & unhappiness to see what happiness really is. At the same time, sometimes, we also need to face or make undesirable choices; the choices, which we know, beforehand, will make us unhappy at that moment, but it is better to face that unhappy or undesirable moment than to keep suffering, while keep a "happy" facade on our faces.

IMDB          Rotten Tomatoes          Wikipedia

Criminal Minds S1E21 Quote 2

Hector and the Search for Happiness, Quote 2

Sometimes, in life, it's indeed better to not know the whole story, because then, you lose all hope, & become hopeless & bitter in your attitude. You might even become pessimist. Even if we are suffering from a bad situation, we still hope for the best & pray for the good times to come. Sometimes, not knowing the whole story, helps us enjoy & appreciate the present moment. Perhaps, that's why, God kept some important information away from us, like, our time of death.

IMDB          Rotten Tomatoes          Wikipedia

Capitalism's Stunning Contradiction

A good discussion on how capitalism & capitalists keep exploiting the general public. Of course, politicians are in their pockets, too, which means that these capitalists also control the government, which is supposed to look after the general public in a democracy.

Capitalism is only going to concentrate the wealth in a few hands & make the general public poorer & poorer. After all, there's no limit to the human greed. Greedy capitalists will keep taking money from the public, & keep making it poorer & poorer, without any regard to general living standards to their workers. At the same time, I am not defending the communism because we have seen its problems in Russia & China; far too much inefficiency & control when everything is handed over to the government.

The root cause of world's modern problems with resource depletion, poverty, & mass unemployment is this continual & increasing greed of capitalism. It is an unstoppable train, which will continue on, until & unless, the world put back religion & ethics in its economic system.

This Earth can definitely support a lot more people compared to current population, but it cannot support people when the resources are being depleted to make a few people on the top of the pyramid richer & richer. This world cannot support more people when those rich people keep hoarding cash & splurging on expensive, but useless, items, like buying football clubs, billion-$$$ mansions, whole islands, etc. With religion (any religion for that matter) & ethics, instead of throwing away their money on these useless materialistic things, they could invest in improving people's lives by investing in medicine, food, agriculture, & alleviating poverty.

Essentially, the world has not changed in the past millennia or so. Brutal monarchs, then, used to forcibly take their public's money & spend on themselves. Monarchs of current times are these super-rich elites (the "one-percenters") who keep hoarding money by drip-feeding their workers & spending that money on themselves. Instead of spending the money on charities, it would be better to not cut costs so much that the general public suffers cuts in paycheques & unemployment, in the first place. Those monarchs were the government themselves & current "monarchs" control the government.

The world is only going to get worse & worse, unless & until, people start involving religion & ethics in their daily lives & businesses, instead of a weekly attendance in a place of worship. Religion & ethics will help putting the fear of death & answering to a higher authority in the people's hearts, & let them think hard before brutally cutting down jobs, & costs, to ultimately make themselves even more super richer, & spend money frivolously on completely unnecessary items in their lives.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xglK2rdPmg4

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: I think it's getting clear to a lot of people that capitalism is out of solutions within its own framework. I mean, first of all, in terms of financial reform, there's been nothing serious enough. It's pretty clear there are still enormous financial institutions that are still speculating wildly, and the same stuff that happened in '07 and '08 is likely to happen again. It's kind of a question of when rather than if.

RICHARD WOLFF, PROF. EMERITUS OF ECONOMICS, UMASS AMHERST: That's right.

JAY: The issue of demand in the economy, low wages and such, nothing's changed. And climate change, capitalism, so far, at least, does not consider it a threat to capitalism to have global warming, and they're not really getting serious about it. So, I mean, are you finding that there's this sense of that, that there aren't solutions here anymore?

WOLFF: I think two things are happening. The one that's most important is that as the crisis since 2007 lingers and lingers, this crisis that was not supposed to happen, that was not supposed to cut so deep, continues to do all of that and to last and last and resist government efforts to change it, that people are shifting and beginning to want to look beyond the crisis years since 2007 and ask the question whether maybe we're not in a bigger, longer-term dilemma for capitalism. And I think we are. And if I could sketch it for a moment, think it would help people to see this as a momentary downturn within a longer crisis.

And here's how I would summarize it. For the first 200, 250 years of capitalism, which begins in England, goes to Western Europe, and then to North America and Japan, the capitalist system, it concentrated in those countries, concentrated its factories, its offices, and stores there where it began. And it turned the rest of the world--Asia, Africa, Latin America--into a hinterland to provide the people, to provide the food, to provide the raw materials. And that was how the world was globally organized.

Then in the 1970s something radically changed. With a jet engine, you could get anywhere in the world in a matter of hours. With modern telecommunications and the computer, you could monitor a factory in Shanghai from Cincinnati as easily as you could manage a factory down the street in Cincinnati. And so capitalists--and I want this really to be driven home if I can--capitalists in the 1970s in Western Europe, North America, and Japan have basically said to the United States and Western Europe and Japan, goodbye, we're leaving, we are abandoning you. You are not where the profit is. The profit is in those places we can now go to where we pay a small fraction of those wages, where we can operate with impunity, where the poverty of these societies, itself a product of all of this, makes them desperate to have the jobs that we can provide. It's a perfect scenario. We made a lot of money for 200 years in the West, and now we're leaving.

And I think the emblematic city that kind of shows this is Detroit, a place that was the apogee, the peak of capitalist efficiency in the 1960s, sustaining 2 million people population, today 700,000, a city that has been literally ripped apart and destroyed because three corporations decided, for profit, to leave that place and say goodbye and leave behind the desolation, the unemployment, the collapsed housing, and all the rest of a city and now has to be the largest bankruptcy of any American urban area in our history.

I think the capitalists of the world are saying to Western Europe, North America, and Japan, we were willing to give you higher wages because we were able to reorganize the planet for 200 years. Now our future is in the areas that are cheap for us--the rest of the world--and we're abandoning you.
...

... So basically they're saying to the West, we're leaving. Now, of course, if you make it worth our while not to leave by bringing the wages and the costs, well, we might reconsider. But then what they're saying to the American people is, you can have a choice of a slow decline as we leave or a rapid decline to slow our departure. This is an unbelievable proposition to present to Western Europe, Japan, and the United States and I think will shape the basic political struggles in all these places for years to come.

JAY: But it's so self-destructive even for capitalism, because now you've taken a market that was the consumer of last resort for the world and turning people into increasingly low-wage workers. You're going to sell your profits where? The places that are already low-wage workers? I mean, it's really completely--.

WOLFF: You know, it's wonderful, 'cause as you introduced me as a Marxist, Marx was fond of saying that capitalists are caught in a stunning contradiction. Every capitalist tries to lower the wage costs, reduce the workers, substitute a machine, cut the wages, never wanting to face the fact that if all capitalists are trapped in a system where they're systematically reducing the wages, then they won't be able to sell what those wage workers are producing. And if you don't face that, you're caught in the contradiction that what the system makes you do undoes you by the absence of anyone to buy this stuff. And there we are, back to the naked, basic contradiction of a system that doesn't want to face that it has these kinds of internal problems.

JAY: So in terms of long-term decline, why isn't this cyclical? We've seen these things over the last century. Why is this any different?

WOLFF: Well, I think that we have the cyclicals, but the one thing that I find so interesting is that this one has certain unique characteristics. It was really out of the blue in the sense that almost nobody saw this kind of thing coming. Everyone assured us, not just the president and the politicians, but the economists, that it wouldn't last long. That was wrong. That it wouldn't cut deep. That was wrong.

But I think the thing that really strikes me is the kind of utter failure of anyone in this system to cope with this other than the 1 percent. The politicians can't figure out a solution. The bankers can't, as you rightly put it--for example, the banks that were too big to fail without exception are now bigger than they were then. Nobody is solving it. And even the mass of people are like deer caught in the headlights not knowing which way to go. In the '30s, after all, they joined unions, they joined socialist and communist parties, and that made a difference. At this point, there is the behavior of a system that kind of knows that this isn't just a temporary crisis, there's something fundamental shifting. And yet no one quite knows what to do.

JAY: ... I've always been struck that one of the things that Marx and Engels said that I think gets completely underestimated is that socialism isn't just some good idea. It's not a better policy that we could adopt. It's something that actually grows within capitalism. You get these massive enterprises, and they're fabulously well-planned. Like, you take Walmart, you get a toothpaste off of a shelf in Walmart, they know to get another toothpaste thing going somewhere in China. But the individual, as you say, the individual enterprises try to drive down wages, but they also get extremely efficient, and especially with computerization and digitization. Walmart is a planned economy.

But it's, like, the biggest private employer. I mean, Marx's whole point is this is actually--this is the seeds of socialism, except they're privately owned.

WOLFF: That's right. They're privately owned. They're driven by the maximization of profit for a tiny fraction of the population. And then you can't be surprised that the capacity, what they're capable of doing, which is a staggering saving of labor for the community, ends up not saving the labor for the community at all, because the whole point of it is to gather absurd wealth in the tiny number of hands. And Marx's point was this is an irrationality that even the best public relations cannot forever cover over.

And I think we're in a moment where, both in the short-run crisis and this longer-run decline, the irrationalities, the contradictions--. Look, basically capitalism is saying to particularly the American working class, for 200 years, we really exploited you on the job, but we gave you rising standard of living. Compensation of an awful day was that you could go someplace at the end of the day and have something called a happy hour to console you for the unhappy hours prior. Now capitalism is saying to you, we're going to exploit the hell out of you, but we're not giving you a rising standard of living. We're actually giving you a falling one. We're condemning your students to debt they can't handle. We're taking away the benefits. We're taking away all of the job prospects and hopes for the younger generation. We're going to work you on the job more hours than ever, and we're going to give you less for it. Whatever you think about the past, I'm not clear that the American working class will find that an acceptable offer.

"The Long Shadow": Race, Class and Privilege in Baltimore (4/5)

This discussion is good enough that I don't have to say much. This should be an eye-opening discussion for those people who think racism & discrimination no longer exist in 21st century North America or anywhere else in the developed world. Racism & discrimination in every sphere of life is alive, & being vigorously practiced, all over the West / Global North / developed world.

As per the discussion, social mobility is restricted, or at least, severely handicapped, due to this discrimination, & the general public incorrectly thinks that African-Americans, or every non-white / non-Caucasian, is poor or destitute because he / she is lazy or does not know how to find jobs. It's not that black & white.

Non-whites / non-Caucasians are hard-working & studious, & want to find gainful employment, but they are being restricted from doing such. But they & their families need that money, too, so they get involved in criminal endeavours, for which, society treats them very harshly. Severe punishment is not going to make the problem of people turning towards crimes, but eliminating the root cause will solve that problem, & the root cause is racism & discrimination in the society.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FBcnrDf_l0

JAISAL NOOR, TRNN PRODUCER: Out of the 790 Baltimore children you surveyed in 1982, 33 moved from low-income to high-income brackets. What was different about them? ...

KARL ALEXANDER, JOHN DEWEY PROF. OF SOCIOLOGY, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIV.: Well, let me say, just to clarify, that's not income. The way we classify their families and themselves as young adults, it's socioeconomic standing, which is a combination of income, occupational status, and level of education. So it's all three of those things combined. And that movement up, what we do is we classify families as low, medium, and high in terms of their socioeconomic standing, and we do that for the parents and we do it for the children. And then we cross-classify the two so we can see how many children went from low to high, how many children went from high to low, and so forth.

And so, yes, we find that just 33 of the children who grew up in lower socioeconomic status families made it into the higher realm as adults. The number of children who started out in favorable family circumstances and dropped to the lowest level, there's just nine of them. So there is upward mobility, there's downward mobility, but that's relatively infrequent ... .

So there's children who moved up from the lowest, from the bottom category to the highest of our classification. That was 9.5% ... . The ones who dropped down from high to low was just 6.3% of the group that started out high fell to the lowest category. ... But that 9.5% moving from low to high is contrasted with 41% who started low and stayed low, so when there's a fourfold difference in the likelihood of moving up from lower origins to the high destinations. The 6.5% who started out high and dropped low, that's against 50% who started high and stayed high. So that's more than almost a tenfold difference.

So ... that actually does a good job of kind of capturing the whole experience globally over the span of years, 'cause it anchors children in where they started in life in terms of their family conditions and then compares it to where they wound up in life in terms of their own conditions as young adults. And the predominant tendency is to stay where you started. Some people move up, some people drop down, but a predominant tendency is to stay where you started. And that's what really the "long shadow" imagery is intended to convey. Economists that look at these mobility patterns, they call it stickiness at the extreme. You know, you're kind of stuck where you started out.

How did the people move up who did make it out? ... the stories are so different one from the other it's hard to generalize. But some did it by being successful in school, ... , the way your parents probably told you to do it and the way my parents taught me to do it, ... , stay the course, study hard, come to school prepared, and do what your teachers tell you, and you'll be successful. Some of them did that. ... We have others who have moved up by being entrepreneurial, doing well without the advantages of a college degree. ...

So the paths to moving up--now, there are different ways you can do this, and many of our study participants have been quite resourceful and energetic and entrepreneurial and have managed to rise above. But, again, the predominant tendency, the pattern, is to not move up. If you start out in a disadvantaged family, the likelihood is that you're going to be in a disadvantaged family yourself as a young adult. So there's movement up, but there's also stability, and the stability in terms of your position in the stratification, hierarchy ... . Stability is the norm. Most people stay where they start. And the ones who break out and are successful, we applaud them, and it's great to see that, but you'd like to have it from more than just 9.5%. You'd like it to be ... 100% if you could. But short of that, you know, something. You'd like to see greater opportunities for children to get ahead in life who start out kind of behind.

NOOR: ... So, recently Paul Ryan, he said that inner-city men are lazy; and that's why they're not successful, that's why they don't have jobs: they don't want to get jobs. And what has happened since you started this study is that you've had under the Reagan administration a massive amount of cuts in social spending, cuts in social security and welfare in the Clinton years, and the escalation of the war on drugs, mass incarceration. What is your response to Paul Ryan? What are your thoughts? And this is also a common idea throughout society.

ALEXANDER: Yeah, no, it is a common idea. It's widely held. And I think it's just--it's certainly too superficial, and it might be just out-and-out wrong. Certainly as a blanket statement, broadly applicable, it's certainly wrong. We certainly don't see this in the experiences of our group. They try to get ahead by getting additional education, and there are just obstacles that stand in their way, so they're unsuccessful. They try to find jobs, but they don't have family members or neighbors or ins with the boss that can help them get into the door.
...

... I think, as a social social concern, I think much attention is focused on the limited opportunities for African Americans. But it's absolutely wrong about all inner-city people, 'cause one of the things that our book establishes is that the whites of lower background have are much more successful in terms of finding stable and well-paying employment, good-paying employment, much more successful than African-American counterparts and the women of either--, black and white.

... it's clear that they, African-American men in particular, lag behind, and it's challenging for them. And then their challenges kind of trickle down to affect women who are trying to establish lives and take care of families, many of them on their own. The national literature says that African-American men are more likely to apply for jobs than are white men when they need them and are eager to find employment. That much is clear.

It's also clear that the stain of a criminal justice record is a greater impediment for African-American men [than] for white men. We see that in our research, but it's also seen nationally.

So I think there's a relevant history here that we haven't even touched upon. But it has to do with the way opportunities open up in the kind of blue-collar workforce. And it goes back to the World War II industrial era, industrial boom. So what it wasn't too long ago, I think, that Baltimore was the economic engine or powerhouse of the Maryland economy. It's easy to forget, but--because we've been mired in these difficult times for decades now, but in the World War II era, when during the height of the war mobilization--Beth Steel, for example, was the largest steel mill in the world, with 35,000 workers, and now it's being sold off for scrap. That was a time--some of the literature refers to this as the moment of the blue-collar elite, where you could find steady work and high-paying work on the assembly lines, in the steel mills, on the docks. So there was a lot of good, steady work to be found.

But Baltimore was highly segregated during that time, and most of that good, steady work was available to blue-collar whites and not blue-collar African Americans, who were relegated to the least-promising kind of employment. They did all the dirty work and the nonskilled laboring work. And so we're talking three generations back. We're talking about the--our study, youngsters' grandparents.

Also there were restrictive residential covenants. So the white working-class in Baltimore were substantially isolated in residential enclaves. If you know the area locally, the first thing you think about when you--what comes to mind when you think about whites in Baltimore are the upscale neighborhoods that are exclusive--the Roland Parks, the Guilfords, the Homelands. But in point of fact, there are working-class, white working-class neighborhoods scattered throughout the city that also are long-standing and very much insulated by residential segregation--Curtis Bay, Brooklyn, and there's over on the west side (near the B&O Railroad Museum) Pigtown, Sandtown, low-income working-class, white working-class neighborhoods that are insulated in terms of being racially segregated.

So you put these two things together in a historic perspective, you've got really a booming industry of high-skill, high-pay blue-collar work and whites having access, greater access to that kind of employment, and you have segregated residential neighborhoods, where people, blacks and whites, don't mix and mingle. They didn't back then, and they don't do much better today. White parents who have social networks through those in the workplace or in the neighborhood, a lot of employment in the non-college workforce is word-of-mouth, ... recommendation from a friend or a cousin or a neighbor that can help open doors. And working-class whites are much better able to provide those opportunities for their children than are African Americans, than are working-class African-American parents.

So what happens is, in the historic context, you see--in the book, we quote a sociologist by the name of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. He's a sociologist at Duke University. And here's the quote. It says, the racial practices and mechanisms that have kept blacks subordinated have changed from overtly and eminently racist to covert and indirectly racist.

So I think this history is where the overtly and eminently racist practices come into play that excluded African-Americans from high-wage work, blue-collar work, and that excluded them from neighborhoods where they could develop social contacts that would be helpful to their children. That's 50 years ago. But if you fast-forward to today, you still have these same isolated neighborhoods, and you still have word-of-mouth hiring for these kinds of--on the construction sites and whatnot. And so white parents are better able to help their children get this kind of work. And they do it. They do it.

I'm going to kind of in a very roundabout way get back to your Paul Ryan quote. The white guys are working hard and doing rather well, inner-city white guys working hard and doing rather well. Because they have these network advantages through their parents, relatives, and friends, they can get into this kind of work. And they grew up with it. ... if your father was an auto mechanic, you're helping him. If he's an electrician, a small-jobber, you're on the job with him. So you get worked in that way. African Americans by and large don't have those opportunities and that access.

But the African Americans that we know through our project are also highly motivated and willing to work hard. But they have more impediments, maybe more barriers in the way that keep them from finding, realizing the same kinds of success that the lower income background whites realize. And so I'm very dismissive of that kind of attitude about inner-city young people, African-American or white or/and white. It just doesn't ring true. It doesn't resonate with what we've seen in the experiences of our children growing up, and it doesn't resonate in terms of what I know of the broader literature that speaks to these very same kinds of issues.

"Americans" by Ted Rall

"Americans" - Ted Rall, Universal Press Syndicate