the messiest of decis

Bacon has spent his entire career working as an educator in and around Portland. He began teaching in the mid-’80s and became vice principal of Albina’s Jefferson High School a decade later. Many of his students from Jefferson are now parents of his students at Boise.

But the same families who grew up in the neighborhood can’t afford to live here now. Bacon says the student body’s homelessness rate has been ticking upward, and others have long commutes from the outskirts of the city. The travel means students often can’t stay for after-school programs or that parents pick their kids up early to avoid traffic. The students who rely on public buses often face an hour of commuting each way. “When an older sibling who comes to school on the bus is sick, that means the younger sibling doesn’t come to school either,” says Bacon. “Kids also just don’t sleep enough. They get up early to get here and then get home late.”

Bacon laments that the neighborhood’s new residents haven’t embraced Boise. It used to be a source of pride for the area, which had long battled for a quality school to call its own. That sense of ownership is fraying.

He knows his school will become whiter, though that will take time. In this year’s parent meeting for incoming kindergarteners, he was surprised at the number of white families. He says Boise will “be here for whoever wants to come” and that he’s tried to embrace the white families who have already enrolled. “I’m not going to spend too much time trying to force white people to come that might not want to come, but we’ll be open to their questions and sell the best parts of the school like we always do,” he says.

There are plenty of reasons why white, more affluent parents don’t send their children to Boise. They might cite the test scores or the draw of creative instruction at charter schools. But much of it involves internalized racism—racism that is amplified by ineffectual school district policies.

White families often transfer their children to Trillium Charter, a high-achieving school that’s less than 10 minutes away and 82 percent white. They can also send their kids to Portland magnet schools if their test scores are high enough or use the petition system to transfer to schools closer to their jobs. According to district figures, only half of neighborhood children attend Boise. Staff say many of these are black families who’ve long attended the school and have managed to stay in the neighborhood. The black students who fake their addresses, indicating they still live in neighborhood boundaries, also skew the numbers.

Black citizens of Tulsa, Oklahoma, confronted White supremacist state violence long before Tulsa Police Department officer Betty Shelby fatally shot Terence Crutcher on camera without legal ramifications. Today (May 31) marks 96 years since White mobs, abetted by police, destroyed the city’s Greenwood neighborhood in one of the U.S.’s worst racist massacres.

Historian John W. Franklin of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture explained to Smithsonian Magazine last year that Black and Native people built wealth after discovering oil near the city in the early 1900s. That wealth anchored Greenwood’s thriving Black business district, which placed it among the country’s most affluent Black neighborhoods. “That’s what leads to Greenwood being called the Black Wall Street,” said Franklin. “It had restaurants and furriers and jewelry stores and hotels.”

That wealth infuriated White residents and business owners, and their anger exploded on May 31, 1921. According to the Tulsa Historical Society & Museum, police arrested a Black man named Dick Rowland on suspicion that he assaulted Sarah Page, a White woman, in an elevator the previous day. Local newspapers circulated unsubstantiated reports about Rowland allegedly raping Page, and an armed White group confronted a similarly armed Black group of World War I veterans outside the courthouse where the sherriff held Rowland. The two sides exchanged shots until the outnumbered Black militia, initially trying to prevent a lynching, had to retreat.

White Tulsans then attacked the Greenwood neighborhood for two days. Smithsonian Magazine says the mobs destroyed 35 blocks and killed almost 300 Black people. Police and the National Guard intervened primarily to put out building fires and arrest Black people, some of whom were taken out of vigilante custody. Franklin says that White rioters, aided by city government and the National Guard, “were deputized and handed weapons” to carry out the massacre.

But while anger towards Rowland may have lit the fuse, Franklin says the riots systematically targeted Black wealth. Franklin helped bring a manuscript from his grandfather, Tulsa lawyer Buck Colbert Franklin, to the museum last year. The manuscript includes the elder Franklin’s description of private planes, commissioned either by the city or White business owners, that were used to bomb Greenwood:

“Smoke ascended the sky in thick, black volumes and amid it all, the planes—now a dozen or more in number—still hummed and darted here and there with the agility of natural birds of the air.

[…]

“The side-walks were literally covered with burning turpentine balls. I knew all too well where they came from, and I knew all too well why every burning building first caught from the top.”

Other fun facts about prison labor corporations:

-Federal and state-run prisons usually pay their slaves minimum wage; some states, however, like Colorado, pay $2/hour.

-Private prisons pay $.17-.50/hour. The highest paying private prison is in Tennessee, which pays $.50/hour for “highly-skilled labor.”

-You think that hasn’t affected wages in the US? You think that hasn’t removed manufacturing jobs from the economy?

-Companies that contract with private prisons for their slave labor include: IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom’s, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre Cardin, Target Stores. Many, many products that say “Made in USA” were made in prison.

-Private prisons often have quotas with the states, wherein the states contractually guarantee that they will provide a certain number of prisoners to fill the beds of a private prison, and if they don’t then they owe the private prison millions of dollars. I’m not making this up. It happened in Colorado after they legalized weed.

-States have a financial incentive to lock up their citizens.

-All of the above corporations have a financial incentive to see citizens get locked up.

-This is why Jeff Sessions is going after weed. The prison industrial complex needs slaves.

-To the shock of absolutely no one, private prisons have even more disparate racial demographics than federal/state prisons.

-Where do you think they send undocumented immigrants who have been rounded up? That’s right, private prisons. That’s why so many of them are in the South. So they take immigrants who are earning some kind of comparable wage and paying income tax to the government, and put them in prison where the wages are absurdly depressed and the prison pays virtually nothing in taxes.

-Oh yeah: private prisons pay virtually nothing in taxes. Because they technically manage real estate (prison as housing), they get all sorts of tax breaks and subsidies.

Tl;dr the prison industrial complex removes jobs from the economy, depresses wages, cheats the tax system, and ENSLAVES PEOPLE, usually people of color.

Sources:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-prison-industry-in-the-united-states-big-business-or-a-new-form-of-slavery/8289

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/09/private-prisons-occupancy-quota-cca-crime

http://mfgtalkradio.com/s7-e15-manufacturing-jobs-lost-prison-slave-labor/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/19/private-prison-quotas_n_3953483.html?1379606057

http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/03/13/289000532/why-for-profit-prisons-house-more-inmates-of-color

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/02/27/immi-f27.html

This map shows every state where women are more likely to live in poverty than men

Wait… hold up. Every state is colored in. That can’t be right… right? 

Yeah, there’s other factors too, but “women don’t ask for raises” and “pink-collar jobs aren’t valued” are smaller factors than the simple fact that caring for your own children is mandatory for women and optional for men.

Here’s the life story of, I’m going to say, about half the women I’ve ever worked with:

- Had children.  Possibly voluntarily, possibly through lack of contraception education and/or funds.

- Broke off relations with the father.  Frequently this was for a reason that was not a choice on her part, like he abused her or went to prison or just plain disappeared.

- Kept the kids.  Even if it was an amicable split, she likely has weekday custody and is the one who takes charge of the vast majority of their needs.

- Dad may or may not pay child support, but even if he does, the average child support is $2550/year and the average cost of raising a child in a low-income family is $8610/year.

- The mother can’t afford paid childcare, but she has some friends/family members who watch her kids, but they can’t commit to a consistent schedule, which means she can only work limited hours and has to take a lot of unplanned time off.

- This drastically limits both which jobs she can take and how much she can earn from those jobs, and completely locks her into poverty until the youngest child is old enough to be home alone.  But by then she’ll have an unimpressive resume of assorted part-time gigs, plus likely health problems from 15 years of eating junk and barely sleeping, so it’s not a fabulous career launch point.

this is capitalism in it’s final form

First, it’s not that new.

Did you know that there was a time in U.S. history—which is by definition recent history—when a corporation was generally intended to have some sort of public interest that they served? I mean, that’s the whole point of allowing corporations to form. Corporations are recognized by the commonwealth or state, and this recognition is not a right but a privilege, in exchange for which the state (representing the people) is allowed to ask, “So what does this do for everyone else?”

The way the economy is now is a direct result of a shift away from this thinking and to one where a corporation is an entity unto itself whose first, last, and only concern is an ever-increasing stream of profits. What you’re calling “benevolent capitalism” isn’t benevolent at all. It’s a pure profit/loss calculation designed to distract from—not even paper over or stick a band-aid on—the problems capitalism creates. And the fact that you’re here championing it as “benevolent capitalism” is a sign of how ell it’s working.

Let’s take Toms, as one example. The shoe that’s a cause. Buy a pair of trendy shoes, and a pair of trendy shoes will be given away to someone somewhere in the world who can’t afford them.

That’s not genuine benevolence. That’s selling you, the consumer, on the idea that you can be benevolent by buying shoes, that the act of purchasing these shoes is an act of charity. The reality is that their model is an inefficient means of addressing the problems on the ground that shoelessness represents, and severely disrupts the local economies of the locations selected for benevolence.

(Imagine what it does to the local shoemakers, for instance.)

The supposed act of charity is just a value add to convince you to spend your money on these shoes instead of some other shoes. It’s no different than putting a prize in a box of cereal.

Heck, you want to see how malevolent this is?

Go ask a multinational corporation that makes shoes or other garments to double the wages of their workers. They’ll tell you they can’t afford it, that it’s not possible, that consumers won’t stand for it, that you’ll drive them out of business and then no one will have wages.

But the fact that a company can give away one item for every item sold shows you what a lie this is. A one-for-one giving model represents double the cost of labor and materials for each unit that is sold for revenue. Doubling wages would only double the labor.

So why are companies willing to give their products away (and throw them away, destroy unused industry with bleach and razors to render them unsalvageable, et cetera) but they’re not willing to pay their workers more?

Because capitalism is the opposite of benevolence.

“Charity” is by definition exemplary, above and beyond, extraordinary, extra. “Charity” is not something that people are entitled to. You give people a shirt or shoes or some food and call it charity, and you’re setting up an expectation that you can and will control the stream of largesse in the future, and anything and everything you give should be considered a boon from on high.

On the other hand, once you start paying your workers a higher wage, you’re creating an expectation. You’re admitting that their labor is more valuable to you than you were previously willing to admit, and it’s hard to walk that back.

Plus, when people have enough money for their basic needs, they’re smarter and stronger and warier and more comfortable with pushing back instead of being steamrolled over. They have time and money to pursue education. They can save money up and maybe move away. They can escape from the system that depends on a steady flow of forced or near-forced labor.

So companies will do charitable “buy one, give one” and marketing “buy one, get one” even though these things by definition double the overhead per unit, but they won’t do anything that makes a lasting difference in the standard of living for the people.

Capitalism has redefined the world so that the baseline of ethics is “How much money can we make?” and every little good deed over and above that is saintly.