#structural inequality

Many people incorrectly see tenants in rent-stabilized apartments as "freeloaders" but automatically believe homeowners are "virtuous." In reality, people choose the most housing stability that their financial situation and the housing market affords them.

Homeownership is the ultimate form of rent stabilization - you get major tax deductions in addition to predictable monthly costs - but I've never heard anyone say homeowners locked in sweet deals they "no longer deserve."

Politicians are often the most guilty of this - they often privilege homeowners' aesthetic desires over building new housing, perpetuating our housing shortage and ensuring those who have the least stable housing continue to struggle.

I wonder if Groyper News Desk realizes he's admitting that right-wing white conservative men went from brave world traveling conquers to cowardly cucks in just a few short generations?

If Black people were truly as “inferior” as racists claim, why did this country spend centuries creating laws, systems, and barriers specifically designed to block Black education, wealth, voting, movement, ownership, and opportunity?

Why outlaw literacy? Why ban voting? Why enforce segregation? Why destroy thriving Black communities? Why rig housing, lending, and employment?

Andrew Jackson Veto of the Bank Bill [1832]

Schwarz, C. (2023). Theorising human trafficking through slow violence. Feminist Theory, 24(4), 535-554.

Fucking love this quote from a paper I had to read for a sociology class, like it so clearly describes what pisses me off about so much of the discourse on this site.

“The immediacy of punishing QAnon’s conspiratorial actor…”

The right’s immediate jump to attribute conspiracy theory type groups (aka Jews) as the cause for human trafficking

“…incarcerating men who purchase sex under ‘End Demand’ paradigms…”

The radical left’s immediate jump to attribute Evil Dangerous Sex-Crazed Men as the cause for human trafficking

“…is seductive because it can deliver dependable results: specific perpetrators detained, criminal legal justice served.”

The jumping to point blame is seductive because both fucking sides are obsessed with quick “justice.” It doesn’t matter if their idea of “justice” attacks meaningless or imaginary individuals who hold no actual power as long as it brings the quick satisfaction of “justice”. It doesn’t matter if their idea does nothing to actually get to the root of the problem, if it ACTUALLY HARMS the very people they say they are standing up for, as long as they get the emotional gratification of watching someone else suffer in return. This is the kind of “justice” I see from both sides.

“Both US right-wing politicians and liberal feminists can position themselves as paternalist caretakers of violated women and children…”

Both fucking sides are obsessed with painting women and children as helpless victims who cannot even think for themselves, let alone advocate for their own rights. Yes, let’s ignore the voices of the actual victims involved because they are just so traumatized and couldn’t possibly know what’s best for them… Both sides are obsessed with virtue-signaling, with being the “heroes”

“…while the drag and drift of broader structural inequalities is allowed to proliferate without restraint.”

And while all this back and forth fighting of who’s actually the “Bad Guys” goes on, of who’s really being the heroes, the actual problems go ignored. The problems created by colonialism and capitalism such as systemic forces of racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, etc. are completely forgotten about or dismissed. Even when most often, so many of the problems in today’s world can be attributed to these structural inequalities.

This is how every single discourse is structured on this site.

There’s one side who believes a certain group is the “Bad Guys” while the other side believes it’s someone else. Meanwhile, nothing gets improved for the actual issue at all whatsoever.

Half yall say Israel and every single Jew are the true “Bad Guys” in the I/p conflict, and go around harassing every Israeli and Jew you can in the name of “justice”. Half yall say Palestine and every single Muslim are the true “Bad Guys” in it, and go around being islamophobic as fuck. Yall ignore actual Israeli and Palestinian victims that tell you this does absolutely fucking nothing to address the actual problems and yall ignore them

It’s the same with trans and queer discourse. Half yall say trans women are “Bad”, half yall say it’s trans men. Half yall promote femininity and shit on masculinity and vice versa. Half yall say it’s the “too queer “queers with the weird pronouns taking away our rights, half yall say it’s actually the cishet aroaces that aren’t “really” queer. Meanwhile, our rights are being taken away left and right because we’re too busy infighting over who’s really “Bad” or not instead of fighting the system that is actively oppressing us.

We have entered a phase of regression,and one of the easiest ways to see it is in our infrastructure: our roads and bridges look more like those in Thailand or Venezuela than the Netherlands or Japan. But it goes far deeper than that, which is why Temin uses a famous economic model created to understand developing nations to describe how far inequality has progressed in the United States. The model is the work of West Indian economist W. Arthur Lewis, the only person of African descent to win a Nobel Prize in economics.

In the Lewis model of a dual economy, much of the low-wage sector has little influence over public policy. Check.

The high-income sector will keep wages down in the other sector to provide cheap labor for its businesses. Check.

Social control is used to keep the low-wage sector from challenging the policies favored by the high-income sector. Mass incarceration - check.

The primary goal of the richest members of the high-income sector is to lower taxes. Check.

Social and economic mobility is low. Check.

Temin says that today in the U.S., the ticket out is education, which is difficult for two reasons: you have to spend money over a long period of time, and the FTE sector is making those expenditures more and more costly by defunding public schools and making policies that increase student debt burdens.  

Even with a diploma, you will likely find that high-paying jobs come from networks of peers and relatives. Social capital, as well as economic capital, is critical, but because of America’s long history of racism and the obstacles it has created for accumulating both kinds of capital, black graduates often can only find jobs in education, social work, and government instead of higher-paying professional jobs like technology or finance— something most white people are not really aware of. Women are also held back by a long history of sexism and the burdens — made increasingly heavy — of making greater contributions to the unpaid care economy and lack of access to crucial healthcare.

How did we get this way?

What happened to America’s middle class, which rose triumphantly in the post-World War II years, buoyed by the GI bill, the victories of labor unions, and programs that gave the great mass of workers and their families health and pension benefits that provided security?

Around 1970, the productivity of workers began to get divided from their wages. Corporate attorney and later Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell galvanized the business community to lobby vigorously for its interests. Johnson’s War on Poverty was replaced by Nixon’s War on Drugs, which sectioned off many members of the low-wage sector, disproportionately black, into prisons. Politicians increasingly influenced by the FTE sector turned from public-spirited universalism to free-market individualism. As money-driven politics accelerated (a phenomenon explained by the Investment Theory of Politics, as Temin explains), leaders of the FTE sector became increasingly emboldened to ignore the needs of members of the low-wage sector, or even to actively work against them.

Temin notes that “the desire to preserve the inferior status of blacks has motivated policies against all members of the low-wage sector.”

What can we do?

We’ve been digging ourselves into a hole for over forty years, but Temin says that we know how to stop digging.

If we spent more on domestic rather than military activities, then the middle class would not vanish as quickly.

The effects of technological change and globalization could be altered by political actions.

We could restore and expand education, shifting resources from policies like mass incarceration to improving the human and social capital of all Americans.

We could upgrade infrastructure, forgive mortgage and educational debt in the low-wage sector, reject the notion that private entities should replace democratic government in directing society, and focus on embracing an integrated American population.

We could tax not only the income of the rich, but also their capital.

We have a structure that predetermines winners and losers. We are not getting the benefits of all the people who could contribute to the growth of the economy, to advances in medicine or science which could improve the quality of life for everyone — including some of the rich people.”

Along with Thomas Piketty, whose Capital in the Twenty-First Century examines historical and modern inequality, Temin’s book has provided a giant red flag, illustrating a trajectory that will continue to accelerate as long as the 20 percent in the FTE sector are permitted to operate a country within America’s borders solely for themselves at the expense of the majority.

Just to put some numbers between how fucked up it is that Joe Manchin just scuttled plans to improve the social safety net in the US, here's the brief data on West Virginia from the US Census.

See how WV population is all of 1,793,716.

So if the population of the US is 331,449,281, according to the same census.... hmm, let's see 1,793,716 / 331,449,281 = 0.0054....

Oh, wow... oh damn, that's actually worst than I thought. The state Joe Manchin represents has .5% of the US population? That can't be right? Nope. It's totally right.