An honest review of the facts should compel a rational thinker to
redirect his or her disgust—away from racist conclusions, and toward the outrageous indecencies that a well-to-do society forces on its less
fortunate members.
It’s easy for lazy thinkers to gloss over the deep-seated reasons for
the anger and violence of downtrodden people. Recent lootings of upscale shops on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile brought out waves of disgust for the ‘thugs’ who were said to care little for human values.
- 1. For Every $100.00 in Median White Wealth, Black People Have $8.70
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/06/04/economic-divide-black-households/*
In 1968, it was $9.43
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/story/2020-06-06/the-black-white-economic-divide-is-as-wide-as-it-was-in-1968.
It keeps getting worse for beaten-down Americans. In the past twenty
years, median income for Black households has /dropped 5 percent
https://www.wsj.com/articles/for-african-americans-a-painful-economic-reversal-of-fortune-11591176602/ while increasing
6 percent
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/for-african-americans-a-painful-economic-reversal-of-fortune/ar-BB14XHZg?li=BBnb7Kz for
White households. This year the Black and Latino communities have
suffered the greatest effects of the coronavirus pandemic
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/05/us/coronavirus-latinos-african-americans-cdc-data.html.
Because of their job losses and lack of savings and inability to
maintain rent payments, they will be taking the brunt of a
growing housing
https://theweek.com/articles/914438/next-phase-americas-coronavirus-problem-massive-housing-crisis crisis,
especially in the big cities, where rent for Millennials is already
over two-thirds
https://www.abodo.com/blog/millennials-living-at-home/ of their
incomes. Black and Latino households are also more like to face food
insufficiencies
https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/tracking-the-covid-19-recessions-effects-on-food-housing-and.
Yet the Trump administration recently considered cuts to the food stamp
program https://time.com/5836504/usda-snap-appeal-rule-change/.
- 2. Congress Won’t Provide Living-Wage Jobs*
When asked what he would do to bring jobs to Kentucky, Mitch McConnell
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/04/25/1294599/-Mitch-McConnell-says-bringing-jobs-to-Kentucky-is-not-my-job# responded,
“That is not my job. It is the primary responsibility of the state
Commerce Cabinet.”
His hypocrisy becomes evident when we consider the Republican demand
for work requirements
https://theintercept.com/2018/04/01/federal-job-guaranteed-jobs-program/ for
Medicaid and food stamps and other forms
https://www.vox.com/2018/7/26/17465068/work-requirements-medicaid-snap-republican-cartoon of
social programs. Millionaires scream “get a job” from their positions of
ignorance. But in recent years almost all
http://dataspace.princeton.edu/jspui/bitstream/88435/dsp01zs25xb933/3/603.pdf the
new jobs have been /temporary or contract-based/, with no benefits
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/03/26/gig-economy-new-term-serfdom and
no job security.
There is plenty of /potential work
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-us-needs-a-new-civilian-conservation-corps// out
there: infrastructure projects for roads, bridges, transit systems, and
wastewater treatment; the planting of trees and development of parkland;
postal service upgrades; the construction of barriers to protect against
sea-level rise and hurricanes. And more work
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/05/the-democratic-party-wants-to-end-unemployment/560153/ indoors:
home care workers to aid the aged and disabled; child care; special
needs programs; and not the least a resurgence in arts initiatives.
Of course there is opposition to federal job initiatives, from
by-the-book economists
https://www.forbes.com/sites/modeledbehavior/2018/04/24/yes-the-jobs-guarantee-is-absurd/#22f78543afd0 and
self-serving free-market
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-problem-with-a-federal-jobs-guarantee-hint-its-not-the-price-tag-1525267192 advocates
who fear that “big government” will cut into their stock market gains.
But there is evidence for the success of guaranteed job programs,
starting with the Depression-era Works Progress Administration, which
put 8.5 million Americans to work building new roads, bridges, and parks
around the country. More recently, according to the Georgetown Law
Center on Poverty and Inequality, subsidized employment programs have
“reduced family public benefit receipt, raised school outcomes among the
children of workers, boosted workers’ school completion, lowered
criminal justice system involvement among both workers and their
children, improved psychological well-being, and reduced longer-term
poverty.”
- 3. Big Tech Won’t Provide Living-Wage Jobs, Even After Decades of
Taxpayer Subsidies*
After building their businesses on 70 years of taxpayer-funded
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/04/27/no-were-not-all-together-how-super-rich-are-cheating-america research
and development, Apple/Amazon/Google/Microsoft/Facebook have expanded
their composite net worth to almost $7 trillion
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMZN, while avoiding
https://fortune.com/2019/12/06/big-tech-taxes-google-facebook-amazon-apple-netflix-microsoft/ over
a hundred billion dollars in taxes. This disdain for Americans certainly
warrants a protest. Big Tech has appropriated decades of taxpayer-funded
research all for the benefit of stockholders who keep adding millions
http://www.youdeservefacts.org/GWD_2019-14.xls to their portfolios.
Insult is added to injury. Said
https://www.voanews.com/silicon-valley-technology/amazons-collaborative-robots-offer-peek-future an
Amazon Chief Technologist: /”The more robots we add to our fulfillment
centers, the more jobs we are creating.”/
In reality, as MIT economist Daron Acemoglu explains
https://time.com/5876604/machines-jobs-coronavirus/, “Look at the
business model of Google, Facebook, Netflix. They’re not in the business
of creating new tasks for humans.” Big Tech would have us believe that
while their machines handle the mundane tasks, more sophisticated humans
will become “bot builders” and app designers. But just how many of us
can become “bot builders”?
The old argument that the loss of jobs to technology has always been
followed by a new and better class of work becomes meaningless when the
machines start doing our /thinking/ for us. Tech CEO Rob LoCascio says
https://time.com/5876604/machines-jobs-coronavirus/ that a call center
bot can respond to 10,000 queries in an hour, compared to six for a
human being. JP Morgan says
https://time.com/5876604/machines-jobs-coronavirus/ that AI programs
can review commercial loan agreements in a few seconds, compared
to /thousands of hours/ of lawyers’ time.
And just as Covid is hitting Black people harder than White people, so
AI is displacing Black workers at a faster pace than White workers,
because of their greater representation in vulnerable areas like food
service, office administration, and transportation.
4. Even Martin Luther King Realized that Non-Violent Protest was Not Enough to Effect Change
Martin Luther King is remembered for peaceful protests, starting with
the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott in the mid-1950s and continuing
through his Poor People’s March in 1968. But he understood the role of
violence. In his 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” he wrote
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/letter-birmingham-jail,
“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily
given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” And in
1968 he said
https://time.com/3951282/riot-violence-use-american-history/: “I think
that we’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard.”
At times for Reverend King the violence was triggered in response to a
peaceful but provocative act. He once helped initiate a /Children’s
Crusade
https://www.biography.com/news/black-history-birmingham-childrens-crusade-1963/ of
young marchers, knowing that racist backlash would elicit public
sympathy. Sure enough, Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety Bull
Connor ordered police to attack the children with powerful fire hoses
and batons, and to threaten them with police dogs.
Historian Daniel Q. Gillion summarizes
https://www.gq.com/story/why-violent-protests-work: “Nonviolent
protest brings awareness to an issue; violent protest brings urgency to
an issue.”
A Progressive Condemnation of Violence
It might appear that some of the above condones violent protests. Just
the opposite. Lasting peace on the streets can only be attained through
long-term measures that seek equality in living-wage job opportunities.
Nothing should keep Congress from implementing a guaranteed jobs
program. The money’s always there
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/06/case-for-job-guarantee-review-pavlina-tcherneva.
As Senator Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, said
https://www.vox.com/2019/3/7/18252270/progressives-tuition-debt-free-college-schatz-pocan:
“After the Republicans did the $1.5 trillion in unpaid-for tax cuts…I
just reject the idea that only progressive ideas have to be paid for.”
Article written by Paul Buchheit, an advocate for social and economic justice, and the author of
numerous papers on economic inequality and cognitive science. He was
recently named one of 300 Living Peace and Justice Leaders and Models.
He is the author of “/Disposable Americans: Extreme Capitalism and the Case for a Guaranteed Income/ https://www.amazon.com/Disposable-Americans-Capitalism-Guaranteed-Interventions/dp/1138671762/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1485178598&sr=1-1&keywords=Disposable+Americans+Paul+Buchheit“
(2017). Contact email: paul (at) youdeservefacts.org.
http://youdeservefacts.org/
Source: Common Dreams 8/17/20 https://commons.commondreams.org/t/what-to-know-when-someone-blames-black-people-for-all-the-riots/81273