Defining janitors with 401K’s as “capitalists” is a kind of social promotion comparable to the elevation by progressives like Teixeira and Abramowitz of shoe-store clerks who dropped out of college into the “mass upper middle class.” Genuine capitalists derive most of their income from the return on their investments or savings, not from labor. By this definition, there are hardly any capitalists in the U.S. Most of the rich are the “working rich,” who derive most of their income from wages or professional fees, not from investments. We are a nation of wage earners, some paid well and others poorly.

— The fantasy of a vast upper middle class [via]

In the halcyon days of the final economic booms, everyone on your cul de sac could have died overnight from some mysterious plague, and while you might have been sad, you wouldn’t have been inconvenienced. Our economy, unlike any that came before it, is designed to work without the input of your neighbors. Borne on cheap oil, our food arrives as if by magic from a great distance (typically, two thousand miles). If you have a credit card and an Internet connection, you can order most of what you need and have it left anonymously at your door. We’ve evolved a neighborless lifestyle; on average an American eats half as many meals with family and friends as she did fifty years ago. On average, we have half as many close friends.

— Bill McKibben, EAARTH: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (2010).  Excerpted on Alternet under the title, ” The Surprising Reason Why Americans Are So Lonely, and Why Future Prosperity Means Socializing with Your Neighbors.” [via]

Since businesses often rely on being able to exploit migrants as a permanent underclass produced by criminalization, what happens if there is no criminalization based on migration status (or very little, since there will still be some “illegal” people)? Would migrant workers still be cleaning the toilets in office buildings like so many insist the rich should be appreciative of? What I’m getting at here is, if reform legalized most or all of the migrants in the country, would the migrants’ wages and conditions improve since they are not subject to the lack of stability caused by criminalization? Or would precarity be created (or does it already manifest) in some other way? Why would businesses/capitalists allow for a more equal work force? Which leads us to ask if there will still be exploited workers, and the answer is yes, as we know that plenty of “legal” people are currently exploited. I would argue that business just wouldn’t allow something like mass legalization to occur in the first place- at least not without other benefits to the businesses themselves (as an example, over 2 million undocumented migrants were granted amnesty in 1986, but there were also stipulations that while employment of “illegal” migrants was outlawed, businesses didn’t have to verify the documents that they received and they could also participate in temporary worker programs. There was also an increase in the use of sub-contractors). But in the unlikely scenario, we must imagine that something else will be used to divide people so as to continue exploiting labor through low wages, long hours, the lack of safety protections, and that may take the shape of new ways to criminalize people, or encouraging further racial division, or something to that effect.

— The Best Immigration Law is No Law at All

How did it come about that a country with a growing underclass of unemployed workers has 12 million illegal immigrants?

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John C commenting on The Growing Underclass: Jobs Gone Forever

If only capitalism was that simple, John C!

If any cultural factor predisposed blacks to fall for risky loans, it was one widely shared with whites — a penchant for “positive thinking” and unwarranted optimism, which takes the theological form of the “prosperity gospel.” Since “God wants to prosper you,” all you have to do to get something is “name it and claim it.” A 2000 DVD from the black evangelist Creflo Dollar featured African-American parishioners shouting, “I want my stuff — right now!”
Joel Osteen, the white megachurch pastor who draws 40,000 worshippers each Sunday, about two-thirds of them black and Latino, likes to relate how he himself succumbed to God’s urgings — conveyed by his wife — to upgrade to a larger house. According to Jonathan Walton, a religion professor at the University of California at Riverside, pastors like Mr. Osteen reassured people about subprime mortgages by getting them to believe that “God caused the bank to ignore my credit score and bless me with my first house.” If African-Americans made any collective mistake in the mid-’00s, it was to embrace white culture too enthusiastically, and substitute the individual wish-fulfillment promoted by Norman Vincent Peale for the collective-action message of Martin Luther King.

— The Recession’s Racial Divide

You see, this summer has been brutal for Operation Rescue,” Newman wrote. “Not only did George Tiller’s death throw everybody in the pro-life movement for a loop (and especially us), but the economic crisis our nation is suffering has brought our financial support to nearly a halt.

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Operation Rescue says it’s broke, may shut down [via]

Here’s hoping!

With the end of the age of antagonistic nation states and blocs that existed between from 1875 to 1995, the capitalist powers can now manipulate the global economy, shifting finance and production as opportunity dictates. Statist parties and groups have long proclaimed the solution nationalisation. But since investment does not increase jobs there is no argument for seizing the ‘commanding heights of the economy’, only abolishing them and finding new ways to organize work. Growth as a means of full employment is self-defeating since growth under capitalism is only achieved through increased competitiveness, competitiveness through productivity and productivity by shedding labour. Unemployment cannot be solved by increasing the amount of non-working since it depends on lower incomes and inevitable inequalities. Capitalism may have created wealth but it was stolen from the past (the ideas, knowledge and technics accumulated by pre-capitalist societies) and filched from the future (irreplaceable future commodities, gene pools, environmental degradations and so on).

— ACE #6 - THE ROLE OF THE REVOLUTIONARY ORGANISATION