Some Longer Bits and Pieces - 9/8/23

Why can't we all have the good things, or in many cases, even things necessary for survival?

Why we need to preserve our history, all of it, so we can learn from it.

The celebration of the 60^th anniversary of the March on Washington demonstrates just how important it is to have a clear and complete understanding of our history.  The fact that the march was called, not just for civil rights, but for full employment, has been largely ignored in the main stream media. The separation of the twin demands – jobs and freedom (note that in the title of the march, jobs came first, then freedom), allows for the racists to argue that, because racial discrimination is not longer legal, the goals of the March and the civil rights movement as a whole have been achieved.

The leaders of the March, as noted below, would have had none of that. It should be further noted that almost all of them were Democratic Socialists, either officially, or in terms of their political beliefs. They clearly understood that “political” freedom wasn’t possible without economic freedom, that is, the resources to be able to enjoy that freedom. Being able to sit at a lunch counter does mean much if you can’t afford the food.

All this got turned on its head during the rise of neoliberalism starting in the 1970s. The neoliberals focused on the “freedom from” political restraints and a return to the political liberalism of the Enlightenment. In the absence of a vibrant left critique, neoliberalism captured forces across the political spectrum and resulted in its dominance for the last 40+ year.

The problem of resurrecting the liberalism of the Enlightenment is that the world in the 1970s was a far different place than Western Europe in the 1770s. In the earlier period, the main contradiction was between the rising (and at that time, progressive) capitalist economic system and the old, restrictive feudal system. Breaking down feudalism required the freeing of individuals, both the merchant/capitalist class and the serf/working class, from the constraints of the feudal order.

In today’s world, the contradiction is between the tiny capitalist class and the rest of us, the 1% and the 99%. The result of the consolidation of capital in the hands of a tiny minority, which has translated into political as well as economic power, is best described in the concept of “Runaway Inequality” and it is the direct upshot of the resurrection of liberalism (neoliberalism).

That’s why it is so important to understand what the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was all about. The organizers understood that we can’t have one without the other.

From the Intercept, 8/28/2023 (slightly edited for brevity)

TODAY IS THE 60^th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It’s obviously most famous for Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. And the best-known part of that speech is King’s words expressing hope that his children “will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

What is striking is how much the “jobs” part of the March on Washington has dropped out of memory — because that was absolutely core to the message the marchers wanted the rest of the country to hear.

The day’s program included a 10-point section called “What We Demand.” Number one is “comprehensive and effective civil rights legislation” that guarantees not just the right to vote, but also “decent housing.”

Number seven is “a massive federal program to train and place all unemployed workers — Negro and white — on meaningful and dignified jobs at decent wages.”

Number eight is “a national minimum wage act that will give all Americans a decent standard of living. (Government surveys show that anything less than $2.00 an hour fails to do this.)” At the time, the minimum wage was $1.15, or the equivalent today, adjusted for inflation, of $11.45. $2.00 an hour would now be about $20. The actual federal minimum wage today is $7.25

Even more succinctly, one of the most popular placards carried by marchers read, “Civil rights plus full employment equals freedom.”

King himself paired economics with civil rights. One hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, he said, “The life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.”

John Lewis, who was then chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, spoke before King. He began by saying:

“All over this nation, the Black masses are on the march for jobs and freedom, but we have nothing to be proud of. Hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here, for they are receiving starvation wages or no wages at all. While we stand here, there are sharecroppers in the Delta of Mississippi who are out in the fields working for less than three dollars a day, 12 hours a day.”

He went on to explain that while the march supported the Kennedy administration’s proposed civil rights bill, it was insufficient. “We need,” he stated, “a bill that will provide for the homeless and starving people of this nation.”

Right after Lewis came Walter Reuther, the president of the United Auto Workers. In his speech, he referenced the low rates of unemployment during World War II and told the crowd:

“If we can have full employment, and full production for the negative ends of war, then why can’t we have a job for every American in the pursuit of peace? And so our slogan has got to be fair employment, but fair employment within the framework of full employment, so that every American can have a job.”

But the most powerful case was made by A. Philip Randolph, the founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and one of the key organizers of the march. It’s well worth reading what he said, because Randolph addressed head on the most profound questions of American society:

“We have no future in a society in which six million Black and white people are unemployed and millions more live in poverty. Nor is the goal of our civil rights revolution merely the passage of civil rights legislation. … Yes, we want a fair employment practice act, but what good will it do if profit-geared automation destroys the jobs of millions of workers, Black and white?

“The sanctity of private property takes second place to the sanctity of the human personality. It falls to the Negro to reassert this proper priority of values, because our ancestors were transformed from human personalities into private property. It falls to us to demand new forms of social planning, to create full employment, and to put automation at the service of human needs, not at the service of profits …

“The March on Washington is not the climax of our struggle, but a new beginning, not only for the Negro, but for all Americans who thirst for freedom and a better life. Look for the enemies of Medicare, of higher minimum wages, of Social Security, of federal aid to education and there you will find the enemy of the Negro, the coalition of Dixiecrats and reactionary Republicans that seek to dominate the Congress.

So once you understand the core purpose of the March on Washington, it’s clear that its dream remains, at best, half fulfilled. While segregation and discrimination still exist, they at least have been formally dismantled. But in economic terms, we have, if anything, gone backward. The federal minimum wage is less in real terms than it was in 1963. The idea of a federal jobs guarantee is barely even discussed. The chair of the Federal Reserve talks openly about the need to decrease the number of available jobs.

Four days after King was assassinated in 1968, his widow Coretta Scott King delivered a speech in which she said, “Now we are at a point where we must have economic power. … We are concerned about not only the Negro poor, but the poor all over America … Every man deserves a right to a job or an income so that he can pursue liberty, life, and happiness.”

If the marchers 60 years ago were correct, this agenda will have to be recovered if African Americans, and Americans in general, are going reach genuine freedom.

Do we really want to give control of our nation’s water system to private corporations and asset managers?

In the category of the continuing scourge of neoliberalism, the Biden administration’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council is openly advocating privatization of the nation’s water systems.

Unwilling to devote taxpayers’ dollars to rebuilding our decaying infrastructure because of the “needs” of the Pentagon war machine, the government wants to abrogate its responsibility to its citizens to private, profit-seeking corporations. One can only imagine how the asset managers at Blackstone are licking their chops. Clean water is essential to human life, and as the title of the book our book club read recently notes, our lives are in their portfolios. Education, healthcare, housing and now water. What’s next? The air that we breathe?

From “Nation of Change”, Sept. 1, 2023

An under-the-radar report by U.S. President Joe Biden’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council should not go unnoticed, said the national watchdog Food & Water Watch on Thursday, as buried in the document is a call for the privatization of U.S. water systems, which progressive lawmakers and civil society groups have long opposed.

On page 15 of the 38-page report, the advisory council said the federal government should “remove barriers to privatization, concessions, and other nontraditional models of funding community water systems in conjunction with each state’s development of best practice.”

Food & Water Watch (FWW) suggested that the recommendation goes hand in hand with the panel chairmanship of Adebayo Ogunlesi, who is the chairman and CEO of Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP).

GIP is “an infrastructure investment bank with an estimated $100 billion in assets under management that targets energy, transportation, digital, and water infrastructure,” said FWW, making the takeover of public water and wastewater utilities by a private corporation—often under the guise of improving aging systems and lowering costs—financially beneficial for the bank.

“Instead of relying on Wall Street advisers, President Biden should support policies that will truly help communities.”

Mary Grant, Public Water for All campaign director at FWW, called the recommendation “a terrible idea.”

“President Biden should have never appointed an investment banker to chair an advisory council for the nation’s infrastructure,” said Grant. “Wall Street wants to take control of the nation’s public water systems to wring profits from communities that are already struggling with unaffordable water bills and toxic water.”

FWW has analyzed water privatization schemes for years, finding that they it often leave communities “with higher water bills, worse service, job losses, and little control to fix these problems.”

Is the US “going down the toilet”?

No comment necessary!

Taken from The Nation magazine, with editing

Teddy Siegel is the creator of a popular TikTok account that highlights hidden gems in New York City. But she doesn’t review up-and-coming restaurants, or scope out trendy bars. She runs got2gonyc, a guide to the free public restrooms in the five boroughs.

You may not expect it, with video titles like “Come Pee With Me in Bloomingdale’s,” but Siegel is performing a vital public service. There are currently just over 1,000 public toilets in New York City—and per one report, only two of those are open 24/7. And while New York is the most notoriously bathroom-deficient city in America, it’s hardly unrepresentative. A 2021 report found the United States has only eight public toilets per 100,000 people. Iceland has 56.

The lack of public restrooms in the United States isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s a sign of America’s failure to invest in communal necessities for the collective good. So where did our public restrooms go? Over the decades, many cities acknowledged that such facilities were a necessity—but didn’t set aside the budget to operate them for free. The result was that by 1970, there were more than 50,000 pay toilets in the US. Then the Committee to End Pay Toilets in America was founded by a group of Ohio high school students who resented the idea that anyone would have to spend money for this basic human need. 

And they succeed, at least in part. Pay toilets mostly went down the drain, but the public funds to replace them never materialized. This is because it’s never actually been about the bathrooms but rather what they represent: an unintentional (and miserably inadequate) substitute for a broader investment in public space. Neoliberalism on steroids!

But progressive leaders at the local level have the power to change that. They have done it before. In the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, “sewer socialists” were elected on platforms that advocated for basic necessities, including sanitation systems and accessible bathrooms (not to mention safe drinking water).

“The state of a country’s civilization can be judged by their toilets.” By that standard, America is far behind Europe and about on par with Botswana. But thanks to relentless activists and some modern-day sewer socialists, hope may not be down the tubes. What a relief. 

And this is apparently a problem?

From the Economist

Although demand for homes has fallen as rates have risen, the supply of properties has fallen almost in lockstep. Homebuyers typically obtain fixed-rate mortgages for 30 years—unheard of in most countries but viewed almost as a constitutional right in America, owing to the role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two giant government-backed firms, which buy up mortgages from lenders and securitizes them. In enabling lenders to offer long-term fixed rates, their objective is to make it easier for people to buy homes. But now long-term rates are serving as an impediment, since homeowners who got low-interest mortgages before the Fed raised rates have no desire to give them up, and so are unwilling to sell their homes. Redfin, a property platform, calculates that 82% of homeowners have mortgage rates below 5%. Charlie Dougherty of Wells Fargo, a bank, calls the result “a state of suspended animation” for the housing market.

So here’s the “problem”. Eighty-two percent of homeowners are protected against inflation, at least in terms of the costs of their mortgages. As a result, banks and real estate agents aren’t making money hand over fist. Pardon me if I don’t shed a tear. But I do have a simple solution. If the Fed cut interest rates, instead of pursuing a 2% inflation rate (which any economist worth their salt will tell you benefits no one except the very wealthy and the banks), this “problem” will be solved.

Corporate Consolidation = Higher Food Prices: No Kidding?

From “Carolina Forward”

Behind grocery store shelves and up and down our supply chains, large corporations increasingly dominate the markets in charge of growing, producing, and selling the food we eat. Food already makes up a significant portion of household spending (an average of about 11.3%, according to the USDA) and these “grocery cartels” increasingly exacerbate the real-world impact of inflation for consumers. Even though the rate of inflation in the United States has now returned to a historically normal level, actual prices remain high, prompting many people to wonder where all the money is going.

A large part of the answer: corporate consolidation in the food industry.

Food and beverage consolidation isn't always obvious. In-store, it can be hard to tell which brands are part of a conglomerate or not. But consider the market share of several large food corporations. For example, just four companies dominate the coffee market: The J.M. Smuckers Company, which owns Folgers and Dunkin; JAB Holding Company, which owns Caribou Coffee, Peet's Coffee, and Gloria Jean's Coffees; and Kraft Heinz, owners of Maxwell House; and of course, the Starbucks Corporation, owners of both Starbucks and Seattle's Best Coffee. Together, these four firms control more than two-thirds of all the coffee sold in U.S. stores.

When companies dominate a market, it is called a tight oligopoly. 

Grocery prices, even against the backdrop of massive inflation, have risen dramatically recently. Price spikes for individual items won significant media attention like the baby formula crisis last year or when egg prices skyrocketed, though prices in both categories later came down; but overall, prices increased and aren't coming down as quickly as we would hope - or at all.

The cost of eating food at home rose 20% for southern shoppers from January 2020 to January 2023, while all prices rose around 15% for the same period. Of course, a variety of causes have been attributed to this rise globally, including the COVID-19 pandemic supply chain disruptions, climate change (which will continue to raise food prices), and the war in Ukraine. All of these factors contribute to a rise in grocery prices - but consolidation is what allows these prices to stay high.

How consolidation keeps prices high is simple. When there are a lot of sellers in a market, each one has a competitive incentive to keep their prices low, and quality high, so people will buy from them. This competition is vital in any healthy market economy, and a cornerstone of basic economics.

The only thing missing from this clear explanation is an analysis of how our economic system, which is based on competition, leads inevitably to consolidation, either “tight oligopoly” or just plain monopoly. It’s not an accident but the logical end of competition. The winners in capitalist competition grow bigger and more powerful (economically and politically) and the losers either get bought out at bargain basement prices or go under. Temporary fixes, like antitrust legislation, can slow the process, but capitalist will find workarounds (when they can’t block legislation outright) such as regulatory capture.

A classic example was the struggle to control the power of banks in the early 1900s. The Populists fought for public banking at the state level. What they got in 1914 during the Progressive Era was the Federal Reserve, a regulatory system made of the nation’s bankers. Talk about the fox guarding the hen house.