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You are here: Home / Archives for Politics / Poverty / Fuck The Poor

Fuck The Poor

Notes on needing/supporting Abortions in the US, now and Post-Roe (Open Thread)

by MisterDancer|  May 3, 20227:11 pm| 78 Comments

This post is in: Activist Judges!, Civil Rights, Contraception Clusterfuck, Fuck The Poor, GOP Death Cult, Healthcare, Open Threads, Organizing & Resistance, Politics, Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Women's Rights, Women's Rights Are Human Rights, World's Best Healthcare (If You Can Afford It), Your Place Is In The Resistance

Everything below is from my prior awareness and information collected recently. Corrections welcome:

If you need assistance, or want to help the fight via donations and/or volunteering? This document focuses on local/state level support groups.
(Thanks to UncleEbeneezer for the hookup on this!)

A broader, if slightly older (just a couple years), set of guidance is the Handbook for a Post-Roe America by Robin Marty. I can recommend the author as someone I paid into the Patreon of, before she closed it. And that was due to the quality, and importance, of her work in this area.

I hear from some sources, including a Doula I know, that acquiring Plan B now is wise — if you can w/o impacting overall supply. For those unaware, Plan B is a “morning after” drug. However, you should be clear on it’s usage and esp. it’s weight restrictions. It’s not dangerous, just has key limitations.

In addition to http://reprocare.com, mentioned in 1st link above, someone here noted https://aidaccess.org/ as another site for Abortion via mail.

I’m providing a variety of approaches — different people will have different needs. Even today, Roe is a dead letter for poorer people, especially of Color, due to lack of Internet access and ability to take time off for the procedure, if needed — including for bullshit “waiting periods”.

Many of the agencies and advocates mentioned above have experience, and guidance, in these areas. It’s worth at least getting familiar with modern options now, even if you’re in a “safe” State.

We have a lot of threads on the Roe leak. This one’s Open.

Notes on needing/supporting Abortions in the US, now and Post-Roe (Open Thread)Post + Comments (78)

Well Imagine That

by John Cole|  June 10, 20215:54 pm| 210 Comments

This post is in: Economics, Fuck The Middle-Class, Fuck The Poor

It appears that despite there being an MBA program in every college in the nation, ostensibly teaching the administration of business, it appears that some knowledge has eluded business owners. Like the many scrolls lost in the burning of Alexandria, many arcane business practices have been lost, but all is not lost, as some new ideas have been rediscovered:

The owners of Klavon’s Ice Cream Parlor had hit a wall.

For months, the 98-year-old confectionary in Pittsburgh couldn’t find applicants for the open positions it needed to fill ahead of warmer weather and, hopefully, sunnier times for the business after a rough year.

The job posting for scoopers — $7.25 an hour plus tips — did not produce a single application between January and March.

So owner Jacob Hanchar decided to more than double the starting wage to $15 an hour, plus tips, “just to see what would happen.”

The shop was suddenly flooded with applications. More than 1,000 piled in over the course of a week.

“It was like a dam broke,” Hanchar said. Media coverage that followed his decision soon pushed other candidates his way.

We’re the stupidest fucking country in the world that “giving people more money to get them to work for you” is apparently a relevatory piece of information. I mean jesus christ. Fast Freddie Herzberg just died in 2000, how the hell did everyone forget this shit.

Well Imagine ThatPost + Comments (210)

The Labor Freakout

by John Cole|  May 8, 20217:00 pm| 274 Comments

This post is in: Fuck The Middle-Class, Fuck The Poor

Unless you live underneath a rock, the last couple of days you have witnessed a genuine freakout from the chattering classes about the jobs report. To save you some time, I will summarize:

“OMG 300 DOLLARS MORE A WEEK IS MAKING IT IMPOSSIBLE TO FORCE THE POORS TO CLEAN THE GREASE TRAPS AT MY FAST FOOD FRANCHISE FOR A WAGE TOO LOW FOR THEM TO PAY THE RENT!”

And really, I am not exaggerating. Shitty, low paying jobs are not being filled, and it is FREAKING out the MBA class. We are at a point where several generations of businesses and business owners have never actually experience a tight labor market, and they literally have no idea what to do. Since the Reagan era, they have been in the driver’s seat, neutering labor unions, having MBA’s nickle and dime employees to death with suppressed wages, cutting away at medical and retirement benefits, shifting them to 401k’s while not providing commensurate pay increases, and so forth. They’ve spent four decades masturbating about being job creators while siphoning all the profit upward, treating employees like indentured servants eager to work 35 hours a week for 8 bucks an hour with no stable schedule, so with employees not willing to literally die during a pandemic to smell like french fries and walmart working the two jobs they need to survive, these shitlords finally find themselves without enough workers.

The one thing they can not find themselves willing to try to do is to try to pay them more. You’ll hear anecdotal stories about McDonald’s owners paying a whole 12 dollars an hour for an “entry level job,” sneering while saying it because everyone knows an entry level position shouldn’t pay enough for the serf to pay rent AND eat. So fuck them.

My suggestion to the government is to not do ANYTHING except push for a 15$ minimum wage, and these assholes will either figure it out on their own and start paying people what thy are worth, start picking the tampons out of their own Burger King bathroom toilets themselves, or go out of business. All of these are fine by me.

These guys can go McFuck themselves.

The Labor FreakoutPost + Comments (274)

Tax These Motherfuckers

by John Cole|  March 22, 20213:46 pm| 82 Comments

This post is in: Fuck The Middle-Class, Fuck The Poor

Spending a couple billion on the IRS seems like it would be as pretty smart investment:

More than 20% of the wealthiest Americans’ income isn’t being reported to the Internal Revenue Service, according to a new study that calculates U.S. tax evasion is far higher than previously estimated.

Random audits of the rich can detect some tax evasion, but the study’s authors found that the IRS easily misses income hidden in sophisticated ways, including in private businesses and offshore structures. Collecting all unpaid income tax from the top 1% would boost revenue to the U.S. Treasury by $175 billion a year.

The wealthy have made so much in gains the past few decades while the rest have just been screwed, and they cheat because they can. It’s to the point they don’t even know what to do with the money, they have so much of it:

I have just taken a picture of my chair. I am not going to go through the trouble of doing any of this, but I have it on good authority that I can now host an auction for that digital photo, and sell the unique “ownership” of it to the highest bidder. That winner can then display the photo online, and while anyone could simply download it and own a lossless copy of it themselves, a record on the blockchain will confer the true owner the knowledge that they have the original.

They get nothing else, really, except that knowledge. Anyone in the world can look at or even acquire the same JPEG file from the internet. This is ownership as a feeling. And it’s the biggest innovation in the art world. One of these JPEGs just sold for $69.3 million (not a typo). And it’s further confirmation that decades of inequality have left the idle rich with entirely so much money that they do entirely ridiculous things. And where money goes, scams are sure to follow.

There is a point to crypto art, though you have to squint to see it. Artists put out limited-edition prints all the time, which aren’t entirely discernible from a printed copy, aside from the artist’s signature and the knowledge that there aren’t many in the world. By auctioning a non-fungible token (NFT) that confers ownership, artists can also deliver a scarce object to fans, and get direct compensation for it. This could prove useful in businesses with a lot of direct intermediation between artists and fans, like music. Kings of Leon selling an NFT that can unlock concert tickets and digital art gives big Kings of Leon fans a way to support the band’s work, rather than funnel their funds to a record label or streaming company.

FFS.

Tax These MotherfuckersPost + Comments (82)

Kids These Days (Are F**ked)

by Tom Levenson|  March 21, 20206:05 pm| 67 Comments

This post is in: Austerity Bombing, Economics, Free Markets Solve Everything, Fuck The Middle-Class, Fuck The Poor, Republican Stupidity, Republican Venality

Coronavirus is changing America hugely in the here and now–just look outside.

It’s also true that it will have a lasting impact on the country (and the world), and while prediction is hard, especially about the future, there is one obvious impact that will harm both millions of individual Americans and the long term economic health of the nation.

That would be what’s waiting for students graduating this June into a job market that for all intents and purposes won’t exist–likely for months/years to come.

TL:DR: it’s bad. Really bad. There are serious losses of income and long term wealth that produce knock-on effects on health and social factors in the lives of those who, by no fault or action of their own, happen to come into adulthood at just the wrong moment.

Kids These Days (Are F**ked)

At this moment, we’re diving into what looks like a deep economic disaster that will wreck the dreams of millions of kids just getting started, and we are doing so because the Republican leadership botched both short and long term plans for a predictable event. This is social misery that is about to happen as a direct result of political choices made by Donald Trump and 40 years of decisions by Republican elected officials. We will need to drive that point home, until being a Republican ranks in popular estimation a couple of rungs below refurbished condom retailer.

To our sorrow, there’s a fair amount of research on  the natural experiments we’ve already endured that shwo what starting one’s career in such a moment does to both short term and longer prospects.  In 2006, a paper looking at Canadian college graduates between 1982 and 1999 showed that recessions have a significant impact on new graduates:

Our main results suggest that the average worker graduating college in a recession faces earnings losses that are very persistent but not permanent. On average, a two standard deviation increase in the unemployment rate (roughly comparing the difference between those exiting college in a bust versus boom) leads to an initial wage gap of about 10 percent. This gap declines relatively slowly, and fades to zero after about the eighth year. Controlling for unemployment rate conditions after the first year of labor market entry, we also conclude that virtually all of the wage deficit can be attributed to the unemployment rate variation in the very first year after leaving school.

Graduating at the wrong time affects the shape of careers; timing matters, in that the newest graduates suffer more than those with a toe-hold in the job market; finally, that average 10% loss masks the differential effects by income level. As usual, the poor suffer more (from the non-technical summary):

show full post on front page

 …initial random shocks affect the entire career. Graduating in a recession leads workers to start at smaller and lower paying firms, and they catch-up by switching jobs more frequently than those who graduate in better times. Third, some workers are more affected by luck than others. In particular, earnings losses from temporarily high unemployment rates are minimal for workers with two or more years of work experience and are greatest for labor market entrants. Among graduates, those with the lowest predicted earnings suffer significantly larger and much more persistent earnings losses than those at the top.

I’ve seen studies on the impact of the 2007-8 events that report similar patterns, but what really caught my eye was this one, published in January, 2020, by Hannes Schwandt of Northewestern and Till M. von Wachter from UCLA. Here’s the abstract, which captures the scope of its miserable findings:

We find that cohorts coming of age during the deep recession of the early 1980s suffer increases in mortality that appear in their late 30s and further strengthen through age 50. We show these mortality impacts are driven by disease-related causes such as heart disease, lung cancer, and liver disease, as well as drug overdoses. At the same time, unlucky middle-aged labor market entrants earn less and work more while receiving less welfare support. They are also less likely to be married, more likely to be divorced, and experience higher rates of childlessness. Our findings demonstrate that tempo-rary disadvantages in the labor market during young adulthood can have substantial impacts on lifetime outcomes, can affect life and death in middle age, and go beyond the transitory initial career effects typically studied.

Schwandt and von Wachter begin with background capturing how the picture of income and career costs have held up, and in some cases worsened since the earlier research I linked above:

Losses in cumulated lifetime income implied by typical estimates per se could lead to lower wealth accumulation, and there is some evidence of reductions in housing wealth among individuals coming of age in the Great Recession (e.g., Dettling and Hsu, 2014). Several studies have documented lasting changes in occupational choice (Oyer, 2006, 2008; Altonji et al., 2016) and employer characteristics (Oreopoulos et al., 2012), and Kahn (2010) finds that 1982 college graduates may begin to lose ground again around 15 years after job entry.

So yeah: graduating in a recession is not what you want. But here’s the killer, literally:

For cohorts coming of age during the early 1980s recession, a temporarily higher state unemployment rate at the age of labor market entry leads to precisely estimated increases in mortality that appear in the late thirties and increase until age 50. These increases in mortality are driven to an important extent by a rise in both disease-related and “external” causes, including lung cancer, liver disease, and drug poisoning.

Aside from early death, effects of entering the job market in crap times make life suck in many ways:

We also find entering the labor market during a recession has a substantial impact on a broad range of measures of socioeconomic status in middle age, including a decline in marriage rates, a rise in divorce rates, and a decline in family size. We also find that after initial recovery in their mid-thirties, adversely affected entry cohorts suffer a reduction in earnings as they reach their mid-forties.

And there are interesting (if that’s the word) distinctions in outcomes by race that may help explain Trump’s appeal to folks whose interests he assaults:

Finally, while the effects on overall mortality are similar by race, increases in deaths of despair appear to be chiefly concentrated among white, nonHispanic men. White men also tend to experience a decline in earnings in midlife and tend to experience larger reductions in family stability than their non-white counterparts. This is despite the fact that non-whites experience larger short-run effects on earnings and other outcomes…

Kids These Days (Are F**ked) 1

In sum: the Trump recession/depression that is beginning right now will damage the hopes and prospects of a generation for a generation.  It will affect us all, including those of us fortunate enough to start our careers in better times, as millions of Americans will have less of chance to lead the fully productive/creative lives they could–and thus our economy and culture as a whole will lose what could have been.

There are some responses that could mitigate the worst effects, it seems to me, and I’m going to be getting in touch with my legislators to push them. First, the most obvious, is to forgive any tuition debt incurred this year. Second, almost equally obvious, would be to forgive it all, certainly for students currently in college, but better, for everyone, as that would be an instant stimulus/support. If students graduating now or over the next few years didn’t have to pay down a debt that the crappy job market will make yet more intractable, they would have more flexibility, more resilience, and hopefully both a better short term and more healthy and emotionally robust time as the years roll by.

And the other urgency, of course, is to not do what Hoover did, and Trump and McConnell and the rest of the junta are doing now: dither over a response that in its first iterations is clearly inadequate to the task. The best thing to do when facing the prospect of double digit job losses is to throw money at anything that (a) keeps folks alive and (b) offers jobs that pay wages.

It’s really not that complicated: don’t burden the most vulnerable with the hardest road to hoe; give them a leg up in hard times. And drop cash from helicopters.

Over to y’all.

Images: Franz von Felbinger, Poor Children, by 1906.

Edvard Munch, Despair, 1894.

Kids These Days (Are F**ked)Post + Comments (67)

Did Something Happen in Puerto Rico?

by @heymistermix.com|  January 13, 202010:22 am| 40 Comments

This post is in: Fuck The Poor

I went to the Post this morning to catch up on Puerto Rico, and there was exactly one story on their front page, and it was this (good) analysis piece:

We’ve heard ceaseless advice about the need to have an emergency backpack, or survival kit, and a family emergency plan. […] Gov. Wanda Vázquez used an official news conference not to address the details of the government’s emergency plan, but to implore citizens to focus on securing their backpacks.

It’s certainly true that we should all take time to reflect on our individual preparation, particularly those of us who require prescription medicine or have special needs. But how much of the emergency response are we expected to bear on our shoulders?

Besides carrying gallons of water, solar lamps, canned food, radios and blankets — already too heavy a burden for the elderly and those with disabilities — what else is expected from us? Do we need to procure cots to sleep on when there’s a shortage of emergency shelters? We stocked up on chain saws to clear the roads after Hurricane Maria; are we now expected to procure heavy machinery to clear our fallen homes? Where does individual responsibility begin, and when does it end?

The Guardian (US Edition) front paged a good story by a reporter on the ground if you want some facts.

If Alabama had suffered 500 earthquakes since Christmas, and had the biggest one in a century a few days ago, I think we might be hearing just a bit more about it.

Did Something Happen in Puerto Rico?Post + Comments (40)

Fair elections in North Carolina forthcoming

by David Anderson|  September 3, 20194:04 pm| 83 Comments

This post is in: Election 2020, Fuck The Poor, Local races 2019/2020

NEWS — We just won our NC state court gerrymandering lawsuit! The trial court struck down the current state House and state Senate plans and required that new plans be drawn immediately.

— Daniel Jacobson (@Dan_F_Jacobson) September 3, 2019

This is a state constitutional case and does not rely on federal law. In this way, North Carolina will be like Pennsylvania in how it de-gerrymanders.

Open Thread.

Fair elections in North Carolina forthcomingPost + Comments (83)

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