Subscribe to Dollars & Sense magazine. Recent articles related to the financial crisis. Save NOLA Affordable Housing Fact SheetThe following fact sheet came via an email from Bill Quigley. It has also been posted on justiceforneworleans.org, a website maintained by the Loyola University of New Orleans Law Clinic, which Quigley directs.
Technorati Tags: nola, public housing, racism, poverty, hud, hano, katrina Please consider donating to Dollars & Sense and/or subscribing to the magazine (both print and e-subscriptions now available!). Econamici: When Affirmative Action was White, by Ira KatznelsonEconomic historians often refer to the period from World War II to the mid 1970's as the "Great Compression." During that period, US inequality plunged to its lowest level ever, before reversing. In an earlier Econamici, "The Wedge," I attributed this plunge to an unprecedented set of redistributive policies: In 1935, Social Security began providing pensions--at first, necessarily, entirely to people who had not paid into the system. During the war, the military provided technical training for millions of men and women otherwise lacking the opportunity. For the poorest, it provided crash literacy programs. After the war, Congress enacted generous GI benefits, including college, health care, and loans to purchase homes or start businesses. Expenditures on these programs took a huge fraction of GDP compared to social spending today. Marginal tax rates during WW II were 94%. By 1948, a staggering 15% of the federal budget was devoted to the GI bill. But, according to historian Ira Katznelson, these and related programs were quite deliberately designed to exclude blacks. So much so, that during the same period of the Great Compression, inequality between blacks and whites increased substantially. Why and how did these historic national redistributive programs exclude blacks? Why is easy. These programs, initiated by the Democratic Party, required the cooperation of southern Democratic legislators. These men, although eager to bring federal funds to the poor and backward South, nonetheless saw a threat to the southern "way of life," which depended on cheap black labor. As a South Carolina Senator proclaimed in response to proposed fair labor standards legislation: "Any man on this floor who has sense enough to read the English language knows that the main object of this bill is, by human legislation, to overcome the great gift of God to the South." How was more subtle. Southern legislators employed two key strategies: classification of beneficiaries and local administration. Before World War II, most southern blacks worked on farms or as maids. So, at the insistence of Southern legislators, the original 1935 Social Security legislation excluded farm and domestic labor. The effect was to exclude 65 percent of blacks nationally, and 70 to 80 percent in the South. Not until 1954, under a Republican administration, was Social Security extended to all workers. Unemployment and workmen's compensation insurance likewise originally excluded domestic and farm workers. During World War II, the US military remained segregated. Facilities for black recruits, mostly in the South, provided limited and inferior training compared to white facilities. Black servicemen complained they were being employed as servants and ditch diggers. Black men were almost entirely excluded from training as pilots, as black women were excluded from training as nurses. After World War II, Southern legislators insisted that local agencies administer the distribution of GI benefits. Southern administrators steered returning black soldiers to inferior segregated colleges or to outright fraudulent job training programs. Southern bankers processed GI mortgage loan applications, "redlining" black neighborhoods--charging higher rates or refusing loans altogether. Veterans' hospitals remained segregated until 1948. In these and many other ways, federal programs boosted millions of poor whites into the home-owning middle class, leaving blacks further behind. According to Katznelson, the Democratic Party made a "Faustian bargain" with its southern members: abandoning core values of equity to gain generous benefits for the white working class majority. Today, whites often resent "affirmative action" for blacks. The link appears too weak between blacks in general and remote slavery or past discrimination. But consider: during World War II, Japanese Americans were rounded up and sent to desert internment camps; as direct victims of bad public policy they eventually did receive (miserly) compensation. Likewise, the Democratic Party's "bargain" created identifiable victims. Many are still alive. Their families today still lack the assets, education and financial security of equivalent whites. Katznelson proposes that were it recast as a response to "white affirmative action," black affirmative action would gain greater legitimacy and sympathy. &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& More Econamici I send Econamici--occasional emails with interesting attachments or links--to friends who are economists or care about economic issues. If you can't follow a link, I can send you the actual article. -- Polly Cleveland Please consider donating to Dollars & Sense and/or subscribing to the magazine (both print and e-subscriptions now available!). Pinochet and NeoliberalismOn Monday Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, former dictator of Chile and neoliberal/monetarist reformer, escaped prosecution for his many crimes against the people of Chile and against humanity.Post-mortem press accounts of Pinochet have tended to characterize his villany as political—emphasizing the many human rights abuses committed under his regime—while perpetuating the characterization of his regime's neoliberal economic reforms as an "economic miracle." (The phrase is attributed to the also-recently-departed Milton Friedman, who trained the "Chicago Boys" behind Pinochet's reforms.) The Christian Science Monitor, for example, quotes only Pinochet fans (including retired Gen. Luis Cortes Villa, director of the Pinochet Foundation, which is "dedicated to giving out scholarships and preserving the positive side of his legacy"), to support the claim that "[t]hough condemned for its brutality, [Pinochet's] regime is credited with stimulating economic growth." Talking to his friends and to admirers of neoliberalism allows the press to characterize this brutal dictator and his legacy as "controversial." How else to leave open the possibility that the repression and human rights abuses required to carry out ongoing neoliberal refroms worldwide are "worth it"? Of course the political and the economic can't be separated in this way. For a useful antidote to recent press accounts, see our 2004 article by Jim Cypher, "Is Chile a Neoliberal Success?" See also Greg Grandin's recent Counterpunch article, Milton Friedman and the Economics of Empire: The Road from Serfdom. Please consider donating to Dollars & Sense and/or subscribing to the magazine (both print and e-subscriptions now available!). We're big in Brussells!The European Federation of Employee Shareownership (EFES) has selectedWorker-Owners and Unions: Why Can't We Just Get Along? from the Sept/Oct issue as one of 50 "remarkable" articles (out of 1,507!) on employee ownership. Although the other articles are from the likes of BusinessWeek, Newsweek, and MSNBC, ours was the only article to get a hyperlink in the top summary. Then again, we were probably the only worker-run collective in the bunch as well. In the article, author Dan Bell examines several real-world case studies of interactions between worker owned businesses and unions, ultimately arguing for greater collaboration between the two. "Can worker-owners and unions get along? Notwithstanding the profound differences between worker ownership and union representation as strategies for improving working conditions and giving workers a voice, and in spite of unions' sometimes valid skepticism, the simple answer is: They must! Globalization has exposed both the labor movement and worker-owned cooperatives to intense competition within a framework of laws and policies that relentlessly favor corporations over workers. To respond effectively, workers need a varied toolkit; they cannot afford to abandon solidarity merely because different groups pursue different strategies." Please consider donating to Dollars & Sense and/or subscribing to the magazine (both print and e-subscriptions now available!). |
