Data, Dispatches, and Diagrams

Ontario's affordable housing crisis deepens

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 13:17:39 -0400

Ontario's affordable housing crisis deepens

Rising deaths in US Welfare-to-work programs raise questions at home

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 08:04:09 -0400

Rising deaths in US Welfare-to-work programs raise questions at home

Canada slammed for trailing peers in fight against tax havens as funds stashed offshore hit record $170B

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 12:23:23 -0400

Canada slammed for trailing peers in fight against tax havens as funds stashed offshore hit record $170B

[The life I live] from “The City of Poetry” The life I live, The one I hoped To...

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 08:58:07 -0400

[The life I live]
from “The City of Poetry”

The life I live,
The one I hoped
To live—
How seldom
They coincide.

Sometimes, briefly,
They do;
Sometimes, in the city.

- Gregory Orr

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Thu, 13 Jun 2013 08:44:27 -0400

gaywrites: (via Trans Student Equality Resources)

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 12:47:11 -0400

gaywrites:

(via Trans Student Equality Resources)

Financial Totalitarianism: The Economic, Political, Social and Cultural Rule of Speculative Capital

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 12:09:11 -0400

Financial Totalitarianism: The Economic, Political, Social and Cultural Rule of Speculative Capital

Canada not targeting offshore tax cheats, analysis shows

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 11:32:40 -0400

Canada not targeting offshore tax cheats, analysis shows

End to homelessness by 2016?

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 09:00:28 -0400

End to homelessness by 2016?

racismschool: Food Inequality While the national average for...

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 22:17:16 -0400

racismschool:

Food Inequality

While the national average for those with food insecurity in their homes is 14.5 percent, Native people, Black people and Latino people are hit the hardest.

As of 2011, One in four Black households (25.1% up from 24.9% in 2009) and one in four Latin@ households (26.2% down from 26.9% in 2009) were food insecure.

Frustratingly enough, (but not at all surprising) I was able to find several pieces of information on white, Black, Latin@ and Asian food disparities. Missing from almost every article, chart and graph was Native people. This is particularly disheartening because no matter what year I compared, the numbers for Native people’s food insecurity wasn’t just double the national average, it is double that of Black and Latin@ people.

In every racial group, it is the children who are hit the hardest. The above graphic from 2010, shows the national food insecurity rates and then the national child food insecurity rates. What many fail to realize is that children are paying the price first and foremost. The problem is, so many see this as someone else’s issue. Realistically, hell-even selfishly, we should remember how much food insecurity affects the mental, emotional and physical health of children. How it affects childhood education. How it so closely correlates to what their futures hold. Which means, what our country’s future holds. Feeding a hungry child today could stop us from having to pay an even bigger price tomorrow.

Feeding America is a great place to go if you need food, if you want to volunteer or if you want to donate. Do what you can, start in your own back yard and then expand it to the world.

Do it for selfish reasons. The person you help feed today, might be the person who heals your pain tomorrow.

Harper's attack on Insite continues

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 14:56:47 -0400

Harper's attack on Insite continues

The future of the American city

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 14:22:46 -0400

The future of the American city:

In 2011, for the first time in more than 90 years, America’s largest cities registered higher population growth than their combined suburbs, according to William Frey, a leading demographer. The signs are this will continue. While the cities are gentrifying, many of America’s suburbs are heading downmarket. It is the invisible side of the same coin. Frey writes: “This puts the brakes on a longstanding staple of American life – the pervasive suburbanisation of its population which began with widespread automobile use in the 1920s, to the present day, where more than half the US population lives in suburbs.”

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Sun, 09 Jun 2013 14:10:37 -0400

A Marxist Critique of Capitalist Development

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 13:32:00 -0400

The Economist published an article entitled Towards the End of Poverty, which argues that the number of people living in extreme poverty on a global scale dramatically declined in the last 20 years. The reason?

Capitalism.

Oh, boy.

Admittedly, 20th century capitalism alleviated extreme poverty on a global scale through industrialization, medicine, and, of course, developing public infrastructures. However, those lifted out of extreme poverty did not experience significant economic mobility in their lifetime. Indeed, since the early 20th century, industrial capital’s expansion into the global market proletariatized the global poor by subsuming them into capitalist class relations, subsequently commodifying their labour-power to perpetuate accumulation. Even today, workers in China and Bangladesh, as recent examples, subsist on abysmally low wages in technology, textiles, and agriculture. Along with inhumane working conditions, the health and well-being of workers continues to be threatened. Much research has shown that chronic poverty negatively impacts human health over time, not to mention mental health and social cohesion. Environmental devastation across the Global South not only endangers human health but makes our collective future on this planet appear rather bleak.

According to Marx, capitalist economies compel people to make a reactive choice to enter into wage relations rather than exercise their self-determination. Capitalists own the means of production - the land, technology, and materials to provide the basic necessities for life - and deprive people the capacity to practice real liberty. By appropriating the means of production, capitalists leave workers with two options: starve or work.

But the putting of labour-power into action – i.e., the work – is the active expression of the labourer’s own life. And this life activity he sells to another person in order to secure the necessary means of life. His life-activity, therefore, is but a means of securing his own existence. He works that he may keep alive. He does not count the labour itself as a part of his life; it is rather a sacrifice of his life. It is a commodity that he has auctioned off to another. The product of his activity, therefore, is not the aim of his activity. What he produces for himself is not the silk that he weaves, not the gold that he draws up the mining shaft, not the palace that he builds. What he produces for himself is wages; and the silk, the gold, and the palace are resolved for him into a certain quantity of necessaries of life, perhaps into a cotton jacket, into copper coins, and into a basement dwelling. And the labourer who for 12 hours long, weaves, spins, bores, turns, builds, shovels, breaks stone, carries hods, and so on – is this 12 hours’ weaving, spinning, boring, turning, building, shovelling, stone-breaking, regarded by him as a manifestation of life, as life? Quite the contrary. Life for him begins where this activity ceases, at the table, at the tavern, in bed. The 12 hours’ work, on the other hand, has no meaning for him as weaving, spinning, boring, and so on, but only as earnings, which enable him to sit down at a table, to take his seat in the tavern, and to lie down in a bed. If the silk-worm’s object in spinning were to prolong its existence as caterpillar, it would be a perfect example of a wage-worker (Marx 1891).

Marx’s argument extends to modern global capitalism. Transnational corporations relocate their capital to other nations, where land, technology, and materials can be acquired at cost. Furthermore, nations with a deregulated labour market attract transnational corporate investment in order to reduce labour costs. Hence, the Global South is an attractive option for corporations to appropriate the local means of production and establish capitalist class relations, thereby compelling workers to sell their labour-power as the local economy shifts away from traditional subsistence patterns. Neo-colonialism under globalized corporate trade entrenches these class relations.

The number people living in extreme poverty - however that is defined - may have dropped, but the number of working poor on a global scale continues to be advanced despite state interventions. To date, 1 in 7 workers in the world earn less than $2 (US) a day, or approximately 900 million people, excluding the United States. Women of colour make up the majority of the working poor in the Global South, suggesting that the intersection of gender, race, and class determines social positioning within neo-colonialism. Capitalism has the capacity to engender major social changes, yet those very changes continue to legitimate accumulation through class exploitation. Contemporary societies may appear to be differently stratified with an increased standard of living. However, capitalist class relations perpetuate environmental destruction and social suffering, only now with a historically unique structure.

Marijuana: One Drug, Two Stories

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 16:35:04 -0400

Marijuana: One Drug, Two Stories

Widening Economic Inequality in United States Is a Deliberate Result of Government Policy, New Study Finds

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 14:18:35 -0400

Widening Economic Inequality in United States Is a Deliberate Result of Government Policy, New Study Finds

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Sun, 02 Jun 2013 12:47:10 -0400

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Sun, 02 Jun 2013 12:46:47 -0400

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Sun, 02 Jun 2013 12:46:27 -0400

A Realistic Radicalism

Sun, 02 Jun 2013 10:38:06 -0400

A Realistic Radicalism