Economic Justice 
Mon May 05, 2008 at 21:07:13 PM EDT
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Fewer and fewer supermarkets in New York City. No single bad guy, no easily identifiable group of bad guys taking them away, just fewer places to get fresh food. Of course, this is a health problem: “Many people in low-income neighborhoods are spending their food budget at discount stores or pharmacies where there is no fresh produce,” said Amanda Burden, the city’s planning director. “In our study, a significant percentage of them reported that in the day before our survey, they had not eaten fresh fruit or vegetables. Not one. That really is a health crisis in the city.”
It's not just a health problem. The article name checks a few of the related issues: rising rents, the inability for local stores to keep up with national chains, the loss of local unionized jobs... it's all connected. Also, the food problem is not only a problem of supply at the top level. Even if you have a supermarket, fresh food is still expensive. If the city is going to provide various zoning and tax breaks to keep the supermarkets within physical reach of the locals, it also needs to find ways to keep the much-applauded fresh food within financial reach of those same locals. If it doesn't, the people visiting the stores are going to keep buying the same lower-cost non-fresh food they would get anywhere else.
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Wed Apr 16, 2008 at 18:18:54 PM EDT
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On Slate today, some amusingly unconvincing prognostications, from the guys who brought you the credit crisis, about how the credit crisis is, like, basically, already over. Credit crisis: It's so 2007 of you to ask. My favorite: John Mack, CEO of Morgan Stanley: Trotting out his most strained sports metaphor on April 8, Mack said that the credit crisis is in the eighth inning or "the top of the ninth." If that's the case, then Morgan's starting pitching was pretty dismal. Mack and the now-departed Zoe Cruz allowed Morgan to lose $3.7 billion from subprime losses in 2007. This, coupled with a $2.3 billion write-down in the first quarter of this year, doesn't inspire confidence in Mack's prognostications.
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Mon Apr 14, 2008 at 12:41:15 PM EDT
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A new Pew Survey has some great data about Americans describing themselves as 'middle class.' First of all, they're basically everybody. The survey asked respondents to place themselves into one of five groups -- upper class, upper middle class, middle class, lower middle class and lower class. About half (53%) say they are middle class; some 19% percent say they are upper middle class and another 19% say they are lower middle class; 6% say they are lower class and 2% say they are upper class.
So if you count "upper middle class" and "lower middle class," which Pew Forum doesn't seem to do, that's 91% of Americans describing themselves as some form of middle class. Here's what really amazes me:
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Wed Apr 09, 2008 at 12:19:00 PM EDT
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The Boston Globe is reporting that Governor Deval Patrick is proposing to put people to work with a large infrastructure project aimed at repairing old bridges across the state. The Globe estimates that it would create 23,000 construction jobs. Bridge maintenance, of course, is an issue that's gotten more attention since the Minneapolis bridge disaster last year, and it may be particularly relevant to Massachusetts, an old state with a good bit of older infrastructure, and where "approximately 10 percent of the 5,500 bridges...are classified under federal standards as 'structurally deficient," according to a Globe report last August.
The biggest concern with it seems to be the funding mechanism, which would be a public bond that would increase the state's debt. While I'm a public policy student, I'm not an expert on the effects of state deficit spending. I do know that some economic theory says that government should act counter-cyclically--i.e., when an economy is in an downturn, government should spend in order to get people working (and thus spending). Arguably, programs like this helped to end the Great Depression by getting people working and spending. While a liberal notion often associated with John Maynard Keynes, it's had a lot of influence--the Bush administration's tax credits are an example of it (albeit a timid one that's careful not to redistribute wealth away from the rich!).
Of course, I also know that if a state is heavily in debt, that means that revenue is going to pay interest. And if a state gets a bad bond rating (not sure if that's a concern here), that can increase those interest payments. But it seems that the benefits may outweigh these costs if the proposal works.
Any thoughts?
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Fri Apr 04, 2008 at 14:07:41 PM EDT
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The night before his death, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. recalled the story of Exodus. In a stirring valedictory, Dr. King reminded striking sanitation workers and their supporters at the Mason Temple that the Israelites wandered forty years in the wilderness before they finally reached the Promised Land. "I may not get there with you," he predicted, but "I have seen the Promised Land."
While many Americans are familiar with the Exodus story, few realize that the Promised Land Dr. King envisioned in his Mountaintop speech was not just an America free from segregation. It was an America transformed; a nation that offered equal economic opportunity to all its citizens. Forty years after Dr. King lost his life, we must ask ourselves: What is America doing to keep Dr. King's vision of equal economic opportunity alive?
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Thu Mar 27, 2008 at 12:30:07 PM EDT
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During my trip to New Orleans with a student group last week, we heard two opposing positions on the city recovery efforts to date. The first, expressed by Tulane University history professor Lance Hill, was that the New Orleans city government was unethically seizing the property of city residents who had left the city and that the city was taking every opportunity to hinder the return of its former citizens. To put it crudely, Hill felt the city was trying to keep the city richer and whiter than it was before the storm.
The other position we heard was that of Dan Shea of the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Shea argued that the recovery was essentially going well. Though he had plenty of complaints about the city, Shea felt that New Orleans was doing the right thing by seizing abandoned property to clean it up and resell it. There was plenty of money available to displaced residents who wished to return, Shea argued; if former New Orleaneans had not returned it was because they no longer wished to live in New Orleans, and the city was within its rights to claim their land and homes to protect property values.
At its essence, the disagreement between Lance Hill and Dan Shea seemed to center on whether the restoration of the city meant the restoration of the same people who lived in the city pre-Katrina to their former homes and neighborhoods or the restoration of an equivalent amount of capital (in the forms of tourism, home ownership, etc) to the city's economy. Hill thought the people took precedence. Shea argued that if the capital returned, the people would sort themselves out in the way that made most sense.
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Fri Mar 07, 2008 at 18:44:47 PM EST
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Forty years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr, went to Memphis to support sanitation workers on strike for a better wage. At that time, the minimum wage for workers in the United States was $9.70 per hour in 2008 dollars.
Today, the national minimum wage is $5.85.
When Memphis's sanitation workers went on strike in 1968, they were being paid an average of $1.80 per hour, which is $10.92 in 2008 dollars. The lowest-paid sanitation workers in 1968 made $1.65 an hour, which equals $9.83 in 2007 dollars.
Today, the lowest-paid ten percent of Memphis sanitation workers make $6.43.
Forty years after King's visit to Memphis, the city where he would lose his life, faith leaders from around the country will gather next Thursday to call on King's memory and to demand a living wage for all workers. The interfaith service will be held at 7:00 pm at Memphis's historic Centenary United Methodist Church, which organized support in 1968 for the Memphis sanitation workers.
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Thu Mar 06, 2008 at 15:30:10 PM EST
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Last week I returned from my fifth trip to the Gulf Coast since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated much of the region. The visit provided me with another opportunity to meet with community leaders and local organizers, as well as our college student service volunteers, all of whom continue to struggle to rebuild their city against overwhelming odds.
I am proud that Jewish Funds for Justice has extended our commitment to the people of New Orleans and the surrounding area. We have already moved almost $4 million dollars into the region, supporting local organizing and community investment.
It didn't take long for my hosts to put in perspective the generosity of JFSJ and the donors to our Katrina Fund. Our friends at the Alliance of Guest Workers for Dignity (a project of the New Orleans Workers' Center), which represents hundreds of guest workers in the Gulf Coast, told us about one of their campaigns:
Thirty Mexican "guest workers" are fighting slave-like conditions in the strawberry fields of Louisiana. Their boss, Mr. Relan, seized their passports, paid them as little as $2 an hour and threatened them with deportation if they attempted to stretch or use the bathroom.
On Valentine's Day, workers walked off the fields to reclaim their dignity.
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Thu Mar 06, 2008 at 12:52:38 PM EST
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American Rights at Work is holding a creative poll: which of Labor Secretary Elaine Chao's anti-worker decisions was the worst? They have added mine worker issues to multiple categories (lucky for Jeremy they let you vote for three!); other options include her efforts to take away overtime from eight million Americans and her opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act, which would empower workers to choose a union by simply filling out a card rather than be subjected to the employer harassment campaigns that accompany most unionization elections.
Click here to vote. If you do, let me know what you choose and why in the comments. (I picked worker safety rule, EFCA, and overtime, although my favorite was the one about her portraits...)
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Tue Mar 04, 2008 at 12:38:42 PM EST
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I had meant to post this much earlier, but somehow it got away from me... The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism created a list of "50 Ways You Can Change the State of Our Union," their response to the President's State of the Union address in January.
When you have a minute, it is worth reading through the entire list. For liberal Jews, it hits all the important notes: universal health care (for), higher wages (for), climate change (against), gun violence (against), civil rights (for), the 1st amendment (for), gay marriage (for), torture and the death penalty (against). You get the idea.
While I agree with just about everything in their list of 50, it is not (nor is it meant to be, I assume) a particularly effective tool to get people to take action. The paradox of choice and all that... when we have too many options we respond by choosing none, rather than finding our favorite from among the dozens and acting on it.
Here at JFSJ we are discussing that very issue;
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