Category: Social Justice

Possible explanation for media enthusiasm for middle class welfare

by philg

American newspapers are tireless advocates for what are essentially middle class welfare programs: affordable housing, Medicare for all, etc. These proposals won’t help the poor, all of whom are already eligible for taxpayer-funded housing, taxpayer-funded health care (Medicaid), taxpayer-funded food (SNAP), and a taxpayer-funded smartphone.

This union-authored study of pay at the Washington Post may provide some insight:

For the 290 salaried male newsroom employees working at The Post, the median salary is $116,065. For the 284 salaried female newsroom employees, it is $95,595.

(Separate question: if women are less expensive to employ and work just as effectively, why does a profit-oriented guy like Jeff Bezos hire any men at all?)

In other words, it turns out that the folks who author the news in D.C. are earning close to the income limit for affordable housing for a family of 4 in D.C. If they get a pay raise they end up in the slavery zone for an American: not rich enough to afford a decent apartment in a nice area, not poor enough to qualify for any subsidies. The result is an apartment in Rockville or a house in Frederick and 2-3 hours of daily commuting.

So it is possible that they advocate for a planned economy and lavish middle-class handouts for purely altruistic reasons, but this advocacy is also consistent with their personal situation.

Related:

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Billionaire Raj: only a bigger government can address the inequality create by a big government

by philg

I’m listening to the Billionaire Raj on Audible. For those of us who live in a U.S.-centric bubble, there is a lot of interesting modern history regarding India’s most successful people and enterprises, including Mukesh Ambani who lives in a $2 billion house in Mumbai and was rich enough to spend $30 billion building a from-scratch mobile operator called Jio. Some of the success seems to come from rapid growth in an immature economy, which therefore offers niches that don’t exist in Germany, Japan, or the U.S. (what start-up could realistically compete with Verizon, for example?). The author attributes most of the success, however, to cronyism. Current Indian billionaires were those who got early licenses and permits from paid-off friends in politics and government. Maybe they don’t need to bother with bribes now because they have huge market share and momentum.

The author, James Crabtree, makes righteous-sounding statements about the dramatic income and wealth inequality that prevails in India today. Implicit in his decrying of the current situation is that the Indian government needs to grow in size and capacity until money can be taken away from the undeserving billionaires and distributed to the worthy poor. He draws dozens of comparisons between India’s current crop of billionaires and the robber barons that grew rich in the late 19th century United States.

The book itself contradicts this comparison. Crabtree paints India pre-1990 as having a centrally planned economy with at least as many restrictions as the Soviet Union. Nobody could buy or sell anything without approval from a government bureaucrat. Nobody could get on a plane and leave the country without government permission. The Indian government, even in its stripped-down post-1990 form, is vastly larger and more powerful than the U.S. government was in the 1800s.

There are some good sections on the infrastructure of corruption. Most people don’t know how to bribe government officials and wouldn’t want to learn how. Thus, a corrupt society encourages the development of a layer of middlemen agents who obtain the required permits from government officials. If they’re paying bribes, the customer of the agent never need know.

Ever wonder why the folks calling with credit card refinancing scams all have Indian accents? There are plenty of people worldwide who speak English and quite a few are willing to work at low wages. Crabtree makes the case that India has the world’s richest and deepest tradition of corruption.

The author studied government and public policy and his proposal for India is essentially that government be “reformed” so that bribery and inefficiency are eliminated in favor of enlightened technocracy. Once that is done, presumably, then an Elizabeth Warren-style sanding down of the billionaires will take place to address the scourge of inequality.

Yet it is unclear how this glorious reform is to be achieved. The author describes Indian politics as driven by castes competing for victimhood status and parties promising to dole out government jobs and other government-controlled resources to victim castes. All party activities are fueled by cash from successful businesses and business owners. (Corrupt politicians are punished, however; after 18 years of prosecution and procedure, J. Jayalalithaa was sentenced to 4 years in prison (she served one month before returning to office).)

Ultimately the book is unconvincing regarding the source of wealth of current Indian billionaires. The book describes some of them going bust after making investments that were a bit too daring. The book describes Ambani being unable to get the government to approve helicopter operations off the roof of his $2 billion house. If he’s a government crony, why can’t he get his helipad? GE was able to get their cronies in the City of Boston to approve a helipad in South Boston that nobody else had been able to get (a condition of GE moving its HQ to Massachusetts). Certainly it seems that the Indian billionaires gambled big and won big as the economy continued to grow. And probably they faced a less competitive environment than in some countries with smaller governments and markets closer to the Econ 101 ideal.

Despite the logical contradictions and absurd dreams of hyper-efficient and hyper-honest government in a country that has a multi-century tradition of the opposite, the Billionaire Raj is useful for shaking the American reader out of the notion that the U.S. and China are the only places where big business happens.

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Whites cashing in on non-white victimhood

by philg

Tonight at our local school (free tickets):

Waking up White and Finding Myself in the Story of Race

Please join the Lincoln community as we welcome Debby Irving – local author, racial justice educator, and public speaker. Debby will present in a workshop format utilizing stories from her life to exploring systemic racism that goes largely unnoticed but feeds long-held radicalized belief systems. By sharing, her struggle to understand racism and racial tensions, she offers a fresh perspective of bias stereotypes, manners, and tolerance. As she unpacks her own long-held beliefs about color blindness, being a good person, and wanting to help people of color, she reveals how each of these well-intentioned mindsets actually perpetuated her ill-conceived ideas about race. She also explains why and how she’s changed the way she talks about racism, works in racially mixed groups, and understands the racial justice movement as a whole.

From Amazon:

Debby Irving is an emerging voice in the national racial justice community. Combining her organization development skills, classroom teaching experience, and understanding of systemic racism, Irving educates and consults with individuals and organizations seeking to create racial equity at both the personal and institutional level.

Irving grew up in Winchester, Massachusetts, during the socially turbulent 1960s and ’70s. After a blissfully sheltered, upper-middle-class suburban childhood, she found herself simultaneously intrigued and horrified by the racial divide she observed in nearby Boston. Her career began in a variety of urban performance-art and community-based non-profits, where she repeatedly found that her best efforts to “help” caused more harm than the good she intended. Her one-step-forward-two-steps-back experience of racial understanding eventually lead her to dig deeply into her own white privilege, where she found truths she never knew existed. Waking Up White describes that journey and the lessons learned along the way.

Now a racial justice educator and writer, Irving works with other white people to transform confusion into curiosity and anxiety into action. She’s worked in private and public urban schools, both in the classroom and at the board level, to foster community among students, teachers, staff, and families by focusing on honest dialog that educates and connects people through shared interests and divergent backgrounds. A graduate of the Winsor School in Boston, she holds a BA from Kenyon College and an MBA from Simmons College. Waking Up White is her first book.

Amazon reader reviews:

A summary of the book: a white person from a wealthy, old-money, well-connected family has a crisis of conscience, then proceeds to take the pain and suffering of hundreds of millions past and present people of color, co-opts it and makes it all about herself, then sells a book to other white people and makes even more money. At the center appears to be a desperate concern about what others think about her. She wants you to think that she is a good person. Your opinion on that topic matters greatly to her.

She gave a talk at my school. Her examples are very dated and her research limited.

There are few books that will lower one’s IQ faster than this smarmy self-centered tome dedicated to the joke called “white privilege.” Leftist drivel combined with pitiful and laughable narratives combine to make a it a horrific read. My horror mounted as I realized that some poor students probably had to read this dreck and pretend that it has meaning in order to obtain the mandatory credit in a self-hate course.

Complete and utter trash. Ideal for use with an open fire, BURNS WELL!

Related:

  • the school building, renovated or brand new as of 25 years ago, will soon be bulldozed and replaced with the most expensive, per-student, school ever built in the United States (residents voted enthusiastic for the spending project and are now arguing bitterly over how to distribute the burden of paying for it!)
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Bill Gates: Income taxes great; wealth taxes bad

by philg

“Bill Gates criticises Elizabeth Warren’s plan for tax on super-rich” (BBC):

Under the original plan, households with a net worth between $50m (£39m) and $1bn (£780m) will be charged with a 2% “wealth tax” every year. This would rise to 3% for any households with a net worth of over $1bn.

But last week, Ms Warren suggested doubling the latter rate – from 3% to 6%. She said the money raised from this new tax would be used to fund her healthcare plan, which is expected to cost the federal government $20.5tn over 10 years.

Mr Gates hit back at the idea during a talk at the New York Times DealBook conference in New York on Wednesday.

“I’m all for super-progressive tax systems,” he said. “I’ve paid over $10 billion in taxes. I’ve paid more than anyone in taxes. If I had to pay $20 billion, it’s fine.

“But when you say I should pay $100 billion, then I’m starting to do a little math about what I have left over,” he added. “You really want the incentive system to be there without threatening that.”

(I don’t understand his statement that he has paid $10 billion in taxes. If he mostly let his Microsoft stock sit or donated it to his foundation, why did he have to pay capital gains tax? Certainly he would not have had a substantial amount of ordinary income that would attract the high ordinary income tax rates that he has advocated. Maybe the $10 billion is capital gains tax on venture capital investments that he made on which he was forced to exit, e.g., due to an acquisition? Plus some from selling Microsoft stock to diversify? Or he is referring to corporate taxes paid by Microsoft (see below) that he paid indirectly?)

He’s “all for super-progressive tax systems,” but with one exception!

Related:

  • Microsoft’s pre-Trump corporate tax system: “By conducting sales from places with small populations and low tax rates, and routing some profit through virtually tax-free jurisdictions like Bermuda, Microsoft has cut billions of dollars from its tax bill over the last decade.”
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49 percent of Washington State voters see themselves as victims

by philg

Yesterday’s post regarding Kshama Sawant, the immigrant running for reelection on a platform of “the rent is too damn high,” motivated me to check the election results. Ms. Sawant was the only incumbent to have lost. More interestingly, 48.7 percent of Washington State voters say “yes” to reinstating affirmative action:

I-1000, the measure passed by lawmakers, aims to increase diversity in public contracting, employment and education, while barring the use of quotas or preferential treatment.

Affirmative-action supporters say such measures are necessary to address longstanding and broad discrimination against women and people of color. One example they cite is data showing a drop in contracts with the state for certified women- and minority-owned businesses.

But throughout the campaign, opponents of affirmative action — led by a group of Chinese immigrants — said the policy gives the government the power to discriminate.

If we assume that people vote their self-interest, then we can conclude from the election result that nearly half of the voters in Washington State expected to benefit from official victim status.

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LGBTQIA is out at Brown University…

by philg

…. because TGQN is in.

I visited a group house in which the students attending this Ivy League university vow “We reject systems that create and reinforce inequality” as a “guiding principle”.

I visited the FBO at the nearby airport, whose ramp was groaning with private jets that had arrived for Parents’ Weekend. Sometimes it is only by spinning three turbojet engines that one can reject inequality…

I had a sandwich at U Melt, which welcomes everyone except those without money:

(The sign plus the absence of any kind of program to provide meals for the poor is more evidence for my theory that social justice causes that don’t cost more than the price of a sign are the most popular.)

Fun on the main student drag:

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Evidence for theory explaining LGBTQIA promotion popularity

by philg

Back in August, I asked “Is LGBTQIA the most popular social justice cause because it does not require giving money?”

Here’s some evidence for the theory, from downtown Washington, D.C.:

The church is surrounded by begging homeless people and a McLaren automobile that costs roughly $150,000 per seat (perfect for sitting in D.C. gridlock!). Are the church and its parishioners concerned about poverty or inequality? Apparently not, since the only cause promoted with a sign regards LGBTQIA.

(In this cause, the church is competing with the D.C. government. City building a few blocks away:

“The District has a higher level of income inequality than any state in the country” and yet the “Mayor’s Office of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Questioning Affairs” has its programs featured in the taxpayer-funded building rather than anything to do with poverty.)

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1.5 billion Chinese people crowd into the “of color” category

by philg

“Harvey Weinstein Told Me He Liked Chinese Girls” (New York Times):

The second power imbalance was around race — the fact that Harvey was white and I was a person of color

With approximately 1.5 billion Chinese people worldwide, doesn’t this make the “Person of Color” category rather crowded?

The old fat guy has more money than the young lithe woman:

Finally, the wealth — Harvey was a multimillionaire, with all the influence money could buy. I was a fresh graduate loaded with student debt. Even during the few months I worked with him, I saw firsthand the influence that money could buy. Later, I was to discover that it could even buy silence.

The two adults have a late-night meeting in a hotel room:

At the Venice Film Festival later that year, these four power imbalances collided in a late-night meeting with Harvey. I had expected to discuss potential film productions and scripts, and we did. But after hours of fending off his chitchat, flattery, requests for massages and a bath, ultimately I found myself pushed back against the bed. I’d worn two pairs of tights for protection, and tried to appease him by taking one of them off and letting him massage me, but it hadn’t worked.

The young trim person is able to escape from the old morbidly obese person:

In the end, I was able to wriggle off the bed and leave

The financial power imbalance is rectified to a small extent:

when I finally signed the nondisclosure document, accepting a settlement of £125,000 (about $213,000) and agreeing to stay silent forever, the trauma was not yet over.

(If all of this happened 20 years ago, that’s roughly $332,000 in 2019 dollars.)

Get ready for a bunch more articles about Harvey and his hotel room companions:

Then, in September 2018, I watched another woman, Christine Blasey Ford, speak up about the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Coincidentally, only a few minutes from my house she was living the very existence I’d feared … In January, I had the privilege of sharing my story with Dr. Blasey and other survivors in a group interview conducted by Ms. Kantor and Ms. Twohey. … Since the story broke in October 2017, many actresses, from the relatively unknown to the superstars, have come out with stories about Harvey. Yet the stories of assistants have gotten relatively little attention by comparison, and tragically, even fewer of those voices have been of women of color.

Reading between the lines, it seems that the victim/author is living in Silicon Valley in a house with her four children. (i.e., depending on the house, she might well have reached the “multimillionaire” status with which she characterized the middle-aged Harvey Weinstein.)

Readers: Is it reasonable for a Chinese person to don the “person of color” victimhood mantle? Would the African Americans living in East St. Louis (murder rate 19X the U.S. average and exceeding that of Honduras, El Salvador, and other countries from which folks are seeking asylum due to violence) agree that they should be lumped together with the mom of four in a house in America’s most expensive neighborhood? Can my Chinese-American dermatologist and engineering Ph.D. friends also claim to be “of color”?

[If Asians are “of color,” why doesn’t Harvard want to admit them?]

Related:

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Why isn’t saying ‘person of color’ offensive?

by philg

Here’s a Facebook posting from a righteous academic:

I’ve been thinking about this image and caption ever since Amatullah posted it. I’ve been thinking about it in its own right—WHY DOESN’T FLINT HAVE POTABLE WATER YET, AND WHY DON’T WE CARE—but also because I see a lot of white “allies” in my daily life and ESPECIALLY in my professional life as a classicist, allies who just don’t know how to PASS THE MIC, step out of their own spotlight, and listen to POC.

Note my post is not a condemnation of Greta, whom I admire. It’s a comment on those of us who can but choose not to promote and listen to our colleagues of color, particularly when it comes to issues of combatting racism.

This is her addition while sharing a post featuring a young woman holding a sign about Flint’s public water supply and the following text:

While I’m immensely proud of Greta & AOC. Please don’t forget Mari Copeny aka: Little Miss Flint. She has been fighting for Flint & has not received even a portion of the attention she & her cause deserves!

EDIT: No empty useless comments about how this isn’t about Race, how it’s Democrats faults, and any other thinly veiled racism wrapped in logical Fallacies will be squashed (to the best of my ability)
This post is to Signal Boost Mari & others like her who are NOT getting the attention THEY deserve.

Read what I said, read it again.
Now share it, follow her & others that have been doing the work. Thanks!

The righteous sharer uses the acronym “POC” for “Person of Color” and refers to “colleagues of color.” If non-whites object to being classified by their skin color, why isn’t this term just as offensive as any other term that refers to skin color, e.g., “darkies” that Kentucky is trying to remove from “My Old Kentucky Home”? If the offensive idea is that inferences can be drawn based on the color of a person’s skin, rather than the content of their character, shouldn’t lumping all “persons of color” together be offensive, regardless of the term used?

Related:

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Asians all look same to Harvard and the Federal judge

by philg

In yesterday’s post on Judge Allison Burroughs ruling that it is legal for Harvard to engage in race discrimination, I wrote

why is it okay for the judge to imply that a group of Asians is lacking in diversity? “In her decision, Judge Burroughs defended the benefits of diversity … ‘The rich diversity at Harvard and other colleges and universities and the benefits that flow from that diversity,’ she added, ‘will foster the tolerance, acceptance and understanding that will ultimately make race conscious admissions obsolete.’” Isn’t the implication that if we assemble white and black Americans we have “rich diversity,” but if we assemble a group of Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Cambodian, Burmese, and Indian students we have a boring monoculture?

A reader pointed out that there is already a web site for the Ivy League admissions officers and their Obama-appointed friends on the Federal bench: alllooksame.com.

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