Chinatown Businesses interests came into the room hesitant. I don’t think any of the mainstream news media (Vancouver Courier or the Straight) did justice to the hesitance … I am personally sympathetic towards Chinatown business interests because I know the exact memories and nostalgia upon which they recall and the
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Melissa Fong: Vancouver DTES Local Area Plan City Council Debates- Part One: Developers
…One topic that dominated the DTES LAP discussions last night was the 60/40 (Social/ market rate housing split) and the definition of affordable housing … All the usual suspects always caution against social housing. Developers are constantly talking about how it is not possible to build social housing without other
Continue readingPolitical Eh-conomy: We can’t all be workers: Putting inequality in the inequality debate
It’s easy to get confused about who is a worker and who isn’t these days. Your CEO may worker longer hours than you, not the top-hatted capitalist of the Monopoly board he. Indeed, it may seem that the leisure class of the turn of the last century has been replaced
Continue readingPolitical Eh-conomy: Economic history in the present: The wage fund and the minimum wage
How many bushels of wheat do you make a year? While this is not the most relevant question to be asking about wages today, some of the discussion around the minimum wage is taking inspiration from a very old economic idea according to which questions like this would be right
Continue readingParchment in the Fire: The Middle Class Is Steadily Eroding. Just Ask the Business World. – NYTimes.com
The Middle Class Is Steadily Eroding. Just Ask the Business World. – NYTimes.com. In Manhattan, the upscale clothing retailer Barneys will replace the bankrupt discounter Loehmann’s, whose Chelsea store closes in a few weeks. Across the country, Olive Garden and Red Lobster restaurants are struggling, while fine-dining chains like Capital
Continue readingSong of the Watermelon: Bigotry Against the Rich: Is That a Thing?
So apparently the rich are an oppressed minority now. Last month, in what is thought to have become the most widely read letter to the editor ever published by The Wall Street Journal, venture capitalist and former News Corp board member Tom Perkins writes, “I would call attention to the
Continue readingParchment in the Fire: The Making of the English Working Class turns 50
Check out @rosaluxnyc’s Tweet: https://twitter.com/rosaluxnyc/status/417378382330884096 Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: class, Labour
Continue readingPolitical Eh-conomy: Solving Christmas conundrums with New Year’s resolutions
I know I promised to not post until the New Year. Clearly the holidays have gotten the better of me. This, however, will be a short reflection and at once a New Year’s resolution. Christmas is a time of large get-togethers for my family and this year was no different.
Continue readingParchment in the Fire: NAFTA at 20: State of the North American Worker
Twenty years since its passage, NAFTA has displaced workers on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, depressed wages, weakened unions, and set the terms of the neoliberal global economy. By Jeff Faux, December 13, 2013. Foreign Policy In Focus is partnering with Mexico’s La Jornada del campo magazine, where an earlier
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: The rise of Bitcoin: and the challenge to the global domination of big money
The following article was written on October 25. I wanted to read it over once more before publishing it, then got busy with other things and forgot about it. In the roughly six weeks that have passed since the writing of this article, the Bitcoin prices have gone from roughly
Continue readingParchment in the Fire: Karl Marx’s Revenge: Class Struggle Grows Around the World | TIME.com
Karl Marx’s Revenge: Class Struggle Grows Around the World | TIME.com. Karl Marx was supposed to be dead and buried. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s Great Leap Forward into capitalism, communism faded into the quaint backdrop of James Bond movies or the deviant mantra of Kim
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: New studies show babies have basically decent impulses and are strongly driven by moral imperatives
More research shows once again that compassion, empathy and mutual aid, and an instinct toward cooperation, are innate in human beings, confirming what the great Russian biologist and anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin had already amply demonstrated over a hundred years ago, in his monumental work, Mutual Aid. My but our
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: NAFTA, “Free Trade” and the TPP: Fast-Track To Full Corporate Rule
“Twenty years ago, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed into law. At the time, advocates painted a rosy picture of booming U.S. exports creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs, and economic development in Mexico, which would bring the struggling country in line with its wealthier northern
Continue readingParchment in the Fire: Let’s Get This Class War Started – Chris Hedges – Truthdig
Chris Hedges: Let’s Get This Class War Started – Chris Hedges – Truthdig. By Chris Hedges “The rich are different from us,” F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have remarked to Ernest Hemingway, to which Hemingway allegedly replied, “Yes, they have more money.” The exchange, although it never actually took
Continue readingParchment in the Fire: Austerity pushing Europe into social and economic decline, says Red Cross | World news | The Guardian
Austerity pushing Europe into social and economic decline, says Red Cross | World news | The Guardian. Europe is sinking into a protracted period of deepening poverty, mass unemployment, social exclusion, greater inequality, and collective despair as a result of austerity policies adopted in response to the debt and currency
Continue readingParchment in the Fire: Class Struggle in County Durham
Dispatches from the class struggle in County Durham: What the colliers’ dependence on the exploiters for their homes means in practice can be seen in any strike. For example, the strike in Durham in November 1863. The people were evicted, wives and children included, in the harshest weather; and their
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: The deeper reasons for the “war on drugs”
There is a deeper reason for the war on drugs, which is the central reason for the policy, even outweighing profits from private prisons and seizure of property by law enforcement officers, both of which no doubt are also significant and strong motivations for keeping the “war on drugs” going.
Continue readingParchment in the Fire: Republicanism and wage-labour
In a previous post, I presented a criticism of republicanism’s inability to adequately address the problems of power exerted in the modern capitalist economy. This should come as no surprise really, given that the republican notion of liberty as ‘non-domination’ was articulated within the context of pre-capitalist economies characterized by
Continue readingParchment in the Fire: Recovering the Centrality of Class
by Ellen Meiksins Wood Originally published in Solidiarity WHEN E.P. THOMPSON’S The Making of the English Working Class came out in 1963, there still existed a vibrant anti-capitalist culture on the intellectual left, which flourished with a special vigor among the British Marxist historians, a remarkable group to which Thompson belonged.
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: Top Priorities of the 21st Century
If I were asked what I felt were the top priorities facing human beings today, in the 21st century, I would have to say there are four that top the list, in my mind. 1. Halt the global corporate coup. Defeat the corporate war on democracy, which is now escalating
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