Category: Economics

Caitlin Johnstone: Disrupt The Culture Wars

Ever since the rise of the “Religious/Christian Right,” culture war combat

Caitlin Johnstone

has been the number one activity highlighted by some sectors of the evangelical/ fundamentalist church.

I believe that this has been the root cause of the widespread fracturing we have seen among Christian churches in the Trump era. Such is the deceptive power of culture war combat ideology. We are told that the battle is for the casue of Christ. When, in fact, Christ has never called us to do any such thing.

Blogger Caitlin Johnstone offers a good analysis of this error embraced by today’s culture-warriors. They miss the bigger picture. American evangelicals are particularly guilty of this particular blindness.

Because evangelical Christianity has always preferred to identify with the wealthy and the powerful, the church rarely addresses the class war continually being waged in this society.

Fortunately, addressing the class conflict between the haves and the have-nots does not require an either/or decision, choosing between either class or cultural issues.

It is possible to address both at the same time. Sadly, evangelicals prefer to remain blind to the one and pour all their energy into the other.

Though I do not fully endorse Ms. Johnstone’s solution to this problem of neglecting the class issues in our society. I do find her social analysis to be spot on.

Here is a brief excerpt:

One of the great challenges faced by westerners who oppose the political status quo today is the way the narrative managers of both mainstream factions continuously divert all political energy away from issues which threaten the interests of the powerful like economic injustice, war, militarism, authoritarianism, corruption, capitalism and ecocide and toward issues which don’t threaten the powerful at all like abortion, racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia.

This method of social control serves the powerful in some very obvious ways, and is being used very effectively. As long as it remains effective, it will continue to be used. The worse things get the more urgent the need to fight the class war will become, anf the more urgent the need to fight the class war becomes the more vitriolic and intense the artificial culture war will become in order to prevent political changes which inconvenience the powerful. This is 100 percent guaranteed. And what’s tricky is that all the vitriolic intensity will create the illusion that the culture war has gotten more important, when in reality the class war has.

It’s just a straightforward fact that the more miserable, impoverished and disempowered the public becomes, the more hateful and all-consuming the artificial culture war will be made to prevent revolution. That’s what’s been happening, and that’s what will continue to happen. You can hate hearing it, and you can hate me for saying it. But it is a fact, and I think we all pretty much know it’s a fact.

You can read the entire article here.

Corporate Price Gouging Is a Major Factor in Higher Prices

Two journalists, Joh Schwarz and Ken Klippenstein, at The Intercept have an important article explaining the role of corporate price gouging in the current struggle with inflation.

The article is titled “CEO Says He’s Been ‘Praying for Inflation’ Because It’s an Excuse to Jack Up Prices.”

Only such a rare, candid moment could explain the capitalist system in a nut shell.

Just as nothing will cause a heartless CEO to find religion as quickly as the prospect of a higher profit margin!

Halleluiah! Praise God! And pass the plate.

By his own admission, this corporate big-wig admits that, along with the current international supply-train issues, corporate price gouging is another major factor in driving up prices for American consumers.

Here is an excerpt:

As corporate profits reach record high, Iron Mountain executive tells Wall Street inflation is great for “the bottom line.”

THE CEO OF Iron Mountain Inc. told Wall Street analysts at a September 20 investor event that the high levels of inflation of the past several years had helped the company increase its margins — and that for that reason he had long been “doing my inflation dance praying for inflation.”

The comment is an unusually candid admission of a dirty secret in the business world: corporations use inflation as a pretext to hike prices. “Corporations are using those increasing costs – of materials, components and labor – as excuses to increase their prices even higher, resulting in bigger profits,” Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary under Clinton, recently argued. Corporate profits are now at their highest level since 1950. . .

. . . It wasn’t a one-off comment by the Iron Mountain CEO, William Meaney. On a 2018 earnings call, he invoked a Native American ritual, telling participants that “it’s kind of like a rain dance, I pray for inflation every day I come to work because … our top line is really driven by inflation. … Every point of inflation expands our margins.”

Iron Mountain’s CFO Barry A. Hytinen also said on an earnings call this past April that “we do have very strong pricing power” and for the company, inflation is “actually a net positive.”

Click here to read the entire article.

Chris Hedges: No Way Out but War

Chris Hedges’ most recent editorial at Scheerpost is titled “No Way Out But War.”

As thorough and prescient as ever, Mr. Hedges catalogues the many ways in

Chris Hedges

which the American political-corporate-industrial establishment — a thoroughly bipartisan, insatiable behemoth — is destroying our country through the pursuit of endless wars.

None of our wars are “wars of necessity,” as if there has ever been such an ugly but cuddly beast. No. American wars are unnecessary wars of imperial aggression, pure and simple.

And this includes the current war in Ukraine, for which the US bears a sizeable load of responsibility.

Below is an excerpt from Mr. Hedges’ article. All emphasis is mine:

Permanent war has cannibalized the country. It has created a social, political, and economic morass. Each new military debacle is another nail in the coffin of Pax Americana.

The United States, as the near unanimous vote to provide nearly $40 billion in aid to Ukraine illustrates, is trapped in the death spiral of unchecked militarism. No high speed trains. No universal health care. No viable Covid relief program. No respite from 8.3 percent inflation. No infrastructure programs to repair decaying roads and bridges, which require $41.8 billion to fix the 43,586 structurally deficient bridges, on average 68 years old. No forgiveness of $1.7 trillion in student debt. No addressing income inequality. No program to feed the 17 million children who go to bed each night hungry. No rational gun control or curbing of the epidemic of nihilistic violence and mass shootings. No help for the 100,000 Americans who die each year of drug overdoses. No minimum wage of $15 an hour to counter 44 years of wage stagnation. No respite from gas prices that are projected to hit $6 a gallon.

The permanent war economy, implanted since the end of World War II, has destroyed the private economy, bankrupted the nation, and squandered trillions of dollars of taxpayer money. The monopolization of capital by the military has driven the US debt to $30 trillion, $ 6 trillion more than the US GDP of $ 24 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spent more on the military, $ 813 billion for fiscal year 2023, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined.

We are paying a heavy social, political, and economic cost for our militarism. Washington watches passively as the U.S. rots, morally, politically, economically, and physically, while China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, and other countries extract themselves from the tyranny of the U.S. dollar and the international Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a messaging network banks and other financial institutions use to send and receive information, such as money transfer instructions. Once the U.S. dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, once there is an alternative to SWIFT, it will precipitate an internal economic collapse. It will force the immediate contraction of the U.S. empire shuttering most of its nearly 800 overseas military installations. It will signal the death of Pax Americana.

Democrat or Republican. It does not matter. War is the raison d’état of the state. Extravagant military expenditures are justified in the name of “national security.” The nearly $40 billion allocated for Ukraine, most of it going into the hands of weapons manufacturers such as Raytheon Technologies, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing, is only the beginning. Military strategists, who say the war will be long and protracted, are talking about infusions of $4 or $5 billion in military aid a month to Ukraine. We face existential threats. But these do not count. The proposed budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in fiscal year 2023 is $10.675 billion. The proposed budget for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is $11.881 billion. Ukraine alone gets more than double that amount. Pandemics and the climate emergency are afterthoughts. War is all that matters. This is a recipe for collective suicide. . .

. . .The 57 Republicans who refused to support the $40 billion aid package to Ukraine, along with many of the 19 bills that included an earlier $13.6 billion in aid for Ukraine, come out of the kooky conspiratorial world of Trump. They, like Trump, repeat this heresy. They too are attacked and censored. But the longer Biden and the ruling class continue to pour resources into war at our expense, the more these proto fascists, already set to wipe out Democratic gains in the House and the Senate this fall, will be ascendant. Marjorie Taylor Greene, during the debate on the aid package to Ukraine, which most members were not given time to closely examine, said: “$40 billion dollars but there’s no baby formula for American mothers and babies.”

“An unknown amount of money to the CIA and Ukraine supplemental bill but there’s no formula for American babies,” she added. “Stop funding regime change and money laundering scams. A US politician covers up their crimes in countries like Ukraine.”

Democrat Jamie Raskin immediately attacked Greene for parroting the propaganda of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Greene, like Trump, spoke a truth that resonates with a beleaguered public. The opposition to permanent war should have come from the tiny progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which unfortunately sold out to the craven Democratic Party leadership to save their political careers. Greene is demented, but Raskin and the Democrats peddle their own brand of lunacy. We are going to pay a very steep price for this burlesque.

You can read the entire article here.

The Full Story on Ukraine is Being Withheld from the American People, Part 3

I have decided to shift gears in this third part of this series about US propaganda and the Russian attack on Ukraine

American “news” rarely if ever mention the economic factors that have moved both Ukraine and Russia into their current hostilities.

The manipulative intentions of the European Union (together with NATO) , the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank are central to aggravating the relationship between these two countries.

My eyes first began to be opened to these issues years ago when I first decided that I needed to be better informed about US foreign policy. Two books were crucial to that formative education. The first was, John Perkins’ book Confessions of an Economic Hitman, with a new second edition called The New Confessions of an Economic Hitman.

Perkins tells his story of working for the CIA throughout Latin America on behalf of American corporations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. It’s a mind-boggling account of how the CIA works on behalf of US corporate powerbrokers by forcing 3rd world governments into perpetual indebtedness.

The second book was David Talbot’s book The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government.  Talbot traces the origins of the CIA and the formative role played by US corporations in shaping its “mission” around the world.

Rather than explaining more myself, below are 3 conversations, or 3 parts

Journalist Bryce Greene

of a single conversation, with journalist Bryce Greene, a reporter for F.A.I.R. Media Watch discussing the importance of America’s enforcement of neo-liberal economics via the International Monetary Fund (IMF) throughout the world — including the European Union:

The third installment below is called “The History of US Intervention (in Russia and Ukraine)”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dave Ramsey Has Become a Demonic Voice Within the Church

Some time ago I blogged about the public complaints made by some of Dave Ramsey’s (former) employees. Most of their charges accused him of an  authoritarian, even dictatorial, management style that intruded into employees’ private lives.

Most recently Mr. Ramsey has come to the attention of several independent news podcasts because of his advice to landlords about raising rent and evicting tenants from their homes because “the market” is dictating rent increases.

Watch the video below called “Should Landlords Feel Guilty.” I offer my reaction below:

The most important thing to notice in this video is the way Mr. Ramsey has surrendered his conscience and his behavior to the requirements of our capitalistic “marketplace.” 

When it comes to his economic, investment decisions the marketplace is sovereign over Mr. Ramsey’s financial life. If the market “demands” that he, as a landlord, evict families from their rental homes, then he apparently has no choice.

The rules of capitalism and the “free market” command his allegiance.

Never mind that the country is experiencing a housing crisis with its dire lack of affordable housing.

Never mind that large corporations are in a buying frenzy scooping up foreclosed properties in order to rent them out at top dollar prices, thus maximizing their bottom line and the profits paid to corporate shareholders.

Never  mind that the homeless population continues to grow at a shocking rate.

Oh sure. Mr. Ramsey assures his listeners that they need to be kind and thoughtful in their personal relationships with other individuals. But this is a disingenuous smokescreen typical of American evangelicals whose morals are so enslaved to American individualism that the larger, collective questions of system evil never cross their minds.

Ramsey flippantly throws out Christian sounding language that serves only  to distract from the colossal compromise of both character and conscience revealed by his abject submission to the laisse faire market forces that obviously have gained Lordship over his life.

At this point, Mr. Ramsey’s economic advice is more demonic than it is Christ-like.

Not long ago I argued that the primary way in which we experience “demonic temptation” is through the corrupt power structures that surround us. To catch up on that analysis I urge you to revisit my blog post.

It’s important for the current discussion.

Because he exists within a supposedly free-market, capitalist, economic environment, in which anyone who questions the system is vilified as a Marxist (or worse), Ramsey obviously accepts this system as, at least, morally neutral, and perhaps even, virtuous.

Thus, surrendering to the dictates of the market, and behaving as any good capitalist would, obviously has no bearing on Ramsey’s Christian confession. He can remain a “good Christian” while ejecting people from their homes into an uncertain, competitive, laisse faire, dog eat dog housing market.

Yep. It’s a cruel world, but that’s the way the capitalist, cookie crumbles.

On the other hand, as I have argued extensively on this blog and in other writings, if we understand the Christian life in terms of our citizenship in the kingdom of God, then Mr. Ramsey has made himself the poster child for the besetting sin of American Christianity: Cultural Captivity.

Rather than critiquing our cultural environment; rather than analyzing, evaluating, and then criticizing the various power structures in which we find ourselves — as serious citizens of God’s kingdom should — we have a lamentable tendency to roll over and play dead in the face of society’s structures of power.

We accept our corrupted, and corrupting, systems of power and control as normal, inevitable, unchangeable, and even preferable to their alternatives. Yet, I am convinced that it is through these normalized systems of power, control, and domination that the Evil One is more successful in tempting and corrupting humanity.

In the face of “what is normal,” the ethics of Jesus and the lifestyle required of every citizen in the kingdom of God all become “unrealistic and unmanageable” given the nature of the world we live in.

I am sure that this is what Mr. Ramsey will say were anyone to challenge his highly dubious ethics of landlordship. Making people homeless when I have the opportunity of higher income in the face of higher expenses is, after all,  normal.

We need to take a lesson from the early Christian church about how to deal with such ideas of “normal.”

For the first several centuries of Christianity, church leaders insisted that no church member could ever work for the police, the military, or the judiciary. (For more on this issue, check out my book I Pledge Allegiance.)

Anyone in the church who did happen to work for any of these three power structures had either to quit their job or be excommunicated from the church.

Why?

Because the early Christians understood — far better than most Christians do today — that Jesus taught his disciples to live lives of non-violence. Thus, no follower of Jesus had any business being party to violence or coercion.

And anyone serving in the police, the military, or the judiciary would eventually have to be involved with violence and/or coercion in the course of fulfilling their “normal” responsibilities.

But early Christian leaders insisted: It does not matter what society and its power structures have normalized for this world. Certain behaviors are always unacceptable for Christians because the Lordship of Jesus Christ always defeats the secular attempts at material lordship this fallen world tries to impose upon us.

I suspect that Mr. Ramsey’s cultural captivity may have begun with his extraordinary success which led to his great wealth and influence.

For all of these things, wealth, success, and power, have a sly, corrupting, acidic effect on the conscience if we do not guard ourselves against them.

Consequently, I want to suggest that it is time to excommunicate Dave Ramsey from the Christian church. Or, at least, to depose him from any leadership or teaching roles.

His financial advice is becoming demonic.

 

 

Conservative Hypocrisy Over ‘Packing the Supreme Court’

Republicans and other conservatives were seized by conniption fits when

AP Photo. J. Scott Applewhite

President Biden formed a commission to investigate the possibility of expanding the number of justices on the Supreme Court.

Quite predictably, the committee has recommended that the court should not be expanded. So what else is new in D.C.?

What that committee, Republicans, other erstwhile conservatives, and establishment Democrats all fail to recognize, at least in public, is that the Supreme Court has already been successfully “packed” by Senator Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump.

Millions of dollars of “dark money” has been invested in placing new justices on the bench that will predictably rule in favor of big-money, corporate interests.

The fact that some of these justices may also lean in an anti-abortion direction is a serendipitous coincidence for “pro-life” evangelicals who are generally so monomaniacally focused on their anti-abortion agenda that they give little thought to other issues at stake.

The Daily Poster has an important article entitled “How Dark Money Captured the Supreme Court” describing a recent report issued by three senior members of the Senate.

The report explains the pivotal role played by anonymous, big-money donors in the selection of the Supreme Court justices appointed by Donald Trump and the Republican members of the Senate.

Justice may still be blind — though that is debatable — but her sensitive nose can detect the sickening-sweet smell of money a mile away. And her hand is always held out for another corrupting contribution.

Here is the article. I strongly encourage you to follow the links and read the additional material you find there:

As Congress nears a deal on Biden’s Build Back Better reconciliation bill, a separate battle is quietly playing out within the Democratic Party over how to handle the extremism and minoritarian rule of the Supreme Court.

Last week, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sens. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., published a report on the way that dark money and corporations have captured the Supreme Court.

The report lays out how an extensive network of right-wing groups — including the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and organizations in the Koch network — have worked to appoint judges who undermine voting rights and favor corporate interests.

What is perhaps most remarkable about the report is that three senators, including the Senate majority leader, are raising serious questions about the legitimacy of an institution that many Democrats are unwilling to confront.

For example, just two weeks earlier, the commission that Biden set up to examine court reform published draft materials of their own report. Those materials expressed skepticism about adding justices to the court, suggesting that it would be seen as a partisan move and undermine public trust in the court.

“Some commissioners believe that there is a real risk that the willingness of Congress to expand the size of the U.S. Supreme Court could further weaken national and international norms against tampering with independent judiciaries,” said the draft document on court expansion, even going so far as to suggest that court-packing may be evidence of “democratic backsliding.”

But, as the three senators’ new report on “court capture” argues, the country’s highest court is already being manipulated.

Whitehouse separately wrote a law review article last week about the influence of dark money and dark money groups’ use of amicus briefs to influence the court.

“The effects of this litigation strategy on our democracy are frightening: the courts are becoming an arena for enacting policies by judicial decree that are too unpopular to pass through democratically elected legislatures,” he wrote. “These coordinated efforts warp the judiciary toward anonymous, ultrawealthy donor interests, all without the public ever learning about the role of dark-money interests in shaping the law.”

News Flash: CBN Actually Stands for the “Capitalist Broadcasting Network”

David Doel, host of The Rational National

Canadian commentator, David Doel, host of the YouTube program Rational National, is right to mock Pat Robertson’s cold-hearted, uninformed, slanderous, Republican propaganda report on the CBN program, The 700 Club. Watch Doel’s comments below as Pat Robertson spouts neoliberal nonsense about the recently passed Senate Infrastructure Bill:

It is clear, as if it wasn’t before, that the CBN abbreviation actually identifies this channel as the Capitalist Broadcasting Network, or perhaps the Conservative Broadcasting Network.

There certainly is nothing Christian about any of THIS. (Robertson’s remarks conclude at the 4:20 mark):

This, folks, is neither news nor informed commentary. It IS hard-core, right-wing propaganda of the worst sort.

Of course, faithful Christians can be politically conservative. But God’s people cannot confuse lies, misinformation, slander, propaganda, or blind partisanship with honest, informative communication. 

From all that I can see, neither Pat Robertson, the 700 Club, nor CBN are able to distinguish truth from falsehood much less integrity from manipulation.

Whether or not you watch CBN, I am sure everybody knows by now that Congress has passed a bipartisan infrastructure bill with a $3.5 trillion dollar price tag.

That may sound like a lot of money, but it really is pocket change when compared to the cumulative expense, contributing to the national debt, that piles up annually from our:

  • ever-expanding military budgets,
  • continual war-making around the world (I have never heard Pat Robertson, precious few conservatives at large, nor many Democrats for that matter condemn the many wanton, US military adventures we carry out around the world),
  • government subsidies paid out to America’s largest corporations (otherwise known as corporate welfare — Come on. Am I really supposed to believe that companies like Exxon haven’t yet figured out how to make a profit on their own dime?),
  • tax cuts consistently given to the largest US corporations,
  • additional tax cuts given to the wealthiest members of society (Remember, Trump’s big tax give away?),
  • the trillions of dollars the IRS estimates is lost by the US treasury each year through tax fraud and evasion among the richest Americans and corporations (Remember that Jeff Bezos, the richest man on the planet, paid no income tax last year!).

The list could go on…

Now, in the face of so many obscene, public injustices, all of which drain the public purse to the tune of billions if not trillions of dollars annually, conservatives are lamenting a direly needed infrastructure bill that will improve essential services for the poor, elderly, and working class members of our society.

Oi vey!

Hightower: There’s No Labor Shortage. There’s a Wage Shortage

Jim Hightower has an article at ScheerPost on the so-called labor shortage in the US economy and the airy-fairy theorizing now coming from America’s

Jim Hightower

most wealthy about how to solve the problem.

I live in Montana. Another state with a multi-millionaire governor (Greg Gianforte) who is planning to terminate the $300/week of extra unemployment benefits granted by the federal government in its most recent relief package.

This is how callous capitalists force underpaid workers to return to low wage, high risk jobs. It’s a form of wage slavery similar to the death grip that old-fashion “company towns” once held over coal miners and railway workers.

It’s called CLASS WARFARE. The haves against the have-nots. It’s the American way.

As Heidi Shierholz writes at the Economic Policy Institute, there is actually little evidence that the economy is currently experiencing a labor shortage. While citing a number of different factors at work, she explains:

…the footprint of a bona fide labor shortage is rising wages. Employers who truly face shortages of suitable, interested workers will respond by bidding up wages to attract those workers, and employers whose workers are being poached will raise wages to retain their workers…

But, of course, capitalists like Gianforte don’t think to raise wages for the working class. Instead, they think of ways to control workers, strip them of the few benefits that have come their way (after a pandemic!), and empower the owners who refuse to pay their workers a living wage.

Personally, I would love to see statewide labor strikes in every state where rich governors have instituted such predatory anti-worker, pro-capitalist shenanigans rather than doing the obvious — institute a $15 minimum wage.

Hightower’s piece hits the nail on the head with a good resource for more information at the end. It’s entitle “There’s No ‘Labor Shortage.’ There’s a Wage Shortage.”

Here is it:

To find workers, there’s a free-enterprise solution right at employers’ fingertips: raise pay, improve conditions, and show respect.

At a recent congressional hearing on America’s so-called “labor shortage,” megabanker Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, offered this insight: “People actually have a lot of money, and they don’t particularly feel like going back to work.”

Dimon is a billionaire who may be unaware that most people are living paycheck to paycheck. Since COVID-19 hit, millions have lost their jobs, savings, and even homes. Relief measures have helped, but ordinary people are not exactly lollygagging around the house, counting their cash.

Instead of listening to the uber-rich class ignorance of Dimon (who pocketed $35 million in pay last year), Congress ought to be listening to actual workers explain why they’re not rushing back to the jobs being offered by restaurant chains and such.

These workers would point out that there’s no labor shortage — there’s a wage shortage.

More fundamentally, there’s a fairness shortage.

It was not lost on restaurant workers, for example, that while millions of them were jobless last year, their corporate CEOs were grabbing millions, buying yachts, and living large. Yet more than half of laid-off restaurant workers couldn’t even get unemployment benefits because their wages had been too low to qualify.

Then there’s the high risk of COVID exposure for restaurant employees, an appalling level of sexual harassment in their workplace, and demeaning treatment from abusive bosses and customers.

No surprise, then, that more than half of employees said in a recent survey that they’re not going back to those jobs. After all, even a dog knows the difference between being stumbled over and being kicked.

So rather than demanding that government officials force workers to return to the old exploitative system, corporate giants should try the free-enterprise solution right at their fingertips: Raise pay, improve conditions, and show respect.

In short, create a place where people want to work! For a straightforward view from workers themselves, go to OneFairWage.site.

The Black-White Wage Gap Is as Big as It Was in 1950. Why?

Last summer David Leonhardt, a writer at the New York Times, published the

David Leonhardt

results of several recent studies examining the historic rates of wage increases (or decreases) among white and black workers in America.

He states that “recent research indicates little progress since the Truman administration.”

Since the Truman administration!!!

The results of these studies point to two culprits.

One, the long-term effects of institutional racism.

And two, the growing income gap between the upper- and lower-classes of our society.

Here is Mr. Leonhardt’s article. (All emphases are mine). The original contains a number of important charts and graphs that will not copy to this post. (Probably because I am technologically impaired.)

If you can read the NYT online, I highly recommend checking it out.  The charts make the raw data jump off the page.

Government statistics suggest that the earnings gap between black and white men is substantially smaller than it was 75 years ago. It shrunk in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s and has remained largely stable since then.

But these statistics are misleading. A more comprehensive look at the data, based on recent academic research, shows that the black-white wage gap is roughly as large today as it was in 1950.

That’s remarkable. Despite decades of political change — the end of enforced segregation across the South, the legalization of interracial marriage, the passage of multiple civil rights laws and more — the wages of black men trail those of white men by as much as when Harry Truman was president. That gap indicates that there have also been powerful forces pushing against racial equality.

Before getting into the causes, though, I want to explain the difference between the best-known wage statistics and the more accurate version. The traditional numbers are incomplete in a way that many people do not realize: They cover only workers. People who don’t work are ignored. This group includes students, full-time parents, people who have given up on finding work and people who are incarcerated.

Excluding them wouldn’t present a problem if the percentage of nonworkers had remained fairly stable over time. But it has not. “There’s been a tremendous run-up in non-work among prime-age men,” says Kerwin Kofi Charles, an economist and the dean of the Yale School of Management.

One reason is that many middle-aged men — of all races, although disproportionately black — have dropped out of the labor force, and are neither working nor looking for work. The shrinking number of decent-paying blue-collar jobs has left many people who didn’t attend college without good job opportunities, and they have responded by no longer actively looking for work.

A second reason that more men aren’t working is that vastly more of them are incarcerated. Incarceration rates are especially high for black men — about twice as high as those of Hispanic men, six times higher than those of white men and at least 25 times higher than those of black women, Hispanic women or white women.

Becky Pettit, a sociologist at the University of Texas, refers to these incarcerated men as invisible. She has written a book titled, “Invisible Men: Mass incarceration and the myth of black progress.”

People considered “unemployed” represent a small — and declining — share of those out of work.

The traditional statistics on the black-white wage gap ignore these trends, because they examine only people with earnings. As social scientists put it, the traditional numbers ignore the “zero values.”
This means that the statistics on the wage gap are looking at a shrinking share of the population over time. They overlook the roughly 30 percent of black men and 15 percent of white men between the ages of 25 and 54 who had not been working in a given week during recent years. (Those shares are even higher now, given the economic downturn.)

“It’s a weird hole,” Mr. Charles says.

He and another economist — Patrick Bayer of Duke — undertook a research project to fill that hole. They collected census data dating back to 1940 and constructed wage statistics that included men who were not working. They are also conducting a follow-up project about women, Mr. Bayer said. The gap between black and white women may have narrowed, but only modestly.

The research by Mr. Charles and Mr. Bayer shows that once all men — working and not working — are included, the picture changes.

The black-white wage gap shrunk substantially from 1950 to 1980, and especially during the 1960s. Civil-rights laws and a decline in legally sanctioned racism most likely played some role. But the main reasons, Mr. Charles said, appear to have been trends that benefited all blue-collar workers, like strong unions and a rising minimum wage. Because black workers were disproportionately in blue-collar jobs, the general rise of incomes for the poor and middle class shrank the racial wage gap.

One law was especially important: the 1966 amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act. When Congress passed the original law, during the New Deal, it deliberately exempted service and other industries with many black workers from the minimum wage. “Just expanding the minimum wage to those industries,” Ellora Derenoncourt, a University of California, Berkeley, economist, said, “boosted the relative wages of black workers substantially.”

Since 1980, however, the wage gap has increased again, and is now back roughly to where it was in 1950. The same economic forces are at work, only in the opposite direction: The minimum wage has stagnated in some states, unions have shrunk, tax rates on the wealthy have fallen more than they have for anyone else and incomes for the bottom 90 percent — and especially the bottom half — have trailed economic growth. Black workers, again, are disproportionately in these lower-income groups.

One nuance is that the racial wage gap has shrunk somewhat among higher-income men. That’s a sign that more African-Americans have broken into the upper middle class than was the case in prior decades.

This history also points to some of the likely solutions for closing the racial wage gap. An end to mass incarceration would help. So would policies that attempt to reverse decades of government-encouraged racism — especially in housing. But it’s possible that nothing would have a bigger impact than policies that lifted the pay of all working-class families, across races.

“Black people are concentrated in low-paying jobs if they have jobs,” Ms. Derenoncourt said. “This has been one of the most egregious forms of inequality over the last 40 years: There has been almost no wage growth for the bottom half of the wage distribution.”

What the Church Can Learn from Eugene Debs

Eugene Debs (1855-1926) was an American politician who became an important early leader in the labor union movement. He condemned

Labor activist Eugene V. Debs speaks at the Hippodrome in New York City in 1910

corporate greed, was a vocal proponent on behalf of American workers, helped to lead numerous strikes, and fought for genuine democracy in the workplace.

Naturally, figures like Debs are a thorn in the side of entrenched, establishment power, so he made many enemies in high places. President Woodrow Wilson had him imprisoned for speaking out against the US entry into World War I. [No, folks, “cancel culture” is hardly new!]

In my view, Debs is a true American hero who has been largely forgotten by mainstream America.

Ed Quish has an interesting article about Deb’s life and legacy at Jacobin magazine. It’s entitled “The Cold War is Over. It’s Time to Appreciate that Eugene Debs Was a Marxist.”

Whenever a learn something new about a figure like Eugene Debs (or a man like Henry Wallace, another person I admire for similar reasons) I can’t help but ask myself, “Where were his Christian counterparts?”

Though he didn’t claim to be a Christian (to my knowledge) in the

Eugene Debs

evangelical sense, his politics, ideology, and actions demonstrate a more profound appreciation for the nature of the kingdom of God and the demands that kingdom makes upon its citizens than is shown by the evangelical church today.

Below is an excerpt:

Throughout his life, Eugene Debs was smeared as an enemy of the American nation. During the 1894 Pullman strike, Harper’s Weekly attacked Debs’s leadership of the uprising as equivalent to Southern secession, claiming that in “suppressing such a blackmailing conspiracy as the boycott of Pullman cars by the American Railway Union, the nation is fighting for its own existence.” Thirty years later, when Debs was imprisoned for speaking against World War I, President Woodrow Wilson denied requests to pardon him, refusing to show mercy to “a traitor to his country.”

Debs’s sympathizers have often defended him against allegations of treason by highlighting his authentic Americanism. Rather than a traitor, they claim, Debs was a true patriot who stood up for nationally shared ideals like freedom and democracy while imbuing them with socialist values. Historian Nick Salvatore, for instance, argues in his landmark 1982 biography that Debs’s life “was a profound refutation of the belief that critical dissent is somehow un-American or unpatriotic.” Inspired by Debs’s example, socialists today might occupy the left flank of a progressive patriotism, pushing the United States to make good on its democratic promise in a way that liberals and centrists cannot do on their own.

Despite some intuitive appeal, this nationalist strategy is a dead end. . . At a basic level, democratic nationalism presents the nation as bound by a shared identity and shared interests, uniting different classes behind a common project domestically and internationally. In the United States, this project has only ever been a variant of capitalist empire that, even when grafted to the cause of democracy. . . 

In his own time, Debs rejected that kind of nationalist project, making his politics more than the radical edge of common sense “Americanism.” When Debs called out the absurdity of the wartime view that patriotism means dying overseas for capitalist profits while treason consists in defending workers everywhere, he showed us the proper response to nationalist ideology: not to try to hijack it for progressive ends, but to liberate us from its obfuscations.

Click here to read the complete article.