Mark Weisbrot
The Guardian Unlimited, 22 giugno 2012
In inglese | In spagnolo | In portoghese

da Ha-Joon Chang
EGEA (2008)

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There is a real cost of having determined selfishness as a fundamental political principle.

원래의 웹 사이트에 문서를 참조하십시오

The taxi industry and its start-up offshoots, such as Uber and Lyft, have been dominating the news lately; a simple Google search for Uber news, for example, produces 10.7 million results. SherpaVentures, a venture-capital firm that has invested in a number of start-ups, and whose founder was a large investor in Uber, recently released a report of what it refers to as the “on-demand economy,” which they describe as based on the “instant, pervasive access to goods and services, tailored to individual needs, often without the burden of long-term ownership or commitment.” SherpaVentures, however, paints a positive, but incomplete, picture of what these new forms of economic organization mean, especially for the workers involved. While there is a lot not to like about the report, I will limit myself here to their comparison of traditional taxi drivers and Uber drivers.

The Central de Movimentos Populares (CMP) was founded in 1993, with support from liberation theology sectors of the Catholic Church, as a federation of poor people’s social movements representing the poor and working class, homeless people’s unions, Afro-Brazilian movements, working class women’s groups, housing movements, indigenous people’s organizations and the LGBT movement.  Today, it has hundreds of thousands of members, acts in nearly every state in Brazil, and is an important actor on the Latin American left.

The CMP's Luís “Gegê” Gonzaga da Silva is a former MR-8 Guerilla who was arrested and tortured during the military dictatorship and helped found the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) party in São Paulo in 1982. He has remained affiliated with the party ever since, and is one of the leaders of its internal Socialism or Barbarism Caucus. He never held public office, never benefited financially from his status as one of the party founders and has spent the last 30 years organizing mass occupations of homeless families in abandoned buildings in downtown São Paulo.

In 2005, a corrupt local judge and São Paulo military police framed him for a murder that took place in an occupied building on a day when he was not in town. He eventually spent 54 days behind bars before Landless Peasants’ Movement (MST) lawyers got him out on habeas corpus. Declining an invitation by Hugo Chávez to move to Venezuela, at the age of 64 he decided to go underground and spent two years in hiding, as a group of Brazil’s best human rights lawyers worked pro-bono to clear his name.  When the charges were thrown out, he returned to his public housing apartment in a former abandoned building in downtown São Paulo and picked up where he left off, leading a squatters movement called the Movimento de Moradia do Centro de São Paulo (MMC). I spoke with him by Skype recently to find out what he thinks about this Sunday’s presidential elections.


(Photo by Brian Mier)

Mark WeisbrotOctober 24, 2014, The HillFolha De S. Paulo

The following reports on labor market policy were recently released:

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

State “Income Migration” Claims Are Deeply Flawed
Michael Mazerov

David Brooks has a tough job. He is supposed to present an intellectually respectable case for a political party that denies human caused global warming and has questions about evolution and the shape of the earth. This is why he must depart from the truth in laying out the path forward for the economy in his column this morning.

He gives us four items to move the economy forward, but we don't have to get beyond the first one to realize that he is not serious. Brooks tells us:

"If you get outside the partisan boxes, there’s a completely obvious agenda to create more middle-class, satisfying jobs. The federal government should borrow money at current interest rates to build infrastructure, including better bus networks so workers can get to distant jobs. The fact that the federal government has not passed major infrastructure legislation is mind-boggling, considering how much support there is from both parties."

Really? There is bipartisan support for having the federal government borrow money (i.e. run larger deficits) to build up the infrastructure? Is Paul Ryan calling for this? Ted Cruz? Marco Rubio? John Boehner? Who are the Republicans who are there demanding that the government run larger deficits to build up the infrastructure?

Brooks could do the country an enormous public service here by naming names. The reality is that President Obama has been unable to get any notable Republican support for even nickel and dime infrastructure projects. It probably wouldn't even matter if he agreed to restrict the spending to Republican congressional districts.

Then we get Brooks telling us:

"The government should reduce its generosity to people who are not working but increase its support for people who are. That means reducing health benefits for the affluent elderly."

There are two questions that come up here. First what is the definition of "affluent" and second what counts as "generosity."  When we were debating tax brackets in 2012 the Republicans insisted that you wouldn't be wealthy enough to pay higher taxes unless your income was above $400,000 a year. By contrast, President Obama put the cutoff at $250,000.

If we accept either of these definitions and think that the excessive generosity takes the form of Social Security and Medicare benefits, then we can stop right here. The money involved is too trivial to make any difference in the lives of working people. In order to have anything worth the trouble we would have redefine affluent to something like an income of $40,000 a year.