April 16, 2021

Check out Monday night’s Bloomberg (!) Briefing: Make the Rich Pay … “United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is calling on nations to institute a wealth tax to help reduce global inequality exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. There has been a $5 trillion surge in the wealth of the world’s richest in the past year even as those at the bottom were made increasingly vulnerable, Guterres told a UN economic and social forum on Monday. With the Covid-19 fallout causing government debt to swell, and hurting poorer people most, wealth taxes are being debated from California to the U.K.”

Politico has a fun roundup on a group of Democratic pollsters who are rehearsing what went wrong in their calls on the 2020 election. Their internal memo concludes, among other things, that they don’t know how Trump voters behave. Duh.

The concept of “racial capitalism” gets an extensive workout in these podcast excerpts in Portside: it’s “the ways that capitalism works as being based on extraction from particular groups of people. This brand of short-term American capitalism is based on this notion of extraction from Black and brown and Indigenous folks in particular. … Wealth extraction is an intentional process. … This isn’t a market inefficiency. It’s a strategic choice made by a set of actors.” The interviewee is Maurice BP-Weeks of Action Center on Race and the Economy.  

From Common Dreams via Portside: “Climate Crisis: Those responsible should be held accountable.” An investor advocacy group, Majority Action, has released a list of 30 corporate directors who are obstacles to climate progress — directors who should be voted out of positions of power to make way for people who are more climate literate.

“The warning signs of defeat were everywhere,” Jane McAlevey explains in her recent article “Blowout in Bessemer: A Postmortem on the Amazon Campaign.” National hope grew among progressives that the Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, AL would vote to unionize, but were crushed last week when they rejected it. The Nation article dives into why it was doomed to fail from the start and lessons learned for others who want to unionize.

A lengthy, thoughtful consideration on digital appropriation and internet etiquette that has been making rounds across certain parts of the Very Online left. 

What’s the cost of union membership loss? The Economic Policy Institute’s Larry Mishel calculates that the decades-long crash in unionized workers as a proportion of the labor force “translates to a loss of $1.56 per hour worked, the equivalent of $3,250 for a full-time, full-year worker. The erosion of collective bargaining lowered the median hourly wage by $1.56” — and this huge wealth transfer to capital from labor has increased inequality drastically in the overall society. Passed along by Portside.

Recent news on Nevada Dems’ sulking over DSA wins: The Intercept reports “When a democratic socialist slate won [state party seats] in March, establishment staffers rushed to drain party funds. Now the new staff has raised it back — and then some.”

A deep dive into the MPD’s particularly awful gun recovery unit, with quotes from some coalition allies within DC’s Defund MPD coalition.