We’ve all heard rags-to-riches stories about successful individuals who “pulled themselves up by the bootstraps.” Certainly, many successful business people owe their good fortune to hard work and innovative thinking. But, to describe those people as “self-made” would be to dismiss a big piece of reality—the role of the commons.
Ubuntu and The Self-Made Myth
Thursday, March 15th, 2012The most classist comment of 2011
Friday, January 6th, 2012Last January Classism Exposed asked for your votes on which was the most classist comment by a public figure in 2010, offering eight options. Readers weighed in and added their own grisly candidates. But this year, there’s no point in running a poll, since we already know who’s going to win (drumroll, please): Newt Gingrich, for calling child labor laws “truly stupid” and advocating firing union school janitors and replacing them with poor students.
Who should we REALLY be wary of?
Sunday, December 11th, 2011The subject line said: “Tis the Season for Criminals”; then the body of the email, written in large threatening capital letters, said, “REMEMBER, DESPERATE PEOPLE DO DESPERATE THINGS, SO BE VERY WARY WHEN YOU ARE OUT IN PUBLIC……” What follows is my response, because I had this incredible experience this morning.
Thoughts about Thanksgiving (& -isms we may encounter at the table!)
Thursday, November 24th, 2011After listening to a NPR segment about Thanksgiving and some anxiety that this very social holiday brings up for folks, I realized that this year may be challenging in new ways. Not only has the economy been stagnant, unemployment is rising, and political movements are taking place nationwide and internationally that put class inequality at the heart of the discussion. What do we talk about when we see each other?
WWFD? What Would Felice Do?
Tuesday, October 18th, 2011Working in the Class Action office, I sometimes find myself asking, “What would Felice do?” Often it’s hard to know, but at other times I can almost hear her voice weighing in on a decision.
First Generation College Students Survey
Thursday, July 21st, 2011Class Action is conducting a survey of prospective, current, and previous first generation college students in order to develop a program that supports these students in college. Please help out by taking a few minutes to complete the survey!
Moving the Bar
Monday, June 27th, 2011At first glance, I thought that it was just another article about disappointing test scores.
Economists can’t be rapists? Hotel maids are lunatics?
Thursday, May 19th, 2011In rushing to the defense of accused rapist and head of the International Monetary Fund Dominique Strauss-Kahn, well-known conservative commentator Ben Stein has stooped to blatant classist stereotypes. His headline on the American Spectator website, “Presumed Innocent, Anyone?,” implies that he’s just asking for a fair trial before judgment – a reasonable point. But look at why he thinks Strauss-Kahn is probably innocent:
Middle Class Traitors: Who Are They?
Thursday, May 5th, 2011I recently came up with a phrase that other than one fleeting reference was not to be found in Google. It seemed to me to really describe a recent phenomenon that I found quite disturbing: the demographics of the electorate who voted for right wing conservatives in the November 2010 elections both on the federal level as well as in many states across the country. The phrase I coined was “Middle Class Traitors.”
Who represents the working class in Massachusetts?
Friday, April 29th, 2011The vote to take away public employee health care bargaining rights took place thirty minutes before midnight, on April 26th, while most of the state slept, oblivious to the event. The scene would have brought a big smile to the face of Wisconsin’s Republican Governor Scott Walker. But this wasn’t Madison. This was Boston, and the protagonists weren’t members of the GOP, but the Democratic House leadership in allegedly progressive Massachusetts.
Joe Bageant: 1946-2011
Sunday, April 3rd, 2011It is with great sorrow that we learned of the recent death of Joe Bageant.
Connecticut Public Employee Activists Fight For Pension Justice
Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011Out of the limelight, public employee activists have achieved a near victory in their quest for a fair pension plan. However, fulfillment of a national precedent setting grievance award to allow Connecticut state employees to transfer from a defined contribution 401(k) type retirement plan into the state’s traditional defined benefit pension system has been delayed.
Class, Race & the Attacks on Public Employees
Friday, March 11th, 2011The Wisconsin uprising has become as loud a wake-up call as there has ever been that working America is under attack. Attempts by Governor Scott Walker and the Republican majority to steal away the collective bargaining rights of public sector workers – as a false premise for the state’s budgetary hardships – has triggered a national uproar by labor rights supporters.
Modern-day Pirates: the Republicans vs. the Public Sector
Monday, February 21st, 2011So, let’s be clear: it’s not about the budget. As the facts have emerged in the 2011 Wisconsin crisis with Governor Scott Walker’s move against public service unions, it is not about Wisconsin lacking funds. There is no credible way that Walker and his clique can argue that eliminating a worker’s right to collective bargaining saves the state a dime. Each time that this is raised it becomes a laughable moment.
‘Tis the Season When the Poor are Freezin’
Thursday, December 23rd, 2010Lack of enough opportunity, social inequality, and exploitation are the main factors in capitalist America that cause poverty, but an often overlooked contributor are the “ghetto taxes” and abusive social policies that go hand in glove with lack of incomes that keeps people poor. Ghetto taxes are the extra fees, rates, and miscellaneous surcharges that the poor as a class are forced to pay for the same basic goods and services that the middle and upper classes get for less – a lot less. One example is life-sustaining utilities: natural gas and electric.
Restorative Circles: Justice without Classism
Monday, December 13th, 2010We know the justice system is biased by inequality. The best justice money can buy. And the locations where this justice system is carried out – courtrooms, classrooms, living rooms, workplaces – are filled with people labeled with roles of unequal status: the judge and the accused, the cop and the criminal, the parent and the child, the perpetrator and the victim, the boss and the worker, the teacher and the student. These roles and locations carry with them social and cultural capital that privileges one over another and support dynamics of “power over” and “power under.”
Chickens in Every Pot? Or Bentleys in a Few Garages?
Monday, November 29th, 2010Lawmakers are really in a bind over whether to let the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy expire at the end of this year. After all, they owe those millionaires a lot after all those campaign contributions this fall.
It’s Not Butter: The Other Tax Spread
Wednesday, November 24th, 2010Congress and the White House are wrangling over the future of the Bush tax cuts, which expire this year. Much has been written about how the 2001 and 2003 cuts widened the gap between the very wealthiest 2% of Americans and the middle and working classes. But far too little notice has been paid to the other spread caused by the tax cuts: the growth of the economic divide between white Americans and people of color in the 2000′s.
Red Carpets and Platinum: Travel and Privilege
Monday, October 4th, 2010“Are you a Preferred Customer?,” asked the hard woman working the late shift at the hotel counter. I was checking in and there was no one else waiting.
Beware of Cabinet Officers Bearing “Gifts”
Wednesday, September 15th, 2010“We already have the privatization of the military…; we’ve seen the privatization of the prison system. Well, the next step is the privatization of public schools.” That prediction by Jonathan Kozol four years ago has come closer to reality with the enactment of President Obama’s Race to the Top educational goals.
