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February 1 - February 18, 2023
By the end of the 1990s, a bipartisan majority voted to repeal most of Glass-Steagall, the law that had protected consumer deposits from risky investing for decades since the Great Depression.
Looking at these numbers, one could be tempted to minimize the role of racism and chalk it up to greed instead.
What is racism without greed?
Individual racism, whether conscious or unconscious, gives greedy people the moral permission to exploit others in ways they never would with people with whom they empathized. Institutional racism of the kind that kept the management ranks of lenders and regulators mostly white furthered this social distance. And then structural racism both made it easy to prey on people of color due to segregation and eliminated the accountability when disparate impacts went unheeded.
the mortgages at the root of the crisis were usually refinances, not home purchases, and that creditworthiness was often beside the point.
he knew enough of the elite conventional wisdom to blame the victims of redlining.
the perils of white public opinion and its political implications.
Securitization
story of cascading loss and downward mobility
Of families who lost their houses through dire events such as job loss or foreclosure, over two-thirds will probably never own a home again.
all of it was preventable, if only we had paid attention earlier to the financial fires burning through black and brown communities across the nation.
somebody’s name had to be there. Did I want it to be our names? No, I did not.”
I heard stories of women eight months pregnant being denied light duty and forced to lift fifty-pound parts.
victories were possible only when people recognized their common struggles and linked arms.
create a sense of hierarchy and you motivate workers to compete with one another to please the bosses and get to the next category up, instead of fighting together to get rid of the categories and create a common, improved work environment for everyone.
The AFL allowed affiliates to exclude black workers, ensuring that the version of organized labor that grew in the early twentieth century had self-defeating prejudices in its
Almost half of adult workers are classified as “low-wage,” earning about $10 an hour, or $18,000 a year, on average.
Economists have calculated that if unions were as common today as they were in 1979, weekly wages for men not in a union would be 5 percent higher; for noncollege-educated men, 8 percent higher.
since 1979, wages for the typical hourly worker have increased only 0.3 percent a year. Meanwhile, pay for the richest 1 percent has risen by 190 percent.
the people who spend all day baking the pie
It’s illegal to threaten to close the workplace rather than be forced to bargain with your employees, but the majority of businesses facing union drives do it anyway.
white people stopped defending the institutions that, more than almost any other, had enabled their prosperity for generations.
starting with Ronald Reagan and accelerating under Newt Gingrich’s conservative takeover in 1996, the political party to which most white voters belong began to consider unions the enemy.
Messages linked the union with degrading stereotypes about black people, so that white workers wouldn’t want any part of it.
they just think color. They just see color. They think that unions, period—not just UAW—they just think unions, period, are for lazy black people…. And a lot of ’em, even though they want the union, their racism, that hatred is keeping them from joining.”
“They get their southern mentality…. ‘I ain’t votin’ [yes] because the blacks are votin’ for it. If the blacks are for it, I’m against it.’
The word union itself seemed to be a dog whistle in the South, code for undeserving people of color who needed a union to compensate for some flaw in their character.
assiduously
southern comfort with people working for nothing hasn’t changed much in the past two hundred years. The five U.S. states that have no minimum-wage laws at all are in the South: Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Georgia has a minimum wage, but it is even lower than the federal one.
From 2001 to 2013, the pay of workers at auto parts plants in Alabama dropped by 24 percent; in Mississippi, it was 13.6 percent.
the unreasoning fears of white women;
The wages of whiteness
“Irish attacks on blacks became so common in New York City that bricks were known as Irish confetti,”
Civil War Draft Riots
“Last-place aversion suggests that low-income individuals might oppose redistribution because they fear it might differentially help a last-place group to whom they can currently feel superior,”
“The idea’s that if you uplift black people, you’re downin’ white people.
this union organizing stuff, we have to be some of the most insane people. Because you take even the most racist, the most hateful people, and you’re willin’ to put your job on the line to fight for them, you understand? We have to be losin’ our minds.
this is how you deal with your white co-workers. They are people, too. Hey, look, they got kids, you got kids. Y’all just find that common ground.”
fast food was the most unequal industry in the economy; Demos research calculated an over one-thousand-to-one average CEO-to-worker pay gap.
a spell of homelessness.
united against racism—good jobs for all.
I decided that the only way we was gonna fix it was if all of us came together.
redolent
one of the first moves from the Trump administration was to reverse the Obama NLRB decision on franchise joint employment. The majority of workers in American fast food come from the same white, working-class pool of voters who went overwhelmingly for Trump, a man whose campaign was dominated by promises to fight for the (white) working class and punish immigrants.
our democracy is even less equal than our economy—and
Democracy is a secular religion in America; faith in it unites us.
The truth is, we have never had a real democracy in America.
in the interest of racial subjugation, America has repeatedly attacked its own foundations.
Republicans who score high in what he calls “ethnic antagonism”—who are worried about a perceived loss of political and cultural power for white people in the United States—are much more likely to espouse antidemocratic, authoritarian ideas
Three out of four Republicans agreed that “it is hard to trust the results of elections when so many people will vote for anyone who offers a handout,”
