It has been 50 years since British shadow defence secretary Enoch Powell gave his "rivers of blood" speech on April 20, 1968. To mark the half-centenary, the BBC broadcast his speech for the first ...
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Rawalpindi/Peshawar, Pakistan - As lightning cuts across the darkened Peshawar sky, Manzoor Pashteen implores thousands of demonstrators to no longer be afraid. The rain lashes down upon them, as they stand in rapt attention, listening to the leader of the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM), a civil rights movement that has quickly risen to national prominence across Pakistan.
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Washington, DC - Just weeks before a white supremacist rally turned deadly last August after a neo-Nazi allegedly drove his car into a crowd in Charlottesville, Virginia, several of the rally's organisers discussed ways to use cars as weapons in an online chatroom.
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US President Donald Trump announced on Saturday that the US-led strikes in Syria were a "mission accomplished", adding that he had no intention of launching further strikes against President Bashar al-Assad's targets.
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Early on Saturday, the US, France and the UK launched strikes on various targets in Syria in response to an alleged chemical weapons attack by the Syrian in the Damascus suburb of Eastern Ghouta. A year ago, the US also launched a similar missile strike after a chemical weapons attack.
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Russia has long been threatening the US with "serious consequences" to its missile strikes against the Syrian regime over the alleged chemical attacks in the rebel-held town of Douma. Speaking after the US air raid on Saturday, Anatoly Antonov, the Russian ambassador to Washington, reiterated that "such actions will not be left without consequences".
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For those who bet on Donald Trump altering the geopolitical landscape in Syria, they are in for a huge disappointment. His braggadocio tweets and bizarre flip-flops, from premature withdrawal to humanitarian intervention, is mindboggling for his advisers before anyone else.
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Stephen Hawking, the world-renowned scientist who passed away on Wednesday at the age of 76, was known not only for his groundbreaking work, but for his support for Palestine. Hawking, who had motor neurone disease, made headlines in May 2013 when he decided to boycott a high-profile conference in Israel where he was scheduled to speak.…
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The idea of assassinating a public figure or a high profile enemy, so as to remove a problem, has a dangerously simplistic logic to it. It is believed that once a leader is eliminated, his or her followers, and problems that they cause, will also dissolve. But h istory abounds with examples of political assassinations that…
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After student organisers of the Berkeley "Free Speech Week" cancelled their events, far-right media personality Milo Yiannopoulos vowed to hold his own rally. Yiannopoulos' appearance at the steps of the University of California's Sproul Plaza on Sunday was brief. After 15 minutes, Yiannopoulos' security guards drove him off, local media reported. The university said security precautions…
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Patrik Hermansson, a gay anti-fascist activist, would seem like an obvious target for the white supremacists, far-right populists and neo-Nazis who make up the alt-right movement. Yet the 25-year-old was able to successfully infiltrate the alt-right's ranks as part of a year-long undercover investigation for Hope Not Hate, a UK-based organisation that monitors hate groups. Posing…
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After being hit in the head and stabbed in the arm during clashes with white supremacists at the California State Capitol in Sacramento last June, Yvette Felarca was defiant in an interview with local television news. "Everyone who came here today ... came here united with one goal, and that's to shut down the Nazi scum.…
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A German comedian took matters into his own hands when Twitter failed to remove offensive hate posts on its platform. Shahak Shapira painted 30 anti-Semitic, homophobic, Islamophobic, and racist tweets outside the company's German headquarters in Hamburg. The Berlin-based performer, who is Jewish, reported around 300 tweets to the company but the majority were not removed.…
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Toronto, Canada – Nearly 200 theatres worldwide will simultaneously screen the film version of George Orwell's dystopian classic, 1984, on Tuesday to protest US President Donald Trump. The idea, which is being called "National Screening Day", is the brainchild of Dylan Skolnick, co-director of the Cinema Arts Centre on Long Island, New York, and Adam Birnbaum,…
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Hundreds of Uber users have taken screenshots of themselves deleting the ride-hailing app, accusing it of profiting from a strike by New York's taxi drivers held against President Donald Trump's ban on Muslim travellers and refugees. The hashtag #DeleteUber trended worldwide on Sunday as users also accused the company's CEO of collaborating with the new US…
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The United Nations' humanitarian aid official in Yemen has said that the civilian death toll in the nearly two-year conflict has reached 10,000, with 40,000 others wounded. The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs' Jamie McGoldrick said that the figure is based on lists of victims gathered by health facilities and the actual number might…
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Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines, has threatened corrupt government officials of throwing them off a flying helicopter, warning he has personally carried out the action before and had no qualms about doing it again. The former prosecutor and governor said that he once hurled a Chinese man suspected of rape and murder out of…
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Narrow conceptions and caricatures of Arab identity are deeply rooted in Hollywood. The hijacker and the terrorist, the opulently wealthy oil sheikh and the oppressed and over-dressed woman, among others, comprise the most prominent depictions of Arab identity in film and television.
These negative illustrations of Arabs are built upon a flat conception of Arab identity, and indeed, the diverse and rich range of identities encompassed or related to the Arab World.
On Sunday, Rami Malek - the lead on the USA Network's drama-thriller Mr Robot - claimed the Emmy for the Best Actor in a Drama series. The nod also earned Malek, an Egyptian American, the distinction of being the first non-white actor in 18 years to win that award.
The historic moment spurred a series of headlines and tweets that identified Malek as an "Arab American", in addition to the Washington, DC-based Arab American Institute endorsing his victory as, "balm for Arab-Americans normally stereotyped or absent in Hollywood".
However, Arab-American jubilation for the historic victory was subsequently complicated by the particular dimensions of Malek's ethnic identity, and specifically, how his status as a Coptic Egyptian - an Orthodox Christian population indigenous to the northeastern African nation - conflicted with widespread identifications of Malek as Arab.
Ironically, the off-screen identity of Mr Robot's Elliot Alderson - a white anti-hero cyber-security hacker - spawned a robust conversation about the intricacies and complexity of Arab identity, and related identities flatly illustrated and understood as Arab.
While marking a milestone moment for Arab or Egyptian Americans in Hollywood (or both), Malek's victory transcended the four corners of the television screen by challenging the flat conceptions of how America understands identities originating from the Arab World.
Hollywood has been a culpable accessory in the narrow and negative illustration of Arabs. The golden age of Hollywood was saturated with portrayals of Arabs as savage and backwards, tribal and misogynistic. Arab women characters seldom appeared on screen, and on the rare occasion they did, were silent, subordinate, or exoticised sexual objects.
Prominent Hollywood caricatures reflect the prevailing political concerns of the day, and as the Bush administration mounted its global "war on terror", depictions of Arabs on screen were overwhelmingly linked to war, terrorism, and the looming threat of both.
Film and television, arguably society's best mirror, recreated popular and political characterisations of Arabs on screen. The consequences of these depictions not only endorsed and broadly disseminated damaging stereotypes of Arabs, but just as deleteriously, cemented a flattened understanding of identities native to the (modern) Arab World.
Anybody from the region had to be Arab and Muslim, suggested the illustrations on screen, and the two identities were disoriented and conflated as one in the same.
The broad array of groups indigenous to the Arab World that preceded Arabs, and dis-identify as Arab, were simultaneously erased and submerged into an identity they actively refuse or resist.
Orientalism left no room for Chaldeans, Nubians, Kurds, Berbers or Copts; and Hollywood - a proponent of the ideology that reduced the Arab World into a cultural, religious and racial monolith - happily followed suit.
Malek’s historic Emmy victory, and the political dimensions of his Coptic Egyptian identity, offered a rare opportunity to disrupt that process.
The wellspring of tweets, social media statuses and headlines celebrating the historic "Arab-American" Emmy win were met with resistance by Coptic Egyptian Americans - who echoed the fact that his "parents were Coptic Egyptians".
Far more than merely a matter of ethnic identification, the rift between those embracing Arab identity and Copts is deep-rooted and, at times, rife with hostility.
With the latter viewing Arab identity as colonial and compelled upon them, and thus, an affront to their indigenousness, faith and existential sovereignty:
"Most of Egypt's Copts maintain that they are the purest bloodline to have descended from the ancient Egyptians. As one Coptic friend tells me: 'I maintain that I'm not an Arab. I'm an Egyptian and of pharaonic descent. The only thing that ties me to the Arabs is the Arabic language.'"
The critical rebuttals saturating social media, and article comments, following Malek's Emmy victory gave this rift renewed relevance: Arab Americans claiming Malek as one of their own, for many Coptic Egyptians, was another example of forcing an undesired identity upon them, and in the process, erasing their identity once again.
This exchange injected a foreign discourse into the broader American conversation on race. Egypt is in the Arab World, and therefore, its inhabitants are Arab-American racial logic presumes.
The US census implicitly adopts this framing, classifying those people originating from the Middle East or North Africa, effectively, as Arab.
The rich milieu of groups native to the region, and the rifts and rivalries between them, has no place in codified constructions of American race and ethnicity. Therefore, Malek being a native of Egypt must be Arab, a widespread belief illustrated by the celebratory news stories and headlines that followed his win.
The tug-of-war between Arab and Coptic nationalists, fighting to claim Malek as one of their own, was ultimately a victory for all involved. It furnished Coptic Americans with a timely platform to discuss the distinct and independent dimensions of their culture and identity, and more broadly, enabled a conversation that complicated how Hollywood, and America, sees people that hail from the Arab World. This is a conversation Washington and Hollywood has strategically avoided, but one Mr Robot, coincidentally kick-started.
Now whether Malek made "Arab-American" or "Egyptian-American" history ultimately hinges on how the Emmy winner identifies himself: picking one side of the Arab and Coptic divide, or choosing to embrace both. Whatever he chooses, everybody wins.
Dozens killed in first four days of Duterte's drug war
At least 45 people with suspected links to drug trafficking have been killed in four days since Rodrigo Duterte was sworn in as president of the Philippines, according to authorities. ABS-CBN, the Philippines' largest TV channel, reported on Monday that at least 29 drug and robbery suspects were killed in Bulacan province, near the capital Manila,…
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It is 2011 and I'm sitting in the Palais des Congres in Montreal, watching anthropologists talk about structural inequality.
The American Anthropological Association meeting is held annually to showcase research from around the world, and like thousands of other anthropologists, I am paying to play: $650 for airfare, $400 for three nights in a "student" hotel, $70 for membership, and $94 for admission. The latter two fees are student rates. If I were an unemployed or underemployed scholar, the rates would double.
The theme of this year's meeting is "Traces, Tidemarks and Legacies." According to the explanation on the American Anthropological Association website, we live in a time when "the meaning and location of differences, both intellectually and morally, have been rearranged". As the conference progresses, I begin to see what they mean. I am listening to the speaker bemoan the exploitative practices of the neoliberal model when a friend of mine taps me on the shoulder.
"I spent almost my entire salary to be here," she says.
My friend is an adjunct. She has a PhD in anthropology and teaches at a university, where she is paid $2100 per course. While she is a professor, she is not a Professor. She is, like 67 per cent of American university faculty, a part-time employee on a contract that may or may not be renewed each semester. She receives no benefits or health care.
According to the Adjunct Project, a crowdsourced website revealing adjunct wages - data which universities have long kept under wraps - her salary is about average. If she taught five classes a year, a typical full-time faculty course load, she would make $10,500, well below the poverty line. Some adjuncts make more. I have one friend who was offered $5000 per course, but he turned it down and requested less so that his children would still qualify for food stamps.
Why is my friend, a smart woman with no money, spending nearly $2000 to attend a conference she cannot afford? She is looking for a way out. In America, academic hiring is rigid and seasonal. Each discipline has a conference, usually held in the fall, where interviews take place. These interviews can be announced days or even hours in advance, so most people book beforehand, often to receive no interviews at all.
The American Anthropological Association tends to hold its meetings in America's most expensive cities, although they do have one stipulation: "AAA staff responsible for negotiating and administering annual meeting contracts shall show preference to locales with living wage ordinances." This rule does not apply, unfortunately, to those in attendance.
Below poverty line
In most professions, salaries below the poverty line would be cause for alarm. In academia, they are treated as a source of gratitude. Volunteerism is par for the course - literally. Teaching is touted as a "calling", with compensation an afterthought. One American research university offers its PhD students a salary of $1000 per semester for the "opportunity" to design and teach a course for undergraduates, who are each paying about $50,000 in tuition. The university calls this position "Senior Teaching Assistant" because paying an instructor so far below minimum wage is probably illegal.
In addition to teaching, academics conduct research and publish, but they are not paid for this work either. Instead, all proceeds go to for-profit academic publishers, who block academic articles from the public through exorbitant download and subscription fees, making millions for themselves in the process. If authors want to make their research public, they have to pay the publisher an average of $3000 per article. Without an institutional affiliation, an academic cannot access scholarly research without paying, even for articles written by the scholar itself.
It may be hard to summon sympathy for people who walk willingly into such working conditions. "Bart, don't make fun of grad students," Marge told her son on an oft-quoted episode of The Simpsons. "They just made a terrible life choice."
But all Americans should be concerned about adjuncts, and not only because adjuncts are the ones teaching our youth. The adjunct problem is emblematic of broader trends in American employment: the end of higher education as a means to prosperity, and the severing of opportunity to all but the most privileged.
In a searing commentary, political analyst Joshua Foust notes that the unpaid internships that were once limited to show business have now spread to nearly every industry. "It's almost impossible to get a job working on policy in this town without an unpaid internship," he writes from Washington DC, one of the most expensive cities in the country. Even law, once a safety net for American strivers, is now a profession where jobs pay as little as $10,000 a year - unfeasible for all but the wealthy, and devastating for those who have invested more than $100,000 into their degrees. One after another, the occupations that shape American society are becoming impossible for all but the most elite to enter.
The value of a degree
Academia is vaunted for being a meritocracy. Publications are judged on blind review, and good graduate programs offer free tuition and a decent stipend. But its reliance on adjuncts makes it no different than professions that cater to the elite through unpaid internships.
Anthropologists are known for their attentiveness to social inequality, but few have acknowledged the plight of their peers. When I expressed doubt about the job market to one colleague, she advised me, with total seriousness, to "re-evaluate what work means" and to consider "post-work imaginaries". A popular video on post-graduate employment cuts to the chase: "Why don't you tap into your trust fund?"
In May 2012, I received my PhD, but I still do not know what to do with it. I struggle with the closed-off nature of academic work, which I think should be accessible to everyone, but most of all I struggle with the limited opportunities in academia for Americans like me, people for whom education was once a path out of poverty, and not a way into it.
My father, the first person in his family to go to college, tries to tell me my degree has value. "Our family came here with nothing," he says of my great-grandparents, who fled Poland a century ago. "Do you know how incredible it is that you did this, how proud they would be?"
And my heart broke a little when he said that, because his illusion is so touching - so revealing of the values of his generation, and so alien to the experience of mine.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
“Is Hillary our Mitt Romney?” asked MSNBC’s Krystal Ball in a recent segment of her TV show. Ball’s statement came on the heels of several comments by Clinton that made her seem completely out of touch with ordinary Americans — that she is not “truly well off,” that she and her husband were compelled to give speeches for six figures apiece because they were “dead broke” upon leaving the White House.
Indeed, considering that Bill and Hillary Clinton have made more than $100 million since leaving the White House in 2000, it’s not surprising that many Americans see the former first couple as hopelessly detached from the problems of ordinary Americans despite presenting themselves as going through the very same struggles as other Americans.
“We had no money when we got there [to the White House],” explained Hillary Clinton in comments to ABC’s Diane Sawyer. “And we struggled to piece together the resources for mortgages for houses, for Chelsea’s education. It was not easy. Bill has worked really hard. And it’s been amazing to me. He’s worked very hard.”
Yet many Americans have also worked very hard, and they have not amassed the same kind of wealth as the Clintons, with multiple homes and over $100 million of earned income in the past decade. But underneath the social distance their wealth creates, there is a much deeper and more troubling truth. The real scandal is not that the Clintons are so wealthy but how they got that wealth.
In 2009, Bill Clinton addressed the Campus Progress National Summit, a gathering of progressive students in Washington, D.C. “I never made any money until I left the White House,” he told the students. “I had the lowest net worth, adjusted for inflation, of any president elected in the last 100 years, including President [Barack] Obama. I was one poor rascal when I took office. But after I got out, I made a lot of money.”
Clinton didn’t just make “a lot of money” when he left the White House. Together, the Clintons pulled in $111 million from 2000 to 2007 — far more than what most people would consider a lot.
Thanks to the Office of Government Ethics (OGE), which compiles personal financial disclosures from federal public officials, and the ethics laws governing the U.S. Senate, we know a little bit about how the Clintons made their money. Federal disclosure laws require not only officeholders to disclose their finances but also their spouses, since spousal income is shared. Thus Hillary Clinton’s disclosures both as a U.S. senator and as secretary of state are a window into this shared fortune, one that was gleaned from the very same interest groups and corporations over which the Clintons had authority.
In 1999, Bill Clinton made repealing the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act — which separated commercial and investment banking — a priority. He commanded a bipartisan push in repealing the law, which was primarily advocated for by Wall Street lobbyists. Not long after his pen hit the paper to repeal the law, Citigroup, a top beneficiary of the repeal, recruited Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin to join as an executive at the firm. Rubin went on to be one of Citigroup’s highest-paid officials, pulling in $115 million in pay from 1999 and 2008.
While Rubin was made rich from Wall Street deregulation, his boss went on the lecture circuit. In February of 2001, Clinton had been out of the White House for less than a month when he gave his first paid speech, to none other than Morgan Stanley — another beneficiary of and advocate for Clinton’s Wall Street deregulation — for $125,000. His next address in Manhattan was at Credit Suisse First Boston, which gave him an additional $125,000. His paid speaking arrangements took him around the world, from Canada to Hong Kong, speaking to a variety of interest groups with major public policy interests, including the American Israel Chamber of Commerce and the investment banking giant CLSA. Clinton had also made passing the North American Free Trade Agreement a priority during his presidency, so it is no surprise that major Canadian firms such as the Jim Pattison Group ($150,000) were happy to pay to hear a few remarks from him as well.
The Wall Street payments were significant in that they represented a form of gratitude not only for Bill Clinton’s deregulation of Wall Street. That year Hillary Clinton, now a senator from New York, voted for a bankruptcy bill that made it much harder for people to qualify for Chapter 7 bankruptcy; the bill was backed primarily by banks and credit card issuers.
Bill Clinton in his spree of speeches repeatedly returned to two of the banking giants at the heart of political power in Washington: Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. In 2004 he took home a quarter-million dollars for a Citigroup address in Paris; Goldman Sachs gave him $125,000 for a New York City address. That address must have been a real hit for the former president, because Goldman invited him back for a series of lectures the next year, at Kiawah Island, South Carolina ($125,000); Paris ($250,000); and Greensboro, Georgia ($150,000). The next year, Citigroup Venture Capital invited him for a $150,000 speech, and the Mortgage Bankers Association — representing the folks at the very heart of the financial crisis — gave him $150,000 for a speech in Chicago.
Goldman and Citigroup repeatedly paid Clinton for the next few years, and a number of other major corporate interest groups — such as the National Retail Federation ($150,000) and Merrill Lynch ($175,000) — also joined in the fun.
After Hillary Clinton lost her presidential bid and was appointed to the State Department, she and her husband had brought in more than $100 million from books and speeches. By any measure, they had far more wealth than they needed to pay debts and to take care of their daughter’s future — the reasons Hillary Clinton cited to Diane Sawyer.
In June of 2010, months after the Affordable Care Act was signed into law and the regulatory battle over the health overhaul was set into motion, the former president took $175,000 from the main health insurance lobbying organization, America’s Health Insurance Plans. A year after Hillary Clinton called Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and his family “friends” of her family, Bill Clinton was paid $250,000 to speak to the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt, which was closely tied to the Mubarak regime. As Hillary Clinton grappled with foreign policy issues in Pakistan, Turkey and the Middle East, Bill Clinton took home $175,000 from the Middle East Institute, a think tank that does work in those areas. In 2011 she filmed a video congratulating Kuwait on its independence; a few months later, he was paid a $175,000 honorarium from the Kuwait America Foundation.
Shortly after stepping down from her post, the she then embarked on her own spree of paid speeches, which don’t have to be disclosed because neither Clinton is a public official anymore. But from voluntarily disclosures and press reports, we know that she gave at least two paid speeches to Goldman Sachs for $200,000 each. Although she has not disclosed her full remarks at these events, a number of attendees talked to Politico about her tone and content. “Clinton offered a message that the collected plutocrats found reassuring, according to accounts offered by several attendees, declaring that the banker-bashing so popular within both political parties was unproductive and indeed foolish,” read the article. We won’t know the full extent of payments for speeches unless Clinton chooses to release them or she officially declares for president and has to release her personal financial documents since 2013.
What has been laid out here is only a small sample of the vortex of wealth that Hillary and Bill Clinton have received from corporations, foundations, foreign organizations and others with an interest in U.S. public policy. No one with any knowledge of politics believes these payments to be disinterested or impartial; they are part of a larger political system that rewards politicians for fealty and obedience. The Clintons were simply following a path laid by other politicos, such as former U.S. Rep. Billy Tauzin of Louisiana, who raked in millions of dollars as a drug lobbyist after crafting an industry-friendly Medicare overhaul, and former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, who has leveraged his experience in government to enrich himself influence-peddling for a variety of corporate clients without ever having to officially register as a lobbyist.
Given their immense wealth and how they got it — politicized kickbacks from the most powerful political forces in Washington, on Wall Street and around the globe — the Clintons would do well to admit that they are unusually wealthy and stop trying to pass themselves off as ordinary folks. If they don’t, their fate may very well resemble Romney’s, as mounting public anger over growing income and wealth inequality could prevent them from returning to the White House in 2016.
On May 16, an artist, a railway service and a government agency spent $291,978 to block poverty from the public eye.
Called psychylustro, German artist Katharina Grosse's project is a large-scale work designed to distract Amtrak train riders from the dilapidated buildings and fallen factories of north Philadelphia. The city has a 28 percent poverty rate - the highest of any major US city - with much of it concentrated in the north. In some north Philadelphia elementary schools, nearly every child is living below the poverty line.
Grosse partnered with the National Endowment of the Arts and Amtrak to mask North Philadelphia's hardship with a delightful view. The Wall Street Journal calls this "Fighting Urban Blight With Art". Liz Thomas, the curator of the project, calls it "an experience that asks people to think about this space that they hurtle through every day".
The project is not actually fighting blight, of course - only the ability of Amtrak customers to see it.
"I need the brilliance of colour to get close to people, to stir up a sense of life experience and heighten their sense of presence," Grosse proclaims.
"People", in Grosse and Thomas's formulation, are not those who actually live in north Philadelphia and bear the brunt of its burdens. "People" are those who can afford to view poverty through the lens of aesthetics as they pass it by.
Urban decay becomes a set piece to be remodeled or romanticised. This is hipster economics.
Influx of hipsters
In February, director Spike Lee delivered an impassioned critique - derisively characterised as a "rant" by US media outlets - on the gentrification of New York city. Arguing that an influx of "... hipsters" had driven up rent in most neighbourhoods - and in turn driven out the African-American communities that once called them home - he noted how long-dormant city services suddenly reappeared:
"Why does it take an influx of white New Yorkers in the south Bronx, in Harlem, in Bed Stuy, in Crown Heights for the facilities to get better? The garbage wasn't picked up every ... day when I was living in 165 Washington Park... So, why did it take this great influx of white people to get the schools better? Why's there more police protection in Bed Stuy and Harlem now? Why's the garbage getting picked up more regularly? We been here!"
Lee was criticised by many for "hipster-bashing", including African-American professor John McWhorter, who claimed that "hipster" was "a sneaky way of saying 'honkey'" and compared Lee to television character George Jefferson.
These dismissals, which focus on gentrification as culture, ignore that Lee's was a critique of the racist allocation of resources. Black communities whose complaints about poor schools and city services go unheeded find these complaints are readily addressed when wealthier, whiter people move in. Meanwhile, long-time locals are treated as contagions on the landscape, targeted by police for annoying the new arrivals.
Gentrifiers focus on aesthetics, not people. Because people, to them, are aesthetics.
Proponents of gentrification will vouch for its benevolence by noting it "cleaned up the neighbourhood". This is often code for a literal white-washing. The problems that existed in the neighbourhood - poverty, lack of opportunity, struggling populations denied city services - did not go away. They were simply priced out to a new location.
That new location is often an impoverished suburb, which lacks the glamour to make it the object of future renewal efforts. There is no history to attract preservationists because there is nothing in poor suburbs viewed as worth preserving, including the futures of the people forced to live in them. This is blight without beauty, ruin without romance: payday loan stores, dollar stores, unassuming homes and unpaid bills. In the suburbs, poverty looks banal and is overlooked.
In cities, gentrifiers have the political clout - and accompanying racial privilege - to reallocate resources and repair infrastructure. The neighbourhood is "cleaned up" through the removal of its residents. Gentrifiers can then bask in "urban life" - the storied history, the selective nostalgia, the carefully sprinkled grit - while avoiding responsibility to those they displaced.
Hipsters want rubble with guarantee of renewal. They want to move into a memory they have already made.
Impoverished suburbs
In a sweeping analysis of displacement in San Francisco and its increasingly impoverished suburbs, journalist Adam Hudson notes that "gentrification is trickle-down economics applied to urban development: the idea being that as long as a neighbourhood is made suitable for rich and predominantly white people, the benefits will trickle down to everyone else". Like trickle-down economics itself, this theory does not play out in practice.
Rich cities such as New York and San Francisco have become what journalist Simon Kuper calls gated citadels: "Vast gated communities where the one percent reproduces itself."
Struggling US cities of the rust belt and heartland lack the investment of coastal contemporaries, but have in turn been spared the rapid displacement of hipster economics. Buffered by their eternal uncoolness, these slow-changing cities have a chance to make better choices - choices that value the lives of people over the aesthetics of place.
In an April blog post, Umar Lee, a St Louis writer and full-time taxi driver, bemoaned the economic model of rideshare services, which are trying to establish themselves in the city. Noting that they hurt not only taxi drivers but poor residents who have neither cars nor public transport and thus depend on taxis willing to serve dangerous neighbourhoods, he dismisses Uber and Lyft as hipster elitists masquerading as innovators:
"I've heard several young hipsters tell me they're socially-liberal and economic-conservative, a popular trend in American politics," he writes. "Well, I hate to break it to you buddy, but it's economics and the role of the state that defines politics. If you're an economic conservative, despite how ironic and sarcastic you may be or how tight your jeans are, you, my friend, are a conservative …"
Lee tells me he has his own plan to try to mitigate the negative effects of gentrification, which he calls "50-50-20-15". All employers who launch businesses in gentrifying neighbourhoods should have a workforce that is at least 50 percent minorities, 50 percent people from the local neighbourhood, and 20 percent ex-offenders. The employees should be paid at least $15 per hour.
Gentrification spreads the myth of native incompetence: That people need to be imported to be important, that a sign of a neighbourhood's "success" is the removal of its poorest residents. True success lies in giving those residents the services and opportunities they have long been denied.
When neighbourhoods experience business development, priority in hiring should go to locals who have long struggled to find nearby jobs that pay a decent wage. Let us learn from the mistakes of New York and San Francisco, and build cities that reflect more than surface values.
Sarah Kendzior is a St Louis-based writer who studies politics and media.
Editor's Note: Visit onebillionrising.org/events to find a One Billion Rising event near you.
One billion girls and women - one in three on this globe, will face violence to their personal bodies. This violence is a global travesty. It exists everywhere that we can see.
It is time to put this sexual violence in a globally articulated collective view so that we all can fully see each other.
It is time to recognise that violence against women and girls is and remains a major political challenge of the 21st century, alongside racial, economic and gender tyranny.
Sexploitation, exploitation, disrespect, disregard start in the intimate realm of private embodied life and extends to the public realms of the economy and the state through the violence of war. Because the problem is structural and systemic, a multi-pronged coalitional global movement is therefore needed. In this instance, One Billion Rising (OBR) stands against imperial structural domination in all its forms.
The many faces of violence
Violence has its many faces. Many of them are protected through silence and shaming. Other kinds, like warfare, are normalised as inevitable. Militarism is also a form of sexual violence that de-humanises us all.
The women of the Philippines resist this militarism. And, after the devastating and violent cyclone that left millions homeless and thousands dead, have said that, "They will be bigger and stronger than the storm." With entire towns wiped away and many of their Islands missing, they stand against the violence of "man-made" weather.
Still, the UN and other international groups say that thousands of women and girls in the Philippines remain at high risk for rape and sexual assault as the islands attempt to recover and rebuild. Environmental disasters - floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, and earthquakes - open the doors to further violence especially against women and girls in places like Haiti, when lives become unmoored.
Women rising everywhere
Women and girls in Guatemala, El Salvador, Ecuador and throughout America Latina are finding reconciliation after decades of sexual violence in their civil war(s). Marsha Lopez Calderon says that women, and men who support them, are finding through education and legal realm greater rights for women to their bodies. They stand against the shame and fear and call for public reckoning. This begins to create a "justice" that matters.
Kushi Kabir who has worked for land rights, and women's rights with indigenous people in Bangladesh's rural villages for decades, embraces One Billion Rising as a global action to mobilise these struggles for justice further. The established commitment to autonomous movements throughout 1,300 villages empowers OBR activism. The activism here is directed towards an accounting of the 200,000 women raped in the 1971 war; and a demand for justice for Kalpana Chokma, an abducted anti-militarist indigenous young woman who remains missing since 1996. The most marginalised of the marginal are put in full view in these struggles.
OBR, as a global action for justice, is dedicated to full inclusion and the overlapping needs of humanity. It stands against the violence towards women and girls by simultaneously standing forth for the protection and preservation of the earth's soil, water, air, mountains, and so forth. Different women's actions across the globe today demand AIDS treatment and prevention; a change in legal rights and rape law in India; rights to education in Afghanistan; finding the disappeared in Argentina and Chili; rights to abortion almost everywhere.
Other mobilisations recognise the rights of hundreds of thousands of indigenous women in Peru who were illegally sterilised during the Fujimori regime. There are OBR actions against sexual harassment, sexual assault and rape by US farmworkers and members of the US military. There are demonstrations across the globe against the sex trafficking of women and girls in Mexico, the Balkans, and South-East Asia.
Fartuun Adan, director of the Elman Peace and Human Rights Center, lives in Mogadishu, Somalia, and mobilises people in rape crisis and women's safe houses to let women who have been victimised articulate their voice. They advocate for human rights and gender justice against violators and abusers throughout South Central Somalia.
It is no small point that too many of the women and girls in the Congo and Rwanda who have been brutally raped and murdered were out gathering firewood.
Women in the Congo suffer the violence of war rape, and yet their pain is silenced in and by the notion of "ethnic" warfare and corporate interest for coltan, the prized resource in producing cell phones and the like. Rape and its terrorisation of women and girls have little "political" salience, even with its extraordinary presence.
The fight to end sexual violence can spearhead a global movement against misogyny, racism and capitalism.
Bodily harm and its environs
The varied commitments to justice are often unified through the visor of sexual violence. Although multiple and differing venues result from individual and cultural agendas, they coalesce and solidify around the intersecting human needs for bodily integrity - be it a human body, or a body of land, or body of water.
It is this struggle for justice that condemns the physical assault against female bodies and extends to the assault against the human family and the earth it inhabits. Movements to end poverty, corruption, starvation, environmental plunder, imperialism, forced migrations, exploited labor, global patriarchy, political repression, racisms, endless refugees of religious wars instigate an inclusive humanity. It is a justice that is simultaneously intimate and public.
When OBR activists dance in the streets, they expose this intimate politics of complexity and inclusivity as it releases people from their silence and loneliness. When one uses one's body to speak through dance onFebruary 14, one frees oneself of fear, and that begins to unleash the possibility for revolutionary action.
Challenge of our times
There are autonomous and indigenous movements that have long fought for women's rights to their bodies in their home countries: India, Canada, Haiti, Congo, Afghanistan, Egypt, and Bangladesh to name a few. Hopefully we can all stand together, not ignoring heart-rending histories of unfairness and exploitation, but building careful coalitions through and past them.
For those who despise all forms of violence we must connect our strategies and our energies so that we interconnect with each other along the many individual fault lines of both personal and public life. Commitments must be melded to each other where they overlap, and not splinter where they differ. These coalitions of the 99 percent dedicated to peace and justice can be an irrepressible force.
Ending this violence is the huge political challenge of our day. Girls and women come in all types, and abilities, and races, and genders, and economic classes, so this is not a singular problem to begin with. We are of every colour, and size, and ability, of every religion, of every culture; we are mothers, daughters, sisters, citizens, migrants, and workers of every sort. Because each woman also has these many other identities we embody humanity when we embrace her and the violence done to her body. As such, ending violence against women encourages and imagines a plural and inclusive agenda towards justice.
It is time to make a global revolution that is personally political and politically personal. And given that revolutions are a collective process and not a singular act, help start the next one on February 14th with a massive expression of liberation.
Florence, a 24-year-old Houston woman, suffers from a life-threatening genetic disease. She has been in and out of hospitals her entire life and has a pile of medical bills she can’t pay. Her partner left after she recently became pregnant, saying he couldn’t handle her constant illness.
Then Florence, who did not want to be identified by her real name, learned at her second-trimester ultrasound that her fetus, which had inherited her disease, would never be healthy either. She decided her only option was to terminate the pregnancy before her child could suffer as she does.
“It broke me into pieces,” she told Al Jazeera.
But then Florence had another problem.
By the time she made her decision to have an abortion, there were no clinics in Texas that could help her. On Oct. 29, a new law went into effect outlawing abortions after 22 weeks of pregnancy. In the wake of the ruling, many abortion clinics in Texas started canceling appointments — even turning away one woman at the door. Suddenly Florence had no choice but to travel out of state for the procedure she desperately wanted.
So she caught an overnight bus to Albuquerque, N.M.
She didn’t tell her friends or family where she was going or why because she was afraid they would judge her. She had never been to Albuquerque and didn’t know anybody there.
“I was told there would be a shuttle to the clinic,” she said. “It’s a dicey situation, so I want to believe it’s true.”
It was.
A volunteer from a reproductive-rights organization in New Mexico picked her up from the bus station and drove her to the clinic. The clinic offered her a steep discount on the $3,500 cost of the abortion, and staff arranged for a local family to host Florence for the duration of her procedure.
Such generosity is not unusual. Across the U.S. there are grass-roots organizations set up to help low-income women like Florence have access to abortions. In most states, Medicaid won’t pay for an abortion unless the woman’s life is at risk. More than 86 aid groups known as abortion fundsexist across the U.S. to provide small grants to women struggling to pay for abortions. Many clinics offer discounts too.
But as a recent wave of anti-abortion legislation has swept the nation and forced abortion clinics to close, paying for an abortion isn’t the only problem. Physical access is a real and growing barrier. The Huffington Post reported this summer that more than 50 abortion clinics have closed in the last three years. In Texas last week, another 15 clinics shut their doors overnight after a law went into effect requiring doctors to have local hospital admitting privileges — a requirement that is bureaucratically difficult for many abortion physicians to meet.
It is too soon to measure how many women will travel out of Texas to get a safe, legal abortion as a result, but abortion-rights advocates expect the number to rise.
Vicki Cowart, CEO and president of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, which runs a Planned Parenthood surgical clinic in Albuquerque, said usually about 5 percent of patients at the the clinic come from Texas. In October that number leaped to 14 percent.
“When there’s a lot of news about abortion being unavailable,” she said, “women often go ahead and make other plans.”
Yet getting to these far-flung destinations is no trivial task for women dealing with financial hardship. As clinics close in anti-abortion states such as Texas, Mississippi, North Dakota and Wyoming, displaced women are forced to travel farther and farther in search of safe, legal abortions. Transportation, accommodation and child-care costs — more than half of women seeking abortions are already mothers — are big logistical barriers. Some experts fear these barriers are becoming so high that only the affluent can overcome them on their own, leaving women like Florence reliant on activists and volunteers.
Since the beginning of the year, an informal latticework of volunteers has sprung up in states where abortion rights or access to clinics is in decline. In Mississippi, which now only has one abortion clinic, in Jackson, Laurie Bertram Roberts launched the Mississippi NOW Reproductive Freedom Fund to provide practical support for women who need help getting to an abortion clinic. Roberts coordinates volunteer drivers from across the state to transport women to their nearest abortion provider, often crossing state lines.
Similarly, in Kentucky abortion access is increasingly only for the mobile. There are just two abortion clinics, in Lexington and Louisville. Accordingly, the Kentucky Support Network started in February to help low-income women get the services they need. Farah Ardeshir, the network’s organizer, said volunteers have driven Kentucky women to Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Tennessee and Ohio. They have helped more than 50 women since the group launched.
Since the omnibus anti-abortion bill passed the Texas legislature this summer, volunteers in the Lone Star State are increasingly aware of the need for practical as well as financial support to ease abortion access. An anonymous contributor recently made a large donation to Planned Parenthood’s abortion clinics in Albuquerque with the specific purpose of funding transportation and accommodation for women arriving from Texas. Angie Hayes launched the Clinic Access Support Network in Houston after a woman posted on Facebook that she needed help getting to a clinic. Hayes’ network now has about 30 volunteers willing to drive women to abortion clinics in the Houston area, with requests rising since the new law took effect.
Fund Texas Women, based in Austin, also just launched and gets women where they need to go, even across state lines. Megan Peterson, deputy director of the National Network of Abortion Funds — the nationwide membership group for abortion funds — notes that at least five more practical support groups like these plan to launch in Texas.
But their work may get even harder.
Now that abortions past 20 weeks of gestation are illegal in Texas, the closest late-term abortion provider is in New Mexico. But a citywide ballot measure in Albuquerque on Nov. 19 seeks to ban abortions in that city after 20 weeks as well. If the initiative passes, there will be no provider in New Mexico able to provide abortions past 20 weeks of pregnancy.
“This is a national disgrace,” said Dr. Sandra Penn, spokeswoman for Respect Albuquerque Women, a coalition working to oppose the ballot measure.
Yet whatever happens in New Mexico, Florence’s ordeal continues.
When she arrived in Albuquerque this week, her physical condition was so poor that the abortion was too risky to perform in an abortion clinic. She now has an appointment with a hospital in San Francisco next week — the closest hospital that would accept National Abortion Fund money. Donors coordinated by the Lilith Fund, a Texas abortion fund, and Fund Texas Women are raising funds to cover her travel costs to California. A separate fund will cover her hospital fees.
Florence’s supporters say her story points to a new trend in the U.S. abortion wars. As abortion restrictions continue to pass and as abortion clinics close, more and more women will crisscross the country in a bid to exercise their constitutional right. If they are low-income, they must increasingly rely on the kindness of strangers to do so.
I write this following my return from the morning’s force-feeding session here at Guantánamo Bay. I write in between bouts of violent vomiting and the sharp pains in my stomach and intestines caused by the force-feeding.
The U.S. government now claims that, among the 164 prisoners at Guantánamo, there are fewer than two dozen hunger strikers, down from well over 100 back in August. I am one of those remaining hunger strikers. I have been on hunger strike for almost nine months, since February.
The guards dragged me out of my cell at around 8:20 a.m. As they took me, shackled, past the other cells and towards the restraint chairs — my brothers and I call them torture chairs — I could barely breathe because of the smell: Some of my brothers are now tainting the walls of their cells and blocking the air-conditioning vents with their own feces, in protest.
The force-feeding remains as painful and horrific as the last time I described it. The U.S. military prison staff’s intent is to break our peaceful hunger strike. The result can be read all over my body. It is visible on my bloodied nose and in my nostrils, swollen shut from the thick tubes the nurses force into them. It is there on my jaundiced skin, because I am denied sunlight and sleep. It is there, too, in my bloated knees and feet and my ailing back, wrecked from prolonged periods spent in the torture chair and from the riot squad’s beatings. You can even hear it in my voice — I can barely speak, because they choke me every time they strap me into the chair.
No form of pressure is too cruel or petty for our captors. They have deprived me of medication for as long as I remain on hunger strike. They have also taken away electric razors necessary for proper grooming, and require all hunger strikers to share a single razor, despite the serious health risks that this poses. A rash spread among some of my fellow prisoners because of this measure by prison authorities.
Not even our rare calls with our families are held sacred. Three weeks ago, as the guards took me to a telephone call with my family, they subjected me to a humiliating and unnecessary search of my private areas. I resisted peacefully, as best I could, and tried to reason with the guards. To avoid these humiliating searches, some of my fellow hunger strikers have abstained from calls with their loved ones or meetings with their attorneys.
Many brothers have ended their hunger strikes because of these brutal force-feeding practices and the cruel punishment inflicted by the prison guards and military medical staff.
Others have chosen to suspend their hunger strikes to give President Barack Obama time to make good on his renewed promise to release Guantánamo prisoners.
But as for my brothers and me, we will remain on hunger strike. We pray that the next thing we taste is freedom. It may be hard to believe, but one of my fellow prisoners now weighs only 75 pounds. Another weighed in at 67 pounds before they isolated him in another area of the prison facility. These men survive only by the grace of God. May God continue to sustain us all until we achieve our goal of justice.
Opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Al Jazeera America.
A former FBI agent has agreed to plead guilty to leaking secret government information about a bomb plot to The Associated Press, the Justice Department said on Monday.
Donald John Sachtleben, a former FBI bomb technician and government contractor for the agency, pleaded guilty to unlawfully disclosing national defense information relating to a disrupted al-Qaeda suicide bomb plot targeting a plane bound for the U.S.
Sachtleben left the FBI in 2008 after a 25-year-career. He served on some of the nation's highest profile terrorism cases, including the Unabomber case, the USS Cole bombing, the Oklahoma City bombing and the 9/11 attacks.
“This prosecution demonstrates our deep resolve to hold accountable anyone who would violate their solemn duty to protect our nation's secrets and to prevent future, potentially devastating leaks by those who would wantonly ignore their obligations to safeguard classified information," said Ronald Machen Jr., U.S. attorney for the District of Colombia, according to a Department of Justice statement released Monday.
The Obama administration has aggressively investigated leaks to the media, indicting six individuals altogether, more than under all previous presidents combined.
As part of a plea agreement, Sachtleben agreed to a prison sentence of three years and seven months, in addition to a separate sentence, consecutive of eight years, one month for unrelated child-pornography charges, the department said.
The plea agreements for both the national security and child pornography charges call for a total sentence of 11 years and 8 months, including a consecutive 97-month term for the child pornography charges.
The AP says it believes the Justice Department was tipped off to Sachtleben's identity during its two-month probe of AP reporters, which the news agency has called a "massive and unprecedented intrusion."
Late Monday, the DOJ appeared to confirm the AP's suspicions. "Sachtleben was identified as a suspect in the case of this unauthorized disclosure only after toll records for phone numbers related to the reporter were obtained through a subpoena and compared to other evidence collected during the leak investigation," the department said in a statement. "This allowed investigators to obtain a search warrant authorizing a more exhaustive search of Sachtleben’s cell phone, computer, and other electronic media, which were in the possession of federal investigators due to the child pornography investigation."
In May the AP revealed that the government had obtained weeks of phone records from more than 100 of its reporters. Although the government would not say why it sought the records, officials previously said in public testimony that the government is conducting a criminal investigation into who may have provided information contained in an AP story about a foiled terror plot.
The investigation concerned an American operative who had successfully infiltrated a terrorist cell in Yemen. He told the terrorist cell he wanted to blow up an American airplane and was given an underwear bomb for this purpose.
His plan was to turn the bomb over to his American handlers and then tell his terrorist contacts that the bomb had failed to go off. That would have allowed him to continue providing intelligence to the U.S. government. But the AP caught wind of the plot and reported that it had been foiled by the United States.
Although the AP didn't disclose that the man was actually a U.S. agent, government sources told the Los Angeles Times that the report led to the agent's cover being blown.
The AP says it delayed publication of the story until it was given government clearance.
Civil libertarians have argued that leaks to the media provide an important check on the government's power and its control over the public's access to information.
The armed group al-Shabaab claimed responsibility for an attack on a shopping mall in Nairobi, Saturday, which killed at least 39 people and more than 150 injured, according to Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta.
The Somali group confirmed to Al Jazeera that it was behind the deadly attack, which began shortly after noon local time, after posting a series of ominous statements on Twitter.
Throughout Saturday, security forces searched for shoppers hiding within the Westgate mall, popular with wealthy Kenyans and expatriates.
According to Marie Harf, deputy spokeswoman for the State Department, American citizens were among those injured.
Kenyan military and police surrounded the mall, which had been hosting a children's day event, and helicopters flew overhead as gunmen remained inside hours after the attack occurred.
President Kenyatta said via Twitter that one of the gunmen had been arrested. Later Saturday, he reported that the gunman had died from bullet wounds.
Bursts of gunfire were heard outside the shopping mall, where shoppers ran for cover and left cars abandoned. Witnesses said six grenades also went off along with lobbies of AK-47 gunfire.
The gunmen announced that non-Muslims would be targeted, said Elijah Kamau, who was at the mall at the time of the attack.
"The gunmen told Muslims to stand up and leave. They were safe, and non-Muslims would be targeted," Kamau told The Associated Press.
Jay Patel, who sought cover on an upper floor in the mall when the shooting began, said that when he looked out of a window onto the upper parking deck of the mall he saw the gunmen with a group of people.
Patel said that as the attackers were talking, some of the people stood up and left, while others were shot.
The gunmen carried AK-47s and wore vests with hand grenades on them, said Manish Turohit, 18, who hid in a parking garage for two hours.
"They just came in and threw a grenade. We were running and they opened fire. They were shouting and firing," he told AP after marching out of the mall in a line of 15 people who all held their hands in the air, in an apparent attempt to not be shot.
Rob Vandijk, who works at the Dutch embassy, said he was eating at a restaurant inside the mall when attackers lobbed hand grenades inside the building. He said gunfire then burst out and people screamed as they dropped to the ground.
It appears the attack began at the outdoor seating area of Artcaffe at the front of the mall, witnesses said.
Kenya -- which sent troops into Somalia in late 2011 to pursue al-Qaeda-linked fighters -- hassuffered a string of retaliatory gun and grenade attacks claimed by the armed group al-Shabaab.
Last month, four Kenyan police officers were shot dead in the border county of Garissa when 40 heavily armed men, suspected of belonging to al-Shabaab, attacked a police post, a senior regional government official said.
In July, al-Shabaab released two Kenyan government officials it had seized in a 2012 cross-border attack, after holding them hostage in Somalia for more than a year.
Around the United States, fast food workers have been striking and picketing, demanding a raise from $7.25 to $15 an hour, and the right to organise a union.
Many people are asking whether the companies can afford to do this. But the more urgent question is, can the workers afford the status quo?
No.
Human beings in major cities simply can't survive and raise families on $7.25 an hour, especially when employers can - and do - reduce workers' hours whenever they choose, to save payroll costs or health insurance. Babies must have formula, children must have shoes, everyone must pay rent, buy food, and take medicine when they get sick. Many fast food workers families find that none of that is possible on their current wages.
| Inside Story Americas - Fast food: High profits and low wages |
By every measure, low wage workers are paid less nowthan they were from the 1950s-1970s. As economists at Center for Economic and Policy Research have shown, if the minimum wage had, since 1968, increased to keep pace with to the Consumer Price Index - the best measure of purchasing power - it would now be be $10.57, $3.50 higher than it is. The minumum wage is also disgracefully low compared to productivity levels; that means that workers are making money, they just aren't being allowed to keep much of it.
So the question of whether fast food companies can afford to pay workers more is like asking whether slaveholders could afford to give up slavery - yes, it's a pain to go from paying workers less to paying them a living wage. Bosses don't like making that change. Some will go out of business, just as some plantations did after the Civil War. The same can be said of factories at the end of last century who were forced to give up child labor and observe safety laws: those were sometime expensive changes. But for the rest of society, such changes are good.
Some people have argued about where a raise to $15 could come from. Judging from McDonald's annual report, a raise would minimally affect the company's massive profits. Some commentators worry about struggling franchises, but the raise could also come out of the considerable (and fixed) royalty they pay to McDonald's headquarters - not out of franchise owners' take-home pay.
And some of the raise for the workers could come out of increases in the price of fast food.
Much has been made of the downside of raising prices on fast food meals, and it's an obvious one: many fast food consumers are poor, and would feel even a small increase acutely.
But in the long run, increasing the pay of fast food workers raises the floor of the low-wage labour market. Other employers might have to pay more in order to compete with fast food companies and attract better workers, but in any case, the raise for fast food workers should be accompanied by policy measures to increase pay in all currently low-wage industries. This would givethe poorest workers in our economy more purchasing power, allowing them to pay more for a Big Mac - or for anything else.
That's what happens in high-wage countries, where fast food workers earn much more. Rather than go out of business, McDonald's finds ways to pay the workers. But also, patterns of consumption change when all workers are prospering. As The Atlantic reports , customers who make more expect more, so in Australia, where fast food workers do make $15/hour, consumers got espresso and McCafe way back in 1993.
A large body of economic research - from economists at the Economic Policy Institute, for example -shows that raising wages for poor workers benefits the whole economy by stimulating demand for goods and services. And why wouldn't it? When people make more money, they are able to spend more - and that includes being able to pay a bit more for a Happy Meal.
For too long, we've accepted the idea that low prices are necessary so that poor consumers can enjoy some basic necessities and indulgences. We accept that low wages for some are simply an unfortunate but inevitable consequence. In this uninspiring vision - a reality for much of America - poor workers endure substandard living conditions to subsidize other poor workers' consumption. But here's a better idea: pay all workers enough to live decently and to buy the stuff they want and need.
And sometimes, they might even be able to eat a better restaurant than McDonald's. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Liza Featherstone is a public school parent in Brooklyn, New York. She's also a contributing writer to The Nation, and writes on education for Newsday, the Brooklyn Rail and many other publications.
Follow her on Twitter: @lfeatherz
