the V monologues
hysterical and useless
Frequent topics include but are not limited to: Sexism, Racism, Mad Men, Spongebob Squarepants, The Simpsons, New York Rangers, New York Yankees, Depression, Work, Book Quotes, Fashion Models, Style, Cute Animals, New York City, Women of Color, Old Hollywood, Disney, Funny Things, Comics, Illustration, Food, Drinking, Music
And if you're still confused: ABOUT ME and GPOY
Students who considered themselves socialists were not so
much interested in the poor as they were desirous of leading
the poor, of being their guides and saviors. It was just this
paternalism toward the poor that the vision of solidarity I had
learned in religious settings was meant to challenge. From a
spiritual perspective, the poor were there to guide and lead the
rest of us by example if not by outright action and testimony.
As a student I read Marx, Gramsci, and a host of other male
thinkers on the subject of class. These works provided
theoretical paradigms but rarely offered tools for confronting
the complexity of class in daily life. […]
[W]hen I told friends and colleagues that I was resigning from my academic job to focus on writing, I was warned that I was making a dangerous mistake, that I could not possibly live on an income that was between twenty and thirty thousand dollars a year. When I pointed to the reality that families of four and more live on such an income, the response would be “that’s different”; the difference being, of course, one of class. The poor are expected to live with less and are socialized to accept less (badly made clothing, products, food, etc.), whereas the well-off are socialized to believe it is both a right and a necessity for us to have more, to have exactly what we want when we want it.
http://angry-hippo.tumblr.com/post/44956546473/socialismartnature-the-food-you-eat-or-brush
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Given the fact that the majority of prisoners are poor people and/or people of color, and that the majority of prisoners are convicted of non-violent crimes such as drug use/sales and/or theft, etc., this is a crime against humanity.
Moreover, the for-profit private prison industry is one of the fastest growing in America. That means that already-super-rich investors and owners make millions of dollars off of super-exploited slave labor in the prisons. This is an outrage. It is the intersection of racism, capitalism, and repression and it is a blight on the U.S. and the human species.
(via socialismartnature)
The only people that can afford to take an unpaid job are those that are already well-off enough to survive without pay. That means that there are careers where the only way to effectively break in to the industry is to be well-off in the first place.
This is a major problem in many industries, including film, advertising, fashion, music, and others. If your parents can pay for an apartment in Manhattan, congratulations, you can get your foot in the door. If not, tough luck, go find another job more suited to your lower-class life.
Via firstbook:
If you work with kids from low-income neighborhoods, First Book can help you get brand-new, high-quality books.
This is how income inequality happens. Read to your kids, people! And donate to First Book, while you’re at it.
(via triguenaista)
I just heard John Boehner say that increasing the minimum wage would actually be a disservice to workers, because a low wage encourages workers to get some skills. Because no one has to work at minimum wage if they are motivated enough, right??
This is the problem with conservatives; they see politics in terms of the individual, instead of the entire polity.
Minimum wage jobs will exist NO MATTER WHAT INDIVIDUALS DO. The goal isn’t to ELIMINATE these jobs — these jobs are a necessary evil of our economy. Someone has to clean up, has to wait tables, has to work retail, has to customer serve. Someone’s always going to have to do that, even if we have the best economy ever. These people deserve to not live in poverty, if they are working. They deserve to be able to feed their children.
Not everyone has the opportunity or the ability to obtain higher level skills to work at a higher level!
And even if they had those skills — are there enough jobs to meet that demand?
You know how many college grads I know who are waiting tables and working at the Gap right now?
HOW ARE THESE FUCKHEADS SO OUT OF TOUCH??
It’s all part of the lie that they want to pay skilled workers. They just don’t want to pay! There’s always someone willing to do the work for less, because there’s always someone in a position where they will literally need any penny they can get. That’s the fundamental disconnect between capitalist society and education. Why are U.S. jobs shifted overseas? Cheaper labor. Why are borders not really closed despite not wanting ‘those people!1’ to stay? Cheap labor. The prison industrial complex? Bright shiny source of soon-to-be-sanctioned *free* labor!
The lie, basically, is that a capitalist society can also be egalitarian; you get a middle-class life, you get a middle-class life, you get a middle-class life!, etc. But that’s not possible; there *must* be the underclass for the system to function. That means either withholding education/training from some members of the society, whether through substandard schooling or the pipeline from Black and Latino communities to jail, or importing/exporting labor for performance by non-U.S. nationals who don’t get protections. It starts off low-level, but with the exponential growth in income disparity, there’s no alternative but to keep a low ceiling on income—and thus a low ceiling on economic mobility.
That concept is Brave New World at its very best.
I think one of the best examples of cheap labor vs. education that I can think of comes in the form of what happened to us kids born in the 1985 - 1995 area.
Basically, growing up, we were told the lie of “IF YOU GET A GOOD EDCUATION, YOU CAN GET A DECENT JOB.” This point was driven home so often by teachers and parents, and bless them, they were just telling what they knew, and didn’t expect economic downturn, but it got to the point where if you had no plans to continue your education, you had everyone wondering where they’d gone wrong with you. You were a failed human being because you had no chance of surviving without the extra education.
One of my favorite cautionary tales (if you could call it that) to try and prevent that and encourage us to go to college was “IF U DON’T U’LL BE FLIPPING BURGERS 4 TEH REST OF UR LIFE DO U WANT FRIES WITH THAT????” which is not only fucking unfair to the people in those jobs, but it gave the unrealistic expectation that if we graduated from college we could avoid minimum wage jobs and actually be able to support ourselves.
Like the good little kids we were, we graduated high school, and most of us went to college. I want to point out that I have nothing against higher education in itself. It’s a decent experience. HOWEVER, when most of us left college, we found ourselves in the negative range money-wise, and unless you were in a particular field, we found ourselves with no job prospects.
Here’s where the fucking irony kicks in.
Because we’re thousands of dollars in the hole because we attended a school because we were TOLD by just about EVERY SINGLE ADULT in our lives that if we didn’t we were subject to a life of abject poverty, we had to go look for something, anything, to keep us afloat. Which means applying to those burger joints we were told we’d have to work at if we didn’t go to school.
IT GETS EVEN BETTER THOUGH
A lot of us apply to those burger joints, but we’re told we’re OVERQUALIFIED to work there. Why? Because of a couple things. For one, while there are some people who work as managers who are rather intelligent people, they don’t want to risk the idea of you being smarter than the person above you. Two, they’re afraid of the pay you might want because you went to college. Three, they’re also afraid you’ll leave after a month if you find a better job, because, you know, fast food doesn’t have high turnover or anything.
I guess the moral of this ramble is, it doesn’t matter how educated or skilled you are, unless you’re in a certain field, what American companies want these days is something damn near slave labor. To paraphrase Chris Rock: “Minimum wage is your boss saying, ‘Hey, I’d pay you less, but that would be illegal.’”
(via anedumacation)
Except if everyone could afford to live like that, who would clean their toilets for minimum wage (or less)? And if everyone should be able to live like this, why are capitalists so reluctant to pay people enough to do so? Oh, yeah. Because then they might not be able to live like that.
A socialist looks at this house and says, “Wow, it sucks that our system is so unequal that some Americans get to live like this while others are crowded in tiny apartments in crime-ridden areas and don’t have to enough to eat. We should change things so everyone’s standard of living is improved, even if that means not as many people get to live in big houses like this.”
A capitalist looks at this house and says, “Everyone should be able to live like this, but I’m not going to do a damn thing to contribute to that ability.”
(via thecometreturns)
One of the biggest distortions in our economic thinking is trying to measure the financial health of the nation by how much wealth accumulates rather than how well money circulates.
(via thecometreturns)
(via super1eklectic)
The Mitt Romney secret video scandal has really caught fire, as it should, because it paints a less rehearsed portrait of a man who has been often charged with saying anything to get elected and gives us a glimpse at what he’d say if being elected didn’t matter. But while I understand the focus and concern on Romney’s contempt for the alleged 47 percent of Americans who “pay no income tax” — a distortion that has been debunked several times now — I am concerned about the second-tier relegation of Romney’s deluded insinuation that had his father “been born of Mexican parents, I’d have a better shot of winning this.” Because this is something worth talking about too.
First things first: The cynicism embedded in this remark is insanely racist. Let’s not be polite about it. A subnarrative concerning Romney’s beliefs about race in America can be drawn out from this statement alone, and it’s important that these points be raised and explored for what they’re worth. That so many of the news establishments reporting this story have treated this as a somewhat throwaway remark belittles the relation between race and the American political process and hints at the media’s own subtle racism. So even if this post exists solely for the sake of saying it out loud, the discursive implications of such a statement need exposition. Full disclosure: I am an Hispanic American and my shots at winning the presidency are not as good as Mitt thinks.
Inference #1: Mexicans and other Hispanic Americans are becoming a majority class and white people will suffer under this population shift.
In the 2010 U.S. Census Report, Hispanics in America topped 50 million and accounted for one out of every six Americans. It is predicted that by 2050, Hispanics will make up as much as one-third of the American population. This is only a cause for alarm if you conflate America and so-called “American values” with whiteness and so-called “cultural superiority.” We already know that Romney believes that cultural superiority translates into economic prosperity; he literally said that in a slight to the Palestinians on his botched foreign relations tour. It is not a stretch, therefore, to assume that this version of ethnic anxiety extends to his own white-washed perception of America, and this is perhaps what compels Romney’s surrogates to fearlessly call press conferences and say things like “I wish this president would learn how to be an American” in reference to our first African American president. It’s the reason Romney himself is able to make “jokes” about how no one has ever asked to see his birth certificate. “I’m white,” he is saying, “so of course I’m American!”
In a great moment of candor, Rush Limbaugh perfectly expressed the kind of fear these implications are meant to generate: Obama hates white people, Limbaugh says, and he’s going to send us (ostensibly white) Republicans “to the back of the bus.” In other words, if we don’t “take our country back,” we are going to live under the thumb of the new majority — and if they treat us the way we treated them, we’re fucked.
Inference #2: Hispanic Americans are the recipients of handouts by birthright.
If we were to assign the “47 percent” that Romney has segregated into a categorical position, the implication is that there are two types of Americans in Romney’s mind: those that depend on government assistance and lack a sense of “personal responsibility,” and those who work hard and are “vilified” for their success. The hard-working success stories are Republican voters — natch! — while the 47 percent of Americans on the government teat, he clearly assumes, vote Democrat. Now, combine those numbers with the figures that represent Republican voters, and an even more interesting picture emerges. Indeed, almost 90 percent of all Republican voters in presidential elections are white. Which is to say that, in Romney-math, only 10 percent of all hard-working Americans are not white.
The sense that “they” are taking our jobs and that “they” are living off government programs is statistically untrue, but popular nonetheless, and in this case, Romney seems to be feeding into this white racist fiction while also alluding to the notion that Obama did not earn the presidency, but had it handed to him by virtue of his race alone. It has nothing to do with the fact that Obama is the only candidate in this race who does not treat people of color like unwanted statistical abstractions, Romney believes, but because “they” have it easier than we do. Obviously.
Inference #3: As a white man in America, Mitt Romney wasn’t privileged enough.
When you’re in a room surrounded by wealthy white men like yourself, it is important to assert your power not only with a copy of your bank balance, but with a Homeric-like myth that asserts your own storied ascent to the aristocracy. Nobody wants to hear about how easy you had it; they want to trade war stories and buy $150 shirts with WE BUILT THIS! slogans on them. So by mourning the purity of his Anglo-Saxon heritage, Romney is simply adding another layer to the epic. Elsewhere in the video, he explains:
I have inherited nothing. There is a perception, “Oh, we were born with a silver spoon, he never had to earn anything and so forth.” Frankly, I was born with a silver spoon, which is the greatest gift you can have: which is to get born in America.
Which is, like, yes Mitt. Totally. Being born in America is the only reason you are successful. You never had a leg up. You were never the recipient of a handout. Your birthright only guaranteed your chiseled facial features. You’re a self-made man and this is your Odyssey. Except that it’s not and you weren’t. The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson sums it up quite nicely:
Romney was the son of a governor and an auto executive who gave him a wealth of connections, a private education, college tuition, a stock portfolio that he lived on while in graduate school, help buying a first house. That he recognizes the value of none of these things is both dismaying and discouraging for anyone who thinks that he will be able to do much to actually encourage opportunity in America. He is clear enough about one difference money can make in life, when he tells those present, “Frankly, what I need you to do is to raise millions of dollars.”
In other words, if only Mitt Romney were Mexican, only then would he have everything. For now, he’ll just have to settle for the privileges and entitlements awarded for being white, wealthy, and male. If only he were Mexican, he might finally become president too. What else could explain it? He’s worked harder for this than for anything else he’s ever done, so if Mitt Romney loses this election, it’s going to have to be somebody else’s fault. If only he could find someone to blame.
