Ten years ago I had the pleasure and honor of meeting a fiddler, the inventor of the halogen light bulb, Elmer Fridrich. People like Elmer, cast in the mold of Thomas Alva Edison, are few and far between today. Do you know who invented the LED (before his death, Elmer thought he had the invention to top the LED but never completed his work), the Plasma TV, the iPod? Me neither. We are diminished by our ignorance.

Ralph Nader agrees.

In elementary school they taught us the names of inventors. Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, Robert Fulton the steamboat, Alexander Graham Bell the telephone, and Thomas Alva Edison the electric light bulb. Nowadays we rarely know the names of the inventors of modern technology—think biotechnology, nanotechnology, pharmaceutical technology, safety technology. Not every breakthrough is invented by a single person, but there are still clusters of people inventing new things each year.

Over twenty years ago, my associates searched for inventors of the air bag so we could celebrate their achievements. It’s not as if the names of such inventors are not known—their names often appear in technical publications or in the U.S. Patent Office’s archives. But inventors are not featured in the popular media or in our school courses. Corporations and their brands are credited for the work of their staff.

Some may think the era of the lone inventor is over and only collectives of inventors produce most of the significant breakthroughs. But you wouldn’t Continue Reading »

So, I’m a white guy. I’m the breathing embodiment of centuries of really bad actions by the white guys who went before me. I also, as I have said before, get that, through no merit of my own, my status as a white guy living in the United States, puts me in a global one percent. I didn’t do any of the bad stuff, but by virtue of my privilege, I’ve always felt an obligation to do what I can to make the world better by not being one of the white guys who did, or continue to do, all that bad stuff. Some people agree with me and some people don’t. I get that.

Here’s my starting point: racism/xenophobia/fear of the other is a top-down phenomenon and in the world today that means, almost exclusively, that white people (really mostly white guys) can’t be the target of racism/xenophobia/fear of the other. I know that when a white guy gets slammed for begin a white guy, he can think that’s oppression. He’s wrong. That’s karma.

So when white guys get their panties in a bunch over Sarah Jeong joining the editorial board of The New York Times, I wasn’t impressed. Libby Watson, reporting in The New York Times Really Fucked This One Up for Splinter, writes:

Yesterday, the New York Times announced that it had hired Sarah Jeong, who is by all accounts an extremely talented tech reporter, as a new member of its editorial board. Today, Jim Hoft, once accurately called the “dumbest man on the internet” by Media Matters, published a collection of Jeong’s tweets which he deemed “racist filth.”

The tweets were not racist; they were jokes about white people, which is a different thing that is not racism. Among Jeong’s supposed offenses: saying “white men are bullshit,” that she couldn’t enjoy Breaking Bad because the premise is just “white people being miserable,” and that “it must be so boring to be white.”

Watson, as the headline suggests, thinks the Times ought to have just ignored the story. I think she’s wrong and that the Times did what was right. She wrote:

The New York Times really fucked this one up. Instead of ignoring this ridiculous complaint and letting it die—which it would have, because who the fuck cares what The Gateway Pundit is doing—they have validated it. (At least they didn’t fire her, you might say, but even responding to this garbage sets a terrible precedent and legitimizes a completely illegitimate, bad faith campaign to discredit Jeong and the Times itself.)

Now, according to the Times, it is fair to say that being rude about white people serves “to feed the vitriol that we too often see on social media,” and that her tweets represent a “type of rhetoric” at all and not just… jokes, nothingnesses, completely mundane and honestly quite boring observations that have no wider importance or meaning. Do we think Sarah Jeong actually enjoys chasing down and bullying old white men for fun? Do we think she earnestly wants to “cancel” white people? No, because that doesn’t mean anything—“cancel” doesn’t mean “do genocide to.”

Well, it is fair to say that being rude about white people serves “to feed the vitriol that we too often see on social media,”. Being rude is not always bad. It’s not always helpful, either, but that’s discourse.

What Watson gets right, however, is why Joeng’s tweets, are not racist. She writes:

Making jokes about white people isn’t the same as making racist jokes about black people, or Asian people, or Jews, or gay people, or any other historically oppressed minority. This is a very simple principle, but one that many aggrieved whites find difficult to accept. You can’t say, “Well, imagine if you replaced ‘white’ with ‘black’ in those tweets,” because those two things are not equally replaceable. As much as you might find it desperately oppressive to not be able to use the n-word when you sing along to rap songs, there has never been a government-endorsed legal or societal campaign of oppression against whites. White people can be oppressed by other means, such as through gender or economics, but whites in the U.S. have never been systematically oppressed on the basis of their race alone.

In fact, white people in the United States have had it comparatively super good in large part because of their oppression of other races; when you, a white person, express or act upon your prejudice towards oppressed groups, you are taking part in that oppression. You contribute to the project of belittling, keeping down, otherizing, and exploiting historically oppressed minorities. When a member of an oppressed community complains about white people, that is different, because it is the whites who are doing the oppression. It is just different, which things often are.

None of that changes if white guys become, in fact, a minority because, we’ve always been a minority and there the real power to oppress and marginalized has always been held by a minority of the minority, that tiny portion of the population, that 0.01 perenct that holds more wealth and power than the rest of us. That’s the dirty little reality. I have more in common with the 99.99 percent than I do with our national/global billionaire class.

There have always been, and continue to be—think Donnie Azoff—white guys convinced that they too can be part of the 0.01, but Horatio Alger was a myth. The Johnson’s of Rock Ridge, however, had the right idea.

David French disagrees and takes aim at liberals like me. French, writing in Yes, Anti-White Racism Exists for National Review, makes his case:

Earlier today, the New York Times announced that it had hired Sarah Jeong to join its editorial board, and — like clockwork — controversial old tweets promptly surfaced. In them, Jeong expressed some rather interesting views of “[dumba** f***ing] white people,” musing about how much joy she gets “out of being cruel to old white men” and how “white men are [bullsh**].” [Oh come on David, we’re adults here. reading dumbass fucking or bullshit isn’t going makes us faint. JH] For good measure she also compared white people to “groveling goblins” and questioned why they’re “genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun.” In a statement, Jeong expressed her regret and explained that she was engaging in “counter-trolling” designed to mimic the language of racists who harassed her online.

The Times is standing by its hire. Good. It’s time to end termination-by-Twitter and debate bad ideas head-on. (As for whether the Times and other elite outlets will display the same fortitude when a conservative is the target of online outrage, I’ll believe it when I see it.)

But it’s one thing to argue that Jeong should be given a chance to prove herself at the Times, and another entirely to justify the content of the tweets themselves. Yet that’s what part of left-wing Twitter did.

The argument isn’t just that the tweets were satire. Rather, numerous liberals took on the very notion that anti-white racism exists, or matters at all. [Emphasis mine, JH]

And then there’s this from yet another white guy. Just in case you can’t bear to read the whole piece, Damon Young, writing in The 10 Worst Sentences From Andrew Sullivan’s ‘When Racism Is Fit to Print,’ Ranked From ‘STFU Andy’ to ‘Does He Have a Concussion?’ for The Root, pulls out the high lowlights beginning with:

10.“The neo-Marxist analysis of society, in which we are all mere appendages of various groups of oppressors and oppressed, and in which the oppressed definitionally cannot be at fault, is now the governing philosophy of almost all liberal media.”

Andrew, Andrew and Andrew. That has always been the governing philosophy of liberal media. Of course, finding liberal media is much harder than just pointing to anyone who thinks our president is less than presidential.

President Donald John Trump doesn’t care about Democracy, The United States of America, the Presidency, his family, his friends or anyone except himself. Every single action he takes is focused on one goal and one goal only: protecting his brand. That is why he so ferociously attacks anyone who questions a reality—think the crowd size at his inauguration—that throws shade on the greatness of Trump.

When it was revealed that Trump one the electoral college in a more or less mediocre way—not the biggest since Reagan—but lost the popular vote, the President lashed out at a shadow electorate of fraudulent voters and empaneled a commission to prove the voter fraud. Like the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe, that lie has gone down in flames:

Andrew Gumbel, writing in Documents disprove White House voter fraud claims, says ex-member of Trump commission for The Guardian, reports:

A review of documents has shown White House claims to have unearthed “substantial evidence” of voter fraud were false, according to a junior member of Donald Trump’s short-lived commission on election integrity.

Matt Dunlap, the top elections official in Maine, said he had examined 1,800 commission documents that were denied to him while he served and that he had since obtained through a court order. He found nothing in them to substantiate the claims made by the commission’s vice-chair, Kris Kobach, and the White House when the commission was disbanded in January.

“The sections on evidence of voter fraud are glaringly empty,” Dunlap reported in an official letter to Kobach and the vice-president, Mike Pence, the commission chair. “After months of litigation that should not have been necessary, I can report that the statements by Vice Chair Kobach and the White House were, in fact, false.

I’m sure there are statements made by the president and his staff that are demonstrably true, but how could you tell?

I make a point of sharing with my students how I see the difference between stupidity and ignorance. To be stupid is to be incapable of learning. To be ignorant is to have not yet learned. (In between those two, of course, is willful ignorance, but that’s another disucssion.) None of us will live long enough to learn all that we want to learn, let along all that can be learned, but we can, as I do, wake each morning celebrating the reality that we can lay our heads down at the end of the day a little less ignorant.

This video—from 1 May 2017—is a prime example for me. Before I watched WALTER MOSLEY SPEAKS ON BLACK AMERICA… I did not know of either CUNY75 or BRIC TV (Brooklyn Information and Culture).

After watching, I wonder what this panel would say today, more than 15 months later.

So the other day I logged into my online banking account to see if a check I’d deposited had cleared. Before I could login, however, I had to tell my bank that I had read and understood all 24,507 words on 49 pages of New York Community Bank’s terms and conditions. Now I’m a fast reader, but I’m sure that reading, and understanding, 49 pages of legalese would take me more than two hours. No one has time for that. What was I to do? I needed to get to work so I scrolled to the bottom, clicked I accept, and checked my account.

Sir Robert Salt understood. This bullshit has to stop. What can be done?

Back in 2014, in Will you read this article about terms and conditions? You really should do for The Guardian, Robert Glancy wrote:

We live in a time of terms and conditions. Never before have we signed or agreed so many. But one thing hasn’t changed: we still rarely read them.

According to a Fairer Finance survey, small print for some companies now runs to more than 30,000 words (the length of a short novel) and, unsurprisingly, 73 percent of people admit to not reading all the fine print. Of those who do, only 17 percent say they understand it.

For a few years I was one of the 27 percent ploughing through the turgid fine print. Researching a book about a lawyer, I became obsessed with contracts. Then one day, after reading reams of legal gobbledygook, I experienced something similar to the moment when Neo sees the cascading Matrix code: I saw that below our day-to-day lives runs a confluence of tiny rules shaping our reality. This underworld only bursts to the surface when things go wrong. Like when you crash your scooter in Bali and realise that your travel insurance doesn’t cover scooter accidents. Or in my case, when I misread (ignored) the fine print of my New Zealand residency and was almost deported.

What lurks among the 24,507 words I agreed to yesterday so I could check my bank balance? I’m actually going to read the behemoth and track how long it takes me to a.) read every word or b.) slit my wrist.

Wish me luck, I’m going in…

Terms and Conditions

Please read and accept our Terms & Conditions.

Make sure to scroll down to the end of the document to accept the Terms and Conditions and submit your acknowledgement.

New York Community Bank Online and Mobile Banking Agreement & Disclosure Statement

If you wish to print this Agreement, please click on the link provided here.

This New York Community Bank Online and Mobile Banking Agreement (“Agreement”) sets forth the terms and conditions that govern your use of the online banking products and services for accounts held at New York Community Bank (“NYCB”), including its divisions and Affiliates, that are accessed through the Internet, including mybankingdirect.com (“NYCB Online,” for a particular service of Continue Reading »

I’m ashamed to read that this video posted 144 days ago and I’m only watching it today.

And the hits just keep rolling in…

Swanky South Beach Hotel That Allegedly Called Haitian Employees ‘Slaves’ to Pay $2.5 Million Settlement

White Woman Snatches Protest Sign From Black Woman, Cries to Police When She Gets Punched in the Face [Updated]

‘All I Did Was Be Black’: Smith College Employee Calls Cops on Black Student Just Trying to Eat Her Damn Food

#BrooklynBecky: Cops Called on Suspicious-Looking ‘Black’ Woman Waiting for Uber in the Rain

Massachusetts college apologizes after police called on black student eating lunch

‘I’m Grateful Because He’s OK’: New Mom Who Went Into Early Labor After Allegedly Being Kicked by Off-Duty Cop Speaks Out

#ServingYourNeighborhoodWhileBlack: Calif. Safeway Calls Cops on Black Woman Donating to the Homeless, Accuses Her of Shoplifting

Cue the World’s Smallest Violin: White Driver Who Followed Black Man, Called Him Slurs, Now Whines About Life Being Ruined

Minneapolis Police Officers Will Not Face Criminal Charges After Gunning Down Fleeing Black Man [Updated]

Mississippi Cop Caught on Video Using Stun Gun on Handcuffed Shoplifting Suspect

Ving Rhames Recalls Being Held at Gunpoint by Police at His Home After A Neighbor Called in a Break-In by a ‘Large Black Man’

Previously…

President Barack Hussein Obama has endorsed 81 candidates in the 6 November mid-term elections. Of those, nearly one-in-five are on the ballot in Ohio. Candidates in our state also received more endorsements than any other state.

The message there is, of course, that Ohio really, really matters. While Stephen Crockett, reporting in Barack Obama Reminds America What a Real President Looks Like, Endorses 81 Candidates for The Root, does not explain why some Democrats are not on the list—like Senator Sherrod Campbell Brown or the Democrat running in my house district (Ohio-16) Susan Moran Palmer—there are multiple possible reason that may have nothing to do with fitness or positions.

Of those endorsed, Crockett writes:

On Wednesday, Obama announced that he was endorsing 81 Democratic candidates in the November midterm elections to right America’s ship because that’s what a real president does even when he’s out of office. According to USA Today, Obama said that he’s “eager” to help straighten out them imbalance of Congressional seats and get this thing back on track. And while he didn’t call out the president by name, he did note that he’s tired of his bitch ass willing to lend his support to those who will actually Make America Great Like When Obama Was in Office.

“I’m confident that, together, they’ll strengthen this country we love by restoring opportunity that’s broadly shared, repairing our alliances and standing in the world, and upholding our fundamental commitment to justice, fairness, responsibility, and the rule of law,” Obama said in a statement viewed by USA Today.

“But first, they need our votes—and I’m eager to make the case for why Democratic candidates deserve our votes this fall.”

Here’s President Obmas’s list:

Richard Cordray (Governor)
Betty Sutton (Lt. Governor)
Steve Dettelbach (Attorney General)
Kathleen Clyde (Secretary of State)
Zack Space (Auditor)
Aftab Pureval (U.S. House, OH-1)
Jill Schiller (U.S. House, OH-2)
Phil Robinson (State House, District 6)
Stephanie Howse (State House, District 11)
Mary Lightbody (State House, District 19)
Beth Liston (State House, District 21)
Allison Russo (State House, District 24)
Erica Crawley (State House, District 26)
Tavia Galonski (State House, District 35)
Casey Weinstein (State House, District 37)
Taylor Sappington (State House, District 94)

Five of the 16 are for statewide office. Of the remaining 10, two are running for Congress in southwestern Ohio and eight are Ohio State House candidates. Four—6, 11, 35 and 37—are in Northeastern Ohio. Three more—19, 21 and 24 are in central and east central Ohio and the remaining district—94—is in southeastern Ohio.

All of Seth Myers’ Closer Look is good, of course, but the one look on Stephanie Ruhle’s face at timemark 3:20 is more than worth the price of admission.

I confess that I was disappointed that the congressional race in Ohio’s 16th House District where Republican Anthony Gonzalez is running against Democrat Susan Moran Palmer to replace James Bupkis Renacci who clearly picked the wrong race in the wrong year to level in politics and is poised to go down in flames in the senate race against Democrat Sherrod Brown.

That Republican Representative William Leslie Johnson, who represents Ohio’s 6th district which includes my hometown of Marietta, was mentioned as one of several Republicans who one Republican strategist said ought to run like your hair’s on fucking fire. Democrats have enthusiasm out the fucking wazoo right now.

That quote comes from Henry Gomez, who, reporting in Ohio Republicans Fear A Blue Wave If Democrats Win Next Week’s Special Election for BuzzFeed News, writes:

Next week, if Republicans lose Ohio’s 12th Congressional District, a seat they’ve held since the early years of the Reagan administration, their nationwide prospects of maintaining control of the House will dim.

But a loss in that special election also would signal acute trouble for several Republican incumbents in Ohio, where the party has dominated the political landscape for much of the last 30 years.

How high are the stakes? State Sen. Troy Balderson, the party’s nominee in the Ohio 12th, has enthusiastic endorsements from both President Donald Trump and Gov. John Kasich — political enemies who have few mutual allies. Vice President Mike Pence campaigned in the district this week, and Trump is expected to visit this weekend. National Republican groups are spending millions of dollars on the race. Meanwhile, Democrat Danny O’Connor, an elected county officeholder from the vote-rich Columbus area, has positioned himself as a moderate.

In interviews with more than a half-dozen Republican operatives, most of whom are cautiously optimistic that Balderson will win, three fears emerged: that a low-turnout election at the height of summer vacation season could tip the contest to O’Connor; that several other Ohio House districts drawn overwhelmingly in their favor could become more competitive; and that the Democrats’ momentum could carry into an open governor’s race that in recent weeks has trended in Democrats’ direction.

Palmer’s chances aside, Democrats cannot afford to complacent in the remaining 90 days before the mid-term election in November. Millions of dollars in dark money are pouring into the state and frankly, not even Brown can feel safe when that kind of cash can just appear from nowhere overnight.

Dave Davis and Joan Mazzolini titled their chapter on Roldo Bartimole: A muckraker comes to Cleveland and founds Point of Viǝw. [I flipped the ǝ, the way it appeared on the POV flag, JH].

Roldo—the journalist Ralph Nader called: arguably Cleveland’s greatest investigative reporter of the past half century—is one of the 25 stories told in the ebook, Plain Dealing: Cleveland Journalists Tell Their Stories released today by Davis and Mazzolini.

I read the chapter—pages 138-166—on Roldo first, of course and he’s also mentioned on pages xiv, 49, 174, 194, 334 (the picture that won’t die), 339, 362 and 366. I’ll hit the rest later this evening.

I’ve always been a sucker for these kinds of books—I ordered another of Listri’s books this morning—because one library, the Carnegie Library in my hometown of Marietta, Ohio, played such an outsized role in my life.

I don’t read sports’ pages. I even have the whole section on hide. Sometimes, however, I get a flash as the loading page gets ahead of settings and I catch a glimpse. That happened this afternoon and I got a flash of the headline: An open letter to the NFL’s owners by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. I’m glad I didn’t miss this one.

Abdul-Jabbar writes:

Dear NFL owners:

Whew! What a tumultuous year for your league. Slipping attendance and ratings. Continuing concussion controversy. Lawsuits from cheerleaders who refuse to shut up and smile. Domestic violence accusations against players. The Papa John’s founder mouthing off about something or other. Players taking a national anthem knee (NAK, for short). President Trump’s “problematic” rambling. Commissioner Roger Goodell under siege from, well, everybody. Bet it makes you fellas long for the good old days when all you had to worry about was Janet Jackson’s nip slip. Where’s faithful Hodor when you need someone to hold the door against relentless attackers?

Then you made it worse.

What follows are 943 sublime words that I couldn’t even begin to expand upon.

Go.

Read.

Then tell the NFL owners to go fuck themselves.

Mano Singham has, rightly in my opinion, identified the key weakness on the right that allows Sacha Baron Cohen to exploit politicians who, if they had a shred of common sense, would never let Cohen in the door: their obsequious relationship with Israel.

In How reflexive support for Israel aided Sacha Baron Cohen, Singham writes:

Cohen got [Republican Georgia state legislator Jason] Spencer to behave this way by posing as an Israeli counter-terrorism expert. In fact, as Allison Drager writes, Cohen has repeatedly duped Republicans to say bigoted and hateful things by exploiting their reflexive support for anything that Israel does.

A facet that fascinates me in all this is that, unlike the tactics of James O’Keefe who relied on editing to twist the story, Cohen appears to just let the recording run and allow Republicans to be hoisted on their petards.

I have to wonder how Charles and David Koch’s staffs drew straws to pick the sacrificial lamb sent in to tell their employers that the study they paid good money for arrived at the conclusion that universal healthcare would be good for the economy and save tons of cash.

Ryan Grim and Zaid Jilani, reporting in Koch-Backed Think Tank Finds That “Medicare for All” Would Cut Health Care Spending and Raise Wages. Whoops. for The Intercept, writes:

A new study from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University is making headlines for projecting that Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’s “Medicare for All” bill is estimated to cost $32.6 trillion—a number that’s entirely in line with 2016 projections, and is literally old news. But what the Associated Press headline fails to announce is a much more sanguine update: The report, by Senior Research Strategist Charles Blahous, found that under Sanders’s plan, overall health costs would go down, and wages would go up.

The study, which came out of the Koch-funded research center, was initially provided to the AP with a cost estimate that exceeded previous ones by an incredible $3 trillion—a massive error that was found and corrected by Sanders’s staff when approached by AP for comment.

But despite that correction, the report actually yields a wealth of good news for advocates of Sanders’s plan—a remarkable conclusion, given that Blahous is a former Bush administration economist working at a prominent conservative think tank.

Blahous’s paper, titled “The Costs of a National Single-Payer Healthcare System,” estimates total national health expenditures. Even though his cost-saving estimates are more conservative than others, he acknowledges that Sanders’s “Medicare for All” plan would yield a $482 billion reduction in health care spending, and over $1.5 trillion in administrative savings, for a total of $2 trillion less in overall health care expenditures between 2022 and 2031, compared to current spending. [Emphasis mine, JH]

Please read that sentence again. Universal health care in the form of Medicare for all would save $2 trillion over a 10-year period or $200 million a year. How did Blahous arrive at those numbers? Grim and Jilani continue:

In order to arrive at this number, Blahous looked at how “Medicare for All” could lower administrative costs and provide savings in areas like drug spending. He concluded that by empowering the secretary of Health and Human Services to negotiate for lower drug prices, Sanders’s plan would add “$846 billion in additional savings over the 2022-2031” period. These savings, and others, are offset by certain other costs, like those which come from higher “utilization,” or the increased amount health care services used once everyone is insured.

Blahous’s report also acknowledges some substantial benefits to eliminating employer-sponsored insurance. He writes that these changes “should increase worker wage net of employer-provided health benefits,” while also “relieving individuals, families, and employers of the substantial health expenditures they would experience under current law.” The report even admits that the Sanders bill would serve as a boon to states, freeing them from most Medicaid obligations.

I have a friend, a small-business owner, who has been behind the Single-Payer Area Network here in Ohio for some time. Why? Because Medicaid for all would save him a boatload of money, putting more cash in both his own and his employees pockets. What’s not to love? Nothing, unless you’re in the business of selling health insurance and health services at grossly inflated costs and lining your pockets with the profits.

The problem with trends is that they eventually change direction. Nothing goes up forever. Even world population will someday crash and the Earth will cool down again (unless we go full Venus). For generations Americans held on to the belief that their children would fare better than they. That possibility ended in the second half of the 20th century and in the 21st century just doing as well as your parents looks harder and harder to do.

The economy is doing better and better for fewer and fewer people. Why?

Robert Reich, writing in Almost 80 percent of US workers live from paycheck to paycheck. Here’s why… for The Guardian, explains:

The official rate of unemployment in America has plunged to a remarkably low 3.8%. The Federal Reserve forecasts that the unemployment rate will reach 3.5% by the end of the year.

But the official rate hides more troubling realities: legions of college grads overqualified for their jobs, a growing number of contract workers with no job security, and an army of part-time workers desperate for full-time jobs. Almost 80% of Americans say they live from paycheck to paycheck, many not knowing how big their next one will be.

Blanketing all of this are stagnant wages and vanishing job benefits. The typical American worker now earns around $44,500 a year, not much more than what the typical worker earned in 40 years ago, adjusted for inflation. Although the US economy continues to grow, most of the gains have been going to a relatively few top executives of large companies, financiers, and inventors and owners of digital devices.

America doesn’t have a jobs crisis. It has a good jobs crisis.

So, what is a good job? All of my siblings have homes and families and what I consider to be good jobs because they pay their mortgages and raise their children well and those who want to go to college will. None of my siblings, however, have college degrees. None of my grandparents had college degrees. My father had a bachelors in Fine Art that he never did anything with—he trained in high school as a draftsman and that was his work for more than 40 years—and my mother was a waitress most of her working life.

I went to college, but if I’m honest, I learned very little there that had anything to do with how I’ve made my living as a writer, journalist and educator. I, at least graduated with no debt. I can’t imagine what it feels like to hit the job market knowing that you owe the bank tens-of-thousands of dollars before you even get your first job. Discovering that the job market will barely pay you a living wage, let alone allow you save a penny or two has to be crushing.

Reich continues:

What’s going on? Simply put, the vast majority of American workers have lost just about all their bargaining power. The erosion of that bargaining power is one of the biggest economic stories of the past four decades, yet it’s less about supply and demand than about institutions and politics.

Two fundamental forces have changed the structure of the US economy, directly altering the balance of power between business and labor. The first is the increasing difficulty for workers of joining together in trade unions. The second is the growing ease by which corporations can join together in oligopolies or to form monopolies.

By the mid-1950s more than a third of all private-sector workers in the United States were unionized. In subsequent decades public employees became organized, too. Employers were required by law not just to permit unions but to negotiate in good faith with them. This gave workers significant power to demand better wages, hours, benefits, and working conditions. (Agreements in unionized industries set the benchmarks for the non-unionized).

Yet starting in the 1980s and with increasing ferocity since then, private-sector employers have fought against unions. Ronald Reagan’s decision to fire the nation’s air-traffic controllers, who went on an illegal strike, signaled to private-sector employers that fighting unions was legitimate. A wave of hostile takeovers pushed employers to do whatever was necessary to maximize shareholder returns. Together, they ushered in an era of union-busting.

Employers have been firing workers who attempt to organize, threatening to relocate to more “business friendly” states if companies unionize, mounting campaigns against union votes, and summoning replacement workers when unionized workers strike. Employer groups have lobbied states to enact more so-called “right-to-work” laws that bar unions from requiring dues from workers they represent. A recent supreme court opinion delivered by the court’s five Republican appointees has extended the principle of “right-to-work” to public employees.

Today, fewer than 7% of private-sector workers are unionized, and public-employee unions are in grave jeopardy, not least because of the supreme court ruling. The declining share of total US income going to the middle since the late 1960s – defined as 50% above and 50% below the median – correlates directly with that decline in unionization. (See chart below).

Perhaps even more significantly, the share of total income going to the richest 10 percent of Americans over the last century is almost exactly inversely related to the share of the nation’s workers who are unionized. (See chart below). When it comes to dividing up the pie, most American workers today have little or no say. The pie is growing but they’re getting only the crumbs.

We’re not 1789 France. Yet. The rise of anti-immigrant sentiment, however, as Americans percieve growing competition for fewer and fewer good jobs suggests how close we are coming.

Despite his comical imitations of shoveling coal or driving a truck, President Donald John Trump is not worker-friendly. Instead, writes Reich:

It is no coincidence that all three branches of the federal government, as well as most state governments, have become more “business-friendly” and less “worker-friendly” than at any time since the 1920s. As I’ve noted, Congress recently slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. Meanwhile, John Roberts’ supreme court has more often sided with business interests in cases involving labor, the environment, or consumers than has any supreme court since the mid-1930s. Over the past year it not only ruled against public employee unions but also decided that workers cannot join together in class action suits when their employment contract calls for mandatory arbitration. The federal minimum wage has not been increased since 2009, and is now about where it was in 1950 when adjusted for inflation. Trump’s labor department is busily repealing many rules and regulations designed to protect workers.

The combination of high corporate profits and growing corporate political power has created a vicious cycle: higher profits have generated more political influence, which has altered the rules of the game through legislative, congressional, and judicial action – enabling corporations to extract even more profit. The biggest losers, from whom most profits have been extracted, have been average workers.

Can we buy stock in tumbrels and Phrygian caps?