America’s geography of wealth: the shrinking urban middle class

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capitalism, informal economy, labor organizing, New Orleans, unemployment

Source: America’s geography of wealth: the shrinking urban middle class visualised | Cities | The Guardian

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Trump’s Blue Collar Base Wants More Jobs And An America Like The Past

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capitalism, Cleveland model, Evergreen Cooperatives, informal economy, makerculture

As I have long predicted, the alt-right revolution has as much chance to come out of the Midwest as anywhere. Having watched the growing misplaced anger among blue-collared whites in Ohio and surrounding states, it is clear that we need to consider this area even after HRC wins. The undying belief in corporate America and the right to become successful through winning the job lottery is the bedrock of this group of voters (see a couple of quotes from this story at the bottom of this post). And so it cannot be surprising that they have chosen one who has been allowed by the media to become a demigod (word chosen carefully) even though his own record belies the media’s slavish devotion to his myth of coming up by his own bootstraps.
In order for this group to not keep growing, becoming more violent and more opposed to the multicultural reality of the US, it is time for the Dems to truly embrace entrepreneurial activity at the local and regional level. The cultural economy is growing smart and capable local leaders with every type of background and the ecological sector is dreaming up innovative, practical ideas that can offer jobs and reduce the damage we have done to our earth since the start of the Industrial Age. Those areas along with the need to invest in vocational education for every region and in large-scale infrastructure repair should be the plan. Green City Blue Lake is one effort right there in NE Ohio doing excellent work connecting jobs (including cooperatives) to repairing the environment and creating a new economy. That initiative and others are brave enough to make the case that it is time for a post industrial solution for NE Ohio, or at least time for a sustainable future. Much more of that type of effort is needed across the Midwest and in every other region.
Also, those of us in already-emerged disaster zones know how the economy stabilizes for a while when recovery starts, mostly due to federal intervention. Yet that intervention overwhelmingly favors multinational, military industrial complex companies over locally controlled ones which short-circuits real recovery and allows developers to entirely control the agenda as happened in New Orleans. Therefore, the Dems should also create a sector that feeds off the resiliency movement already begun and creates opportunities for workers and small companies to help better prepare our regions for those events that happen in every part of North America. Show up at actions, like today’s Solidarity with Standing Rock events across the US or Wednesday’s anti-TPP social media & email action day.
I used the word revolution earlier, and the appropriate response to that is often devolution. Here in the US, it is time for regions to lead and the Dems would do themselves a big favor if they began that process during this election cycle.
“He also says he thinks Trump will eliminate some of the environmental regulations that have affected industries in the region.” “she said. “I know it’s never going to be the same with General Motors or Packard, but with Donald Trump negotiating on trade, maybe we’ll get some of these jobs back.”

Trump’s Blue Collar Base Wants More Jobs And An America Like The Past | FiveThirtyEight

Issue One: Invisible Labour | mice cms

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capitalism, labor organizing, outsider culture

Thanks to “sophistiratchet #blackademic beast from/in/of New Orleans” Terri Coleman for highlighting this publication on her Facebookistan page. Cultural appropriation is so constant in colonial economies that artists are forced to enthusiastically participate in maintaining its dominance.  The artists in this issue intelligently and sensitively address how labor as a commodity when it comes to creating and sharing art assists that frame of events.

How can we account for all of the invisible labour that’s required for us to do our so-called radical work? Informed by intersectional and materialist feminisms, Issue 01 foregrounds forms of labour that go unrecognized in the white spaces of contemporary and media art worlds. This issue is concerned with the before, the after, the behind-the-scenes, and the off-camera. How much not-art is required to make the art? What’s the cost and who puts their life on the line? Without reducing all forms of life to labour, the works featured in this issue allow us to think value differently, to acknowledge all that we do to keep ourselves and our communities vivacious and resilient.

Source: Issue One: Invisible Labour | mice cms

 

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Every Single County in America Is Facing an Affordable Housing Crisis

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airbnb, capitalism, housing, hustle, informal economy

When people overreact about airbnb, I think I’ll bring the story up that is linked at the end of the post. Affordable housing has been in a crisis for some time, long before that site was created.
The lack of affordable housing issue comes from the same old greed that has allowed this crisis to happen in every place in the US, not all of which are airbnb-heavy counties obviously: owners cashing in on the highest rates they can get for their property, whether the culprit are developers or homeowners. If you want to charge at the high end of market rates (whether through airbnb or Craigslist/classifieds or using brokers or any other system), then you are going to get a revolving door of tenants and those tenants are not going to care about the area or the neighbors. If you want to have responsible tenants, then map out something that works for both parties (whether using airbnb, a handshake or Craiglist/classifieds or using brokers or any other system).
As for those who use airbnb to decimate their neighborhoods: those folks have been around since the first days of the Industrial Age, using any means necessary to populate their slums. The way to counteract those slumlords is for a city government to take affordable housing seriously, and begin to address that issue without penalizing those homeowners and yes renters that use their property properly to offer good places to long-term neighbors and to the type of visitors interested in participating in community when they travel, and for short-term and newly arriving residents.
I find it ironic that those who are crying the loudest against airbnb are not now (and have never been noted for) demanding rent controls or incentives to increase long term affordable housing. Interestingly, after Katrina, the vitriol against public housing was shockingly directed almost entirely at those trapped in the cycle of poverty for generations as their neighbors and neighborhood associations applauded the shuttering of well-built, brick townhouses and had no issue with the crap now being slowly built in its place with much of it reserved for market rate apartments.
I have been lucky for almost my entire renting life to have caring and responsible homeowners that I have rented from and they always repay my loyalty with their own, but too many of my friends are being priced out of the city because of this type of rampant market-rate greed that started IMMEDIATELY after Katrina (long before airbnb) and so lets call it what it is. I have long advocated for the city to offer tax credits for rent-controlled listings or at least for those who offer rates on the low end or middle. I think the DDD should offer incentives to the owners of Canal Street businesses to develop their upper floors for the service industry to be able to be in walking distance of their workplaces, and the same with the Quarter (as a resident, I can show you how many floors over storefronts are completely vacant; it would boggle your mind).
Airbnb done badly is just a symptom of that greed and outlawing it will not stop slumlords but will reduce the number of caring residents who use it responsibly to make the mortgage or to keep their apartment if they need to be away for a month or two. Airbnb offered the data in 2013 that 89% of their listing were single listings of primary residences. (If you suspect that data is 100% accurate, I will say that i have some skepticism just as I do about hotel data, but I can tell you that in my 20+ airbnb trips, all but 2 of them have been primary residences and those 2 were well-managed European hostel-style with strict rules about behavior.) As a constant traveler, I appreciate the ability to stay in a neighborhood and get to know residents, and to be able to walk to the store and to the metro or bus. I cannot tell you how many times before airbnb that I was in a hotel “zone” with no place to walk to get food and little access to public transportation, no one to talk to about what or where it was safe for a woman alone, adding up to what was often a stressful experience.
Check out these sensible recommendations for short-term housing (including different rates for primary residence airbnbs and a cap on the number of short-term rentals in any one area):http://www.theselc.org/draft_short_term_rental_recommendati…, but let’s recognize that the boogeyman has been among us for some time and cannot be solved by outlawing a sharing site.

Affordable Housing Crisis

(let me also say that as a direct action organizer, it is my experience that when a direct relationship can be the primary conduit for a transaction – whether its benefit is meant to be economic or social or intellectual or any other – the behavior of all involved is likely to be better. Therefore, I will always advocate for the most direct links to be respected by municipalities and agencies that want to create bureaucracy where informality will work. Online sharing sites create what is called “credential exchanges” and, when done correctly, require contact between individuals in the selection, the hosting and the review stage which mean that individuals build a reputation through these direct links. I believe these systems are more likely to reduce fraud and dangerous situations than a absentee corporate hotel or a city agency’s oversight.)

Hybrid Economy Passage

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book review, capitalism, Rifkin

The capitalist era is passing . . . not quickly, but inevitably. A new economic paradigm—the Collaborative Commons—is rising in its wake that will transform our way of life. We are already witnessing the emergence of a hybrid economy, part capitalist market and part Collaborative Commons. The two economic systems often work in tandem and sometimes compete. They are finding synergies along each other’s perimeters, where they can add value to one another, while benefiting themselves. At other times, they are deeply adversarial, each attempting to absorb or replace the other. The struggle between these two competing economic paradigms is going to be protracted and hard fought. …While I suspect that capitalism will remain part of the social schema for at least the next half century or so, I doubt that it will be the dominant economic paradigm by the second half of the twenty-first century. Although the indicators of the great transformation to a new economic system are still soft and largely anecdotal, the Collaborative Commons is ascendant and, by 2050, it will likely settle in as the primary arbiter of economic life in most of the world. An increasingly streamlined and savvy capitalist system will continue to soldier on at the edges of the new economy, finding sufficient vulnerabilities to exploit, primarily as an aggregator of network services and solutions, allowing it to flourish as a powerful niche player in the new economic era, but it will no longer reign.

http://thezeromarginalcostsociety.com/