http://billmoyers.com/story/student-income-loans-transfer-wealth-investors-risk-students/
How Students’ Wealth is Redistributed to the Rich
Student income loans transfer wealth to investors, risk to students.
BY KENNETH J. SALTMAN | SEPTEMBER 19, 2016
Student activists from the various CUNY campuses across New York City hold a rally in front of Hunter College to demand divestment from Israel, the resignation of the CUNY board, free tuition, and a cancellation of student debt. (Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)
At more than $1.3 trillion as of 2016, US
student loan debt has become widely
discussed in the media, the business press and academia as a new debt bubble with the potential to burst
and trigger a global economic crisis that puts everyone at risk. The student debt bubble is regularly
compared to the subprime mortgage debt bubble that resulted in the failure of banks, the great recession
and the public bailout of Wall Street and the auto industry in 2008. Prior to the subprime crisis, high- and
low-risk mortgages were packaged together into investment bonds so that when enough of the high-risk
mortgages defaulted, the bonds that had been rated as safe collapsed. Similarly, one form of student debt
investment security, Student Loan Asset Backed Securities (SLABS), is composed of pooled student debt.
A crucial difference between the subprime debt bubble and the student debt bubble is that the properties
that comprised subprime mortgage securities served as collateral to the mortgage debt. If a homeowner
defaults on a mortgage, the bank claims the property in its stead. Student loan debt has traditionally not
been collateralized. In other words, if a student or former student defaults on student loans, there is no
tangible asset for the bank to claim. However, since a great deal of student loan debt has been federally
subsidized and especially reinsured, private banks that package student loan debt into investment
securities have been able to sell these investment securities because they carry the full faith and credit of
the federal government. Despite having no collateral, they have the federal guarantee.
In 2010, the federal government ended the Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP) that
federally subsidized and reinsured private loans that formed the basis of most SLABS, opting to shift
federally subsidized loans into direct federal loans issued through the Department of Education. Despite
the end of FFELP, privately held student loan debt and securities based on it accumulated prior to 2010
remain a massive outstanding debt that is predominately serviced, managed and collected by a single for-
profit corporation, Navient, that spun off from Sallie Mae. Sallie Mae was a public bank that lent to
students and was privatized by the Bill Clinton administration. Navient faces criminal charges of illegal
collection practices and defrauding borrowers and has come under fire most notably from Sen. Elizabeth
Warren (D-MA). With federal insurance and subsidy removed on these privately held FFELP loans as of
2010, Wall Street lost its enthusiasm for securitizing newly issued unsecured private debt, despite the fact
that bankruptcy laws make student loan debt extremely difficult to discharge through bankruptcy. Enter the
Student Income Loan.
Heather McGhee on Student Debt
BY BILLMOYERS.COM STAFF | APRIL 25, 2012
After the end of FFELP in 2010, private investors developed Student Income Loans (also known as
Income Share Agreements or ISAs), an “innovative” financing technique to expand private student loans
and develop a new kind of student debt investment security. Several for-profit and nonprofit companies,
such as 13th Avenue Funding, Lumni and Pave created Student Income Loans that provide tuition in
exchange for a percentage of future income. These lenders pool the Student Income Loans into
investment securities. The financiers have presented Student Income Loans as a service to students,
providing another avenue of educational finance and as an innovation in lending. Since the federal
government does not insure or subsidize the loans, the private investors make terms that mitigate their
risk while maximizing their profit. Profits can be enormous. The Wall Street Journal offers an example of a
student ultimately paying $60,000 for a $15,000 tuition loan.
One key way these Student Income Loan banks limit risk and maximize profit is by restricting loan
issuance to students who study subjects that are expected to result in high incomes, such as engineering,
or by restricting loans to graduate students in select fields. This instrumental and vocational tendency of
student income loans contributes to the rising clamor to defund elements of higher education that do not
directly result in commercial benefits for business, such as programs in the humanities and the arts, the
social sciences and even the abstract sciences.
Other new nontraditional private lenders post-FFELP cater to what Forbes calls “the indebted 1 percent”
because they have “racked up pricey and prestigious debt.” These banks capture the lowest-risk student
borrowers from the outstanding pool of the student loan debt that is eligible for refinancing — 75 percent of
the $1.2 trillion in debt. Companies like CommonBond ($100 million refinanced) and SoFi ($1 billion
refinanced) refinance student loan debt at lower rates than the federal government by cherry-picking the
students and graduates who are seen as the lowest risk of defaulting on their loans. By creaming off the
highest quality — that is, lowest risk — loans, Sofi and Common Bond are able to offer lower interest rates
only to the minority of borrowers who have an average income of more than $130,000 yet raise the overall
risk of other pooled federal student debt.
Higher education spending cuts by states need to be seen as effectively an upward redistribution scheme,
with tuition increasing by the same amount as public defunding, about 10 percent.
Another way Student Income Loans limit risk for investors is by pooling loans together in tranches (like
subprimes). Some Student Income Loan arrangements pool debtors together and make the default by one
debtor to cause the interest rates (percentage of future income taken) for all borrowers to rise. Lenders
like to make these pools of debtors out of students from the same alma mater so that there is an additional
sense of affiliation and moral obligation to fellow students. This arrangement adds a moral culpability onto
the borrower in such a way as to counter the rationality of homo economicus that drives these projects.
Why, after all, wouldn’t a rational economic actor seek to default on these loans in which the only collateral
is their future work and good will? By linking the fate of other borrowers in the investment security, lenders
levy on debtors a social stake in not defaulting (you, borrower, are screwing not just the rich greedy
banker but also your fellow student who has a precarious situation like yours). Of course, the truly social
act would be to dispense with the debt altogether and make the social obligation one for the entire society
to bear rather than restricted communities of borrowers.
Student Income Loans and other new nontraditional private student loans represent not merely a new form
of student loan financing but also: (1) a form of upward economic redistribution in the context of a broader
assault on public institutions, particularly on public higher education, and a downward transfer of
responsibility and risk onto youth; (2) a force for the neoliberal vocationalization and instrumentalism of
higher education that participates in the broader trend driven by neoliberal privatization and corporate
culture; and (3) a form of indenture that relies upon the fabrication of a specific form of restricted morality
and the capture of future forms of associated living. I suggest that these three key elements of Student
Income Loans need to be seen as a material and symbolic project of class warfare waged by the rich on
the rest.
An Assault on Public Higher Education
Following the great recession of 2008 and the ensuing rightist push for austerity, states and the federal
government significantly cut public higher education spending. Universities responded by raising tuition.
As is common during recessions, university enrollments increased. As students assumed debt to pay for
university, an effective redistributive transfer was accomplished whereby youth, among the most
economically vulnerable citizens, absorbed the costs. A number of states not only cut higher education
funding but also enacted educational privatizations and created slush funds for businesses. While
spending has not been fully restored, students are shouldering the debt burden and banks are profiting.
Black Students Feeling Especially Crushed By
Student Debt
BY RICHARD LONG | MAY 6, 2015
Higher education spending cuts by states need to be seen as effectively an upward redistribution scheme,
with tuition increasing by the same amount as public defunding, about 10 percent. Thirty-six percent of
undergraduates take federal student loans and 6 percent take more expensive private loans. Forty-seven
percent of public higher education revenue comes from tuition. The state defunding of public higher
education is regressive, much like the shift from an income tax to a sales tax, in that it puts more of the
burden on a smaller segment of the population while lifting the burden to pay for this public good through
taxation off of those with greater wealth and income.
The federal government also cut education spending in the wake of the recession. To make matters worse
the federal government “generated upward of $100 billion in revenues from its student loan operations
from 2008 to 2013.” To put this federal revenue generation in context, the money that students pay to the
federal government joins a pool of money that in the age of austerity decreasingly goes to pay for the
caregiving functions of the federal government but increasingly goes to pay for its punitive functions.
Perhaps most perniciously, half of federal discretionary spending goes toward the military and military-
related spending, while enormous amounts go to subsidize private industries such as corporate agriculture
and entertainment. In this regard, the shift of the costs of higher education onto students represents a kind
of debt spending by youth to fund the military and corporations. This generational pillage is not just
unethical but it represents an economic burden on future workers and consumers who will be spending to
service debt to create bank profits. In addition to being a financial redistribution, it also represents
atransfer of risk and responsibility.
As Andrew Ross explains, the transfer of fiscal responsibility from the state to the individual is a key
aspect of higher education privatization. He points out that it would only cost $87 billion to federally fund
every two- and four-year public college. This is a miniscule amount relative to the $1.22 trillion spent
annually by the federal government on tax breaks and less than the current $102 billion federal outlay for
education that represents just 2.67 percent of all federal spending.
Vocationalism and Instrumentalism
Student Income Loans further the vocationalizing and instrumentalizing trend that has been expanding
with the corporatization of higher education. The American Enterprise Institute, an outspoken neoliberal
advocate of Student Income Loans or Income Share Agreements (ISA), writes:
Because ISA investors earn a profit only when a student is successful, they offer students better terms for
programs that are expected to be of high value and have strong incentives to support students both during
school and after graduation. This process gives students strong signals about which programs and fields
are most likely to help them be successful.
In this context, successful means students endeavoring to pursue the highest-paying fields that are the
most directly commercializable. As Jeff Bryant of Salon writes, this will likely lead to students being
pushed into academic programs that are “financially incentivized” by investors rather than toward
programs that appeal to students’ imaginations, ideas or interests.
Bryant suggests that the dangers of the vocational tendencies of Student Income Loans may be harmful
not only to the pursuit of meaningful, passionate and interesting work but that it may be harmful to
business as well because “outliers” from the humanities often make important contributions to business.
He emphasizes that unless the interests and desires of a young student are math or science, “a quest for
personal development and intrinsic reward — becomes a lifelong liability regardless of personal
attributes.”
Moreover, making majors in the humanities, arts and social sciences more expensive will result in the
further gutting of these programs from universities and a reduction in the number of not just workers but
citizens who are educated in the knowledge and habits of society and self-reflection grounded in traditions
of culture and scholarly thought. There is more at stake than just individual economic opportunity.
As Henry Giroux argues, the undermining of the humanities as part of the war on public higher education
represents the production of civic illiteracy in that it deprives citizens of the intellectual tools to interpret
and intervene in public problems as well as a form of “organized forgetting” as the history is flattened into
a permanent present understood through acts of working and consuming.
These public and civic concerns expressed by Giroux seem not to be on the minds of the financiers
behind Student Income Loans. McGrath writes:
“Not to be glib about it,” says Tom Glocer, former Thomson Reuters CEO and a CommonBond equity
investor, “but if you’re coming to me for a loan and you’re a dentistry student at the University of
Pennsylvania, I’ll be more willing to make a loan than if you tell me you’re an art history major at Texas
Christian.”
Student Income Loans do not only allow the rich to own the labor of another, they also allow the rich to
create investment securities out of these collected pledges of future time and work while supporting the
institutions that have historically bolstered their own class interests. These speculative instruments then
serve as the basis for additional future private lending and in turn, yet more speculation. Ultimately,
Student Income Loans promote not only a strictly commercial way of seeing education and its social value
and defund fields of study alleged to have little commercial value, they also create a financial incentive to
avoid mass public funding of higher education while fueling a dangerous educational debt bubble.
KENNETH J. SALTMAN
Kenneth J. Saltman is a professor in the Educational Leadership and Policy
Studies Ph.D. program at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Saltman is
the author most recently of Scripted Bodies: Corporate Power, Smart
Technologies, and the Undoing of Public Education (Routledge 2016).
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/08/income-inequality-murder-homicide-rates
The surprising factors driving murder rates: income inequality and respect
Maia Szalavitz
Inequality predicts homicide rates ‘better than any other variable’,
says an expert – and it is linked to a highly developed concern for
one’s own status
Fri 8 Dec 2017 06.00 ESTLast modified on Sun 30 Sep
2018 11.34 EDT
‘If your social reputation in that milieu is all you’ve
got, you’ve got to defend it.’ Photograph: Lorenzo
Rossi/Alamy
A17-year-old boy shoots a 15-year-old stranger to
death, apparently believing that the victim had
given him a dirty look. A Chicago man stabs
his stepfather in a fight over whether his entry into his parents’ house without knocking
was disrespectful. A San Francisco UPS employee guns down three of his co-workers,
then turns his weapon on himself, seemingly as a response to minor slights.
These killings may seem unrelated – but they are only a few recent examples of the
kind of crime that demonstrates a surprising link between homicide and inequality.
While on the surface, the disputes that triggered these deaths seem trivial – each
involved apparently small disagreements and a sense of being seen as inferior and
unworthy of respect – research suggests that inequality raises the stakes of fights for
status among men.
The connection is so strong that, according to the World Bank, a simple measure of
inequality predicts about half of the variance in murder rates between American states
and between countries around the world. When inequality is high and strips large
numbers of men of the usual markers of status – like a good job and the ability to
support a family – matters of respect and disrespect loom disproportionately.
Inequality predicts homicide rates “better than any other variable”, says Martin Daly,
professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at McMaster University in Ontario
and author of Killing the Competition: Economic Inequality and Homicide.
This includes factors like rates of gun ownership (which also rise when inequality does)
and cultural traits like placing more emphasis on “honor” (this, too, turns out to be linked
with inequality). “About 60 [academic] papers show that a very common result of greater
inequality is more violence, usually measured by homicide rates,” says Richard
Wilkinson, author of The Spirit Level and co-founder of the Equality Trust.
According to the FBI, just over half of murders in which the precipitating circumstances
were known were set off by what is called the “other argument” – not a robbery, a love
triangle, drugs, domestic violence or money, but simply the sense that someone had
been dissed.
When someone bumps into someone on the dance floor, looks too long at someone
else’s girlfriend or makes an insulting remark, it doesn’t threaten the self-respect of
people who have other types of status the way it can when you feel this is your only
source of value.
“If your social reputation in that milieu is all you’ve got, you’ve got to defend it,” says
Daly. “Inequality makes these confrontations more fraught because there’s much more
at stake when there are winners and losers and you can see that you are on track to be
one of the losers.”
Harold Pollack, co-director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, agrees. “If you
foreclose [mainstream] opportunities for respect, status and personal advancement,
people will find other ways to pursue those things.”
Obviously, potential murderers don’t check the local Gini Index – the most commonly
used measure of inequality that looks at how wealth is distributed – before deciding
whether to get a gun. But they are keenly attuned to their own level of status in society
and whether it allows them to get what they need to live a decent life. If they can’t, while
others visibly bask in luxury that seems both impossible to attain and unfairly won, those
far from the top often become desperate.
Issues of respect don’t only affect males, of course – but overwhelmingly, murders tend
to be committed by men: the current proportion in the US is 90%.
What’s less known is that in most countries, most of the victims are male, too. That’s
because, since inequality is common worldwide, killings related to status predominate –
and men kill those whom they see as rivals. Murders are also disproportionately a crime
of the young. For both evolutionary and cultural reasons, social status is most highly
contested during adolescence and early adulthood, because high rank
is frequently associated with sexual attractiveness.
The link between these crimes and inequality is also underscored by how much their
levels differ between countries. “It’s the most variable component of the homicide rate,”
says Daly.
All types of homicide are much less common in the egalitarian Scandinavian countries
than in the US. But disputes over male status are so much lower in such countries that
while in the US, 77% of victims are male, only 50% are in the Nordic nations.
“What’s fallen out is all this male macho stuff,” Daly says. Although inequality can also
affect rates of crimes like robbery or burglary, its effect is most clearly seen in the way it
murderously magnifies beefs.
The recent, stunning rise in inequality in America started in 1979, with the top
1% capturing 54% of all the increase in income between that year and 2007. While the
Great Recession briefly paused the trend, between 2009 and 2013, the 1% took 85% of
income growth and the situation has only worsened since. During that time,
however, homicide rates showed nearly the opposite pattern: they rose through the
1960s and 1970s, reached a peak in 1991 and fell by nearly half between that year and
2015.
The last two years, however, have seen some rises: the rate in 2016 was nearly 9%
higher than in 2015 and 2017 also seems likely to show a jump. Daly says that no one
knows what time lag to expect between a rise in inequality and a rise in murder – but if it
does take a few decades, this could be the start of a troubling trend, not a blip.
The rise of Trump shows that “inequality has a real tangible effect on voter behavior,
just not necessarily what you’d expect”, says the Stanford historian Walter Scheidel, the
author of The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age
to the Twenty-First Century. Scheidel’s book shows that historically, the only way high
inequality has been flattened has been through catastrophe: disease, famine, world war,
societal collapse or communist revolution.
Extended breastfeeding linked to higher IQ and income in study
By Sandee LaMotte, special to CNN
Updated 11:37 AM ET, Thu March 19, 2015 | Video Source: CNN
Long-term study finds that IQ at age 30 was nearly 4 points higher for babies breastfed for a year or
more
Study conducted in Brazil also associates longer breastfeeding with higher income and education levels
Critic points out that the study doesn't account for other possible contributing factors
(CNN)"Breast is best" -- you could call it a mantra of sorts that sums up much of today's research on
breastfeeding.
Not only does breastfeeding have clear short-term benefits, such as protection from infectious diseases
and a reduction in mortality, it's also been shown to be associated with an increase in intelligence.
Prior studies have shown an increase of up to 7.5 IQ points in elementary age children who were
breastfed, as well as an increase in verbal, performance and comprehensive IQ in adults.
The latest addition to this perspective is a long-term study of infants born in Pelotas, Brazil, in 1982.
Published in Lancet, the study interviewed 5,914 new mothers about their plans for breastfeeding and
then followed up to see how they did.
"Information on breastfeeding duration was collected very close to the time when weaning happened,
so we had a very precise information on the duration of breastfeeding," said study author, Dr. Bernardo
Lessa Horta, in a podcast on Lancet.
What makes this study unique is that it followed the subjects all the way to age 30.
"We were able to follow about 68% of the participants, which is a very good follow-up rate," said Lessa
Horta. "We observed that breastfeeding was positively associated with performance and intelligence at
30 years old, as well as with education, school achievement and higher monthly incomes."
In fact, Lessa Horta said the subjects who had been breastfed for 12 months or longer had a higher IQ
(about 3.7 points), more years of education and earned roughly 20% more than the average income
level.
"It's suggesting that the positive effect of breastfeeding on IQ leads to a higher income," he said. "This is
our main finding at this moment."
One possible reason for the advantage of breast milk, Lessa Horta added, is that it is "rich in long-chain
polyunsaturated fatty acids which are important to brain growth and development." Called LCPUFA for
short, these essential fatty acids are found in salmon and shellfish and have been added to infant
formulas since the 1990s. However, the benefit to mental or psychomotor development from adding
LCPUFA to infant formula is unclear.
Because the study did not measure home life, intellectual stimulation or bonding between mother and
child, it was not able to tease out whether these factors may have also contributed to the increase in IQ.
That leaves it open to critics, such as Texas A&M Professor Joan Wolf, author of "Is Breast Best?
"This study does not address the very real possibility that mothers who choose to breastfeed, regardless
of income or education, distinguish themselves from those who bottle-feed in all kinds of ways that are
likely to promote intelligence," Wolf wrote CNN.
For Lessa Horta, the implications of his study are clear: "The finding supports the promotion of
breastfeeding. It's more evidence that besides the clear short term benefits, breastfeeding also has long
term consequences in terms of human potential."
https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/ethiopian-garment-workers-are-being-paid-worlds-lowest-
wages/11098232?smid=Page:%20ABC%20News-
Facebook_Organic&WT.tsrc=Facebook_Organic&sf212453237=1&fbclid=IwAR3Jn7geRmyv34znb41V_yKIMRUIckrky-
2grdMQ5eeOk1A2Dn4JesqYlSU
THURSDAY 9 MAY 2019 5:52PM
By James Purtill
$26 a month: Ethiopians are being paid world's lowest wages to make your Calvin Kleins
Ethiopia is trying to become the new Bangladesh of garment factory labour by promising the
lowest wages in the world, but the workers themselves report they're struggling to survive on US$26 a month while
stitching clothes for Calvin Klein, H&M and other brands.
A study from New York University's Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, released this week, tells an old
story: the hidden cost of the fashion industry.
It's also a classic story of neoliberal economic development, one that's been played out countless times since the
1990s: An impoverished country seeks foreign investment by declaring itself 'open for business', and offers up a
vast and willing labour force.
Global capital, forever scouring the world for a competitive advantage, sets up shop: Factories are built, and young
uneducated women are recruited from agricultural villages.
In 2015-16, Ethiopia built the state-owned Hawassa Industrial Park, located 140 miles south of the capital of Addis
Ababa. The park currently has 25,000 employees producing garments for global brands also including Levi's, Guess,
and Tommy Hilfiger.
An Ethiopian government brochure for potential foreign investors advertised: "Cheap and skilled labor: 1/7 of China
and 1/2 of Bangladesh."
In fact, the labour would be even cheaper: Workers are being paid $26 a month, almost a quarter of the $95 a
month minimum wage in Bangladesh.
Supplied: Stern Centre
The government based this figure, which was then factored into business plans, on the amount it paid its own floor
sweepers - as the report points out, this is an unfair and arbitrary comparison for sewing-machine operators
employed by foreign manufacturers.
Some workers told the authors of the report the government-employed job screeners sent to small towns and
villages promised considerably more than $26 a month.
"I thought the salary would be much higher," one worker said.
"I was not told the truth."
Meanwhile, the influx of workers has driven up the cost of accommodation. A single bare room within a few
kilometres of the park costs about $52 a month.
The report states: "One young woman showed us the concrete ground-floor room she and three fellow workers
rent from a homeowner. There is no toilet, only an open-air latrine nearby. The woman said she and her
roommates work different shifts, and she'd had some of her belongings stolen. Sometimes, she added, there is no
food left for her when she returns from the factory. All four women sleep on thin mattresses on the floor, and
when it rains, water seeps into the living space. We heard from others at the park that some employers hand out
plastic sheets, which employees place between their mattresses and the concrete floor in an attempt to stay dry."
An October 2017 survey told of workers fainting from hunger, as well as "being too tired from walking three hours a
day to come to work and to go back home [and] the lack of energy and fainting due to the workers not eating
properly because they cannot afford to eat two meals per day."
'It's okay to be a little bit late to work'
Workers coming from family farms struggled to adjust to an economic system within which they were considered
units of labour, and which was geared towards efficiency and production: "Unfamiliar with industrial custom, they
don't understand why they would be disciplined for lateness, absenteeism, or chatting with workstation neighbors
at the expense of completing their sewing tasks - all behaviors that might be acceptable in a family-agricultural
setting."
"A significant percentage of workers said they did not believe there would be problems for the factory if they
missed working days and also said that they believe it is okay to be a little bit late to work."
"Frustration over their pay, combined with homesickness and other unfavorable aspects of factory life, has led to a
sense of alienation and lack of commitment to working productively."
And so they quit.
During its first year of operation in 2017-2018, overall attrition hovered around 100 per cent, meaning that, on
average, factories were replacing all of their workers every 12 months.
Some factories have been running at 15 per cent efficiency.
<<<Hawassa industrial park.
Supplied: Enterprise Partners
Hawassa employees.>>>
Supplied: Enterprise Partners
The Stern Center study does not accuse the brands of using sweatshop labour: "Ceilings are high, lights bright, and
ventilation more than adequate."
Indeed, Ethiopia hoped to shift manufacturing away from Bangladesh with its lax building safety standards: "The
Rana Plaza disaster, a factory collapse that killed more than 1,100 people in Bangladesh in April 2013, reinforced
PVH's determination to start anew in Africa," the study says.
PVH was among the first to move. The US-based company is one of the world's largest apparel chains, with labels
such as Calvin Klein, Izod and Tommy Hilfiger, and operates more than 2,000 factories in more than 40 countries. It
has an annual revenue of $9.7 billion.
Instead of sweatshops, the story of the Ethiopian garment industry is more mundane and perhaps disconcerting:
It's the logical result of a system that rewards enormously wealthy companies to seek out the cheapest source of
manufacturing.
Staggeringly low wages was the reason brands came to Ethiopia, but the global investment has not translated into
prosperity for the employees.
'Generational sacrifice' to build industrial base
Backers of the industrial park say some degree of "generational sacrifice" needs to take place in Ethiopia as the
country develops economically.
They say today's workers likely will have to endure exceptionally low wages while they accumulate industrial skills
and achieve productivity levels that in the future will bring them, and their children, higher pay and better
circumstances.
This has happened in China, which started with t-shirts in the 1990s, and has now built a prolific apparel sector. The
country eventually diversified into manufacturing other goods, like mobile phones. Its success is one reason
companies are going elsewhere for cheap labour.
But there's another scenario: Ethiopia could become a permanent pool of cheap labour; in Bangladesh, workers'
wages have not greatly increased in three decades.
Dr Arkebe Oqubay, special economic adviser to the prime minister and architect of the Hawassa Industrial Park
strategy, estimated that it would take 15 to 30 years for the country's workforce to acclimate itself fully to the
global garment industry.
"Pace is critical," he told the authors of the study.
"We need to improve before [foreign] firms become frustrated."
Credits
Author James Purtill
http://www.messynessychic.com/2016/05/13/desire-to-kill-the-
streetcar/?utm_source=sendicate&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2016-05-16+A+weekly+newsletter+from+Paris/
Desire to Kill the Streetcar
By MessyNessy, 13TH MAY, 2016
In the 1920 and 30s, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston, Seattle and countless other major American
cities had sprawling electric streetcar rail systems until General Motors, Standard Oil, Phillips Petroleum
and Firestone bought up a controlling interest in National City Lines. Once the monopolising companies
owned the railways, they shut them down, forcing Americans to buy cars or ride GM-manufactured
buses, fuelled with Standard Oil and Phillips Petroleum, and fitted with Firestone tyres. This deliberate
campaign to kill the electric-powered streetcars is known as the General Motors conspiracy.
The full story didn’t become public knowledge until a Harvard Law began investigating the conspiracy in
the seventies and took it all the way to the Senate. During the hearings, which brought forward the
proposal to restructure the automobile, truck, bus, and rail industries, General Motors was described as
‘a sovereign economic state’ and affirmed that the company played a major role in the displacement of
rail and bus transportation by buses and trucks.
“When National City Lines would acquire a transit system, the trolley rails would be ripped up, the
overhead wires would be cut down, and the system would be converted to buses within 90 days.” –
Brooklyn Historical Railway Association.
By the time the Justice Department caught wind of what was going on, National City Lines had already
acquired and taken control of 46 transit network lines. In 1946, nine corporations were indicted in
federal district court, accused of “conspiring to acquire control of a number of transit companies,
forming a transportation monopoly” and “conspiring to monopolize sales of buses and supplies to
companies owned by National City Lines”.
Five corporations, including GM and the usual suspects, were convicted of conspiring to monopolize the
sale of buses and related products to local transit companies controlled by NCL; but were acquitted of
conspiring to monopolize the ownership of these companies. General Motors was fined $5,000 and GM
treasurer H.C. Grossman was fined $1.
But by then it was too late and American cities and suburbs had already bought into car culture. After
buying up streetcar companies all over the countryIt had only taken the alleged monopolists less than
two decades to replace the system with their own products.
The General Motors conspiracy is also frequently dismissed however, claiming the corporations’ did
nothing that wasn’t already happening to a bankrupt system which was already being dismantled across
the country.
An in-depth Vox article on the subject points out that “while it’s true that National City continued
ripping up lines and replacing them with buses — and that, long-term, GM benefited from the decline of
mass transit — it’s very hard to argue that National City killed the streetcar on its own.”
So General Motors just put the nail in the coffin, finished off the job, fired the fatal bullet and put it out
of its misery, right? Even if GM financially benefited longterm from ensuring the demise of an
environmentally friendly transit system and replaced it with a gas-guzzling car-dependent culture– who
believes in global warming anyway?
Sources: Water and Power, Eric Brown, Museum of the City/ Suggested further reading here.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/07/gofundme-crowdfunding-essential-america-safety-net
Go fund yourself: crowdfunding is now an essential part of America's safety net
In the past, local activists may have turned to elected officials to raise funds, but now
they rely on crowdfunding sites to pay for basics – including school lunches
Alissa Quart
Mon 7 May 2018 06.00 EDTLast modified on Mon 7 May 2018 11.01 EDT
Annie Hanshew turned to GoFundMe to raise $100,000 for families who hadn’t paid for
school meals and were facing collections. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
For years, Annie Hanshew has wanted things to change in her hometown of Helena,
Montana – she even ran for the local school board. But her activism came to a head
when she found out in April that a collection agency planned to squeeze more than
$100,000 from families who hadn’t paid for school meals, Hanshew, 36, felt she had to
take strong action, especially after she discovered, to her horror, that school district
officials hadn’t been tracking which student debtors actually qualified for either free or
reduced lunch: she knew that this move would further burden area low-income families.
In the past, a local activist like Hanshew might have simply called their school board or
complained to an elected official and Hanshew and other people did do the latter. But
these are dark times, filled with distrust for efficacy of the established order. So
Hanshew then reached for the authority many Americans have resorted to as of late
when confronted by an emergency or a personal tragedy: GoFundMe.
Her GoFundMe campaign has so far earned $4,545 out of Hanshew’s $100,000 ask.
A press release from GoFundMe in 2017 estimated that its platform raised $33.8m to
pay for school room basics
Hanshew chose the platform for a reason: citizens in Seattle and Fargo had already
used it to raise money for school lunches in their community. There are also dozens of
school lunch-specific campaigns on the site, so that kids with unpaid meal accounts are
not “lunch shamed” in places like Richmond, Texas. Indeed, since GoFundMe started in
2010, there have been tens of thousands of campaigns to support K-12 teachers: a
press release from the company in 2017 estimated that its platform raised $33.8m to
pay for school room basics.
Crowdfunding companies like GoFundMe are in themselves not evil. But the fact that
we have to rely on them to pay for our basics is. That schools and their defenders need
to raise money for things like lunches is an outrage. People have paid their taxes. Why
were these meals not simply provided gratis to kids from struggling families?
Here’s why. Our social fabric is sundered. GoFundMe and the other crowdfunding sites
that have proliferated since 2010 are an example of what has sprung up in its place,
what I have called America’s dystopian social net. That is, we now require private
solutions to what are public problems.
We needn’t wait for the negative futures promised by sci-fi films such as Mad Max or
The Hunger Games, where the wealthy live in luxurious places and the rest of us dwell
in a rotting world ruled by an antagonistic government. This bleak future is here now,
and exists in tableau after tableau on charity crowdfunding sites.
These campaigns form a frightening archive of America’s failings. There are calls for
help relieving healthcare-related debt and shortfalls, victim’s compensation or for gun
violence victims. As one campaign put it: “Matt was shot in the chest and had to
undergo surgery late last night to remove part of his lung … I know the medical bills will
be piling up soon.” Healthcare is another thing, of course, that I believe civilization
should pay for and it seems dreadful that each of these pity stories should be pitted
against each other, a veritable Fight Club or battle royale of misery. Read together, it’s a
catalogue of despair that also can represent the redirection of our social rage to penny-
ante altruism.
In particular, the requests for payments for health or IVF treatments are unabashedly
plaintive, their authors willing (and perhaps desperate) to expose their illnesses and
suffering to whoever will read on. The site also encourages something I think of as “sob
story-ism” or, to quote the famous Russian saying, the worse the better. This is not just
my lit crit interpretation. The GoFundMe site lays it out pretty clearly, offering
campaigners “tips” for writing a “A great campaign Story” (capitals theirs). That story,
they say, “will outline your cause clearly, in a way that is engaging to read … all while
speaking from the heart”.
In 2017, crowdfunding scholar Daren C Brabham wrote in a paper in the journal New
Media & Society (he had previously published online) that there is “no surprise that the
same language used to puff up crowdfunding as a democratizing force in the media
bears a striking resemblance to the free-market economic arguments used by political
groups on the right to justify stripping the NEA and other organizations of public
funding”.
Brabham’s case studies were online fundraising for the arts. But his words pertain to
school-oriented campaigns as well, as classrooms are also turning into DIY efforts,
sticky-taped together, more Etsy than the US Department of Education.
That’s not to say that GoFundMe and the like can’t offer moments of inspiration.
Hanshew, after all, is a woman who simply hates to see poor families as well as
teachers shell out some of their meager salaries to pay their students’ lunch debt, and
knows two teachers who have attempted to do just that, offering to put me in touch with
them. (One of them was Melissa Romano, Montana’s teacher of the year.)
If anything, Hanshew’s good citizenship should serve as a model.
To me, though, the need for these efforts is a symptom of a whole generation of parents
under siege – overworked and haunted by debt, abandoned by existing structures and
unable to pay for anything extra for their kids.
Even the lucky campaigns tend to point out societal gaps and prejudices, too.
As Hanshew sees it: “In a perfect world, kids would just get meals without means
testing. It’s never going to happen in Montana and the fact that we have to fundraise to
make up the difference is bad, but I am so used to this reality that I can’t imagine
change.”
The Helena public schools ultimately decided, at least partially due to the pushback
from the community and the public GoFundMe campaign, to forgive the lunch debt of
families that have demonstrated eligibility for free lunches. Of course, that still didn’t
cover the children of working-class families whose kids were free lunch ineligible yet
struggled to pay for the meals.
Meanwhile, Hanshew has also come to recognize that GoFundMe, while a great outlet
for her and others in the community, hasn’t been the most effective tool due to the fees
– the crowdfunding site has been taking money off the top of her campaign’s donations
and they aren’t tax deductible. For this reason, Hanshew is looking into a new way to
cover school lunch debt. It’s – what else – founding, with teacher Romano, her own
non-profit.
YOUR POINTS WILL BE TAKEN AWAY IF IT IS LATER FOUND THAT SOMEONE COPIED YOUR PAPER
Extra credit paper directions:
- Each paper is potentially worth 2 points extra credit which is added on to your midterm or final exam score.
- Papers are due the Saturday after finals – June 15.
- Papers are submitted through Blackboard. No e-mail or hard copy papers accepted. Instructions for this are on a separate instruction sheet.
- You write the paper only on the articles that are on Blackboard for this class.
- If you write more than one paper, you cannot reuse any concepts from prior paper/s.
Technical expectations:
- 300 – 350 words
- double spaced
- in a 12 point non serif font (Arial, Tahoma, Calibri, Candara, Verdana are some examples)
Paper expectations:
This paper is not a formal essay or term paper. This paper is not a summary, an opinion or a simple response. The objective of this paper is to allow students to show they have an understanding of course concepts and can apply them to current social conditions. It will include the following conditions:
- After reading one of the articles on Blackboard, students will consider 2 concepts from this course that can be applied to the article. These concepts will be defined according to the definitions in this class. No dictionary, encyclopedia or other source definitions are acceptable.
- Papers will NOT have:
— introduction
— opinion
— citations
— references
- Each paper must include 3 quotes from the article.
- Your paper will be written on a computer, saved to a computer or portable device such as a flash drive, then up-loaded to Blackboard. The title of each paper MUST include some aspect of the title given on Blackboard (example: for a paper on an article about Rosa Parks, the title of the paper might be ‘RosaParksExtraCredit.’)
-The format described below must be followed. Do NOT show references as I’m already very familiar with the course concepts and articles. Do not follow APA, MLA or another academic format.
- Students may write up to 7 extra credit papers for a total of 14 extra credit points
- PAPERS MUST BE SAVED AS doc, docx, or pdf. NO EXCEPTIONS
Format of the paper:
- Paragraph 1: Identify and define the first of the two concepts you will be applying.
— note: The definitions MUST come from either our textbook or class notes. Papers using dictionary, Wikipedia, etc definitions will not be read.
- Paragraph 2: Identify and define the second of the two concepts you will be applying.
— note: The definitions MUST come from either our textbook or class notes. Papers using dictionary, Wikipedia, etc definitions will not be read.
- Paragraphs 3 and 4: Show how each of these concepts can be applied to the article you’ve read.

Get help from top-rated tutors in any subject.
Efficiently complete your homework and academic assignments by getting help from the experts at homeworkarchive.com