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post #10 (November 22, 2019) U.N Intervention

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post #10 (November 22, 2019) U.N Intervention

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This article relates to the readings we had this week as well as our discussion on the importance of the U.N and its different purposes. The U.N is needed to shed light on serious humanity issues between countries and within countries, also the fear of the U.N stepping in is what stops some countries from going completely chaotic. A quote from the article states "“If the U.N. doesn’t speak about it, who is going to speak about it?” Mr. Khan [Pakistan's prime minister] said. The intervention is needed so tensions won't be further escalated between India and Pakistan which are both holders of nuclear weapons.

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Prime Minister Imran Khan of Pakistan at the United Nations this week. Credit... Doug Mills/The New York Times

Pakistan's leader, lamenting what he said was the world's indifference to civilian suffering in Kashmir, on Wednesday condemned India's military clampdown there and said he would appeal to the United Nations for help.

"They do not understand that this can go horribly wrong," the Pakistani leader, Prime Minister Imran Khan, said.

In August, the Indian government revoked the longstanding autonomy of the contested border region and arrested thousands of Kashmiris. It cut off phone and internet service to millions of people and imposed a curfew.

The move raised tensions between India and Pakistan, which have long been at odds over the restive region. A million troops have squared off along the disputed border, one of Asia's tensest flash points and the source of two previous wars between the two countries.

On Wednesday, meeting with editors of The New York Times, Mr. Khan said he would ask the United Nations to intervene when he addressed the General Assembly on Friday.

"If the U.N. doesn't speak about it, who is going to speak about it?" Mr. Khan said.

In revoking a 70-year-old legal provision that had given autonomy to the state of Jammu and Kashmir and buttressing its military presence there, Indian officials said the goal was to establish peace and prosperity.

Pakistan has a history of funding separatist militants in Kashmir. But the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, rose to power with an unvarnished appeal to Hindu nationalists, who have long wanted access and sway in Muslim-majority Kashmir.

Over the past two months, Indian forces have rounded up at least 2,000 Kashmiris, including elected representatives, local officials say.

Mr. Khan said India was behaving irrationally - and against its own longer-term interests.

"Arrogance," he said, "stops people from being rational."

Mr. Khan said he would ask the United Nations to step in, warning that it was too risky to allow tensions to escalate between India and Pakistan, both of which have nuclear weapons.

"This is the U.N.'s job," he said, adding: "They have to intervene, send observers there."

That may be a long shot.

"I can't imagine India agreeing to it, and the U.N. isn't going to intervene over India's objections," said Laurel Miller, director of the Asia Program at the International Crisis Group.

The Kashmiris are not the only Muslim group to be oppressed as the world looks away. The Rohingya in Myanmar and the Uighurs in China have also been brutalized.

But in Kashmir, part of the problem, Ms. Miller said, may not be the message but the messenger.

"There is a history, and an existing reality, of Pakistani tolerance of and support for militant groups," she said.

Ms. Miller, like Mr. Khan, said some nations might be reluctant to press the issue because they don't want to jeopardize their relationship with India, a major economic market.

That could change, she said, if widespread violence breaks out in Kashmir.

Mr. Khan said he feared that was exactly what would happen.

"This is very dangerous," he said, "because people don't realize where it's headed. It's going to be a massacre, the moment they lift the curfew."

The Pakistani leader said he was not optimistic that he would accomplish anything in his speech to the United Nations, at least not in the near term.

"But at least the world will be aware," he said. "Because I fear an impending genocide."

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Pakistan Leader Will Urge U.N. Intervention in Kashmir

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Pakistan's leader, lamenting what he said was the world's indifference to civilian suffering in Kashmir, on Wednesday condemned India's military clampdown there and said he would appeal to the United Nations for help. "They do not understand that this can go horribly wrong," the Pakistani leader, Prime Minister Imran Khan, said.

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Post #9 (November 22, 2019) Current Covert Racism in Amerikkka

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Post #9 (November 22, 2019) Current Covert Racism in Amerikkka

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This article relates to the discussion we had in class this week about how race and racial identity is an important factor in peoples daily lives, especially with Americas long history of racism,segregation, and of course slavery that has had long generational ramifcatons that keep black people and minorities far behind in every aspect of life. The people that are effected  by this can't just "get over it" because slavery happened so long ago as one student with a red hat was so eager to comment. That fact of the matter is, is that "Large and persistent racial gaps in housing and employment are a fact of American life... A good deal of this is the long overhang of past discrimination, the legacy of Jim Crow and redlining and urban renewal and the deliberate neglect of communities of color by authorities at all levels of government." Just because white people don't experience this, doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and shouldn't be discredited.

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There is implicit bias - and then there is behavior like this.

Houses in West Hempstead, on Long Island. Credit... Kathy Kmonicek for The New York Times

Most of our public discourse about racism - when it's not about violence or monuments or presidential rhetoric - is about white privilege, implicit bias and structural racism. Instead of specific actors, we tend to focus on forces that don't actually implicate anyone in particular.

Those forces are real. And those conversations are important. Racial inequality is about the structure of our society. But it's also about more ordinary bias and discrimination.

There are still racist individuals. They still act in racist ways. And in the aggregate, their actions still work to disadvantage entire groups on the basis of race. It's not as visible as it once was, but it is real, and it still weighs on the lives - and the livelihoods - of millions of people.

A potent example comes from a deep new investigation of housing discrimination. Working with outside experts, Newsday, the leading newspaper on Long Island, conducted a three-year investigation into racism in the housing market there, sending pairs of undercover testers (black and white, Hispanic and white, Asian and white) in sequence to realtors throughout the area.

The testers reported racially disparate treatment in 40 percent of interactions with realtors. Black testers experienced disparate treatment in 49 percent of cases, Hispanic testers in 39 percent and Asian testers in 19 percent. Some realtors refused to show listings or conduct house tours for minority testers, others steered them away from predominantly white neighborhoods. They warned white testers away from black or Hispanic neighborhoods while also showing more listings and allowing them to see homes without proof of mortgage-ready financing.

This was one investigation in one part of the country with a specific history of housing discrimination and racism. But a similar study from 2012 - conducted by the Urban Institute and the Department of Housing and Urban Development - showed nationwide patterns of housing discrimination. After conducting 8,000 tests in a representative sample of 28 metropolitan areas, researchers found that, compared with whites, black renters and home buyers were shown substantially fewer units, as were, to a lesser extent, Asian-Americans and Hispanics.

Discrimination is common, not just in housing, but in employment as well. Fifty-six percent of black Americans, 33 percent of Hispanics and 27 percent of Asian-Americans said they experienced racial discrimination when applying for jobs, according to a 2017 survey by NPR and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Their self-reporting is backed by data. A 2017 meta-analysis of field experiments on racial discrimination found that for black Americans, discrimination has been static - there has been no change since 1989. Whites still receive more than a third more callbacks for jobs, even after accounting for education, local labor market conditions and other factors.

Not every instance of workplace discrimination is reported to authorities - far from it. But it's not for nothing that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a federal agency tasked with tackling unfair treatment in the labor market, has received hundreds of thousands of complaints of racial discrimination at workplaces since 2010.

Large and persistent racial gaps in housing and employment are a fact of American life. The black unemployment rate is still consistently higher than the white unemployment rate; blacks are still disproportionately concentrated in low-wage, low-advancement positions; and African-Americans are still more likely than any other group to live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty and disadvantage. "It is difficult or in some cases impossible to reproduce in white communities the structural circumstances under which many black Americans live," as the sociologist William Julius Wilson put it.

A good deal of this is the long overhang of past discrimination, the legacy of Jim Crow and redlining and urban renewal and the deliberate neglect of communities of color by authorities at all levels of government. But despite what we might believe about modern American society, some of it is the result of ongoing explicit discrimination. Millions of Americans are still taking deliberate action to deny jobs and homes on the basis of race.

A recent study shows how this might look in practice. Black and white job seekers receive job leads from their social networks at similar rates. They use those networks at similar rates, too. But as David Pedulla and Devah Pager (who died last year) show,

black job seekers are less likely than white job seekers to (1) know someone at the companies to which they are submitting applications, and (2) have their network mobilize key resources on their behalf, specifically contact an employer on their behalf.

This could be an unfortunate happenstance, I guess. But more likely it reflects past discrimination and how it continues to shape the labor market, especially when present and future opportunity depends on past access.

There are solutions - you can expand state and federal anti-discrimination agencies, as well as fully enforce the Fair Housing Act, for starters - but the first step is to shake ourselves of the idea that explicit racial discrimination is yesterday's problem. It's a live force in American life that works in tandem with structural racism to recapitulate past injustice and reproduce racial disadvantage, a one-two punch that ensures its future.

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Opinion | The Racism Right Before Our Eyes

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There is implicit bias - and then there is behavior like this. Most of our public discourse about racism - when it's not about violence or monuments or presidential rhetoric - is about white privilege, implicit bias and structural racism. Instead of specific actors, we tend to focus on forces that don't actually implicate anyone in particular.

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Post #8 (November 14, 2019) Global Cultural Appropriation of Mexican Embroidery

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Post #8 (November 14, 2019) Global Cultural Appropriation of Mexican Embroidery

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This article discusses how these indigenous practice of embroidery is plagiarised by huge corporations and high end world known designers. This appropriation discredits the indigenous peoples work and tradition which relates to the dilution of cultures as globalization spreads. Also the migration of people from this village to the U.S is caused by immense poverty which causes further loss of culture as it is less practice in the younger generations. Often times the market low balls the artist because the people that copy and steal their cultural artwork is sold for less, which further impoverishes the population.

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Mexico Dispatch

Shopping for the brightly colored thread used in the style of embroidery done in villages around Tenango de Doria, a town in the Mexican state of Hidalgo. Credit... Celia Talbot Tobin for The New York Times

SAN NICOLÁS, Mexico - A mystery lies behind the origin of the distinctive forms depicted in the elaborate embroidery stitched in San Nicolás, a pinprick of a mountain village in the central Mexican highlands. But to Glafira Candelaria José, who has sewn those images all her life, there can be only one source.

The polite phrase for this is cultural appropriation. In local villages, where children begin to embroider before they learn to read, people call it plagiarism.

For all its lushness, this part of Mexico has been largely ignored and its heritage disdained. Acute poverty pushed many Otomí to migrate to the United States, the only way to shake off childhoods when they went hungry and shoeless.

Her collective did embroider bags for Carolina Herrera a few years ago. More recently, though, the same fashion house used tenango iconography in its 2020 resort collections without any credit. After a complaint from the culture minister, the company said its designer "wanted to show his deep respect" for "Mexican craftsmanship."

The tradition of the tenangos is new by Mexican standards, with the Otomí, or hñähñu as they call themselves, developing their singular iconography in the 1960s.

Marta Turok, an anthropologist and expert on Mexican folk art, said some images may have derived from nearby cave paintings or from portrayals of healing ceremonies practiced by local shamans, who were among the first artisans.

But the Otomí are enriching their designs with new experiences, including migration, said Diana Macho Morales, a social anthropologist at the National School of Anthropology and History who has carried out research in the community.

Alongside stylized images of flora and fauna, Ms. Macho has encountered surprises: a giraffe, an image derived from a government campaign for a healthy diet and the Incredible Hulk.

For most of the artisans, the one-way connection to international fashion is nothing more than an asterisk, a distraction from the real concern of how to make a living.

Those who do the heavy labor of needlework earn less than $10 to embroider a square about the size of a small cushion. Some artisans, known as "dibujantes," draw the designs onto the fabric, and earn more. A few dibujantes, whose designs have become well-known, dream of showing off their work to a global audience.

Mr. Flores, who is battling Nestlé, is a dibujante. He used to spend part of every year working as a landscaper in North Carolina. "I would like to go back - but this time to exhibit my work with a brand, and with a visa," he said.

Ezequiel Vicente José, a retired teacher, is one of the village's best-known dibujantes. He has established a distinctive style, regularly adding images of human activities to his designs: cutting firewood, planting a cornfield, a wedding, the Day of the Dead - "an infinity of things," he said.

Mr. Vicente thinks the craft could generate a livelihood for more people if artisans banded together, by agreeing on prices and on "how to improve the drawings."

"Selfishness and envy have not allowed us to work together," he said.

Even with a collective approach, the village artisans would still be constrained by the absence of basic infrastructure. There is not a single bank branch in the entire municipality of Tenango de Doria. The road to San Nicolás is paved but most of the other villages are at the end of dirt roads.

As a result, many artisans have no choice but to sell to middlemen who arrive on market days and set the prices.

"We compete among ourselves and that lowers the price," Ms. López said as she unfolded an elaborate tablecloth that she designed and embroidered, and that she said should cost about $250. A buyer in the Tenango de Doria market would offer only $150, she said.

But perhaps the biggest concern in the village is how many in the next generation will want to follow their parents.

Faustina José, 43, grew up in a family of eight children and they all embroidered. Only one of her four children draws and embroiders with her; the other three are in the United States.

"It is being lost," she said of the craft that helped lift her out of poverty. "Young people don't want to do it. They prefer to work, or to study."

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This Mexican Village's Embroidery Designs Are Admired (and Appropriated) Globally

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Mexico Dispatch SAN NICOLÁS, Mexico - A mystery lies behind the origin of the distinctive forms depicted in the elaborate embroidery stitched in San Nicolás, a pinprick of a mountain village in the central Mexican highlands. But to Glafira Candelaria José, who has sewn those images all her life, there can be only one source.

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Pst #7 (November 5, 2019) Push to Raise Minimum Wage

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Pst #7 (November 5, 2019) Push to Raise Minimum Wage

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This article relates to the topic we discuss in class related to the standard the growing inequality that capitalism creates and how financialization peoples such inequalities by being anti-union, and wanting to make as much profits as possible even at he expense of their employees. This relates to the growing homeless population and concern n the U.S as well because they can't earn enough money to pay for basic necessities. Also the topic of the rise in housing costs relate to this article because the workers need better and higher wages to keep them in their homes and their communities.

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"I have to try to make ends meet," said Quintina Moore-Caraway, an airport worker in Houston. A minimum wage of $12 an hour at the airport will take effect in 2021; some there now make less than $9. Credit... Michael Starghill Jr. for The New York Times

Labor unions and community groups are pursuing an increasingly successful strategy to force employers to pay their workers more: minimum wages for specific occupations and industries.

The effort has resulted in several noteworthy victories recently - mandatory pay of up to $20 an hour for hotel workers in Oakland, and raises for airport employees in Denver and Houston. Organizers behind these efforts say they want to shift the debate from establishing a bare-minimum wage for workers at the lowest rung of the economic ladder to lifting more people into the middle class.

"Our goal was to keep up with rising housing costs and help people stay in their homes and communities," said Jahmese Myres, acting executive director of the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, a major force behind the Oakland effort. "While we're hoping it gets addressed comprehensively at the federal and state level, workers in Oakland can't afford to wait," she added.

By keeping the focus on specific industries and occupations, organizers have largely been able to bypass the partisan divide over the national minimum wage, which has been frozen at $7.25 for a decade. The House has passed legislation that would raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, but the bill has no chance in the Republican-controlled Senate.

The push for sector-specific minimum wages comes amid a broader debate about inequality, and a sense that the fruits of the decade-long recovery have largely gone to highly educated Americans while most workers have had to make do with modest gains. It also seeks to build on the momentum from successful efforts for state and local minimum-wage increases in places like Seattle, New York State and California.

"Workers are standing up to a broken system," said David Madland, a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress. "It's largely in progressive cities and states right now, but there's a renewed sense of grass roots activism."

But it is workers in particular businesses that have seen the biggest gains. Under pressure from unions like the Service Employees International Union and UNITE HERE, local governments have raised salaries for airport employees and hotel workers across the country.

Part of the unions' calculus is that the costs of such targeted higher minimum wages, especially in the travel and hospitality industries, will primarily be borne by visitors and affluent local residents, rather than those with lower incomes. That has made the increases more palatable to voters and elected officials.

"We know our industry," said D. Taylor, international president of UNITE HERE, which represents hotel workers. "We don't pretend to know every industry like retail or construction."

But employers and some economists argue that raising the minimum wage, even if only for some workers, will raise the cost of doing business and could ultimately backfire by discouraging hiring.

"You're creating incentives for hotels and airports to find ways to get by with fewer workers," said Michael R. Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. "The losers are the least experienced, least skilled people in the labor market."

Still, Mr. Strain said local efforts made more economic sense than increasing the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. Employers in big cities in California can more easily pay workers $15 an hour than those in, say, small-town Ohio.

In March, the Denver City Council lifted wages for more than 6,000 airport workers, including ramp agents, baggage handlers and retail employees, to $15 an hour by 2021, with intermediate increases to $13 in 2019 and $14 in 2020. That followed successful campaigns for higher pay at airports in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

"People may feel it's only $3 an hour, but it makes a big difference in my life," said Ahmed Osman, a wheelchair assistant at Denver International Airport. Before the increase, he was earning $10.20 an hour.

"I was a doctor back in Sudan, and it is challenging to work in a minimum-wage situation," he said. "This has freed up time for me to study for my medical licensing exams."

Earlier this month, the mayor of Houston, Sylvester Turner, instituted a $12-an-hour minimum for airport workers that will go into effect in 2021. Currently, some airport workers make less than $9 an hour, not much more than national minimum wage.

"I have to try to make ends meet," said Quintina Moore-Caraway, 45, a ramp agent at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston. "Everything in my house I've had to pawn. It's hard to find a second job when you have a family."

Hotel workers in Oakland saw a bigger bump when Measure Z, a ballot proposal approved last November by a margin of three to one, went into effect over the summer. It requires hotels to pay at least $15 an hour - and $20 an hour if they do not provide health insurance. The minimum wage for other workers in Oakland is $13.80.

The minimum wage in California is $12 an hour and will increase by $1 annually until it reaches $15 in 2022. Many cities will hit that benchmark before then; San Francisco is already at $15.59.

Besides the pay increase, Measure Z limits the total area that hotel workers have to clean daily and requires employers to equip them with panic buttons to use if they are in danger.

UNITE HERE led the campaign for the measure along with the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy.

The travel industry is doing well, advocates assert, and employers can afford raises.

"Hospitality has pretty comfortable margins, compared with, say, restaurants or retail," said Wei-Ling Huber, president of UNITE HERE's Local 2850 in Oakland.

About 20 hotels will be affected by the law, according to Dhruv Patel, president of Ridgemont Hospitality, which operates two of them. Measure Z applies to establishments with more than 50 rooms.

Before Measure Z, Mr. Patel paid $14.50 an hour with optional health insurance. Now many workers are asking for $20 and forgoing health coverage.

"Going from $14.50 to $20, that has a huge economic impact," Mr. Patel said. "To single out an industry shouldn't be legal."

Ridgemont has 45 employees, he said, but would have added 10 to its support staff were it not for the new minimum wage. "Something has to give to make up for the higher salaries," Mr. Patel said.

Oakland is going through a renaissance, Mr. Patel said, but now hotel developers might choose to build elsewhere in the East Bay.

Libby Schaaf, Oakland's mayor, said she supported Measure Z as a necessary step to raise wages for working-class employees. But she said she worried that businesses would be confused by wage rules that vary by city and industry.

"This will result in a patchwork of local activism, but we have to do it because the federal government has not," Ms. Schaaf said. "I'm very frustrated by the failure of federal policymakers to set a livable minimum wage."

The Fight for $15 movement has sought to raise the national minimum wage to $15 and has received strong support from Democrats, including the party's presidential candidates. In July, the House, which has a Democratic majority, passed legislation that would raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025, but the Senate has not taken up the measure.

Opponents of raising the minimum wage have long warned that doing so would cost jobs, but the low unemployment rate has undercut those arguments. Research following minimum-wage increases in Seattle offered conflicting results about the benefits for most workers.

Denver, Houston and other cities that have raised minimum wages tend to have strong local economies, which makes it less likely that they will suffer net job losses. While not as prosperous as some of those cities, Oakland is gaining residents and jobs as a result of the boom in neighboring San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

Airlines for America, an industry association, has opposed airport-specific wage increases across the country, including the move in Denver. The group has argued that the increases will be passed on to travelers through higher airfares.

"We continue to believe that the appropriate way to address wage issues is to ensure that all workers are covered equally across the board," the group said in a statement. "Picking winners and losers and creating a patchwork of conflicting and confusing local standards is just bad policy."

But labor activists and some economists say industry-specific minimum wages serve an important purpose - increasing the incomes of workers who are not clustered at the bottom of the pay scale.

"This is for middle-income workers," said Ben Zipperer, an economist with the liberal Economic Policy Institute. "Having sectoral standards can have a much broader effect than just raising the minimum wage."

Places like Oakland may stand out, but more cities could adopt this approach, said Ken Jacobs, chair of the Labor Center at the University of California, Berkeley. A recession might delay the process, but even then he expects it to continue.

"I expect we will see more of this kind of experimentation in the coming years," Mr. Jacobs said. "How do you create more middle-class jobs and go above $15 an hour? That's where you have sectoral and local strategies."

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Push to Raise Minimum Wage Goes Local, at Airports and Hotels

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Labor unions and community groups are pursuing an increasingly successful strategy to force employers to pay their workers more: minimum wages for specific occupations and industries. The effort has resulted in several noteworthy victories recently - mandatory pay of up to $20 an hour for hotel workers in Oakland, and raises for airport employees in Denver and Houston.

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Post #6 (October 22, 2019) The third pillar

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Post #6 (October 22, 2019) The third pillar

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This article discusses how the "third pillar" of society is ignored, or rather neglected. This article examines how often communities are left on the back burner of politicians and corporations. This article relates to topics we discussed in class how businesses and large corporations have a social duty to offer benefits to it's workers and take care of them and the social responsibility of such giants. Communities are often ignored, so the pockets of the wealthy overflow. The article also talks about how todays businesses are impersonal and states “Relationships seem to be stronger when the members of the community have fewer alternatives, for it gives the members confidence that they will stay mutually committed.” This implies that there are negatives to such modern model.

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THE THIRD PILLAR
How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind
By Raghuram Rajan

Raghuram Rajan comes both to praise community and to bury it. This University of Chicago professor and former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund wants his new book to "reintroduce into the debate" the titular and neglected "third pillar" of community alongside the pillars of market and state that dominate modern society. Rajan says he is seeking "the right balance between them so that society prospers." But he lacks the courage of his convictions. What begins as an incisive critique of how economists and policymakers abandoned community ends as a dismaying illustration of the problem.

The prospect tantalizes: a voice from within some of our most market-focused institutions arguing that "community matters" and so "it is not enough for a country to experience strong economic growth." The opening chapters of "The Third Pillar" sparkle with concrete illustrations of how vibrant local communities contribute to human flourishing in ways typically overlooked. Rajan describes how ranchers benefit by handling livestock trespass cooperatively. Because the community is more attuned to individual circumstance, he observes, "given any quantity of available resources, it can offer a far-higher level of benefit to the truly needy."

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As a former central banker, Rajan gives special attention to the community's role in financial markets and goes so far as to defend long-ago prohibitions on usury. Neighbors helping neighbors represents a form of saving, creating a reciprocal obligation to be repaid when the tables inevitably turn. Small, young firms tend to get more and better loans when fewer banks are present, perhaps because less competition means a higher likelihood of retaining a firm's business as it grows. This leads to a crucial, more generalizable point: "Relationships seem to be stronger when the members of the community have fewer alternatives, for it gives the members confidence that they will stay mutually committed." The modern market's greater abundance of choice is not without trade-offs.

These threads dissolve in the hundreds of pages of vaguely sketched economic history that follow. While ably describing how both a growing market and a growing state have eroded the community's relevance and vitality over time, Rajan gradually redefines the third pillar from "communities whose members live in proximity" to merely democracy or the "voting public." An intrinsically valuable and varied local institution congeals into a homogeneous tool for ensuring that the market and state behave.

When genuine community does make a return in the book's section on prescriptions, Rajan sacrifices it willingly. Having shown how the state has weakened community by seizing the role of safety net, he nevertheless wants to go further in that direction. America's variety of antipoverty programs, "strung together with the help of the state government, the local government, private efforts and charitable funds" (in other words, "community"), are "inadequate," he says, calling instead for "a basic level of unconditional federal economic support" along with universal health care. On one page, Rajan recommends that "powers should stay at the most decentralized level consistent with their effective use," but on the next he declares that "when inclusiveness goes up against localism, inclusiveness should always triumph."

Rajan's real aim seems to be movement "toward one borderless world," with stronger communities a perhaps helpful means to that end. "A central concern in this book," he writes, "is about the passions that are unleashed when an imagined community like the nation fulfills the need for belonging that the neighborhood can no longer meet." He recalls wistfully the days when "technocrats ... did not have to spell out these arguments to the wider public." Sure, "the elite did not engage" in any debate "as they abandoned the integrated community," but he finds it "hard to fault their choice." After all, "the meritocratic markets now demanded it."

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An Economist's Argument for Preserving Communities

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THE THIRD PILLAR How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind By Raghuram Rajan Raghuram Rajan comes both to praise community and to bury it. This University of Chicago professor and former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund wants his new book to "reintroduce into the debate" the titular and neglected "third pillar" of community alongside the pillars of market and state that dominate modern society.

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Post #5 (October 15, 2019) Global Business Giants are Targeted by Pro-democracy Protesters in Hong Kong.

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Post #5 (October 15, 2019) Global Business Giants are Targeted by Pro-democracy Protesters in Hong Kong.

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This New York times article is relevant to this class because most of these global businesses were founded in the U.S and are seen as sympathizing with the Chinese communist party to keep their businesses there. We have discussed in class how foreign businesses move into a country that's culturally and politically vastly different and exploit the people there. The protesters are making a stand and voicing their human rights concerns.

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Pro-democracy demonstrators have begun singling out companies that they consider enemies of their movement. Vandalism and calls for boycotts have followed.

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A vandalized Starbucks in the Ma On Shan district of Hong Kong. Credit Credit Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times

HONG KONG - One company is the world's largest coffee chain. Another runs a Japanese restaurant empire. A third makes some of the most popular online games on the planet.

The global businesses - Starbucks, Yoshinoya and Activision Blizzard - would seem far removed from the political discontent in Hong Kong. But to some of the pro-democracy protesters there, and a growing number of their global allies, the companies are seen, rightly or wrongly, as sympathizers with the authoritarian Chinese Communist Party in Beijing, and as legitimate targets for boycotts or even vandalism.

Protesters are documenting what they see as the companies' ties to China, then circulating the information on mobile apps and websites - sometimes based on mere rumor, or on comments made by executives or their family members. Starbucks and Yoshinoya have been repeatedly targeted because of the owner of their Hong Kong franchises, while Activision Blizzard, the maker of World of Warcraft, has been subject to boycotts for attempting to censor a pro-democracy player in Hong Kong.

The monthslong protests and their fraught politics are rippling overseas, ensnaring an ever wider range of corporations and executives, no matter their nationality. All have spent years cultivating their brands, but now find their reputations in jeopardy over any suggestion that they don't support the protesters.

Some companies are in the awkward position of trying to dodge questions about the issue, to avoid offending either China, with its vast market, or Hong Kong activists, who have fervent support among Westerners and Taiwanese. After a single recent tweet, the N.B.A. found itself caught between both sides.

"All corporations here are walking on eggshells when it comes to what they say, whether it's about Hong Kong or about the mainland," said David Webb, a shareholder activist in Hong Kong.

The companies' vulnerabilities are growing, as activists turn increasingly to vandalism and to boycotts. And Hong Kong's reputation as a hub of freewheeling capitalism, with one of the world's most business-friendly environments, is already suffering. These days, workers regularly sweep up glass from shops with broken windows, as shuttered storefronts with graffiti sit in the shadows of gleaming skyscrapers.

Last weekend, protesters called for rallies in shopping malls and a boycott of allegedly pro-China restaurants and stores - with a small, hard-core contingent encouraging the "renovating" (smashing) or "decorating" (spray-painting graffiti) of those locations.

At a Starbucks branch in the Tseung Kwan O district, a few protesters used hammers and a fire extinguisher to smash glass shelves, while others threw plates and trays on the ground. "The heavens will destroy the Communist Party" was spray-painted on a counter.

Activists called for protests at Apple stores after the company removed an app, HKmap.live, from its App Store that showed the locations of police officers in real time. But there have not been attacks on Apple stores yet.

Apple has enormous business interests in China, which is its third biggest market after the United States and Europe, and the decision to remove the app was criticized by pro-democracy activists and lawmakers. Timothy D. Cook, Apple's chief executive, said the app was removed because people were using it to track down officers to attack them or pinpoint sites to target when the police were not present.

Some protesters attacked subway stations, including with Molotov cocktails. Many believe the MTR Corporation, the company that operates the subway, has been working with local officials to undermine protests by shutting down some stations, ending service early and, once, closing the entire system.

"The outbreak of vandalism or violence in an operating station will endanger the safety of other passengers and MTR staff," the company said in explaining the closures.

"When I see people destroying public facilities and stores, I feel pained because you still need money to repair it," said Michelle Tang, a 40-year-old sales worker. "I want it to be peaceful and free again," she said of Hong Kong."Now I wouldn't dare say anything if people were smashing glass around me."

As the movement settles into a prolonged campaign, activists are systematically pushing for broader boycotts.

One group developed an app, WhatsGap, that tells residents which restaurants to patronize and which ones to avoid. The ones considered friendly to the protests appear on a map of Hong Kong marked in yellow, while those considered hostile have a black marker. The developers plan to add shops.

"For a lot of people not on the front line, these are things they can do," said Alison Yung, 36, an events planner, who backs the protests. "They can support the movement this way."

At universities, students are handing out cards with lists of businesses to boycott and staging sit-ins at establishments on campus. Twice last month, people occupied the cafeteria of S.H. Ho College at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

The cafeteria's caterer is Maxim's Group, which is also the franchise owner of Starbucks in Hong Kong. Maxim's has drawn the ire of activists because the founder's daughter, Annie Wu Suk-ching, said last month in a speech to the United Nations Human Rights Council that the protesters were "rioters" who did not represent Hong Kong.

Maxim's released a statement saying that Ms. Wu had no position at the company, and that it hoped "all parties" in the ongoing political conflict "will resolve their differences."

Starbucks did not answer an email request for comment.

Yoshinoya also got the attention of activists when its Hong Kong executives fired an advertising agency that created a post on the restaurant's Facebook page mocking the police. Hop Hing Group, which operates Yoshinoya in Hong Kong, did not return a call seeking comment.

The chief executive of Best Mart 360, a local convenience store chain, was accused of having ties to gangs from Fujian Province in mainland China that have clashed with protesters. (Best Mart 360 has denied any such ties.)

McDonald's presents a dilemma for the movement. The chain is ubiquitous in Hong Kong (and open 24 hours), and some people have shown their support for the protesters by buying them McDonald's coupons, to keep them going through the long demonstrations. But some activists have pointed out that McDonald's sold an 80 percent stake in its China and Hong Kong business in 2017 to a private equity group comprised of Citic, a Chinese state-owned conglomerate, and the Carlyle Group, based in New York.

International support for the protests has made the issue harder for companies to navigate.

Last week, the Chinese government punished the N.B.A. after Daryl Morey, general manager of the Houston Rockets, posted a tweet in support of the protests. After the league distanced itself from Mr. Morey, some Americans began showing up at games with "Free Hong Kong" posters and banners, and members of Congress chastised the N.B.A.

Activision Blizzard faced a similar backlash after it suspended an e-sports player in Hong Kong, Chung Ng Wai, for voicing support for the movement during a live broadcast. It forced the player, who goes by the name Blitzchung, to forfeit a reported $10,000 in prize money. Many gamers called for a boycott of the company; dozens of Blizzard employees staged a walkout in protest at the company's California headquarters; and members of Congress spoke up, too.

Blizzard said last Friday it would restore the prize money to Mr. Chung and reduce his suspension to six months, while asserting that the company's relationship with China had not played a role in the original decision.

Whether the backlash against global brands will result in financial damage is unclear.Some actions taken by the protesters may not have much effect by themselves.

For example, protesters have been calling for a boycott of Cathay Pacific because the airline, under pressure from Beijing, has fired or punished employees who are part of the movement. But for anyone who wants to fly directly from Hong Kong to a Chinese city, it is impossible in most cases to avoid taking either Cathay or a Chinese state-owned airline. Flights between Hong Kong and mainland China are emptier than usual these days not because of a boycott, but because many Chinese want to avoid the protests.

Some activists have made mistakes in choosing which businesses to target. That was the case with Shanghai Commercial Bank. Activists vandalized at least one branch, apparently thinking the chain was based in mainland China.

But the bank is based in Hong Kong. Its motto is "serving the community."

Tiffany May contributed reporting.

Edward Wong is a diplomatic and international correspondent who has reported for The Times for more than 20 years, 13 of those in Iraq and China. He received a Livingston Award for his Iraq War coverage and was on a team of Pulitzer Prize finalists. He has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton. @ewong

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Hong Kong Protesters Are Targeting Starbucks. Apple Could Be Next.

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Pro-democracy demonstrators have begun singling out companies that they consider enemies of their movement. Vandalism and calls for boycotts have followed. HONG KONG - One company is the world's largest coffee chain. Another runs a Japanese restaurant empire. A third makes some of the most popular online games on the planet.

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Post #4 (October 14, 2019) Globalization Is Moving Past The U.S. and Its Vision of World Order

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Post #4 (October 14, 2019) Globalization Is Moving Past The U.S. and Its Vision of World Order

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This article discuses how the United States is becoming more economically isolated as the rest of the world gets more and more interconnected. This article relates to the topics discussed in class as well as the readings. The article mainly focuses on the train War between trump and China, and how major  companies are looking to move to Mexico and Southeastern Asian countries.The article also makes a point to states that a globalized world is irreversible, which also ties into the class discussions that we are only to continue on becoming a more globalized world.

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Credit Credit Delcan & Company

LONDON - If globalization were ever going to unravel, the beginning would probably feel something like this.

President Trump, the leader of the country that built the world trading system, continues to disrupt international commerce as a weapon wielded in pursuit of national aims. He has unleashed trade hostilities with China, placed tariffs on steel made by allies like Europe and Japan, and restricted India's access to the American market. He vowed to hit Mexico with tariffs mere months after he agreed to a new version of a deal liberalizing trade across North America.

But globalization has become such an elemental feature of life that it is probably irreversible. The process of making modern goods, from airplanes to medical devices, has become so mind-bendingly complex, involving components drawn from multiple continents, that a few unexpected tariffs will not prompt companies to swiftly close factories in China and Mexico and replace them with plants in Ohio and Indiana.

What does appear to be ending is the post-World War II era in which the United States championed global trade as immunization against future conflict, selling the idea that the free exchange of goods was a pathway toward a more stable world order.

American administrations forged rules governing disputes, enabling countries to trade with diminished fear of capricious political intervention. In ceding this role, Mr. Trump has weakened the rules-based trading system while removing a counterweight to China, whose transactional approach to trade places scant value on transparency and human rights.

"One thing is really clear: There has got to be a reset in the world trading system," said Swati Dhingra, an economist at the London School of Economics. "It's all breaking at the seams at this point."

The trade war unleashed by Mr. Trump has injected higher costs and confusion into the global economy, forcing businesses to anticipate the next venue for hostilities. American retailers and manufacturers voiced that complaint on Monday in testimony to the Office of the United States Trade Representative, ahead of Mr. Trump's plans to put tariffs on a further $300 billion worth of Chinese imports.

"This is now the post-American world economy, one in which globalization is much more spotty," said Adam S. Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. "The world is a riskier place, where access to markets is a lot less sure."

In the Trump framing, the United States is best served by the unsentimental exploitation of its position as the world's largest economy. It must brandish threats of limiting access to its market to force other countries to capitulate to its demands.

But the rest of the planet is increasingly refusing to play along, instead seeking alternatives to trade with a suddenly mercurial United States. This year, Europe and Japan set in motion a mammoth trade deal that generates fresh opportunities for their companies, while leaving American players at a disadvantage.

Under the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a separate trade deal forged by 11 countries, Japan agreed to open its heavily protected market to agricultural imports, handing American farmers a lucrative opportunity. Days into his presidency, Mr. Trump closed that window by renouncing American participation in the deal. Now, European farmers have secured their own broadened access to the Japanese market.

China has responded to Mr. Trump's tariffs with levies on American goods, including soybeans, wood products, and machinery. At the same time, China has lowered tariffs on imports from countries like Germany and Canada, lifting the fortunes of American competitors in those nations, according to an analysis by Chad P. Bown at the Peterson Institute.

For example, China doubled duties on American agricultural and fish products to an average of 42 percent from 21 percent, Mr. Bown found. At the same time, China lowered average tariffs on the same wares from the rest of the world to 19 percent.

Mr. Trump has sold his trade war as a means of returning jobs to a forsaken American heartland. In his version, naïve presidents allowed other nations, especially China, to steal factory jobs from the United States. His tariffs will pressure multinational companies to bring those jobs back.

But if that story makes for rewarding politics, it rests on antiquated economic assumptions about the global marketplace.

Mr. Trump's trade war will probably not increase the number of American jobs, although it has imperiled paychecks at auto plants and other factories that rely on imported components. What it will bring is higher prices for manufactured goods, economists say, along with uncertainty over the terms of trade. It is sapping vitality from an already weakening world economy.

Entire supply chains - expansive linkages of parts for factory goods - have formed across Asia, Latin America and Europe. The United States could recreate those supply chains at home, but at a far higher cost. In the meantime, American industries would be severely constrained.

The largest manufacturers use China as a base to sell products to the world, limiting their exposure to American levies. Caterpillar, the agricultural and construction equipment company, operates factories in China, but sells many of its finished products within Asia.

Companies that are inclined to leave China are more likely to move production to other low-cost nations like Vietnam rather than bring work back to the United States. Hasbro, the toy company, is considering shifting production to the United States, but GoPro, the maker of mobile cameras, is looking at Mexico.

A poll last month by the American Chamber of Commerce in China found that 40 percent of its member companies had moved factory operations out of China or were considering doing so. Among those leaving, fewer than 6 percent were going to the United States, while more than a third were focused on Southeast Asia or Mexico.

Companies that do resume making goods in American factories are likely to buy robots and other machinery, rather than hiring large numbers of Americans.

The calculus of technology and geography - never simple - has been rendered more complicated by Mr. Trump's trade war. Canary, an oil field services company based in Denver, has been seeking to shift purchases of equipment from Chinese to Mexican suppliers to avoid American tariffs, its chief executive recently asserted.

Yet in refusing to rule out across-the-board tariffs on Mexican goods, Mr. Trump left the corporate world guessing about the commercial map. Where can a company invest without worrying about a fresh outbreak of trade hostilities? That question hangs over the world economy even after the president relented on threats to impose tariffs on Mexican goods.

"It's not so much you don't know where to go," Mr. Posen said. "There is no place to go. In a world in which there is arbitrary use of commercial regulation by the United States, no cross-border investment looks to be as safe and useful as it used to."

Companies are mostly hesitating, limiting orders and holding off on investments in the hope that time will bring clarity. A similar worry now discourages commerce in Britain, as it remains stuck in its Brexit quagmire. With no inkling on the rules that will govern future dealings between Britain and the rest of the European Union, investment is slowing.

But Brexit is a regional affair. Mr. Trump's trade war is downgrading expectations for growth worldwide.

Globalization did not happen by government design, and it will not be dismantled by political predilections. Businesses will continue to tap world markets and trade across borders - a wealth-enhancing formula, even as many major economies have failed to equitably distribute the bounty, leaving communities vulnerable to job losses.

Still, the risks are considerable. Mr. Trump's relentless focus on factory jobs has produced an unhelpfully nostalgic view of the American economy, Mr. Posen said, obscuring the reality that 80 percent of the country's output comes from so-called services industries. China's retaliation to Mr. Trump's tariffs makes it harder for American accounting, legal services and engineering companies to crack the Chinese market.

The escalating trade war has dealt a potentially grievous blow to the workings of the global commercial system, and especially to its de facto referee, the World Trade Organization.

Many of Mr. Trump's tariffs have come with the credibility-straining legal justification that they are required for national security. Trade experts have derided his approach as an existential assault on the concept of a rules-based trading system.

The dispute with Mexico elevates the fear. The Trump administration cited a domestic law created to enable presidents to cut off finance to rogue regimes, deploying a remedy for unfair trade - tariffs - as a cudgel in an unrelated dispute over immigration policy.

"This set of tariffs against Mexico is completely outside the W.T.O.," said Meredith Crowley, an international trade expert at the University of Cambridge in England. "It's just a big punch in the nose to the W.T.O."

Among the institution's members, the sense is deepening that its rules need updating. The organization was not built to address the disruptive force of China, a colossal economy that has subsidized key industries while pursuing a vast collection of global infrastructure projects known as the Belt and Road Initiative.

Beijing has lavished credit around the world in exchange for promises that recipient governments use the cash to hire Chinese construction companies, willingly doing business with authoritarian regimes from Egypt to Iran.

In conducting his trade war outside the W.T.O. framework, Mr. Trump has ironically bolstered China's mode of operation - one in which bottom-line concerns take precedence over labor and environmental standards, while national interests eclipse general principles.

"This is openly violating the rules of game," said Ms. Dhingra, the economist.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 14 of the New York edition with the headline: Globalization Finds Safe Place as U.S. Wages a Trade War. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Globalization Is Moving Past the U.S. and Its Vision of World Order

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LONDON - If globalization were ever going to unravel, the beginning would probably feel something like this. President Trump, the leader of the country that built the world trading system, continues to disrupt international commerce as a weapon wielded in pursuit of national aims. He has unleashed trade hostilities with China, placed tariffs on steel made by allies like Europe and Japan, and restricted India's access to the American market.

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Post #3 (October 10, 2019) Stay-at-Home Parents work Hard. Should They Be Paid?

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Post #3 (October 10, 2019) Stay-at-Home Parents work Hard. Should They Be Paid?

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In this New York Times article,it discusses a proposal made my Democratic presidential candidates to pay stay at home parents, and to recognize their economic contributions in raising children and domestic work. the policy is fender neutral,however; mainly this type of domestic work is performed by women. This article relates to the "Gender and Economics" article we read and discussed in class. Both articles talk about how women are ignored by the GDP when it is a measure of growth, value, and worth.

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The idea, a favorite of social conservatives, is now supported by several Democratic presidential candidates.

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A 1976 poster by Jacquie Ursula Caldwell. Credit Library of Congress

It's not uncommon in the United States for two parents to spend long hours working hard - but the one who works outside the home is paid for it, while the one who does housework and child care is paid nothing.

Now, several Democratic presidential candidates are proposing that parents who stay home to care for children are paid, too. It's a twist on typical family policies - like paid leave, subsidized child care or the right to work part-time - all of which make it easier for parents to have jobs outside the home. Instead, this proposal would make it easier for them not to.

It's an idea that blurs partisan lines. On the left, there have long been calls to recognize the economic value of unpaid domestic labor by paying for it. At the same time, many on the left fear that paying at-home parents - who are most often women - would reinforce unequal gender roles and set women back in the labor force.

On the right, proponents appreciate that the proposal supports traditional families and allows young children to be home with a parent. Yet many on the right resist the expansion of government benefits, especially without work requirements.

The tax code already tends to favor couples with a single earner over dual-earner couples who earn similar incomes. But the other ways the tax system helps parents require that they work outside the home. Two are tax credits aimed at families with children: the earned-income tax credit for low earners, and the child tax credit, which is given to most families. Two others are for buying child care: the child and dependent care credit, and dependent care flexible spending accounts.

Democratic presidential candidates have proposed some type of payment that would benefit at-home caregivers of young children and other relatives.

"The question is: What do we mean by work?" Andrew Yang said on The Daily last month, and gave as an example his wife, who stays home with their sons. "I know my wife is working harder than I am, and I'm running for president. And right now, the market values her work at zero. So we have to think bigger about what we mean by work and value."

Cory Booker and Julian Castro have focused on poor families, proposing to expand the earned-income tax credit to include at-home caregivers - essentially eliminating the tax credit's work requirement for people who are doing unpaid care work.

Others have proposed sending a monthly check to parents for any caregiving needs, as Canada, Australia and most European countries do (or, in Mr. Yang's case, sending a check to every American). Six of the senators running for president support the idea: Michael Bennet, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Mr. Booker.

They are co-sponsors of the American Family Act of 2019, introduced by Senator Bennet. It would send all but the highest-earning families $300 a month for each child up to age 5, and $250 for each child 6 to 16. People who don't work for pay would be eligible - in contrast with the existing child tax credit - and it would be paid monthly, not just at tax time.

"Caregiving is the most meaningful work a parent can do, but for some reason, we've made it harder and harder on families," Mr. Bennet said. The proposal would "give parents the opportunity to make decisions that are best for their families," he said.

Mr. Booker included this "child allowance" and the expanded tax credit in a plan he presented on Thursday to reduce child poverty.

Other candidates, including Ms. Warren and Mr. Sanders, also want to create a Social Security credit for people who take time out of the work force to care for family, "to compensate the more than 43 million unpaid family caregivers for their work," according to Mr. Sanders's campaign. (Ms. Warren, in her 2003 book, "The Two-Income Trap," proposed giving at-home parents a subsidy, though she did not include that in her 2020 campaign plan for subsidized child care and preschool.)

The general idea behind the proposals is that children need care - and families take a financial hit to provide it, whether they buy child care or stop working. Child care costs have been rising, and in many places it's difficult to find high-quality care.

Also, more than half of Americans say they believe young children should have a parent at home, and more than half of mothers say they would prefer to stay home (even though most parents work).

Andrew Yang on his way to a stage in Des Moines last month. He said recently, "The question is: What do we mean by work?" Credit Charlie Neibergall/Associated Press

Most of the Democratic candidates have proposed some form of subsidized child care or public preschool, and some say that a corresponding subsidy for at-home caregivers would allow parents to choose who cares for their children. (President Trump made a similar proposal when he was running for president, but did not include it in his tax plan.)

But they're also acknowledging something else: Often, staying home is not really a choice at all. If parents' jobs are too inflexible to accommodate children's needs, or pay too little to afford child care, taking care of their child has to come first.

As long as people have debated the idea, there has been disagreement over whether paying women for unpaid labor is liberating or oppressive.

In the United States in the late 1800s, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the writer and social reformer, wrote that unpaid labor took away women's independence and ought to be done by paid experts. Around the same time, the United States for a period paid single mothers a pension, on the belief that it was best for children if mothers did not work outside the home (though black women were largely excluded).

The idea resurfaced during the feminist movement of the 1970s. That period is well known for the rush of women into the work force. But there was a parallel movement, which began in Europe and spread to the United States: wages for housework. The argument was that women should be paid for the work they were already doing, and that men's paid work depended on it, as Louise Toupin described in a history of the movement last year.

Similar debates continue today in countries that pay a child allowance. In Finland, for example, the policy is seen as giving women "freedom to choose," while in Sweden, it has been called a "trap for women." (The policies are usually gender-neutral, but it's mostly women who use them.)

In the United States, some critics of the idea say that if more mothers took breaks from outside work, it could erase their gains in the labor force and stall progress toward sharing labor at home.

"Without strong incentives for dads to take on some of those duties, this would simultaneously cement women's second-class place in the work force and perpetuate men's second-class place in family life," said Stephanie Coontz, the director of research and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families.

Class and race complicate the issue. Historically, African-American women have always been expected to work, and federal benefits for poor families increasingly include work requirements.

Family policies can have different effects on children and parents, said Chris Herbst, an associate professor of public affairs at Arizona State University. Research is clear on the benefits of high-quality care for children from low-income families. But he found that work requirements can result in worse outcomes and lower-quality care for children. Other research has found that for children from richer families, the benefits of child care were smaller.

A popular policy would be one that all parents could use, said Kimberly J. Morgan, a political scientist at George Washington University who has studied the politics of family policies internationally. Societies that value caregiving have policies that assist parents who work outside the home (like paid leave and subsidized child care) as well as parents whose work is at home.

The more widely appealing message, she said, would be: "It's not just supporting working mothers, but it's about investing in children broadly."

Claire Cain Miller writes about gender, families and the future of work for The Upshot. She joined The Times in 2008 and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. @clairecm * Facebook

A version of this article appears in print on , Section B, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Policies to Bring Home the Bacon When You're Already Home. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Stay-at-Home Parents Work Hard. Should They Be Paid?

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The idea, a favorite of social conservatives, is now supported by several Democratic presidential candidates. It's not uncommon in the United States for two parents to spend long hours working hard - but the one who works outside the home is paid for it, while the one who does housework and child care is paid nothing.

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Post #2 (October 6, 2019) Ending Child Poverty

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Post #2 (October 6, 2019) Ending Child Poverty

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In this New York Times article, they discuss Senator Cory Booker's proposal to eradicate childhood poverty by offering $300 monthly cash allowance to poverty stricken families. This relates to the U.N.'s 17 sustainable development goals we discussed in class. Cory Booker states that this proposal will help 7.3 million children escape poverty in the U.S. This is a substantial statistic that will have a domino effect and improve the health of children as well as the quality of education they will receive which is are all increasingly concerning domestic social issues in the U.S.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/us/politics/cory-booker-child-poverty.html

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Senator Cory Booker proposed a child poverty plan that would give families $300 per month for each child under 5 years old. Credit Credit Eric Thayer for The New York Times

Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey rolled out a broad set of policy proposals on Thursday that seek to significantly reduce child poverty, including by offering a $300 monthly cash allowance to most families with young children.

Though many of the Democratic presidential candidates have introduced proposals to help working families, few of Mr. Booker's rivals have offered a policy specifically aimed at cutting the child poverty rate. The Booker campaign said its plan would help at least 7.3 million children escape poverty, citing an analysis by researchers at Columbia University.

Earlier this year, Mr. Booker campaigned heavily on his "baby bonds" proposal, which would offer government-funded savings accounts for children that would be handed over as a lump sum when they turned 18, but could only be put toward "wealth-building" transactions like paying for college, buying a home or starting a small business.

His new plan seeks to help families with young children immediately. Though it includes some broadly defined goals and builds off ideas his campaign has already introduced, it also includes three proposals that could shift some wealth toward poor people.

[Several Democratic candidates support ideas that would provide money for stay-at-home parents.]
"Building on the same American spirit that gave us Social Security, Medicare, nutrition assistance and so much more, we must come together to ensure that every child has a fair shot to participate in and benefit from our collective promise," Mr. Booker said in a statement. "I know that we can do this, and as president, I will act."

A central tenet of Mr. Booker's plan is to provide a $300 monthly cash allowance to families for each child under 5 years old through a vast expansion of the child tax credit. The proposal would also eliminate a loophole that leaves out the poorest American families, whose tax credit under the current system is limited to 15 percent of their earned income over $2,500.

The tax credit would begin to phase out for individual filers earning at least $130,000 or couples earning $180,000.

Mr. Booker's proposal follows a bill, the American Family Act of 2019, that was introduced by two other Democratic senators, Michael Bennet of Colorado, who is also running for the Democratic nomination, and Sherrod Brown of Ohio. The bill proposed expanding the child tax credit from $2,000 per year to $3,600 per year, or $300 per month, for families with children up to 5 years old, and then $3,000 a year until the child turns 18. Mr. Booker and several other Democratic candidates have signed on to that bill.

Sending money to families with children is common in Europe and in Canada, and a Columbia University study of the 2017 version of the bill found that it would cut child poverty roughly in half.

Mr. Booker also proposed expanding the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps, by 30 percent. And he called for expanding school meals outside the academic year and allowing all children who are eligible for food stamps to receive free or reduced-price school lunches.

Experts in childhood education viewed Mr. Booker's focus on childhood poverty as a welcome discussion in the sprawling campaign.

"We have kids operating under toxic stress because they're not eating or they don't have a stable home or they're not safe," said Paul Reville, a professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education. "And until you tackle this, the whole problem of human capital development can't possibly be successfully treated."

In a more expansive proposal, Mr. Booker called for increasing funding by 40 percent for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families block grant program, which provides temporary financial assistance to families dealt an unexpected crisis like a job loss.

Citing a study from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank, which found that the program is providing direct financial assistance to only about one in four families, Mr. Booker also proposed requiring that TANF grants focus on families that are most in need.

The campaign would not offer a total cost for Mr. Booker's proposal, and said that if elected, he would most likely need cooperation from Congress to increase funding levels for government programs. The campaign proposed paying for his plan with a similar method he has cited in other proposals: repealing President Trump's tax cuts and overhauling capital gains taxes and the estate tax.

Some experts questioned the expansive goals and unknown price tag of Mr. Booker's plan.

"I think it is totally aspirational," said Susan Neuman, a professor of childhood education at New York University. "You can do some things that really, really make a difference. If you look at the literature on child poverty, you can see that the tax credit is a benefit, providing lunches year round is a benefit. But providing more money for TANF or child care will not change behavior, and I question whether all of these policies are possible to do at one time."

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Cory Booker Wants to Talk About Child Poverty

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Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey rolled out a broad set of policy proposals on Thursday that seek to significantly reduce child poverty, including by offering a $300 monthly cash allowance to most families with young children.

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Post #1 (September 13, 2019)- rent control and homelessness in california 

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Post #1 (September 13, 2019)- rent control and homelessness in california 

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This article is relevant because it discusses the effects of gentrification, which was a topic we discussed in class and how it mainly effects minorities and how it is part of the development process. For example, the minority ruled neighborhood of Boyle Heights in LA was gentrified and the rent jumped by more than 40% since 2016, thus increasing the nationwide social issue of homelessness and further displacing minorities. This action of the State Government intervening by imposing rent caps relates to Keynes theories that this will help the state economically by doing so socially.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/11/business/economy/california-rent-control.html

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San Francisco has had rent control for decades, but it has not been spared from a housing squeeze and rising homelessness. A state law approved Wednesday aims to strengthen tenant protections. Credit Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times

California lawmakers approved a statewide rent cap on Wednesday covering millions of tenants, the biggest step yet in a surge of initiatives to address an affordable-housing crunch nationwide.

The bill limits annual rent increases to 5 percent after inflation and offers new barriers to eviction, providing a bit of housing security in a state with the nation's highest housing prices and a swelling homeless population.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who has made tenant protection a priority in his first year in office, led negotiations to strengthen the legislation. He has said he would sign the bill, approved as part of a flurry of activity in the final week of the legislative session.

The measure, affecting an estimated eight million residents of rental homes and apartments, was heavily pushed by tenants' groups. In an indication of how dire housing problems have become, it also garnered the support of the California Business Roundtable, representing leading employers, and was unopposed by the state's biggest landlords' group.

That dynamic reflected a momentous political swing. For a quarter-century, California law has sharply curbed the ability of localities to impose rent control. Now, the state itself has taken that step.

"The housing crisis is reaching every corner of America, where you're seeing high home prices, high rents, evictions and homelessness that we're all struggling to grapple with," said Assemblyman David Chiu, a San Francisco Democrat who was the bill's author. "Protecting tenants is a critical and obvious component of any strategy to address this."

A greater share of households nationwide are renting than at any point in a half-century. But only four states - California, Maryland, New Jersey and New York - have localities with some type of rent control, along with the District of Columbia. A coalition of tenants' organizations, propelled by rising housing costs and fears of displacement, is trying to change that.

In February, Oregon lawmakers became the first to pass statewide rent control, limiting increases to 7 percent annually plus inflation. New York, with Democrats newly in control of the State Legislature, strengthened rent regulations governing almost one million apartments in New York City.

Measures were recently introduced in Massachusetts and Florida to allow rent regulation in cities with a housing crunch - like Boston, Miami and Orlando.

Nationally, about a quarter of tenants pay more than half their income in rent, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. And California's challenges are particularly acute. After an adjustment for housing costs, it has the highest state poverty rate, 18.2 percent, about five percentage points above the national average, according to a Census Bureau report published Tuesday.

Homelessness has come to dominate the state's political conversation and prompted voters to approve several multibillion-dollar programs to build shelters and subsidized housing with services for people coming off the streets.

Despite those efforts, San Francisco's homeless population has grown by 17 percent since 2017, while the count in Los Angeles has increased by 16 percent since 2018. Over all, the state accounts for about half of the country's unsheltered homeless population of roughly 200,000.

That bleak picture - combined with three-hour commutes, cries for teacher housing and the sight of police officers sleeping in cars - is prompting legislators and organizers to propose ever more far-reaching steps.

State Senator Scott Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat, offered a bill that would essentially override local zoning to allow multiple-unit housing around transit stops and in suburbs where single-family homes are considered sacrosanct. The bill was shelved in its final committee hearing this year, but Mr. Wiener has vowed to keep pushing the idea.

Economists from both the left and the right have a well-established aversion to rent control, arguing that such policies ignore the message of rising prices, which is to build more housing. Studies in San Francisco and elsewhere show that price caps often prompt landlords to abandon the rental business by converting their units to owner-occupied homes. And since rent controls typically have no income threshold, they have been faulted for benefiting high-income tenants.

"Rent control is definitely having a moment across the country," said Jim Lapides, a vice president at the National Multifamily Housing Council, which opposes such restrictions. "But we're seeing folks turn to really shortsighted policy that will end up making the very problem worse."

But many of the same studies show that rent-control policies have been effective at shielding tenants from evictions and sudden rent increases, particularly the lower-income and older tenants who are at a high risk of becoming homeless. Also, many of the newer policies - which supporters prefer to call rent caps - are considerably less stringent than those in effect in places like New York and San Francisco for decades.

"Caps on rent increases, like the one proposed in California or the one recently passed in Oregon, are part of a new generation of rent-regulation policies that are trying to thread the needle by offering some form of protection against egregious rent hikes for vulnerable renters without stymieing much-needed new housing construction," said Elizabeth Kneebone, research director at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California.

Mr. Chiu's bill is technically an anti-gouging provision, with a 10-year limit, modeled on the typically short-term price caps instituted after disasters like floods and fires. It exempts dwellings less than 15 years old, to avoid discouraging construction, as well as most single-family homes. But it covers tenants of corporations like Invitation Homes, which built nationwide rental portfolios encompassing tens of thousands of properties that had been lost to foreclosure after the housing bust a decade ago.

According to the online real-estate marketplace Zillow, only about 7 percent of the California properties listed last year saw rent increases larger than allowed under the bill. But there could be a big effect in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods like Boyle Heights in Los Angeles, where typical rents on apartments not covered by the city's rent regulations have jumped more than 40 percent since 2016.

By limiting the steepest and most abrupt rent increases, the bill is also likely to reduce the incentive for hedge funds and other investors to buy buildings where they see a prospective payoff in replacing working-class occupants with tenants paying higher rents.

Sandra Zamora, a 27-year-old preschool teacher, lives in a one-bedroom apartment in Menlo Park, Calif., a short drive from Facebook's expanding headquarters. A year ago, Ms. Zamora's building got a new owner, and the rent jumped to $1,900 from $1,100, a rise of over 70 percent. Most of her neighbors left. Ms. Zamora stayed, adding a roommate to the 600-square-foot space and taking a weekend job as a barista.

"Having an $800 increase at once was really shocking," she said. "It just keeps me thinking every month: 'O.K., when is it going to happen? How much am I going to get increased the next month?' It's just a constant worry."

Even as more states begin to experiment with rent control, it has long existed in places like New York City, which intervened to address a housing shortage post-World War II, and San Francisco, where it was adopted in 1979.

Today it is common in many towns across New Jersey and in several cities in California, including Berkeley and Oakland, although the form differs by jurisdiction. Regulated apartments in New York City are mostly subject to rent caps even after a change in tenants, for example, while rent control in the Bay Area has no such provision.

In New York City, where almost half of the rental stock is regulated, a board determines the maximum rent increases each year; this year it approved a 1.5 percent cap on one-year leases, considerably lower than the limits passed in Oregon and California.

Cea Weaver, campaign coordinator of Housing Justice for All, a coalition of New York tenants that pushed for new rent laws, welcomed the outcome in California.

"Any victory helps to build a groundswell," she said. "There is a younger generation of people who see themselves as permanent renters, and they're demanding that our public policy catches up to that economic reality."

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 16 of the New York edition with the headline: California Passes Statewide Rent Control in Effort to Ease Housing Crisis. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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California Approves Statewide Rent Control to Ease Housing Crisis

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California lawmakers approved a statewide rent cap on Wednesday covering millions of tenants, the biggest step yet in a surge of initiatives to address an affordable-housing crunch nationwide. The bill limits annual rent increases to 5 percent after inflation and offers new barriers to eviction, providing a bit of housing security in a state with the nation's highest housing prices and a swelling homeless population.