The Verizon Strike Signals a Larger Economic Battle →

The Verizon case incorporates big themes in the economy—outsourcing, monopolies, automation, and inequality, to name a few. It reflects the gradual thinning out of good-paying, middle-class U.S. jobs. And in this election year, it forces politicians to choose—not just between labor and management, but between a future of shared prosperity for workers and one in which a lot of low-paid service employees cater to the bidding of the ultra-rich.
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In contract negotiations, Verizon asked to consolidate more call centers and route more calls overseas to facilitate outsourcing. The company also wants to redeploy existing technicians away from their homes for months at a time to service its network, which CWA sees as a deliberate effort to force workers to quit.
Verizon deems this all necessary because its landline business is hemorrhaging customers, as people cut the cords on their home phones. Verizon lost 1.4 million landline subscribers just last year. But the super-fast FiOS broadband network, also considered part of the wireline business, is booming, with sales up 9 percent last year. While total gross revenue was down 1.8 percent in 2015, the overall business made $8.9 billion. Only $300 million in savings came from reducing employee costs, according to Verizon’s own figures. In other words, the wireline business remains very profitable.
And Verizon’s wireless business, staffed mostly with non-union employees, is doing spectacularly, with obscenely high profit margins—nearly 40 cents on every dollar of revenue. The company could use that money to invest in high-demand services like FiOS, but except for one announcement this week of an expansion into Boston, FiOS build-out has stalled.
In sum, Verizon seems to be over-emphasizing the part of its business with non-union workers and under-emphasizing the part with a unionized labor force...
The shift to a foreign workforce has degraded the quality of the Verizon product—ask anyone who’s ever been on the phone for customer service with them. Verizon continues to outsource because, as one of just a handful of major telecoms, they don’t really have to worry about market share. In my area, Verizon was the only available seller of DSL broadband, competing only with more expensive cable service from Time Warner, until it divested from California wireline service this year, selling it to Frontier Communications. There’s simply no value in keeping quality high because customers are cornered, with nowhere else to go.

Uber and Lyft don't cover their cost of capital and rely on desperate workers →

Uber and Lyft are only economically viable because they offload their cost of capital -- the investment and depreciation on cars and the cost of keeping a driver fed and healthy -- onto the drivers, who are only willing to accept such a bad deal because the labor market sucks.
Businesses that can't cover their costs of capital are not sustainable without some source of subsidy (like the food-stamps for McDonald's and Walmart workers that we all pay for). If the labor market improves and workers decline to continue to subsidize rideshare companies they'll need to find some way to get the government or the capital markets to subsidize them or they'll collapse.

Robber Baron Recessions →

The argument begins with a seeming paradox about overall corporate behavior. You see, profits are at near-record highs, thanks to a substantial decline in the percentage of G.D.P. going to workers. You might think that these high profits imply high rates of return to investment. But corporations themselves clearly don’t see it that way: their investment in plant, equipment, and technology (as opposed to mergers and acquisitions) hasn’t taken off, even though they can raise money, whether by issuing bonds or by selling stocks, more cheaply than ever before.
How can this paradox be resolved? Well, suppose that those high corporate profits don’t represent returns on investment, but instead mainly reflect growing monopoly power. In that case many corporations would be in the position I just described: able to milk their businesses for cash, but with little reason to spend money on expanding capacity or improving service. The result would be what we see: an economy with high profits but low investment, even in the face of very low interest rates and high stock prices.
And such an economy wouldn’t just be one in which workers don’t share the benefits of rising productivity; it would also tend to have trouble achieving or sustaining full employment. Why? Because when investment is weak despite low interest rates, the Federal Reserve will too often find its efforts to fight recessions coming up short. So lack of competition can contribute to“secular stagnation” — that awkwardly-named but serious condition in which an economy tends to be depressed much or even most of the time, feeling prosperous only when spending is boosted by unsustainable asset or credit bubbles. If that sounds to you like the story of the U.S. economy since the 1990s, join the club.

Capitalism is coercive and creates patterns of deprivation, as explained by libertarian blockquotes →

Capitalism isn't the end of humanity, and I'm hopeful we'll discover a next, better set of institutions.

Whenever you accuse capitalism of being coercive and causing patterns of deprivation, certain people lose their shit. This is especially true of the libertarian crowd, which is extremely invested in insisting that capitalism is actually super-duper freedom with no coercion at all.
People who don’t like this message (in my experience) like to dismiss it as some kind of fringe Marxist thing, but you can actually piece it together entirely from libertarian and libertarian-favored thinkers. Watch me do this below.

Black Lives Matter and America’s long history of resisting civil rights protesters →

The majority of Americans haven't embraced the activists’ message or strategies, either; fewer than a third of Americans said Black Lives Matter focuses on real issues of racial discrimination while 55 percent said the movement distracts from those issues, according to a September PBS News Hour/Marist poll. Another poll conducted that month by NBC News and Wall Street Journal found that 32 percent of Americans had mostly positive views of the movement; 29 percent had mostly negative views and 39 percent were neutral.
Such tepid acceptance of black activism isn't surprising. This country has a history of disapproving of civil rights protests and demonstrations. And perhaps nothing better demonstrates that dynamic than the movement of the 1960s.
Today, sit-ins, freedom rides and marches for voting rights are viewed with historical reverence. Schoolchildren across the country memorize Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Conservatives invoke the moral authority of the civil rights movement as a model for their own activism. Civil rights workers are viewed as national heroes.
But in their day, activists were met with widespread disapproval. A review of polling data from the 1960s paints a picture of an America in which the majority of people felt such protest actions would hurt, not help, African Americans’ fight for equality...

House panel votes to make women register for the draft →

The proposal passed the House Armed Services Committee without support from its sponsor, Iraq War veteran Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., who introduced the measure as a way to force congressional conversation about the role of women in the military.
But several Republicans broke ranks with their committee counterparts to support the idea of drafting women for military service, until now a possibility solely reserved for men.

How the Other Fifth Lives →

For years now, people have been talking about the insulated world of the top 1 percent of Americans, but the top 20 percent of the income distribution is also steadily separating itself — by geography and by education as well as by income.
...Smeeding finds that the gap between the average income of households with children in the top quintile and households with children in the middle quintile has grown, in inflation-adjusted dollars, from $68,600 to $169,300 — that’s 147 percent.
In an earlier paper, Smeeding and two co-authors wrote that
we have seen a threefold increase between 1972 and 2007 in top-decile spending on children, an increase that suggests that parents at the top may be investing in ever more high-quality day care and babysitting, private schooling, books and tutoring, and college tuition and fees.
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Equally or perhaps more important, the affluent dominate the small percentage of the electorate that makes campaign contributions.
In a September 2015 essay, “The Dangerous Separation of the American Upper Middle Class,” Richard Reeves, a senior fellow at Brookings, writes:
The top fifth have been prospering while the majority lags behind. But the separation is not just economic. Gaps are growing on a whole range of dimensions, including family structure, education, lifestyle, and geography. Indeed, these dimensions of advantage appear to be clustering more tightly together, each thereby amplifying the effect of the other.

The secret rules of the internet →

Mora-Blanco is one of more than a dozen current and former employees and contractors of major internet platforms from YouTube to Facebook who spoke to us candidly about the dawn of content moderation. Many of these individuals are going public with their experiences for the first time. Their stories reveal how the boundaries of free speech were drawn during a period of explosive growth for a high-stakes public domain, one that did not exist for most of human history. As law professor Jeffrey Rosen first said many years ago of Facebook, these platforms have "more power in determining who can speak and who can be heard around the globe than any Supreme Court justice, any king or any president."