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Black Commmentator

The December unemployment statistics have come and been pondered. The jobless rate declined from 7.0 percent to 6.7 percent over the month, the lowest it's been since President Obama took office.

Some commentators took that to indicate significant progress and the White House eagerly touted the figures. However, most economists agreed that the decrease in the official percentage rate is mostly due to the fact that the number of people actually working and actively looking for work continues to shrink.

While 74,000 new jobs came on line in December a smaller percentage of workers over 16 years old have jobs than at any time in the last 30 years.

The unemployment rate for African American workers fell from 12.5 percent in November to 11.9 percent in December. Some media observers chalked this decease up to progress in the jobs picture for the black community. The real picture taken from the Labor Department report is quite different and alarming.

The percentage decline in the jobless rate is "almost entirely due to people leaving the labor force as the number of people reported employed in December only rose by 143,000, just enough to keep the employment-to-population ratio constant," observed Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. "Blacks disproportionately left the labor market, with the labor force participation rate for African Americans dropping by 0.3 percentage points to 60.2 percent, the lowest rate since December of 1977. The rate for African American men fell 0.7 pp to 65.6 percent, the lowest on record."

The jobless rate for young African Americans (16-19 years old) was 38.2 at the beginning of last year and fluctuated up and down a few points over the following months. It dipped from 35.7percent in November to 35.5 percent in December.

"Each month, the official unemployment rate provides the share of the labor force unemployed in that month," wrote Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute. "But this understates the number of people who are unemployed at some point over a longer period, since someone who is employed in one month may become unemployed the next, and vice versa. Therefore, the official annual unemployment rate - which is actually the average monthly unemployment rate for the year - is much lower than the share of the workforce that experienced unemployment at some point during the year. The average monthly unemployment rate in 2013 was 7.4 percent, but we estimate that 12.7 percent of the workforce, or more than one out of every eight workers, was unemployed at some point in 2013." ...(Click title for more)

Jan 14, 2014 - THE CHICAGO Teachers Union's House of Delegates demonstrated at its first meeting of the year that the union wants to shake up the city and state political establishment.

In a sweeping majority vote, representatives of the union's 23,000 members passed a resolution to launch an Independent Political Organization (IPO). The goal of the initiative is to unite progressive groups, nonprofit organizations and unions around political campaigns that have the potential to sustain social movements and activism, rather than empowering Democratic Party candidates who have turned their back on teachers and public education.

The resolution concludes:

    RESOLVED that the Chicago Teachers Union, along with key allies in the progressive labor movement and amongst progressive community organizations will launch an independent political organization (IPO) that is capable of leading strong electoral and legislative campaigns to benefit working families, our active and retired members, and our communities, and be it further

    RESOLVED that the IPO will enable a broad multitude of diverse organizations to establish a pipeline for candidate development to identify and train people who are part of our movements to become elected officials; and that such people are dedicated to our shared vision, will fully support campaigns that advocate for our needs, and will be held accountable to the people who helped put them in office, and be it finally

    RESOLVED that the IPO will engage in year-round community outreach and campaign to build public support for our platform and political objectives, not just during the election season; and the IPO's goal is to develop, elect and support candidates to be advocates for those objectives, not just to become members of elective office.

The commitment to create an IPO is indicative of the gut-level feeling among teachers and others who want to see social justice that "politics as usual"--in a state dominated by the Democrats at every level--won't bring about the kind of change so clearly needed in our society, where access to jobs, housing, health care and education for ordinary people is going down the tubes while corporate profits shoot through the roof.

The initiative taken by the CTU can, with the support of its allies, have significant implications for how social justice movements in Chicago can channel their energies around electoral politics.

Whether the IPO will be a space that can cultivate truly independent candidates like Kshama Sawant--the Socialist Alternative candidate who won a seat on the Seattle City Council last November--remains to be seen. For certain, her campaign and the radical left proposals it put forward are the kind that the IPO would potentially support....(Click title for more)

Embattled Public Schools Fight Privatization

Jan 11, 2014 - China will depend upon advances in technology, especially in the field of robotics, to maintain its competitive economic edge, especially as its population ages and the size of its workforce declines.

The growth of robotics is also likely to bring about major societal changes, including reshaping the world of work, not only in manufacturing but in service sectors including education and health care. According to the International Federation of Robotics, China's demand for robots will increase from 26,000 to 35,000 through 2015, and is likely to increase dramatically thereafter.

If China is to achieve its goals in relation to robotics, then solutions must be not just technical. In addition, there are at least three other major challenges that must be overcome. The first is the need to achieve clarity and certainty with regard to the legal and ethical issues involved. For example, driverless cars are already available and have been legislated in several American states. However, ethical standards, product liability, agency, safety standards, insurance and other legal issues will need to be resolved so that people developing this industry will have enough certainty to risk the substantial investment required.

Among the legal issues that must be resolved are:

* Legal definition of "robot." The law will have to have a clear definition of what exactly is meant by "robot?" Just as cyber law had to depend upon extending traditional metaphors and analogies to contexts involving the Internet, so too appropriate legal metaphors must emerge which will allow government, courts and others to design the appropriate legal infrastructure that will provide the necessary guidance for this new industry to evolve.

* Balance. The law is about conflict and the need to balance competing interests. The design of legal rules that govern robotics will need to achieve the appropriate balance between encouraging innovation through robotics and related technologies and ensuring public safety, particularly in the context of autonomous robots.

* Agency issues. The law of agency is especially relevant to robotics and covers the legal principles governing the liability when one person acts on behalf of another. An example is a software-only system such as automated trading agents which have caused serious "flash crashes" in share markets in the United States....(Click title for more)

By Tim Kreider

Sometime in the past couple of generations, capitalism's victory over our hearts and minds seems to have become complete, in that hardly anyone even notices it anymore.

It's a monoculture, taken for granted, like monogamy, or monotheism, or having one sun. It's hard to think of any "serious" literary writers in the United States under the age of fifty who engage the big political issues of our time as directly as Boomer authors like Paul Auster ("Leviathan"), Thomas Pynchon ("Vineland"), or Robert Stone ("A Flag for Sunrise"), let alone in the way that muckraker novelists like Upton Sinclair used to.1 When we call literary writers "political" today, we're usually talking about identity politics. If historians or critics fifty years from now were to read most of our contemporary literary fiction, they might well infer that our main societal problems were issues with our parents, bad relationships, and death. If they were looking for any indication that we were even dimly aware of the burgeoning global conflict between democracy and capitalism, or of the abyssal catastrophe our civilization was just beginning to spill over the brink of, they might need to turn to books that have that embarrassing little Saturn-and-spaceship sticker on the spine. That is, to science fiction.2

Science fiction is an inherently political genre, in that any future or alternate history it imagines is a wish about How Things Should Be (even if it's reflected darkly in a warning about how they might turn out). And How Things Should Be is the central question and struggle of politics. It is also, I'd argue, an inherently liberal genre (its many conservative practitioners notwithstanding), in that it sees the status quo as contingent, a historical accident, whereas conservatism holds it to be inevitable, natural, and therefore just. The meta-premise of all science fiction is that nothing can be taken for granted. That it's still anybody's ballgame.

Kim Stanley Robinson is generally acknowledged as one of the greatest living science-fiction writers; collectively, the three novels of his "Mars" trilogy-"Red Mars," "Green Mars," and "Blue Mars"-have won all the major science-fiction and fantasy awards. He is also, for my money, one of the most important political writers working in America today. In his Mars novels, Robinson uses the Red Planet as a historical tabula rasa, a template for creating a saner, more sustainable, and more just human society. What's most powerful about the Mars books as political novels is that they envision a credible utopia, one that doesn't-unlike, say, Skinner's "Walden Two"-rely on a revision of human nature. Robinson's characters are cynics, opportunists, idealists, narcissists, drug-dependent, manic-depressive, borderline Asperger's, and emotionally frozen survivors of abuse, but with all their flaws and conflicting agendas they manage to remake their world in more humane and equitable form.

The first wave of his Martian settlers are all scientists, who are no more perfect than any other human beings but have been rigorously trained in a kind of intellectual integrity. Robinson argues that, now that climate change has become a matter of life and death for the species, it's time for scientists to abandon their scrupulous neutrality and enter into the messy arena of politics. Essentially, Robinson attempts to apply scientific thinking to politics, approaching it less like pure physics, in which one infallible equation / ideology explains and answers everything, than like engineering-a process of what F.D.R. once called "bold, persistent experimentation," finding out what works and combining successful elements to synthesize something new. He scavenges ideas from the American Constitution, the Swiss confederacy, "the guild socialism of Great Britain, Yugoslavian worker management, Mondragon ownership, Kerala land tenure, and so on" to construct his utopias. The major platform planks these methods lead him to in his books are:

--common stewardship-not ownership-of the land, water, and air an economic system based on ecological reality

--divesting central governments of most of their power and diffusing it among local communities

--the basics of existence, like health care, removed from the cruelties of the free market

--the application of democratic principles like self-determination and equality in the workplace-which, in practice, means small co-ops instead of vast, hierarchical, exploitative corporations-and,

--a reverence for the natural world codified into law.

Depending on your own politics, this may sound like millennia-overdue common sense or a bong-fuelled 3 A.M. wish list, but there's no arguing that to implement it in the real world circa 2013 would be, literally, revolutionary. My own bet would be that either your grandchildren are going to be living by some of these precepts, or else they won't be living at all. ...(Click title for more)

Solidarity, Carl Davidson, CCDS