Logo for The Tapback from Civic Action [[link removed]]
THE EMPEROR'S WARDROBE
Chase Bank CEO Jamie Dimon further undermined the CEO worship at the core of neoliberal economics by once again opening his mouth [[link removed]] and letting dumb stuff trickle out . While the longtime bank CEO has no particular expertise in the field of artificial intelligence, that didn’t stop him from confidently telling a Bloomberg TV audience that AI means “ your children are going to live to 100 and…literally they’ll probably be working three-and-a-half days a week .” So apparently Dimon is thinking this is going to be the first technology in history to magically reduce work time without the sort of political struggle that’s always opposed by the Chase CEOs of the world — unless of course, that when he said "your children" he didn't mean, well, your children.
Dimon then went on to ponder the overall social impact of technology, musing that “ the biggest negative in my view is AI being used by bad people to do bad things .” Yep, that’s the deep thought of one of the most powerful CEOs in the country: the risk of AI is "bad" people doing "bad" things with it. That’s the sort of sophistication and risk assessment we’re talking about at the highest levels of global finance. And some people think this guy and his ilk are the heroes of our economy?
Make it make sense.
Three Numbers [[link removed]]
2.4 million [[link removed]] people are employed as farmworkers [[link removed]] in the United States. A large proportion are immigrants, many are undocumented, and all are excluded from the basic organizing rights guaranteed to most other workers at the federal level by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.
$14.22 an hour [[link removed]] was the average wage paid [[link removed]] to childcare workers in 2022. This is about half of the average wage for US workers overall.
$20 an hour [[link removed]] in additional profits were banked by Amazon through an algorithm [[link removed]] called Project Nessie, the FTC alleges in a new lawsuit. Nessie was designed to systematically test whether rivals like Target would follow suit when Amazon raised prices on specific items , with the goal of effectively eliminating price competition.
A Chart [[link removed]]
Don't cal it a comeback, but as the chart below from EPI [[link removed]] shows, the number of documented child labor violations has more than doubled over the past 10 years. Given how few resources go into enforcing labor laws, the full extent of the problem is likely dramatically larger — and legalized child labor is on the rise too.
A few years ago, it would have been almost impossible for most of us to imagine a political constituency for the return of child labor … but that’s why most of us don’t work for the right-wing Foundation for Government Accountability. That’s the Florida group behind the comprehensive — and to date, startlingly successful — campaign to normalize child labor as part of an overall effort to weaken public institutions in general. It's certainly a bold plan, but you do have to wonder if these folks know the basic plot of Newsies .
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Blowing up the Groupchat [[link removed]]
Nobel prize winner Angus Deaton has a lot to say about his chosen profession of economics and its deep failure to address the crisis of poverty and inequality , and it's all good stuff . In a lively NPR interview [[link removed]] about his new book, Deaton explains that when he first came to the US during the Reagan era, he was shocked at the extent to which his colleagues did not care about inequality and rejected any government role in the economy .
One result of economists failing to take inequality seriously, Deaton argues, is the unfortunate trend of declining US life expectancy, primarily due to sharp increases in deaths from drug abuse and suicide. As Deaton and fellow econom ist Anne Case found, the increase in these so-called "deaths of despair" is directly tied to a lack of good jobs… which in turn follows from the pursuit of particular neoliberal economic policies. In response, Deaton calls on his fellow economists to think harder and advance policies that promote higher incomes for workers and provide support for communities, and asks us all to “ abandon our sole fixation on money as a measure of human wellbeing ."
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