"We experience class shame when we internalise social situations, and defeats, over which we have little control. But just at the point where we have least control, it’s important to our self-respect, and our hope for the future, to claim some sliver of responsibility. The modern version of the self-help ethos can appeal to the poor precisely because it operates on this emotional contradiction. It is exemplary of what the American cultural theorist Lauren Berlant called “cruel optimism”. It makes people believe that anyone can achieve anything they want if they work hard enough. But that belief, because it is a fantasy, actively impedes the goal of personal flourishing that makes the fantasy appealing.

Let’s consider the fantasy more closely. Today’s self-help mantra, as Jen Sincero, author of You Are a Badass (2013) puts it, is that “if you want something badly enough, and decide that you will get it, you will”. This is a fantasy of infinitude, of a world overflowing with abundant wealth and opportunity for everyone. No one need clean, serve hot food, work tills, drive forklift trucks, enter data or deliver mail if they don’t want to. Everyone can be a millionaire “influencer” or CEO. No one is fundamentally limited by the gifts, or disabilities, that they were born with, let alone by being born into a particular class, city or culture. There is nothing put wrong by brute luck that can’t be put right by dedication."

https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2022/02/the-cruelties-of-self-help-culture

"Dr. Kaitlyn Henderson, a senior research adviser with Oxfam America’s U.S. Domestic Policy Program, who authored the report, told me in an interview that “it is shocking, especially considering that this is the highest [that] inflation has been in four decades.”

Even those making $15 an hour earn barely enough to get by. The supposedly high upper limit “breaks down to $31,200 a year—before taxes,” explained Henderson. This means they “have a harder time keeping a roof over their head and food on the table. This is not enough for an individual to live [on], much less a working family.”

If this crisis is not apparent to the public, we can thank institutions like CEI that spread nonsense about wages “naturally” rising, and the corporate media’s near-exclusive focus on the number of jobs over the quality of jobs and pay. Media outlets routinely obscure the catastrophe of low wages each month when the Labor Department’s jobs report generates stories that focus on employment numbers and little else."

"CBPP backs myriad basic federal policies to fix this problem, including paid leave and federal funding for child care and home health care. Similarly, Oxfam America backs straightforward solutions such as federal funding boosts as well as the passage of the Raise the Wage Act, which would gradually raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $15 an hour—hardly a big ask 10 years after the Fight for Fifteen movement, and already inadequate to meet working people’s needs.

The problem of low wages in the U.S. ought to shock us, in spite of the pro-corporate optimism about the economy and the media’s refusal to amplify the problem. The solutions are obvious, easy, and hardly radical."

https://independentmediainstitute.org/publisher-portal/?article_id=9873

With these, I've finished sending the Made In China issues published so far. The next one will be sent in probably a few months

"The authors find that the average carbon footprint in the top 1% of emitters was more than 75-times higher than in the bottom 50%.

“The inequality is just insane,” the lead author of the study tells Carbon Brief. “If we want to reduce our carbon emissions, we really need to do something about the consumption patterns of the super-rich.”

A scientist not involved in the research says that “we often hear that actions taken in Europe or the US are meaningless when compared to the industrial emissions of China, or the effects of rapid population growth in Africa. This paper exposes these claims as wilfully ignorant, at best”."

https://www.carbonbrief.org/eradicating-extreme-poverty-would-raise-global-emissions-by-less-than-1

"Nearly 50 years ago, long before smartphones and social media, the social critic Lewis Mumford put a name to the way that complex technological systems offer a share in their benefits in exchange for compliance. He called it a “bribe.” With this label, Mumford sought to acknowledge the genuine plentitude that technological systems make available to many people, while emphasizing that this is not an offer of a gift but of a deal. Surrender to the power of complex technological systems — allow them to oversee, track, quantify, guide, manipulate, grade, nudge, and surveil you — and the system will offer you back an appealing share in its spoils. What is good for the growth of the technological system is presented as also being good for the individual, and as proof of this, here is something new and shiny. Sure, that shiny new thing is keeping tabs on you (and feeding all of that information back to the larger technological system), but it also lets you do things you genuinely could not do before."

https://reallifemag.com/the-magnificent-bribe/

The insecure economy

Amid the rising cost of living, the government is hiding behind falling unemployment figures while workers in almost every industry continue to suffer, writes Ella Glover.

“I work, and they say work is supposed to pay [but] my income seems to go onto the bills and council tax,” Zara, a single mother of three, told LBC host James O’Brien through tears last week. “I turned the boiler off a long time ago, and we use hot water bottles.” Due to the rising cost of living, Zara and her children are surviving off only one meal a day – despite her working full time.

As Zara’s story shows, work doesn’t mean security. Particularly when that work is casual, part-time or low-paid. That’s why, when the Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced last week that unemployment figures have returned to their pre-pandemic levels of 3.9 per cent and are forecast to drop year-on-year until 2026, it could hardly be considered an achievement. After all, what do employment rates tell us when full-time workers are going without basic necessities?

As it stands, unemployment figures, while outwardly promising, are nothing but a sticking plaster for the crumbling conditions of the UK labour market. Insecurity in the UK’s job market is rife and, according to a new report by think tanks Autonomy and the Centre for Labour and Social Studies (CLASS), insecurity has risen in 18 out of the 20 industries it analysed and across all of the nine main occupational groups since 2010, despite unemployment figures dropping consistently since 2005. Work insecurity has also risen across all regions, races and ages, with BAME people, women and young people hit the hardest. For that reason, the report, titled “The Insecure Economy”, argues that unemployment is an inadequate metric by which to measure the state of the UK’s labour market.

Insecure and unstable working conditions are no longer the preserve of the most precarious workers, such as food couriers and bar staff on low-paid, zero-hour contracts. Now, insecurity has seeped into the health and social care sector, education, and even academia, which has historically been considered middle-class. All have seen increased casualisation and the introduction of zero-hour contracts over the last few decades.

Bogus self-employment, forced self-employment, zero-hour contracts and fire and rehire practices are now rampant in the UK workforce, having been accelerated by the pandemic. Sunak’s furlough scheme may have kept unemployment down, but ensuring people can work isn’t enough to protect them from rising costs which are forcing some to choose between keeping their heating on and feeding themselves.

In-work poverty – or the number of people living below the poverty line despite earning a wage – has been on the rise, with the chance of households with two full-time workers being plunged into poverty more than doubling over the last two decades. Indeed, even before the pandemic, one in six working households were living in poverty, and more than 30 per cent of couple households with one full-time earner were in poverty – nearly as high as the rate of hardship for families without any full-time workers.

https://www.huckmag.com/perspectives/uk-unemployment-is-falling-but-poverty-isnt/