Category - Race

Kudos to the folks at the Center for Constitutional Rights and their allies in the struggle to end exploitative telephone contracts in New York state prisons. The problem is not restricted to New York, but that’s where the Telephone Justice coalition has been focusing its efforts.

Typically, states receive kickback commissions from the phone companies who receive the contract, creating a situation in which there is no incentive to seek competitive bids. Unsurprisingly rates for such calls are well above market rates, as much as $6 per minute. The phone companies and prison officials justify the high prices by saying there is a need for added security measures. There is little evidence to justify this claim, especially since calls from all Federal prisons cost just 7¢ a minute.

In any case, the records show that companies and states often make millions of dollars in profits from surcharges and inflated per-minute rates. In New York State, 57.5 percent of the profits - over $200 million since 1996 - were kicked back to the state in the form of commissions.

So it turns out that crime does pay, only it’s the state and telephone companies that are getting paid, not the perpetrator or victim of the crime. The joys of being the middleman. Is it possible that schemes like this contribute to state legislatures’ ongoing practice of finding new ways to put and keep people in jail, from “three strikes” laws to mandatory minimums for victimless crimes? State governments like to find ways to generate revenue without imposing general taxes, and ripping money off from the families of inmates is probably a good way to do so without incurring the wrath of most voters. That’s just one of the arguments made by lawyers at the CCR who helped to end this practice.

The contracts are also unjustifiable as a matter of public policy. The profits returned to the states are treated as income - in New York, they are said to pay for basic prisoner services such as health care and release clothes - and this system is analogous to an unlegislated, regressive, and highly selective tax, under which specific individuals are asked to bear the financial burdens that are the proper responsibility of the state. By imposing such burdens on families of prisoners, the practice resembles a form of collective punishment.

Given the class divide in who goes to jail, and the divide in who tends to vote, relatively few voters are from families with someone in jail. So the people who are being squeezed have no clout with the lawmakers. Well, in New York they’ve managed to earn some clout through the efforts of the Telephone Justice coalition, which was launched by the CCR.

Since 1999, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) has been fighting on the ground and in the courts to end the exploitative telephone contract between New York State and MCI/Verizon which charged family members 630% more for collect phone calls from their loved ones in prison than the average consumer. Single-carrier collect call systems are the norm for telephone service in prisons across the United States. Prisoners may only call collect, and loved ones who accept the calls must accept the terms dictated by the chosen phone company. At a time when prisoners are increasingly housed in facilities hundreds of miles away from their home communities, telephones become for many the only way to stay in touch.

This year, after three years of tireless work, we won. [cont’d]

Next step: take the campaign to all the other states. (See the campaign’s endorsers page for links to some other telephone justice efforts around the country.

Marcellus Andrews is guest blogging at On the Commons and has a nice essay on how the world looks to an economist who’s “black and green”–an African American with a passion for the environment. “Somewhere along the way, I became a bit green in my views on economic life and policy, though my ‘greenness’ has a distinctly black undertone.”

Further down in his essay, Andrews raising the question of how unequal racial power might force its way into scenarios that seem to be so wonderfully egalitarian, like the proposed “Sky Trust.” (See this previous Econ-Atrocity.)

…Yet, even as I struggle with mathematical models exploring all the ways that such “sky trust” type systems reconcile efficiency and justice in a narrow sense, my studies evade the ruthless bio-politics of inequality bound to turn “the commons” into another hierarchy of the powerful over the vulnerable. The vulnerable forever stand apart and below the powerful – even green, progressive power – objects of charity or even redistributive justice, but objects nonetheless. Charity becomes thin, stingy, evincing slight degrees of sadism when, when the vulnerable are the wrong color.

Green power, like all power in divided societies, will balance the needs of rulers and ruled, whether the rulers are a clique, a board of directors, or a voting majority with blood-based antagonism toward the Others. Green power – the use of public and private power informed by scientific, particularly ecological, and economic reason – is far more likely to be humane than other forms of power precisely because it is imbued with a sense of limits and balance. Indeed, green power, at its best, constructs better ways of pricing and managing collective risks, thereby mitigating the destruction of natural capital.

But our individual, family and communal access to resources and the resulting unequal control of development are shaped by the bio-political facts of society: we are born into families and communities of color, class, region, religion and language, inheriting access to resources and levers of power or the abyss of powerlessness. We inherit and the bequeath the social wars that grant us access to power or leave us in weakness, even the power to shift policy in a green direction.

As you can see, I am struggling with the uneasy relationship between sustainability and equality in a market and technology driven world economy, where economic and social innovation must now redesign capitalism to make it cleaner and ecologically viable, yet where the mechanisms of social/racial inheritance threaten to reinforce bio-political and social power in unacceptable ways. I ask your patience and your help as I work through the problematic economics of equality and sustainability, hardened as I am by my American blackness. I want to think about the economics of the commons in light of the fact that green power is unlikely to be shared across American color lines, even as it reconciles the way we make a living to the life process of the Earth….

More power, so to speak, to Andrews for his willingness and ability to face the demons we might wish away. A sky trust will be a great institution for many reasons, but it will not only change society, but be affected by the pre-existing features of society in a give-and-take sort of way. Not all of them will necessarily be for the best.

Scientific American is reporting on a an article in the journal Neuron that describes brain scanning experiments intended to see if poorer people react differently than richer people to opportunities to gain a little extra money.

The microeconomic law of diminishing marginal utility states that while accumulating a good—pretzels, pencils, nickels, whatever—each successive unit of that good will be less satisfying to acquire than the one before it. Finding a shiny quarter on the street is a real thrill. But, if you are carrying around a bag of coins, acquiring another one does not seem nearly as exciting. In fact, would you even bother to pick it up?

That hesitation is what researchers at the University of Cambridge in England were banking on when they designed a study to see if the haves catch on more slowly than the have-nots when it comes to reward-based learning. Reporting in the current issue of Neuron, the scientists reveal that when a small sum of money is on the line, poorer people learn quickly how to maximize their profits, leaving their wealthier counterparts in the dust.

The 2006 Election(s)
By John J. Fitzgerald

The 2006 Election cycle has come and gone. Just like the 2006 Hurricane season it has not performed exactly as predicted, but it has left some changes in its wake. We might actually have experienced several different elections rather than just one. A lot of decision-making got formalized on the 7th of November.

Here are some of the highlights:

Dear Readers — the following is an email message I sent to all fellow faculty at Western New England College where I teach. I am including it here based on an invitation I received to share it with all readers of this Blog. I am reproducing it here without editing.

Mike Meeropol (econ Prof, Western New England College, Springfield, MA)

I am writing this e-mail because I am thoroughly disgusted with the effort to “Willie Horton” the candidacy of Deval Patrick for Governor of Massachusetts. I hope some of you inclined not to read this will force yourself to do so … Even people who were not inclined to support Mr. Patrick for Governor should respond to the vicious advertising campaign.

By Geert Dhondt, Staff Economist

Madness surrounds all of us. Luckily the world is full of contradictions. While capitalism, barbarism and madness might seem all around us, so is its opposite, its negation. Thus, if we look hard enough we can recognize the new society in the present and we will be able to see the emergence of revolutionary possibilities. In the U.S., C.L.R. James was one of the first to clearly articulate the importance of independent Black struggles in creating these openings.

C.L.R. James was born in 1901 in Trinidad. In 1932 he left Trinidad for England where he immersed himself in the Pan-African and Trotskyist movements and worked as a cricket reporter. In 1938, on Trotsky’s request, he came to the U.S. to reinvigorate the American Trotskyist movement. By the time James was deported in 1952, he had broken with Trotsky’s conception of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers’ state and developed instead a critique of state capitalism; he had broken with Lenin’s conception of the vanguard party and emphasized a different role for Marxist organizations and intellectuals; he also developed an important analysis of the role of independent Black struggle.

By Brenda Wyss, CPE Staff Economist

Jamaica is hemorrhaging nurses and teachers. The Jamaica Gleaner reports that Jamaica loses roughly 8% of its RNs and more than 20% of its specialist nurses annually. Most go to the US or the UK. The US, with 97.2 nurses per 10,000 people, actively recruits nurses from Jamaica, a country with only 11.3 nurses per 10,000 people. Meanwhile, US and British schoolteacher work programs recruit Jamaican teachers for inner city schools in New York City and London. In 2001 alone, 3% of Jamaica’s teachers (almost 500 educators) left the island to accept temporary assignments abroad. Jamaica’s Ministry of Education estimates the country
lost 2,000 teachers between 2000 and 2002. And Jamaica’s brain drain is not limited to nurses and teachers. In fact, an IMF report estimates that more than 60% of all Jamaicans with tertiary education have migrated to the US.

Jamaica’s chronically under-resourced health and education sectors can ill afford the loss of skill. In its 2001 Annual Report, Jamaica’s Ministry of Health reported nationwide vacancy rates of 37% for RN positions, 28% for public health nurses, 17% for nurse practitioners, and 61% for assistant nurses. At the same time, a shortage of trained teachers threatens educational quality. While Jamaica has trained increasing numbers of teachers over the years, the fraction of teachers serving in Jamaica’s schools who are fully trained has declined. Between the 1990-91 and 1996-97 school years, the total share of trained teachers decreased by 11%.

By Noah Enelow

You would think the discovery of massive natural gas deposits in the heart of a developing country would present itself as an enormous windfall. All this country would have to do is find a source of financing, extract and refine the gas, sell part of it on the world market, and keep the rest, along with the profits, for domestic development.

Unfortunately, in Bolivia it hasn’t worked out quite so rosily. The battle over natural gas has exacerbated the country’s class and ethnic tensions to the point of warfare. Dozens of people have been killed in massive street protests; the president has resigned; the country is in chaos. What happened?

Upon first glance at the problem, there appear to be two root causes. The first issue was that the gas would have had to be exported through Chile, a longtime rival of Bolivia, which usurped Bolivia’s only seaport over a hundred years ago. The deal would thus enrich Chilean export companies at the expense of the Bolivians. The second issue was that the extraction and refining of the gas were to be undertaken entirely by a multinational company, Repsol-YPF. Their contract, signed long before the latest and largest gas deposits were discovered, was to provide the Bolivian public sector with 18% of the profits from sales. The rest would leave the country - a typical pattern for extractive industries in underdeveloped countries.

But those two issues are the just the tip of the iceberg. The peasants who make up the bulk of the protesters have good reason to believe they’d never see a dime of even those meager profits. Over the last two centuries, numerous raw materials have been extracted from Bolivia: silver, rubber, guano, and tin. The result? Underdevelopment, poverty, and disease. The leading cash crop of Bolivia, coca leaf, has been targeted for eradication by both the domestic government and the United States, as part of the “War on Drugs”.

Furthermore, as Bolivia has become increasingly beholden to the IMF’s structural adjustment program, life has steadily grown worse for the poor. In the last 3 years, the poorest 10% of the people have seen their incomes decline 15%, as the wealthiest 10% have seen their incomes increase 16%. Social services have been slashed while taxes have increased, to pay off the country’s high debt. How far can one expect a country to tighten its belt when its poverty rate is 70%?

Finally, the entire conflict is rife with ethnic and class tensions. The Bolivian elites are overwhelmingly of Spanish descent, while the poor are overwhelmingly indigenous. As a group, the former have proven untrustworthy, unaccountable, and corrupt; the latter grow more irate by the day.

The resignation of the U.S.-endorsed president, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, who supported the gas plan, thus represents a victory for the poor. But the struggle is not over. The primary representative of the indigenous people, the self-described socialist and coca grower Evo Morales, in a recent speech declared the West a “culture of death”; meanwhile, in Sanchez’s resignation speech, he referred to Morales as a “narco-syndicalist” and warned of the power of the coca growers.

Is an agreement possible? A broad, highly organized coalition of labor and indigenous groups, the National Coalition in Defense of our Gas, has drawn up a list of demands. These include the formation of a constituent assembly to ensure greater popular participation in government, and the re-nationalization of Bolivia’s gas resources. The coalition has given the new president, Carlos Mesa, a 90-day truce to allow him to implement their demands. Will the two sides of Bolivia forge a new social contract, or will the country’s exports continue to enrich the few while leaving the many impoverished? Stay tuned.

References:

The Americas.org website contains a fantastic wealth of information about Bolivia. Numerous alternative sources and viewpoints are present alongside updates from the BBC and mainstream media.

Laura Carlsen. “Resources War: Lessons From Bolivia.”

Newton Garver, “Bolivia in Turmoil“, Counterpunch 10/17/03.

Keith Slack, “Poor Vs. Profit in Bolivian Revolt.”

(c) 2003 Center for Popular Economics

Econ-Atrocities are a periodic publication of the Center for Popular Economics. They are the work of their authors and reflect their author’s opinions and analyses. CPE does not necessarily endorse any particular idea expressed in these articles.

By Rob Fetter and Stephanie Luce, CPE Staff Economists

Since the Bilingual Education Act of 1968 provided federal funding to school districts to assist them in adopting bilingual education programs, bilingual programs in many languages across the U.S. have flourished. Those committed to bilingual education continue to push their states and school districts to improve their programs, but bilingual education advocates have a new challenge: to fight off ballot initiatives that would eliminate the successes won to date.

On November 5, voters in Massachusetts and Colorado will vote on ballot initiatives that would end existing bilingual education programs in both states. The proposed initiatives - Constitutional Amendment 31 in Colorado and Question 2 in Massachusetts - would require students to go through a one-year “structured English immersion” program. Teaching materials would be in English only. After the first year, students would be integrated into regular classrooms and be prohibited from speaking in their native language. Further, teachers could be personally sued if found speaking in other languages in the classroom, and barred from public employment for five years. English learners in grades 2 and higher would have to take an annual test for English proficiency.

By Kiaran Honderich, CPE Staff Economist

(Reprinted from CPE’s newsletter, “The Popular Economist,” Spring, 2002.)

Over the last year activists have made important progress in the battle against global AIDS. Developing countries won a partial victory at the WTO ministerial meeting in Doha in November, affirming their right to produce affordable generic drugs in a health crisis. And the appalling mainstream consensus that treatment with antiretroviral drugs was too expensive and complex to be made available in poor countries–writing off literally tens of millions of lives at a stroke–is finally giving way to acknowledgement that treatment is possible in resource-poor settings, although it seems likely to be rolled out in a way that neglects rural populations. These battles are by no means finished–the WTO is still hashing out whether poor countries too small to produce their own generic drugs should be permitted to import them from another country; if Bush gains fast track authority then he will be able to take back the gains of Doha; and South Africa’s ANC government is being dragged kicking and screaming by activists towards the treatment programs that its country needs–but real progress is being made.

By Liz Stanton, CPE Staff Economist

1. You’ve Been Psychologically Conditioned To Want a Diamond. The diamond engagement ring is a 63-year-old invention of N.W.Ayer advertising agency. The De Beers diamond cartel contracted N.W.Ayer to create a demand for what are, essentially, useless hunks of rock.
2. Diamonds are Priced Well Above Their Value. The De Beers cartel has systematically held diamond prices at levels far greater than their abundance would generate under anything even remotely resembling perfect competition. All diamonds not already under its control are bought by the cartel, and then the De Beers cartel carefully managed world diamond supply in order to keep prices steadily high.