#USA #Housing #StagnantWages #RentierTech: "The American Dream, such as it is, used to be two dreams, one based on work and solidarity, the other on asset appreciation and disconnected individualism. We killed the first one.
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Those were the two American dreams: a good job and your own home. We killed the first one, and the second one devoured us whole.

Without a strong labor movement, wages stagnated. Corporate power waxed, and with it, the power to pollute, to poison, to maim and to defraud. The labor movement wasn't strong enough to stop Reagan from killing free UC tuition when he was governor of California. It wasn't strong enough to hold back spiraling health care prices. It wasn't strong enough to block the business lobby from neutering antitrust and ushering in four decades of market concentration, market capture and corruption. Workers couldn't save their defined benefits pension and were railroaded into market-based 401(k)s, forcing them to play the stock casino against their bosses, ever the sucker at the poker table.

With stagnant wages and out of control medical, educational and end-of-life bills, homeownership – the thing you do as an individual, where your gain is someone else's loss – became the American secular religion. Your house wasn't just a place to sleep and keep your photo albums: if it appreciated enough, you might be able to liquidate it on your deathbed and pay off your eldercare, your healthcare, your kids' college debt, and leave enough left over for your kids' downpayments.

And so every American who had a home became the enemy of every American who didn't – including one another's children. Every home built threatened your own property values. The racist, batshit American school funding formula, which sees schools funded out of property taxes, meaning the richest kids get the best schools, turned out to be a great way to increase your property values." https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/01/housing-is-a-human-right/#rentier-tech

The need for a new wave of #union militancy is obvious and sorely needed, and given growing discontent over #stagnantwages and the #costoflivingcrisis, the coming years represent an opportunity to develop #collectivestruggle. #Solidarity bargaining may be the key to this. By training the next generation of unionists to focus on the power of the working class as a whole — that is, by appealing to as broad a cohort of workers as possible — we could renew our movement.

https://jacobin.com/2023/11/solidarity-bargaining-labor-movement-strategy-uaw-australian-unions-may-day

Gotta have my van towed back to my guy in the IE. Always have a “guy” for your car. I don’t know what I’d do. They don’t want to touch it out here. The tow is insane, but hella cheaper than a new van. Thank god we don’t need the money for, I don’t know, food, shelter. </sarcasm>

#povertysucks #workingclass #costofliving #stagnantwages