Life under Capitalism

The bonfire of red tape

Life under Capitalism, UK politics
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Grenfell after the fire

Grenfell is the end result of long standing Tory disregard for anybody not rich and their desire to get rid of anything that stands in the way of making money:

Prime Minister David Cameron today said that his new year’s resolution was to “kill off the health and safety culture for good”.

Health and safety legislation has become an “albatross around the neck of British businesses”, costing them billions of pounds a year and leaving entrepreneurs in fear of speculative claims, he said.

He announced plans to cap the amount which can be earned by lawyers from small-value personal injury claims against employers and to reduce overall costs in cases funded by “no-win no-fee” deals.

And he revealed he has asked the Health and Safety Executive to bring forward to the end of 2012 its timetable for abolishing or consolidating up to half of all existing regulations.

And it worked. The refurbishment of the Grenfell tower to improve the view of its rich neighbours managed to save a whole 5000 pounds by not having to use fire resistant cladding. But let’s forget that and just harass the guy who might have had a faulty fridge in his flat…

Trust Kansas to find a new way to screw the poor

Life under Capitalism, US politics
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Is Kansas screwing over the poor this way just a measure of lawmakers’ distrust and hatred of poor people, or yet another handout to banks:

For these reasons, cash is one of the most valuable resources a poor person in the United States can possess. Yet legislators in Kansas, not trusting the poor to use their money wisely, have voted to limit how much cash that welfare beneficiaries can receive, effectively reducing their overall benefits, as well.

The legislature placed a daily cap of $25 on cash withdrawals beginning July 1, which will force beneficiaries to make more frequent trips to the ATM to withdraw money from the debit cards used to pay public assistance benefits.

Since there’s a fee for every withdrawal, the limit means that some families will get substantially less money.

Could be both. One of the dirty little secrets of late capitalism is how much it depends on an endless supply of poor people nickled and dimed out of their money through tricks like this. Being poor is so often so much more expensive than being middle class and the reason is there’s good money to be made off off keeping people in poverty.

The culture of poverty does not exist

Life under Capitalism, Poverty, Race, US politics
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The importance of the culture-of-poverty approach is that it allows for recognition of the accumulated history of racism and inequality, but posits the ongoing effects of these as mediated through black cultural pathologies. It therefore permits American liberals to identify with opposition to racism while pushing them towards policy solutions geared towards the transformation of black people, and not American society.

With every crisis in Black America the same pathologies the Black community supposedly suffers from — veneration of the criminal lifestyle, lack of proper family structures, abhorrence of education as acting white — are trotted out as an explanation, by conservative commentators as that’s just how those people are, by supposed liberals as the unfortunate end product of Black history in America. There’s just one problem: they’re lies. The culture of poverty does not exist.