Voter ID laws have been accused of acting effectively like modern-day poll taxes. I delved into some numbers to explore the financial realities behind voter ID.
Breaking down the numbers on voter ID, wages, and poll taxes
Tag: class war
The myth of Trump support among the working classes
The popular myth that Trump is supported by working class voters perpetuates stereotypes about the working class as conservative, short-sighted, and uneducated.
Poverty as explicit entertainment
The myriad ways in which the middle class engages with poverty betray a number of social anxieties, ranging from the desire for distance to avoid responsibility for class inequality to an almost vicious pleasure in mocking people from low-income backgrounds to reinforce the notion that they are placed where they belong, thus absolving middle and […]
Who took the ‘Working’ out of ‘International Working Women’s Day’?
New York City, 1909: The Socialist Party of America holds an event commemorating a 1908 strike by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, a labour organisation that played an extremely prominent role in reforming working conditions at the turn of the 20th century. It had a great deal invested in the subject, as garment workers […]
From fake corporate responsibility to fake philanthropy
Mark Zuckerberg inspired collective media fawning last year when he announced that he was ‘giving away’ 99 percent of his fortune to charitable enterprises. Oh, the humanity! A man with massive profits and capital from a savvy, sharp entry into the tech economy was willing to give it all away for the good of the […]
Independent contractors and the new corporate welfare
Silicon Valley is a land of haves and have nots, but it’s also a land of the salaried and the independent contractors — the 1099 economy (gig economy, piecework economy, hustling economy, share economy, etc.) is booming and freelancers are the rock on which tech titans are built. They are modern-day disposable workers akin to […]
Invisibilising San Francisco’s service class
One class of workers tends to dominate discussions about class war in San Francisco: Those in the technology industry. By extension, when people discuss issues like displacement, rising costs of living, and other issues that the tech industry contributes to, they reference other workers — but unless you’re reading labour journalism, these workers all tend […]
Rich people are not an oppressed minority
So, ‘wealth therapy.’ Let’s talk about it, because it’s become the subject of a number of trend pieces, and at the same time that it makes me want to crack up and spit out my tea, it also makes me want to cry, because it’s emblematic of so much that is wrong with this country. […]
Cooperatively fighting debt
Friend and colleague Somer Sherwood recently shared an interesting article that I’ve been mulling over ever since — it is, on its face, a straightforward tale of economic and financial planning. But it’s also more than that. It’s about family, and the collective bonds of people (related or otherwise) willing to work together to support […]
Class war and Treasure Island
Things have changed very dramatically on Treasure Island since I lived there. The former naval base has gone from a source of cheap, albeit slightly dodgy, housing surrounded by decaying infrastructure to an increasingly gentrified neighbourhood. Before, there was a strange sense of camaraderie among those of us willing to live in a part of […]