The war between the states

[richardmurray]

All of the image below were what the party of abraham lincoln wanted to cut from federal budgets. 

All of this money is going to new york state, not across anywhere, all new york state. 

 

It's funny. I look at each of these and the debt of the USA is clear. 

 

1) Rental assistance. First, NYC has high rents.   So most people who live in New York City can't even afford to be in the apartments who have legally lowered rent. What is my point? 

The NYC real estate market is buoyed by welfare. The people making millions for selling a loft are buoyed by a city whose populace is subsidized so that the real estate industry can make profits. It is a financially dysfunctional situation, that was brewed long before I or most who live in nyc was born. 

But what is the question, New York City plus NEw York State made this mess long ago, this is again, a long term problem that has festered, but why does the federal government have to pay for New Yorks dysfunctions over many decades? And secondly, don't let anyone fool you. Many a new yorker has championed a neighbor being kicked out with total glee. 

 

2) Again, many people join the military for personal benefits, roof over the head, food , stipend, free college, yes healthcare, people don't join the military because the military offers nothing and it is dignified. PEople join the military for benefits!!! But, again, columbia presbyterian isn't a hospis. It isn't some free medical facility. Healthcare cost.

 

3) Again, the Metropolitan Transit Authority started as a few lines, it was an exclusive service. Yes it was expanded through the world war II monetary increase but this is again a high cost. Infrastructure is financially never cheap. Somehow people think infrastructure is. Old human facilities deteriorate because the power to maintain them, by any means, is gone. This is no different than the MTA. yeah, it runs all day in NYC. yes, NYC couldn't function absent it, as most who live in NYC don't own a car. But, it is expensive and the gilded age was over a long time ago. 

 

4) The fire department + law enforcement agencies of NYC are huge, especially law enforcement. But again, law enforcement has the best paid union in NYC, is deemed by many, erroneously though purposefully, a communally positive job. And today is a large behemoth that has grown out of control to be blunt. But, it is also expensive. 

 

The article below admits much of this but misses a key word. Slavery. Slavery fits Fiscal Capitalism like peanut butter and jelly. Fiscal capitalism allows for individual or groups freedom, an open marketplace for all, but it demands most be the loser. Slavery has the great solution, if the losers are enslaved those who are not can live in an augmented scenario to their favor. No, get rich quick doesn't work. No, no plan or strategy can lead all or most to fiscal positivity. No, most will eventually not accept being peaceful while poor. No, all militaries eventually fade, and with them , whatever they are protecting. No, the individual will not always rise above or is to blame for failing to rise about a fiscally poor environment. 

 

Now what does this have to do with black people, specifically? To black people outside the USA a cautionary tale.   Any community in humanity chooses to do negative things for their betterment. No one has to, but if you do, don't lie about it. Don't turn the lies you make of yourself into laws.  

To black people in the usa, I don't know the future, but dysfunctional systems exist in the USA, in its big cities like NYC. Said dysfunctions are not any one person's fault, more the fault of many over time. But the USA has dysfunctions that when they finally stall will influence the life of all.  Tell the truth about the usa, not what you want. 

 

 

 

Please Don’t Call My Job a Calling
June 5, 2023

By Simone Stolzoff

Mr. Stolzoff is the author of the book “The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life From Work.”

Last month, in an interview about Warner Bros. Discovery’s $50 million streaming profit in the first quarter of 2023, the company’s chief executive, David Zaslav, told CNBC that he believed the Writers Guild of America strike would ultimately end because of “a love for the business and a love for working.”

As the sixth week of the strike begins, the writers’ persistence reveals a sharper truth: Love, unfortunately, doesn’t pay the bills.

The implication that love is a suitable stand-in for job security, workplace protections or fair pay is a commonly held belief, especially in so-called dream jobs like writing, cooking and working in the arts, where the privilege to do the work is seen as a form of compensation itself.

But the rhetoric that a job is a passion or a “labor of love” obfuscates the reality that a job is an economic contract. The assumption that it isn’t sets up the conditions for exploitation.

Indeed, creative, mission-driven and prestigious jobs often take advantage of employees’ love for what they do. According to one 2020 study, employers see poor treatment of workers — such as expecting overtime work without pay or asking people to do demeaning tasks that aren’t part of their job descriptions — as more acceptable if the workers are thought to be passionate about what they do. This stems from bosses’ tacit assumptions that their employees would do the work even if they weren’t paid.

That seems to be the message some W.G.A. members have gotten. “Writing is a noble vocation,” says Charles Rogers, a writer and showrunner who is on strike in Los Angeles. “But the industry is set up to make writers feel like they should be grateful just to be here.” Employers then rely on employees’ indebtedness and the proverbial line of people out the door who would happily take their places to justify paying them less than they deserve.

The idea that employees work for something other than money is also pervasive in industries that are geared toward helping people, such as education. “Teaching is a calling,” tweeted Mayor Eric Adams of New York City a few weeks ago. “You don’t do it for the money, you do it because you believe in the kids that come into your classrooms.”

That may sound like reverence, but the New York City teachers’ union contract expired last September, and Mr. Adams has resisted pay increases that keep up with inflation. Teachers need better compensation, not platitudes celebrating teacher appreciation week.

In a 2018 paper, Fobazi Ettarh, who at the time was a librarian, coined a term for how the perceived righteousness of her industry obscured the issues that existed within it. Ms. Ettarh called the phenomenon vocational awe, which she defined as the belief that as a workplace, libraries were inherently good, and therefore supposedly beyond critique. When a workplace is seen as virtuous, she claimed, it’s easier for workers to be exploited. “In the face of grand missions of literacy and freedom, advocating for your full lunch break feels petty,” she wrote.
 

Ms. Ettarh had known she wanted to become a librarian since she was a teenager. When she was studying for her library science degree, her professors loved to wax poetic about how becoming a librarian is a calling and libraries serve as the last truly democratic institution.

But from the other side of the reference desk, she saw how the industry’s ideals concealed its low pay. In her first position out of grad school, Ms. Ettarh was told by her supervisor, “No one becomes a librarian to make a living wage.” (She was making $48,000 at the time.) She eventually left the industry.

During the pandemic, vocational awe was on full display from educators who were told that they were doing God’s work but also to make do with what they had to health care professionals who were deemed essential yet often not given compensation or protection commensurate with the severity of their work. The perceived righteousness of honorable industries covered up poor conditions like frosting on a burned cake.

While vocational awe is common in do-gooder professions, it can exist in any field that relies on the strength of its brand to distract from the reality of workers’ experiences. Take zookeeping, a profession where the average pay is $16.51 per hour, according to Indeed. Zookeeping is romanticized — you get to spend time with animals! — but also characterized by long hours, hard labor and cleaning up feces.

In a study, the organizational behavior researchers Jeffery A. Thompson and J. Stuart Bunderson found that following the calling to be a zookeeper led to trade-offs. “Fostering a sense of occupational identification, transcendent meaning and occupational importance on the one hand,” they wrote, offset “unbending duty, personal sacrifice and heightened vigilance on the other.” The researchers concluded that low pay, unfavorable benefits and poor working conditions are often the sacrifices workers make for the privilege of doing what they love.
This sense of duty and personal sacrifice can conflate workers’ output and their self-worth, as I chronicle in my new book, but it can also have a chilling effect on their willingness to surface wrongdoing. When you’re in a great job — one that you feel lucky to have — the fear of losing it can make it harder to speak up.

But thankfully, workers are recognizing their collective strength. Employees at workplaces across the country have organized and are fighting for better conditions.

In Hollywood, it’s the screenwriters demanding more job security and a better cut of residuals. In Ann Arbor, Mich., graduate students at the University of Michigan are also on strike, demanding a raise in minimum annual salaries from about $24,000 to $38,500. In Oregon, nurses are calling for staffing increases to better serve patients.

And they have a lot of support. Seventy-one percent of Americans approve of labor unions, according to a Gallup poll from last year, which is their highest recorded approval rate in the United States since 1965.

As Ms. Ettarh told me, “Workers are seeing that unless they work together to fight back, institutions will grind them to dust.” For starters, employers can recognize that we work for more than love.

 

URL

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/opinion/employment-exploitation-unions.html

 

[Pioneer1]

Well my state is Michigan.

We're surrounded by the world's largest supply of fresh water and we can pretty much grow all of the food we need that is necessary for survival.
In the northern more desolate parts of the state....we got plenty of deer, moose, and rabbits and shit running around wild.

We have so much land and natural resources we can support a population of atleast 50 million people if necessary.

....so we good, lol.

 

[ProfD]

Every state in the union should be able to stand on its own.

 

Federal funds should only required to offset shortfalls in state budgets.

 

Of course, fiscal management is a different kettle.