corvids
"Again, issues of fairness, mercy, and justice become subordinate to neoliberal notions of efficiency."
"Debate about whether those in power wanted to kill them or were simply indifferent to their well-being only serve to determine whether the violence done to them was direct State violence or a form of State-sponsored violence through willful ignorance."
"Still, to suggest that the violence was unnecessary or entirely unjustified would be to misunderstand the complexity of the story. Even calling the actions "riots" rather than "rebellions" or "uprisings" obscures the principled outrage that animated many acts of resistance that occurred in the aftermath of Gray's death."
"If neoliberal America is engaging in a war on the vulnerable, vindicated by a murderous perversion of the frontier code, it is recruiting the rest of us to join in."
"Indeed, if there is an activist agenda today, seeking to subvert the people's will as expressed by the nation's legislatures, it is one pushed by the political right."
"The court also cited "evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society." With no other Western nation allowing for such juvenile executions, one has to wonder why the maturation of America's "standards of decency" had taken so long."
"As an illustration of the excesses of our time, all three men point to the gross inflation of executive compensation, which was 20 times an average worker's pay in 1973 and is roughly 260 times an average worker's salary today [...] To add insult to injury, those earning their income from wages must, under current tax code, pay a higher percentage of their wages to the government than those who earn their income from dividends and capital gains."
"... it now appears that our future will sustain prosperity for a few while a large, permanent class of people will live lives of destitution. Who will speak up for them?"
"There is plenty of reason to debate the central premise of privatization—that business always does it better—but we don't have to go there to find the idea objectionable ...] Businesses are not made to function for the public good. They are made to function for the good of profit ...] Furthermore, by injecting moneymaking into the relationship between a citizen and the basic services of life—water, roads, electricity, and education—privatization distorts the social contract."
"These shifting social and cultural dynamics are the perfect complement to the current neoliberal economic movement. At the same time that market logic promotes the private interest over the public good, everything else in our society has become increasingly fractured, fragmented, and individualized."
the last chapter of this book is just four pages, and brought me to tears with nearly every paragraph. it's a list and analysis of people resisting the oppression that is the focus of the rest of the book. and it is some of the most hopeful such analysis we've ever seen
it's too long to properly share on here, but the book is Nobody, by Marc Lamont Hill, if y'all want to read it yourselves
"In order to repair the damage that has been done, we must craft a new set of frameworks for our economy, for our schools, for our justice system, for public housing. We must resist the power and persuasion of market values. We must reinvest in communities. We must imagine the world that is not yet."