To end police violence, we have to end poverty

[KamaAina]

http://theweek.com/articles/573307/end-police-violence-have-end-poverty

The movement against American racism recently got a big boost from a new project called "Campaign Zero." The racial justice activists behind Campaign Zero hope that by reforming the police and courts, and improving community oversight, they can eliminate unjust police violence.

This is a promising and important agenda. However, it's worth examining what a narrow focus on police violence risks leaving out. Economic factors, particularly poverty, are deeply entwined with racist outcomes and police violence. To truly fight racism, we have to fight poverty, too....

So what should we make of all this? First of all, while there is a large class disparity within races, there is still generally a disadvantage between races at every stage of the class ladder. Class does not fully explain racism.

That said, the class differences within races is often staggering. For prison, the difference in lifetime risk of incarceration is something like ten times as great for low-class blacks as it is for high-class blacks. If we assume that the police are generally arresting the same people they interact with generally, then something similar likely holds for police shootings. What accounts for this?

[ruffburr]

1. The day is-

Fast approaching that we will have to create a guaranteed minimum Income for all, With robotics coming along at a record pace, Increasing A.I.etc. A majority of manual labor and white collar jobs will be a thing of the past, Their will be robotic maintenance work until they have away to self repair, So in 10 years give or take at current levels of improvement we as workers will be obsolete, The reason I bring this into this thread is that the question of poverty Is a question that would also become obsolete, But how would the Powers That Be deal with it given their propensity for berating as lazy anyone making less than six figures? Would they adapt to a guaranteed income or create a vast underclass by just kicking people to the curb? Poverty today is systemic for the most part, We are fighting back, Finally, But it will be slow, min wage, workers rights, etc.Prison and the whole justice system has been turned into for profit ventures ruining lives for profit starting with poor P.O.C and poor folks in general , It boils down to the system is broken and hijacked by corporate facists. Sorry for the Rant.

[daredtowork]

7. This is where Hillary is getting in the way

By going out of her way to separate race and economics, Hillary doubles down on stigmatizing poverty instead of realizing - as you point out - thst the shell game of B.S. jobs for welk-connected white peopke is going to end eventualky. Better to get out in front of it with a FAIR PLAN that RESPECTS PEOPLE.

Step down with shorter work hours if you have to: as long as there is universal access to housing, medical care, food, and basic exchange for quality of life, the Revolution probably won't come any time soon. Endless-growth based capitalism has failed though: Billionaires hog all the goodies and call everyone else "leechers" as they throw them under the bus.

[uponit7771]

2. Rich people of color face the same discrimination, just have the resources to deal with it better...

... but the goal isn't to deal with it better its to illiminate the EFFECTs of the discrimination all together

[KamaAina]

4. Case in point: the Napa Valley Wine Train incident.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10027104618

[Igel]

5. My word for it ...

Anecdata.

As it's been put by others far smarter than I, "what you see is all there is." WYSIATI.

[ymetca]

3. And to end poverty we have to end "work"

Work is for saps. No one should ever have to work.

I remember reading R. Buckminster Fuller's Synergetics, wherein he proposed that the goal of technology should be to eliminate work. Or more rather "work for work's sake". So much of what we call "employment" these days is completely destructive to the planet, and an ever-increasing threat to our own survival. Bucky suggested that our long-term goal should be to provide the highest standard of living for everyone on the planet, while doing the least amount of environmental harm, by using technology to improve efficiency. A typical engineering point of view.

He overlooked, of course, how much of the world is divided into royal/corporate/nation-states for the sole purpose of keeping a tiny few enormously rich at the expense of everyone and everything else.

"I'm HUGE!", declares Trumpenstein, that Great Beast of death-knell Capitalism, slouching up from the barcalounger of one of his many man-caves. Towards Washington he strides. "You're FIRED!" He declares, the golden hair of a "Bimbo" News Anchor tightly clenched in his fist, his other wielding a poleax.

...all watched over by machines of loving grace, the all-but-forgotten American poet, Richard Brautigan once wrote. I have no doubt that he intuited the truth. That universal unemployment is the cure --not the disease-- of all that ails humanity.

[seveneyes]

6. Those too lazy to work for a living will likely rob or steal for a living

This will not do...

[Psephos]

8. Poe.

She was and is exceptional in every way.

[nomorenomore08]

9. Better to have them collecting checks than committing felonies.

In a "lesser of two evils" kind of way.