YouTube has the video Chuck Collins in Eugene, April 17, 2019: Solutions to Wealth Inequality.

We are living in a time of extreme inequality, and few places are more unequal than the United States. America’s 20 richest people now own more wealth than the bottom half of the rest of the population combined. Scholar and activist Chuck Collins argues that these inequalities have their roots in forty years of the powerful and wealthy rigging the entire system in their favor. He proposes a wide range of public policies to roll back decades of accelerating inequality, analyzes the barriers to progress, and shows how transformative local campaigns can be made into a national movement for change.

One of the sources he mentions is inequality.org – Your portal into the world of inequality online — and ongoing efforts to leave our planet a more equal place.

CNN has the article Fact check: Kamala Harris was correct on integration in Berkeley, school district confirms.

Harris was indeed part of the second integrated class at Berkeley’s Thousand Oaks Elementary School: she entered school in 1969, and the plan to desegregate the school was implemented in 1968.

Berkeley Public Schools has the article 50th Anniversary of Berkeley’s Pioneering Busing Plan for School Integration.

This year marks the anniversary of a landmark achievement for the Berkeley Unified School District and for racial equity in education nationwide. It was 50 years ago, in 1968, that Berkeley made headlines for its pioneering busing plan to fully integrate the city’s public schools.

I am sorry that I was taken in by reports that Harris was too young to have experienced the busing in Berkeley. At least my nagging doubts caused me to do my own Google searching about this. I should have been more careful before I posted links to the false stories.

I just recalled that in 1974, Sharon and I left Texas for the North, ending up eventually in Bolton, Massachusetts. Our daughter was born in 1971, and the thought of her going to the segregated schools in Texas was gnawing at me.

At some point, when she was safely ensconced in the de facto segregated schools in Bolton, I read an article that said that the Richardson, Texas schools had implemented a voluntary busing plan to desegregate their schools. Richardson was the town we left when we moved out of Texas.

Let me explain that Bolton Schools were de facto segregated because there were no black children attending schools in Bolton when our daughter first started to go to school. Later, there were one or two black children in the schools, but that was a small consolation that soothed my conscience only a little. There were more black children in the schools when we went to Oakland, California for a year in 1983. I was actually a visiting engineer at the University of California in Berkeley.

In the capitalist part of the private sector as it currently exists in the USA, a corporation with public share holders must provide a financial return to its stock holders. If it fails to provide that return over a long enough period, the share holders revolt by replacing the corporation’s leadership with new leaders.

There are some things that society needs for it to flourish where no immediate financial return will accrue to the entity that makes the investment. Such investments include health care, education, infrastructure, defense, police, and fire fighting. The beneficiaries of these investments is the society as a whole, the benefits may be long term in coming, and the benefits are not easily measured in financial terms.

Some societies, such as the USA, have organized into something we call the federal (and local) government to provide these services. In a democracy, it is supposed to be the popular vote that sets policies as to what services the government ought to pay for. Some people think of providing these services through the federal government as a form of socialism. Whatever you want to call it, we have found this can be an effective way to provide these services. It is up to the voters to judge how well the the private sector and the government sector are doing their jobs. If we find that their needs to be a shift in the way these services are paid for, we should decide based on what works, not on how we label it.

Strategic Culture has the article Iran goes for “maximum counter-pressure”.

As I previously reported, shutting down the Strait of Hormuz would destroy the American economy by detonating the $1.2 quadrillion derivatives market; and that would collapse the world banking system, crushing the world’s $80 trillion GDP and causing an unprecedented depression.
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Iranian diplomacy, discreetly, has alreadt informed the EU – and the Swiss – about their ability to crash the entire world economy. But still that was not enough to remove US sanctions.

If 10% of this article is true, we are in deep doo-doo. Deeper than anything I could have imagined.

YouTube has the video Richard Wolff: “Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism” | Talks at Google.

Professor Wolff discusses the economic dimensions of our lives, our jobs, our incomes, our debts, those of our children, and those looming down the road in his unique mixture of deep insight and dry humor. He presents current events and draws connections to the past to highlight the machinations of our global economy. He helps us to understand political and corporate policy, organization of labor, the distribution of goods and services, and challenges us to question some of the deepest foundations of our society.

I have absorbed a lot of what Professor Wolff has talked about on the internet over the last few years. In this lecture he manages to answer many of the questions I still had.

He is not telling you what he thinks you should believe. He is telling you about things you ought to think about. You still have to do the thinking.

The Real News Network broadcast the show Economic Update: Rise and Fall of the USSR.

This week on Economic Update, Professor Wolff goes beyond the simplistic, sterile Cold War debates of demonizers vs celebrants of the USSR as he delivers an in depth analysis of the USSR’s strengths, weaknesses, successes and failures from its revolutionary beginnings in 1917 to its implosion in 1989. The first episode of a special 2-part series where Professor Wolff gives the same in-depth analysis for the People’s Republic of China in the second part.

A very interesting history lesson. I don’t attest the the truth of everything Prof. Wolff said. How could I? I wasn’t there. However, it is all worth considering along with all the other things you think you know, but cannot attest to either. I anxiously await the promised analysis of China. Of course, I have my own opinions, but I don’t think they are too far off what Wolff will say.

Jacobin Magazine has the very interesting article John Dewey’s Experiments in Democratic Socialism.

While the Vermont product became one of the twentieth century’s most well-known philosophers, widely considered the philosopher of American democracy itself, his idiosyncratic thought earned him enemies across the political spectrum. The Right saw him as a Communist, the Communist Party saw him as a philosopher of reaction. As for Dewey, the only “ism” he could attach his name to was “experimentalism.”

I have been using the term “what works ism” to describe my philosophy. Dewey’s term is easier to pronounce, but mine has a different set of nuances than Dewey’s. I actually like both sets of nuances.

There is much more to this article than the little excerpt I chose above. It is interesting to think about his philosophy and what Richard Wolff describes at his web site Democracy At Work.

City Lab has the article Berlin Will Freeze Rents for Five Years.

My first reaction may come from my capitalist indoctrination, tempered by my acceptance of Democratic Socialism.

Wouldn’t government building and renting out housing do more than rent control? Rent control tends to stop private investment in housing. Of course private investing in housing that makes the most profit is probably not what the city needs.

The following excerpt from the article seems more in line with what I think might be the better idea. If renationalization is what is being considered, perhaps this implies that there was a period of privatization that was the failed policy that lead to the current problems.

In a city where even relatively wealthy, well-connected people rent, this has led to a growing popular movement for greater collective control of the housing market. Berlin is already being swept by a campaign to renationalize former public housing blocks …

The above link leads to the article Berlin Builds an Arsenal of Ideas to Stage a Housing Revolution
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For decades, the state has sold off much of its public housing. Now, Berlin seems to be deciding that its housing market is broken, and that the private sector alone will not fix it.

As I have come to realize, there are certain needs that are not best served by a profit-driven system. If public housing has failed in the past, then we need to understand those failures, and try to prevent them. Privatization was not a solution that worked in many cases.

Democracy At Work has this great video Understanding Marxism: Q&A with Richard D. Wolff [June 2019].

Prof. Wolff talks about why Marxism is appealing to a growing audience.

I frequently watch videos of Prof. Wolff. At a certain depth, I understand what he is talking about. Still, this takes me to a deeper understanding than I had managed before this video. (Admittedly, this is long, but Richard Wolff is a great teacher.)

The Real News Network has the segment Billions Stolen From Black Families by Predatory Lending.

White Collar criminologist Bill Black analyzes the new study, “The Plunder of Black Wealth in Chicago,” opening the way for a fruitful conversation about reparations and our future.

For people who do not understand reparations, and that includes Bernie Sanders, this is a very important video to watch.

There are so many lessons to be learned here. An odd one that I take away from this is that there is nothing inherent in capitalism that says that the white predators have to behave this way. In a fair society and judiciary, these practices would have been highly illegal. Specific people and specific agencies of government took actions that were clearly wrong.

This kind of behavior is certainly one that can arise in and are a danger of a capitalist system. They must be guarded against. That is why regulations have arisen, but we have allowed those regulations to be undone. We need to examine what we should have done to prevent such deterioration from happening. The forces of this predation will always be with us.

It will be interesting to see Donald Trump’s reaction to this. I’ll have to do a little research to see how much of his father’s wealth was built on these practices.

June 20, 2019

Here is the first article I came up with in my search. From The Dreaded New York Times I found the article ‘No Vacancies’ for Blacks: How Donald Trump Got His Start, and Was First Accused of Bias.

A few years later, the government accused the Trumps of violating the consent decree. “We believe that an underlying pattern of discrimination continues to exist in the Trump Management organization,” a Justice Department lawyer wrote to Mr. Cohn in 1978.