#Belinda Luscombe, "The rise of the 'carebomb' ", TIME, November 2-9, 2020. - "Home-based centers are regarded as the used car yards of the U.S. childcare ecosystem: the place people go when they can't afford anywhere else, which may be why the number of fully licensed operations has more than halved in the past 15 years, from 200,000 to 86,000. About 7 million children under the age of 5 are cared for in someone's home, according to the 2016 National Survey of Early Care and Education." "The Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) found that childcare centers operating out of someone's home was the most likely type of provider to stay open. More than a quarter of them continued operating without any interruption, while only 12% of childcare chains kept functioning."
#Abby Vesouslis, "Day cares on the brink," TIME, November 2-9, 2020. - "86 of childcare providers reported serving fewer children than they were before the pandemic, and 70% said they're incurring 'substantial' new operating costs, according to a July survey for the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC)."
"Newly unemployed caretakers, who tend to make low wages in demanding settings, may never return to their profession, and childcare-center owners may choose to abandon their businesses for more lucrative ones." "Most states require that day-care centers maintain high adult-to-child ratios, and ample square footage. In some places, day-care operators are required to hire staff trained in early childhood development."
"The average day-care operator grosses $48,000 a year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while standard childcare workers make roughly $24,000." "It's unclear if providers who are hired back now will still have a job a month or a year later." According to data provided to TIME, the costs of providing center-based childcare have increased by an average of 47% since before COVID-19. In California, costs have jumped 64%, and in Georgia they've skyrocketed 115%."
"In July, the Democratic-led House passed a bill appropriating $50 billion toward the Child Care Stabilization Fund to provide grants to childcare providers." "The Center for Law and Social Policy estimated the industry would require nearly $10 billion per month to survive the pandemic, according to an April report."
#Stacy Mitchell and Susan R. Holmberg, "Why the Left Should Ally With Small Business," The Nation, November 30-December 7, 2020. - "The fate of working people and small independent businesses have risen and fallen more or less in tandem. The heyday of unions in the mid-20th century was also a period of flourishing small businesses. The 1970s were likewise a turning point for both, albeit a dire one. Yet the number of unionized workers and of small businesses has plummeted over the past 40 years. Inequality, in turn, has risen sharply."
"Rebuilding small businesses is thus crucial to achieving the left's vision of broad prosperity and a thriving democracy." "Meanwhile, the US Chamber of Commerce counts only a fraction of America's small business members and it derives much of its massive budget and board of directors from large corporations."
"Between 1982 and 2017, the share of US business revenue going to firms with fewer than 100 employees, went from 40 percent to 23 percent, according to Census Bureau data." "If small businesses continue to disappear from the landscape, it will fuel more extreme inequality and further entrench the corporate giants that rule our lives and menace our democracy. Under federal tax rules, for example, Amazon paid virtually no income taxes in recent years. The average effective tax paid by competing local businesses is around 20 percent." "If you took only the bottom half of wage earners, they make about the same at small firms as at large ones. In other words, the average income is higher at big corporations solely because of the inflated earnings of those in the upper ranks."
"A 2018 Harvard Law Review paper estimated that today's medium annual wage of $30,000 would be about a third higher, or $41,000, if it weren't for excessive compensation." "The growing anti-monopoly offers fertile ground for reestablishing an alliance of labor and small business."
#Mircisha Sinha, "The Oligarch's Revenge," The Nation, October 19-26, 2020. - "In the later 19th century, after the overthrow of Reconstruction, many of its state governments disenfranchised Black men, instituted racial segregation, conditioned racial terrorism and violence, and kept a majority of Black and white Southerners economically bound through sharecropping, debt peonage, convict lease labor, and tenancy." "The Jim Crow South was upended by the civil rights revolution. Yet, even in defeat, its language of oligarchy and its opposition to progressive political and economic policies through a appeal to racism has been adopted by the modern Republican Party."
According to Heather Cox Richardson, "the unending struggle between American democracy and oligarchy began with the birth of the nation." Richardson, the author of 'How the South Won the Civil War', identifies the key to her argument as a 'struggle between the free North and the slaveholding South was essentially a [battle] between people and property, as exemplified in the anti-slavery free ideology of the original Republican Party, which valorized workers over capitalists." "As a result of the war, the federal government implemented a progressive income tax, land-grant colleges, the Homestead Act and money for railroads (which came at the expense of Native populations), and federal protection for Black rights in the postwar South."
"FDR failed when it came to race, his record blemished by, among other things, the internment of Japanese Americans during the war." "As the Democratic Party became identified with civil rights, the Republicans swerved right, opposing all progressive social policies as government handouts, and taxes on the rich as a scheme to redistribute wealth from hardworking white men to unworthy Blacks and women."
"Like the Southern slaveholders of yore, who dreaded abolitionism, socialism, communism, feminism, and the-isms of modernity, our modern oligarchs and their GOP enablers use the same bugbears and racism wolf whistles to prevent the United States from developing a strong welfare state." "The world today looks on aghast as the American republic, with a criminally incompetent and kleptocratic oligarchy hell-bent on undermining democracy, self-combusts in the mist of a global crisis."
"Even though Richardson's book was completed before the pandemic and the mass protests sweeping the country, her study is a useful history of the deterioration of the party of Lincoln into a revantist right-wing, white supremacist political organization."
#Randall Kennedy, "Politicians in Robes," The Nation, October 19-26, 2020. - "In 'Supreme Inequality', Adam Cohen argues that for half a century, America's highest court has waged a unrelenting war on the poor, while championing the rich." "At least where wealth is involved, Justice Lewis Powell declared: 'the Equal Protection Clause does not require absolute equality or precisely equal advantages,' He made this declaration in 'Buckley v. Valeo (1976), Powell also said: 'The concept that government may restrict the speech of some elements of society in order to enhance the relative voice of others is wholly foreign to the First Amendment.' 'Most significantly, in 'Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), it ruled that the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law overstepped constitutional bounds by prohibiting corporations and unions expending funds from their treasuries on [election] speech.'
"Elsewhere in election law, the Supreme Court repeatedly facilitated impediments to voting. In 'Crawford v. Marion County' (2008), the Court upheld an Indiana voter identification law in the absence of any showing that it was needed to thwart substantial voter fraud, and even though it predictably and disproportionately burdened Black prospective voters, and other groups that Republican lawmakers viewed as likely Democratic supporters." "In 'Shelby County v. Holder' (2013), the court invalidated a key provision of the Voting Rights Act that had effectively monitored and restrained jurisdictions with long records of racial disenfranchisement."
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