Class Of 2020 Quotes

We can all take something positive from the class of 2020; to accept what has happened in the past, to embrace the present, and to remain open to the probability that it will get better in the future.

We can all take something positive from the class of 2020; to accept what has happened in the past, to embrace the present, and to remain open to the probability that it will get better in the future. I hear echoes of Stephen Pollan in that advice: With gratitude, optimism becomes sustainable.

The rest of us, on the ·other hand-we members of the protected classes-have grown increasingly· dependent on our welfare programs. In 2020 the federal government spent more than $193 billion on homeowner subsidies, a figure that far exceeded the amount spent on direct housing assistance for low income families ($53 billion). Most families who enjoy those subsidies have six-figure incomes and are white. Poor families lucky enough to live in government-owned apartments of often have to deal with mold and even lead paint, while rich families are claiming the mortgage interest deduction on first and second homes. The lifetime limit for cash welfare to poor parents is five years, but families claiming the mortgage interest deduction may do so for the length of the mortgage, typically thirty years. A fifteen-story public housing tower and a mortgaged suburban home are both government subsidized, but only one looks (and feels) that way. If you count all public benefits offered by the federal government, America's welfare state (as a share of its gross domestic product) is the second biggest in the world, after France's. But that's true only if you include things like government-subsidized retirement benefits provided by employers, student loans and 529 college savings plans, child tax credits, and homeowner subsidies: benefits disproportionately flowing to Americans well above the poverty line. If you put aside these tax breaks and judge the United States solely by the share of its GDP allocated to programs directed at low-income citizens, then our investment in poverty reduction is much smaller than that of other rich nations. The American welfare state is lopsided.

The assumption that femininity is always structured by and performed for a male gaze fails to take seriously queer feminine desire. The radical feminist critiques of femininity also disregarded the fact that not all who are (seen as) feminine are women. Crucially, what is viewed as appropriately feminine is not only defined in relation to maleness or masculinity, but through numerous intersections of power including race, sexuality, ability, and social class. In other words, white, heterosexual, binary gender-conforming, able-bodied, and upper- or middle-class femininity is privileged in relation to other varieties. Any social system may contain multiple femininities that differ in status, and which relate to each other as well as to masculinity. As highlighted by “effeminate” gay men, trans women, femmes, drag queens, and “bad girls,” it is possible to be perceived as excessively, insufficiently, or wrongly feminine without for that sake being seen as masculine. Finally, the view of femininity as a restrictive yet disposable mask presupposes that emancipation entails departure into neutral (or masculine) modes of being. This is a tenuous assumption, as the construction of selfhood is entangled with gender, and conceptions of androgyny and gender neutrality similarly hinge on culturally specific ideas of masculinity and femininity.

Technocrats live their lives abstractly, even while they are managing their own sphere. For them, all problems are intellectual. You must think constantly, and that thinking makes action possible. Once you have thought, the doing simply follows. Reason leads to language, and the battleground of the technocrat is language. If the language is reshaped, so will be the action. Political correctness, as it’s called, is the manner in which the technocrats as the ascendant class reshaped the world. The tension of the technocracy is between their work in their own fields and the universal principles that they practice. This shows itself most clearly in the way they deal with the declining class, the heavily white, industrial working class. In the thinking of the technocracy, the fundamental cause of oppression is whites who have historically oppressed using race, nationality, and gender. But the technocrats draw a sharp distinction between themselves (predominantly white) who are at least engaged in a struggle to transcend oppression in thought and speech and those whites who continue to practice it. This declining class is plunging economically, but for the technocracy, which embraces a vast range of incomes, that decline is not of the essence. It is their unwillingness to abandon oppression.

Dr. Fauci’s business closures pulverized America’s middle class and engineered the largest upward transfer of wealth in human history. In 2020, workers lost $3.7 trillion while billionaires gained $3.9 trillion.46 Some 493 individuals became new billionaires,47 and an additional 8 million Americans dropped below the poverty line.48 The biggest winners were the robber barons—the very companies that were cheerleading Dr. Fauci’s lockdown and censoring his critics: Big Technology, Big Data, Big Telecom, Big Finance, Big Media behemoths (Michael Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch, Viacom, and Disney), and Silicon Valley Internet titans like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Larry Ellison, and Jack Dorsey.

RENEWABLE ENERGY REVOLUTION: SOLAR + WIND + BATTERIES In addition to AI, we are on the cusp of another important technological revolution—renewable energy. Together, solar photovoltaic, wind power, and lithium-ion battery storage technologies will create the capability of replacing most if not all of our energy infrastructure with renewable clean energy. By 2041, much of the developed world and some developing countries will be primarily powered by solar and wind. The cost of solar energy dropped 82 percent from 2010 to 2020, while the cost of wind energy dropped 46 percent. Solar and onshore wind are now the cheapest sources of electricity. In addition, lithium-ion battery storage cost has dropped 87 percent from 2010 to 2020. It will drop further thanks to the massive production of batteries for electrical vehicles. This rapid drop in the price of battery storage will make it possible to store the solar/wind energy from sunny and windy days for future use. Think tank RethinkX estimates that with a $2 trillion investment through 2030, the cost of energy in the United States will drop to 3 cents per kilowatt-hour, less than one-quarter of today’s cost. By 2041, it should be even lower, as the prices of these three components continue to descend. What happens on days when a given area’s battery energy storage is full—will any generated energy left unused be wasted? RethinkX predicts that these circumstances will create a new class of energy called “super power” at essentially zero cost, usually during the sunniest or most windy days. With intelligent scheduling, this “super power” can be used for non-time-sensitive applications such as charging batteries of idle cars, water desalination and treatment, waste recycling, metal refining, carbon removal, blockchain consensus algorithms, AI drug discovery, and manufacturing activities whose costs are energy-driven. Such a system would not only dramatically decrease energy cost, but also power new applications and inventions that were previously too expensive to pursue. As the cost of energy plummets, the cost of water, materials, manufacturing, computation, and anything that has a major energy component will drop, too. The solar + wind + batteries approach to new energy will also be 100-percent clean energy. Switching to this form of energy can eliminate more than 50 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, which is by far the largest culprit of climate change.

Dr. Fauci’s business closures pulverized America’s middle class and engineered the largest upward transfer of wealth in human history. In 2020, workers lost $3.7 trillion while billionaires gained $3.9 trillion.46 Some 493 individuals became new billionaires,47 and an additional 8 million Americans dropped below the poverty line.48 The biggest winners were the robber barons—the very companies that were cheerleading Dr. Fauci’s lockdown and censoring his critics: Big Technology, Big Data, Big Telecom, Big Finance, Big Media behemoths (Michael Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch, Viacom, and Disney), and Silicon Valley Internet titans like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Larry Ellison, and Jack Dorsey. The very Internet companies that snookered us all with the promise of democratizing communications made it impermissible for Americans to criticize their government or question the safety of pharmaceutical products; these companies propped up all official pronouncements while scrubbing all dissent. The same Tech/Data and Telecom robber barons, gorging themselves on the corpses of our obliterated middle class, rapidly transformed America’s once-proud democracy into a censorship and surveillance police state from which they profit at every turn.

In the face of the calamity, the Modi government froze. In the seven months from March to September 2020, Modi made 82 public appearances—physical as well as virtual. In the next four months, he made 111 such appearances. From February to 25 April 2021, he clocked 92 public appearances. From 25 April, after he called off the Kumbh and his Bengal rallies, Modi disappeared. He made no public appearance for 20 days.147 The prime minister of India fled the field when his people needed the government most. Through all of April and much of May, upper class Indians flooded Twitter with calls for help to find hospital beds, oxygen cylinders, drugs like Remdesivir and ventilators.148 The Union did not think to set up a helpline to guide those who needed this help. Into this space strode the youth Congress leader B.V. Srinivas (@srinivasiyc) who, with a team of volunteers, began to help people reaching out for aid on Twitter. He was so effective in the absence of the State and any government presence that even the embassies of New Zealand and the Philippines contacted him for help when staffers fell ill with Covid.149 Focussed on the government’s image, Jaishankar tweeted: ‘This was an unsolicited supply as they had no Covid cases. Clearly for cheap publicity by you know who. Giving away cylinders like this when there are people in desperate need of oxygen is simply appalling.’ The New Zealand embassy staffer who had received oxygen from Srinivas on 2 May died 18 days later.

… The most important contribution you can make now is taking pride in your treasured home state. Because nobody else is. Study and cherish her history, even if you have to do it on your own time. I did. Don’t know what they’re teaching today, but when I was a kid, American history was the exact same every year: Christopher Columbus, Plymouth Rock, Pilgrims, Thomas Paine, John Hancock, Sons of Liberty, tea party. I’m thinking, ‘Okay, we have to start somewhere— we’ll get to Florida soon enough.’…Boston Massacre, Crispus Attucks, Paul Revere, the North Church, ‘Redcoats are coming,’ one if by land, two if by sea, three makes a crowd, and I’m sitting in a tiny desk, rolling my eyes at the ceiling. Hello! Did we order the wrong books? Were these supposed to go to Massachusetts?…Then things showed hope, moving south now: Washington crosses the Delaware, down through original colonies, Carolinas, Georgia. Finally! Here we go! Florida’s next! Wait. What’s this? No more pages in the book. School’s out? Then I had to wait all summer, and the first day back the next grade: Christopher Columbus, Plymouth Rock…Know who the first modern Floridians were? Seminoles! Only unconquered group in the country! These are your peeps, the rugged stock you come from. Not genetically descended, but bound by geographical experience like a subtropical Ellis Island. Because who’s really from Florida? Not the flamingos, or even the Seminoles for that matter. They arrived when the government began rounding up tribes, but the Seminoles said, ‘Naw, we prefer waterfront,’ and the white man chased them but got freaked out in the Everglades and let ’em have slot machines…I see you glancing over at the cupcakes and ice cream, so I’ll limit my remaining remarks to distilled wisdom: “Respect your parents. And respect them even more after you find out they were wrong about a bunch of stuff. Their love and hard work got you to the point where you could realize this. “Don’t make fun of people who are different. Unless they have more money and influence. Then you must. “If someone isn’t kind to animals, ignore anything they have to say. “Your best teachers are sacrificing their comfort to ensure yours; show gratitude. Your worst are jealous of your future; rub it in. “Don’t talk to strangers, don’t play with matches, don’t eat the yellow snow, don’t pull your uncle’s finger. “Skip down the street when you’re happy. It’s one of those carefree little things we lose as we get older. If you skip as an adult, people talk, but I don’t mind. “Don’t follow the leader. “Don’t try to be different—that will make you different. “Don’t try to be popular. If you’re already popular, you’ve peaked too soon. “Always walk away from a fight. Then ambush. “Read everything. Doubt everything. Appreciate everything. “When you’re feeling down, make a silly noise. “Go fly a kite—seriously. “Always say ‘thank you,’ don’t forget to floss, put the lime in the coconut. “Each new year of school, look for the kid nobody’s talking to— and talk to him. “Look forward to the wonderment of growing up, raising a family and driving by the gas station where the popular kids now work. “Cherish freedom of religion: Protect it from religion. “Remember that a smile is your umbrella. It’s also your sixteen-in-one reversible ratchet set. “ ‘I am rubber, you are glue’ carries no weight in a knife fight. “Hang on to your dreams with everything you’ve got. Because the best life is when your dreams come true. The second-best is when they don’t but you never stop chasing them. So never let the authority jade your youthful enthusiasm. Stay excited about dinosaurs, keep looking up at the stars, become an archaeologist, classical pianist, police officer or veterinarian. And, above all else, question everything I’ve just said. Now get out there, class of 2020, and take back our state!

At other charter networks, the changes made to boost college success might look a little different, but they share one commonality: making students more independent learners and thus more likely to survive on a college campus. At Boston’s Brooke Charter Schools, for example, which just launched its first high school and has yet to send any graduates to college, the mindset begins in the earliest grades. During one visit there, I watched fourth-grade teacher Heidi Deck practice “flipped instruction,” in which students, when presented with a new problem, are first asked to solve it on their own, armed only with the tools of lessons learned from previous problems. “We really push kids to be engaged with the struggle,” said Deck. Next, she invites them to collaborate with one another to solve the problem, followed by more individual attempts to do the same. Always, Deck expects the students to figure out the puzzle. This is exactly the opposite of the most common approach to instruction, in which teachers demonstrate and then have students practice what they just watched. That’s dubbed the “I do —we do —you do” approach. With flipped instruction —and the many other teacher innovations here —“kids have to do the logical work of figuring something out rather than repeating what the teacher does,” said Brooke’s chief academic officer, Kimberly Steadman. The goal: Starting with its Class of 2020, the first graduating class Brooke sends off to college, all its students will be independent learners, able to roll with the surprises that confront all college students, especially first-generation college-goers.

If u want ppl 2 deliver u groceries & goods but don't want to hold the corporations they work for accountable for PPE, thriving wages, hazard pay, & taxes, you're exploiting cheap labor for your own safety. We won't survive on exploitation. We only survive through solidarity. (4/1/2020 on Twitter)

A pessimistic orientation does not seek accommodations with the system. We share the goal of the undercommons, which “is not to end the troubles but to end the world that created those particular troubles as the ones that must be opposed” (Halberstam 2013, 9). Moten and Harney don’t play the liberal game of reform; they are constantly reframing the problems at hand. What questions we ask are crucial—for bad questions yield worse answers, ones that compound the problem. On prison abolition, their intervention is decisive and reconfigures the coordinates of the debate: for them, it is “not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery” (Moten and Harney 2013, 42). How do you abolish a society? How do you fight state power? Is anti-statism, ethical (that is, nonviolent) anarchism, the only solution? Is it a solution? Or do you dare to seize power, as with the example of Morales? A universal politics takes these questions to heart. For this reason, its skeptical negativity is put into the service of a more virtuous end: locating antagonisms, rather than settling for conflicts or pseudo-struggles. Its challenge is to sustain the antagonistic logic of class struggle, and avoid the comfort of static oppositions. The cultural Left has its enemies (Trump, Putin, Le Pen, Erdoğan, Modi, Duterte, Netanyahu, Orbán, Bolsonaro, Suu Kyi, MBS, etc.)—and, conversely, notorious leaders blame liberal media, demonizing bad press with the “enemy of the people” charge—but nothing really changes; the basic features or coordinates of the current society remain the same. Worse, the liberal capitalist system is legitimized (only in a free democracy can you, as a citizen, criticize tyrants abroad and, more importantly, express your outrage at the president, politicians, or state power without the fear of retribution) and the cultural Left is tacitly compensated for playing by the rules—for practicing non-antagonistic politics, for forgoing class insurgency and not engaging in class war (Žižek 2020f)—rewarded with “libidinal profit” (Žižek 1997b, 47), with what Lacan calls a “surplus-enjoyment” (2007, 147), an enjoyment-in-sacrifice. That is to say, cultural leftists, with their “Beautiful Souls” intact, enjoy not being a racist, a misogynist, a transphobe, an ableist, and so on. Hating the haters, the morally repulsive, the fascists of the world, is indeed an endless source of libidinal satisfaction for “woke” liberals. But what changes does it actually produce?

In 2020, two psychologists published a survey of the American class divide when it came to happiness; in 1972, the difference between people with or without bachelor’s degrees had been very small, but it had steadily grown to a huge gulf by 2016, the year that, coincidentally or not, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States.

The technocracy has the upper hand against the white working class, although it is a tenuous hand, as can be seen by the election of Donald Trump. But this is merely the opening confrontation. Pressure on the technocracy will build. America is heading toward an institutional crisis in which the competence of the technocracy and the institutions of the federal government will be questioned.

Age: 13 [ERROR] / 28 Class/Level: Divine Candidate 1 XP: 0/50 HP: 20/20 Attributes [Free Points 2] Body: 5 Agility: 4 Mind: 10 Spirit: 9 Attunement Moon: 20 Sun: 1 Night: 10 Mana Moon: 54/54 Sun: 16/16 Night: 34/34 Affinities Time: 10 Wood: 6 Air: 5 Blessings Mythic Blessing of Mursa - Blessed Return Ageless Folio Skills Anatomy: 7 Arcana: 11 Enchanting: 16 Fishing: 1 Herbalism: 5 Librarian: 5 Ritual Magic: 25 Spear: 11 -Wind Spear:8 Spellcasting: 30

Stress costs British business over £400 million a year, and the Health and Safety Executive predict that the bill will continue to rise. The World Health Organisation estimates that stress will account for half of the ten most common medical problems in the world by 2020. The economic costs, and the threat of legal action, have alarmed employers and governments alike; it is these, rather than the human cost, which are driving government policy - it is the Secretary of Trade and Industry who comments on stress, not the Health Secretary. Over the last decade there has been a huge amount of research into the causes of stress, yet its incidence has continued to soar. Little has come out of the research except a burgeoning industry which offers stress consultants, stress programmes, stress counsellors, therapists and, when all that fails, lawyers to fight stress claims. This amounts to a dramatic failure of collective will either to recognise the extent of the problem or to do anything effective about it. All that is offered are sticking plasters to cover the symptoms, rather than the kind of reform of the workplace which is required to tackle the causes. According to one major study into the causes of stress, 68 per cent of the highly stressed report work intensification as a major factor.

During the forty years from 1978 to 2018, typical workers saw their compensation rise by a meager 12 percent; CEO compensation, meanwhile, ballooned by 940 percent. As of 2020, home health and personal care aides, one of the fastest-growing sectors of the economy, took home $27,080 per year on average. Other workers who provide socially necessary care, like preschool teachers, take home just over $30,500 a year. Food and service workers, meanwhile, take home just $21,250 a year. For the 7.5 million US residents who work these three jobs—and for the families dependent on them—staying afloat is a constant struggle, if not an impossibility. I wish I could say these occupations were the anomaly, but they’re not. What was once America’s working class is today its working poor.19 The

BEST NIOS OPEN SCHOOL CENTER IN NOIDA AND GHAZIABAD Admission process for Transfer of Credit (TOC) in NIOS is as follows: Students who have failed or have compartments in the 10th or 12th class from any State board can apply for TOC admission. If a student has passed in some subjects in their previous board exam, those subject marks will be transferred to the NIOS board, and the student will have to appear for exams in the remaining three subjects. These exams will be held in October 2024. For admission, students can contact us via call or message on the provided contact number. In NIOS TOC admission, the marks of two subjects from the previous board are transferred to the NIOS board's mark sheet, and the student has to appear for exams in three subjects from NIOS. The student needs to pass all three subjects. After passing, NIOS provides a mark sheet for five subjects, showing the passing marks for the transferred subjects and the marks obtained in the three subjects the student appeared for. To opt for the TOC facility, students need to submit their original mark sheet from the previous board to NIOS, which should not be laminated. Students who have failed in 2020 or later from any recognized state board can apply for TOC. Students who have failed in any previous year from any board can also appear for exams under Stream 2 of NIOS. Admissions for Stream 2 in NIOS are currently open for students who have either failed this year or have failed previously. These students can appear for exams in October of the same year to save their academic year, and the results will be declared in December.

The data bears this out. In addition to a “persistence scorecard,” S&P Dow Jones Indices publishes snapshots of how many mutual funds beat their benchmarks. Most years, a majority underperform their indices, whatever the market. Over multiple years, the data becomes progressively grimmer. As of June 2020, only 15 percent of US stock-pickers had cumulatively managed to surpass their benchmark over the last decade. In bond markets, it is a similar tale, albeit varying depending on the flavor of fixed income. The data is more favorable for fund managers in more exotic, less efficient asset classes, such as emerging markets, but on the whole the data is clear that in the longer run most fund managers still underperform their passive rivals after fees.

Les monstres jihadistes des années 2010 et 2020 ont été engendrés par un "sommeil de la raison" qui dure depuis le dernier quart du XXe siècle, rythmé par la berceuse, fredonnée à l'infini par Olivier Roy et ses épigones, dont le refrain égrène "Ca ne sert à rien de connaître l'arabe pour étudier l'Islam en France". Elle légitimera au nom de la science le paisible endormissement d'une haute administration et de ses relais dans la classe politique, qui partage cette ignorance culturelle linguistique et en fait vertu. La déficience du savoir de nos élites a ainsi ouvert un boulevard à l'extrême-droite, qui fait son miel électoral de l'exacerbation des tensions communautaires éclatant au visage de nos concitoyens déboussolés, alors que le consensus des politiciens "respectables" a longtemps préféré les mettre sous le boisseau, confortés en cela par nos maîtres aliborons.

Let’s take the case of US law schools as an example. If you were to say to someone educated, “There are too many law schools producing too many lawyers in the US,” she would probably agree, in part because there have been dozens of articles over the past several years about the precipitous drop in positions at law firms and the many unemployed law school graduates.9 The general response to this problem is, “Well, people will figure it out and eventually stop applying to law school,” the suggestion being that the market will clear and self-correct if given enough time. On the surface it looks like this market magic is now happening. In 2013, law school applications are projected to be down to about 54,000 from a high of 98,700 in 2004.10 That’s a dramatic decrease of 45 percent. However, a closer look shows that the number of students who started law school in 2011 and are set to graduate in 2014 was 48,697, about 43,000 of whom will graduate, based on historical graduation rates.11 We’ll still be producing 36,000–43,000 newly minted law school grads a year, not far from the peak of 44,495 set in 2012, from now until the current entering class graduates in 2016. Meanwhile, in 2011, only 65.4 percent of law school graduates got jobs for which they needed to pass the bar exam, and estimates of the number of new legal jobs available run as low as 2,180 per year.12 Bloomberg Businessweek has projected a surplus of 176,000 unemployed or underemployed law school graduates by 2020.13 So even as applications plummet, there will not be dramatically fewer law school graduates produced in the coming several years, though it will have been easier to get in as acceptance rates rise due to the diminished applicant pool.14 We’ll still be producing many more lawyers than the market requires, but now they’ll be less talented. If anything, the situation is going to get worse before it gets better. Human capital markets don’t self-correct very quickly, if at all. At a minimum there’s a massive time lag that spans years, for several reasons.

I took up duck farming in The Ozarks in 2020. I guess I did it mainly because the YMCA Aquatic Center in Orlando was operating at full occupancy with a geriatric aerobics class, and the instructor wouldn't let me ride my unicycle in the pool.

Incentivizing government service, though, would be altogether different. Why should we want young Americans to perform one or two years of government service? One reason is that a common experience would help break down some of the barriers that have arisen owing to geography, class, race, religion, education, language, and more. World War II did precisely this for millions of Americans. Today, however, there is simply too little common experience in this society and too much that reinforces differences and divisions. It is revealing that according to a recent poll, almost half of second-year college students report they wouldn’t choose to room with someone who supported a different presidential candidate than they did in 2020, while a majority say they wouldn’t go on a date with someone who voted differently and nearly two-thirds couldn’t envision marrying someone who supported a different candidate.

The immigration debate in America today is not really about immigration. Nor is it about national security, the economy or the vagaries of our outdated asylum system. Like much else in our civic life, the immigration debate is mostly a proxy for domestic policies and the culture wars. It just happens to a particularly potent proxy because it tends to elicit strong feelings about the American dream, ethnic identity, class and nationhood. That is to say, immigration is an issue that’s ripe for exploitation and cooption by both the Left and the Right. Each side can easily condemn the other without ever getting down to debating actual US policy on its merits. This is one reason why we still have an immigration system that dates from 1965. Book Review: “They’re not sending their best.” Claremont Review of Books, volume 20, no.3 (summer, 2020). P.45

Christianity Confronts the Caste System in India By Cameron Hilditch National Review, December 10, 2020 For those who don’t know, the caste system is a 3,000-year-old Hindu theological idea, according to which people are grouped into five rigid and hierarchical social groups. Brahmins are the cream of the crop, followed by Kshatriyas, who together make up the country’s ruling classes. Vaishyas form the middle class, Shudras the laborers, and Dalits (literally “outcastes”) are at the very bottom of the social hierarchy, mostly functioning as street sweepers, latrine cleaners, and the like. Caste is fixed at birth, determined by actions undertaken in a past life. Consequently, there’s little room for social mobility.

Join me in celebrating the class of 2020.

Still, the tentacle must be pretty big for her to be able to discern that it's a tentacle at all. That's not real, she thinks, with the instant scorn of any true New Yorker. Just two days before, big white film-production trailers took over her entire block. That happens all the bloody time these days, because movie people invariably seem to want multicultural working-class New York as a backdrop for their all-white upper-class dramedies—which means Queens, since East New York is still too Black for their tastes and the Bronx has a "reputation".

As the 2019 elections were approaching, the Modi government felt the need to appear less pro-rich and more pro-poor again. But the union budget passed in February was somewhat a missed opportunity so far as the peasants were concerned. No loan waivers were announced in their favor, simply an enhanced interest subvention on loans and an annual income support of Rs 6,000 (80 USD)—6 percent of a small farmer’s yearly income—to all farmers’ households owning two hectares or fewer.131 In fact, the union budget was once again more geared to pleasing the middle class. The income tax exemption limit jumped from Rs 200,000 (2,667 USD) to 250,000 (3,333 USD), and the income tax rate up to Rs 5 lakh (6,667 USD) was reduced from 10 to 5 percent. The income tax on an income of Rs 10 lakh (13,333 USD) dropped from Rs 110,210 (1,470 USD) to Rs 75,000 (1,000 USD).132 The poor were doubly affected by the fiscal policy of the Modi government in 2014–2019: not only did the tax cuts in favor of the middle class, the abolition of the wealth tax, and, more importantly, the reduction of the corporate tax rates have to be offset by increased indirect taxes, but the stagnation of fiscal resources did not allow the government of India to spend more on public education and public health—all the more so as Narendra Modi wanted to reduce the fiscal deficit. First of all, tax collection diminished. The exchequer “lost” Rs 1.45 lakh crore (1.933 billion USD) in the reduction of the corporate tax, for instance. That was the main reason why gross direct tax collection dipped 4.92 percent133 in 2019–2020, a fiscal year during which gross tax collections were less than those in 2018–2019. Tax collections had never declined on a year-on-year basis since 1961–1962.134 Second, government expenditures diminished. The central government reduced its spending on education from 0.63 percent of GDP in 2013–2014 to 0.47 percent in 2017–2018. The trend was marginally better on the public health front, where the Center’s spending declined from 0.37 percent of GDP in 2013–2014 to 0.34 percent in 2015–2016, before rising again to reach 0.38 percent in 2016–2017.

Half of the human population is relegated to second class status and suffers violence and abuse from men.

Before 2020 ended Bezos came to personify the rapacious opportunism of the billionaire class who were extracting wealth from a public health emergency, at the expense of employees laboring in proximity to the virus.

The idea that emerged from both the New Deal and World War II was that a state managed by experts dedicated to solutions without an ideology would do for the country what it did for the war: it would breed success. But of course, this became a principle, the principle became a belief, and the belief became an ideology. The ideology created a class who felt entitled to govern and who were believed to be suitable to govern. It

Generosity takes many forms. Barnaby Pain, a church planter with 2020birmingham who is one year into a church revitalization project, makes this clear. He emailed the following to me (John) recently, when I asked him to reflect on why he planted with 2020birmingham. I felt, since Bible college, that the only place I could lead a revitalization would be in Birmingham. Why? I knew revitalization would mean a lot of challenges. I knew I was not some amazing rugged hero with vast experience who could accomplish change alone. I felt weak and unimpressive, and facing up to my own limitations and weakness meant that leading a revitalization would require more than just me and my young family. So we needed the generous support of faithful people with us and the support of faithful pastors around us. Birmingham was the only place I thought we had this, and we had it there in abundance! We were able to gather a first-class team of families to join with us to kick-start the revitalization. The benefit of collaborative church planting and the thriving movement of church planting in Birmingham was that all these people already knew what was expected; they’d seen it done. And churches were willing to be generous in giving us their best. Another benefit is the ongoing partnership between churches. Just because we took a group of families a year and three months ago does not in any sense mean the job is done. Ongoing needs arise at different stages of our journey, and the churches around us get this. They are in constant contact to pray and offer real practical support.

The rest of us, on the other hand—we members of the protected classes—have grown increasingly dependent on our welfare programs. In 2020 the federal government spent more than $193 billion on homeowner subsidies, a figure that far exceeded the amount spent on direct housing assistance for low-income families ($53 billion).

I remember two boys being suspected of being gay in my class as a child in the 1970’s. Assuming there were also two girls that were gender challenged, that makes four people out of a class of thirty that had gender issues! In the 2020’s that number is believed to be around eight people. What has changed to cause this?

In the late summer of 2020, Kila Posey asked the principal of Mary Lin Elementary School, in the wealthy suburbs of Atlanta, whether she could request a specific teacher for her seven-year-old daughter. “No worries,” the principal responded at first. “Just send me the teacher’s name.” But when Posey emailed her request, the principal kept suggesting that a different teacher would be a better fit. Eventually, Posey, who is Black, demanded to know why her daughter couldn’t have her first choice. “Well,” the principal admitted, “that’s not the Black class.” The story sounds depressingly familiar. It evokes the long and brutal history of segregation, conjuring up visions of white parents who are horrified at the prospect of their children having classmates who are Black. But there is a perverse twist: the principal, Sharyn Briscoe, is herself Black. As Posey told the Atlanta Black Star, she was left in “disbelief that I was having this conversation in 2020 with a person that looks just like me—a Black woman. It’s segregating classrooms. You cannot segregate classrooms. You can’t do it.

Sometimes the elite green gospel has proved catastrophic—especially for the middle classes. In August and September 2020, high winds, lightning strikes, and scorching temperatures caused hundreds of forest fires throughout California. Past “more natural” policies had discouraged controlled burning, removal of brush from forest floors, cattle grazing on hillsides of dead undergrowth, and the logging of tens of millions of dead trees lost during recent droughts. Even the emasculated timber industry might have managed if it had been permitted to hire thousands to harvest the dead trees of the last six years, thus providing jobs, timber, and forest safety. Instead, the summer perfect storm created a sort of green napalm—a combustible fuel of unharvested timber that would turn a traditional wildfire into an uncontrollable inferno, burn over four million acres, and send one hundred million metric tons of carbon emissions into the air. Due to the tremendous temperatures created by the infernos, eerie pyrocumulus clouds for weeks dotted the Sierra Nevada skyline, in apocalyptical fashion emulating the mushroom clouds that billow up after nuclear blasts. The ensuing smoke clouds soon covered much of the state and overwhelmed the efficacy of public and private solar farms, which in turn led to rolling scheduled power outages. And the power crisis had been made worse by the voluntary state shutdown of clean-burning natural gas and nuclear power plants—all exacerbated by near-record temperatures in some areas of the state reaching 110 degrees.

As I have pointed out repeatedly over the past four years, we appear to be headed toward a dystopian future in which there will basically be two classes of people: (a) “normals” (i.e., those who conform to global-capitalist ideology and decrees); and (b) the “extremists” (i.e., those who don’t).

In the United States, the situation is still more extreme: the poorest 50 percent owned barely 2 percent of the total in 2020, as opposed to 72 percent for the richest 10 percent, and 26 percent for the patrimonial middle class.

we members of the protected classes—have grown increasingly dependent on our welfare programs. In 2020 the federal government spent more than $193 billion on homeowner subsidies, a figure that far exceeded the amount spent on direct housing assistance for low-income families ($53 billion). Most families who enjoy those subsidies have six-figure incomes and are white. Poor families lucky enough to live in government-owned apartments often have to deal with mold and even lead paint, while rich families are claiming the mortgage interest deduction on first and second homes.

MY DEMOGRAPHIC RESEARCH makes it crystal clear that emerging countries, outside of China and a few others like Thailand, will dominate demographic growth in the next global boom. But the even more powerful factor is the urbanization process, with the typical emerging country only 50 percent urbanized, as compared with 85 percent in the typical developed country. In emerging countries, urbanization increases household income as much as three times from its level in rural areas. As people move into the cities, they also climb the social and economic ladder into the middle class. With the cycles swirling around us for the next several years and the force of revolution reshaping our world, emerging markets are in the best position to come booming out the other side. That’s why investors and businesses should be investing more in emerging countries when this crash likely sees its worst, by early 2020. My research is unique when it comes to projecting urbanization, GDP per capita gains from it, and demographic workforce growth trends and peaks in emerging countries. It’s not what I’m most known for, but it’s the most strategic factor in the next global boom, which emerging countries will dominate. As a general guideline, those in South and Southeast Asia, from the Philippines to India and Pakistan, have strong demographic growth, urbanization trends, and productivity gains ahead. This is not the case for China, though. Latin America has mostly strong demographic growth, but limited continued urbanization and productivity gains. Much of the Middle East and Africa have not joined the democratic-capitalism party, but those regions otherwise have the most extreme urbanization and demographic potential. One day they’ll be the best places to invest, but not yet.

What he’s done is he’s hurt the middle class and lower-income, and his tax credits and all that have benefited the rich. It hasn’t benefited the poor.” Simple. Straightforward. Connected to people’s lives. Not contempt-filled or condescending. This kind of messaging is much more effective than the Ukraine/Russia/norms and guardrails hand wringing that you are hit over the head with by the media and Democratic elite.

This was a period in which millions, as listeners and participants, helped create a popular music and counterculture that was not just ‘staffed’ and serviced by the creative efforts of the working class and lower middle class musicians, but actually shaped and defined by them in the interests of transforming the historical exclusions and icy and condescending hierarchies of bourgeois culture.” p.31 Red Days, 2020

In his new piece in Jacobin, Karp lays out how the Democratic Party has rejected the politics of class solidarity in favor of embracing the professional elite. The results of this should be abundantly obvious: NAFTA, TPP, allowing union power to decline, banking bailouts, an embrace of woke virtue signaling to keep working-class minorities in the tent while providing nothing of substance in terms of their economic well-being.

elevating a candidate based on their identity can provide a progressive sheen to the status quo. A way to score all your good lefty points without having your own class interests, power structures, or cocktail circuit access threatened. A way to feel good about what a good person you are without actually having to commit to change a system that has allowed you to get yours.

The reckoning with this type of politics is only just beginning on the left as we grapple with the real legacy of the Obama years. It meant something to elect the first black President. I don’t want to diminish that. But for the disproportionately black and brown and female working class, it would have meant more to have a President who fought for union rights, who helped middle class homeowners rather than standing by as their net worth was destroyed by criminal banksters, who didn’t let corporations write his big Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal.

If the Democratic Party wants to win, then they should actually do something for the multi-racial working class instead of just changing the race of the so-called “leader” that runs palliative care for the working people in the giant hospice that both rural and urban America have become.

If Democrats want to be the party of working people, then they can’t pick and choose which people. I want no part of the party centered around the professional-managerial class, throwing a bone of identity politics to the black and brown working class to keep them in the tent.

Your identity is only celebrated if it does not upset the economic structure which benefits the wealthy over the working class.

History is likely to look back at the Obama years as an unbelievable missed opportunity. He had it well within his power to reorient the Democratic Party around the working class, but instead he continued to move it towards the wealthy and the upper middle class. It remains to be seen whether the tide can be turned back.

In his way, Donald Trump has made many of the same mistakes that Obama did. He too was brought to power by the combination of a passionate grassroots movement and a wealthy donor class.

What would happen if the public was actually enlisted in the service of a pro-working class agenda?

These are good people, they have great ideas. How come for the last 45 years wages have been stagnant for the middle class, how come we have the highest rate of childhood poverty, how come 45 million people still have student debt,how com 3 people own more wealth than the bottom half of america? And here is the answer. Nothing will change unless we have the guts to take on wall street, the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the military industrial complex and the fossil fuel industry. If we don't have the guts to take them on we'll continue to have plans, we'll continue to have talks but the rich will get richer and everybody else will be struggling.

Humanity, Love and Kindness is the class of 2020!

In 1984, the creator of Sam Adams beer, Jim Koch, was staring long and hard across the chasm. It was spring. It was the beginning of the baseball season in Boston, and it was about to be “morning in America.” Ronald Reagan was preparing for what would be a landslide reelection to the presidency, the economy had finally turned around after years in recession, the US Olympic team was about to run away from the competition at the Summer Games in Los Angeles, and Jim was in the middle of his sixth year as a management consultant for Boston Consulting Group (BCG), already earning $250,000 per year (that’s more than $600K in 2020 dollars) before his thirty-fifth birthday. By all accounts, Jim Koch had it made. His feet were planted securely on the terra firma of the business consulting world. “We flew first-class. You consulted with CEOs. Everyone treated you really well,” Jim recalled. These were interesting, heady times at BCG. The company had just become fully employee owned, complete with an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) that forged a real path to truly significant wealth for consultants like Jim. At the same time, he had already worked alongside a quartet of future luminaries:

Multinational corporations realized sometime in the mid 2010s that if they began to parrot and sponsor social justice seminars, that these critical race theorists would in turn not criticize them for shipping U.S. jobs overseas and perpetuating the class divide within our society. In effect, they purchased leftist

we both have a deep skepticism of and contempt for those who would fixate on race and gender alone as a way to distract from the war-making and economic rigging that has proved so destructive for working class people of all races. We have nothing but disgust for those who would use identity as a wedge to divide natural allies from one another in order to maintain the status quo. After all, throughout American history, cynical politicians have weaponized race and gender to turn our working class citizens against one another, rendering them powerless. Because a true multi-racial working class coalition would be an unstoppable force, and no donor or multi-national corporation could stop them. The wealthy know quite well that they share class interests regardless of their race, gender or sexual orientation. Take a look at a Manhattan cocktail party and you’ll see plenty of “bipartisanship” which strangely has the same interest.

The truth is that in an era where both parties have decided to center corporate interests, identity has been used to culturally pander to the working class so that you can keep screwing them economically. For those who hold power, it’s relatively nonthreatening to embrace a type of change that would only go so far as to change the race or gender of the keepers of the status quo. The great American meritocracy, in which every little boy and girl can ascend to their rightful status, can be venerated and preserved if the only problem with it is bias of race and gender. Once you start thinking hard about class interests and start asking whether there’s really anything so special about those people at the top of the meritocracy, that is ultimately a much more dangerous and potentially transformational view.  What really threatens American elites isn’t the notion that we need more women or more people of color with their boot on the throat of the working class, the real threat comes when people start asking why the working class should have a boot on their throat at all.