Archive (Page 6) • Schooling in Socialist America • Buttondown

School Funding in the Covid Crisis

[I’ll be discussing these ideas at an upcoming event if you’re interested in joining!]Things are bad. Really bad. It’s truly a crisis in the sense that this...

New directions: school finance

When the pandemic started my partner was eight months pregnant. I needed something to distract myself from the anxiety of having a child in a crisis. I’d...

Is there a train-wreck coming?

Scared there's a train wreck coming. I think society's basically got two parts: a state and an economy. They're inter-related. The economy is how we make our...

On the fireworks

Every night, or even in the afternoon and mid-day, we hear explosions. The explosions are sometimes a singular big boom. Other times there are multiple booms...

Big picture update

I haven’t done a finance update in a bit, but I got a chance to listen to my favorite econ podcast while changing Thisbe — have to stand and leave her on the...

Thinking about the word 'rally' this week. On the one hand, there have been historic marches and rallies (and successful direct actions) on police brutality...

Two demands in real estate

A communist graffiti artist is on an amazing rampage in our neighborhood. Here’s a building project happening around the corner from us that I took on a...

The US is not a failed state

Apologies for the lateness of this post. My partner gave birth last Thursday to a tiny human named Thisbe Gilbert Ronen-Backer, and I’ve been accordingly...

Finance-speak and oppression

Something else about the business news, finance, market discourses I've been thinking about. This discourse is clearly a ruling class discourse. But what...

The threat of bankruptcy

Happy May 1. What a time to celebrate international workers’ day. In honor of the day, I figured I’d continue a wonky project focusing on some numbers for...

Once again I have to recommend Econoday Unplugged for straight talk when it comes to the economy. It’s just a soft-spoken American guy who stutters a bit and...

Schools are not a loan

On April 23rd, the School District of Philadelphia announced that there will be a $1 billion shortfall in its budget over the next five years due to the...

Illyrian economics

Things are heating up. I got to the part in Joanna Bockman’s Markets in the Name of Socialism where she describes the basic outline of Yugoslavia’s socialist...

My sweet inflatable you

One of the bigger ‘destabilizing’ forces in economy is when prices of everything goes up or down. If the price of stuff goes up (inflates), then money...

Towards a socialist finance, part 2

In trying to craft some socialist concepts of finance, I’ve been reading about the history and theory of socialist economics in the 20th century. Right now...

Class struggle content

As much as I’ve been on a tare about finance, I’ve been watching some pretty awesome class struggle content on television. By which I mean streaming on my...

Response to Grace Blakely

This review by Grace Blakely crafts a good slogan about 'breaking the power of finance', but a couple things stand out to me: 1. 'Finance' isn't necessarily...

Is there a housing crisis?

I keep seeing headlines about possible housing crises in the pandemic. I decided to do a little meander around some housing indicators to see if one’s...

Are the testing numbers real?

So much of what’s happening in finance capitalism right now depends on whether it looks like the pandemic is stopping. The ruling class has eyes glued on...

Capital's Achilles heel?

I was almost right! Sort of. I’d had an instinct that the dollar swaps the Fed was doing with 20 international banks had something to do with inflation. I...

Gimme some muni

One of the historic things about the Fed’s pesach miracle was its entrance in muni markets: it committed to buying $500 billion of municipal bonds. ‘Munis’...

A capitalist dilemma

If you want to hear some capitalists going at it over one of the biggest questions for capitalism right now, listen to this Squawk on the Street podcast...

Towards a socialist finance

From the article “Concrete Utopia,” on Yugoslavian Architecture.I’m trying to understand finance as a socialist. The pandemic is a good opportunity because...

What the Fed did on Thursday

It was a pesach miracle. The Fed decided to initiate another program of $2.3 trillion, boldly buying credit it has never bought before (specifically junk...

'Green' Bonds Now

We know that carbon emissions are an emergency. They need to go down a lot and fast. We all know the Green New Deal and the Green Stimulus and other...

Poop back and forth, forever

Remember that scene from Me, You, and Everyone We Know where the little boy says I want to poop back and forth. Like, I'll poop into her butt hole... and...

The Wizard of Oz Effect

This strangely formatted article has so much important information about the financial terrain in this moment. What I’m getting from it is that there was a...

Corporate debt spreads, here I come. This weekend I set myself the task of trying to understand this short piece at Econospeak on corporate credit spreads...

People before corporations?

This may be a dumb or unpopular question for a socialist to ask, but I’m interested in thinking it through: should our slogan be “people before...

The online news show Rising is a new favorite source for left news/analysis. I listen to it almost every day. One of the strangest and most interesting...

There’s a good piece on the difference between furloughs and layoffs in the Philly Inquirer today. The lines are fuzzy at best. Furloughed workers ‘maybe’...

Joblessness and suicide

(CW: suicide.) Joblessness claims went up again last week, making the total 6.6 million claims in the last month. In searching around for the impacts of...

Leverage: an assignment

A friend on Facebook who studies economics posted a challenge: try to read this semi-insidery article about what’s going on in finance right now and post a...

Black hole, not black swan

Finance people call this pandemic production crisis a black swan, but I don’t like that term. Of course it’s accurate from a ruling class point of view: it’s...

We need working class data collection

I think socialists need our own data collection that takes measurements from a working class perspective. For example: yesterday, US consumer confidence...

Remarkable, contentious leverage

I know you're dying to know about some sneaky leverage in the pandemic relief package signed last week! Apparently there's $454 billion of this package that...

I’ve been reading about the Federal Reserve. It just spent $6 trillion dollars to rescue capitalism from the pandemic. It’s a main character in the story of...

The Imperiali$m of Relief

American imperialism manifests in a lot of ways. But in this pandemic crisis, one way that’s getting my attention is in terms of protection against...

Interest rates like beer for a dime

Two big questions about the crisis are: what was the state of capitalism before coronavirus, and what’ll its future be?I rarely hear socialists talking about...

The (socialist) thing about buybacks

Everyone’s bashing buybacks. Bailouts and relief packages for Wall Street are so bad, critics say, because corporations just buy their own stocks and enrich...

$6 trillion isn't enough.

The big item in the news this morning is the CARES Act, passed in the Senate last night. It features a $2 trillion of fiscal programs including:$1200 of...

Bond with the wind

Like I’ve said before, I’m an education researcher. Why would I be compulsively blogging about the capitalist mode of production in this moment (other than...

Precision Crisis

The pandemic is causing an economic crisis, but we should be precise. When I see socialist analysis and others on the left say that the problem is...

Socialist approaches to the crisis?

Ever hear those annoying ethics hypotheticals where you have to choose between two awful situations to figure out what your ethical theory is? That’s sort of...

Prediction: Yellow Vests. In the US.

Get ready to be angry. Two very different economic experiences are emerging in our fair mode of production. If you didn't believe in a struggle between...

Recovering from capitalist pandemic

We obviously want people to recover from COVID-19, but when it comes to society as a whole there's going to be a bigger recovery from the structural impact...

Thoughts on education, capitalism, policy.

Welcome to Schooling in Socialist America by me, David I. Backer. education, ideology, policy, socialism (@lilacphilly + @phillysocfem), puns, etc. he/him....