“The goal of welfare reform is not to cut off benefits to a small group of welfare recipients,” writes Katherine Sciacchitano in In These Times (February 3), “but to reshape the whole market for unskilled labor. Any hopes that the law can be patched or ‘fixed’ are illusory. The reform’s basic mechanism is simple: Create a captive labor force that must work or lose benefits….Like similar measures from the 19th century, the law will channel welfare recipients into low-wage jobs, where they will drive down wages even further.” She quotes John Milkint, a Milwaukee temp-agency executive: “People won’t work [for minimum wage] because their benefits are too high. Benefits are too high because they are pegged to union wages that prevent us from competing internationally. They both must fall.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Things pacifists don’t want to know. Veronica Anderson, writing in Catalyst (February) about Manley High School’s freshman academy: “In September 1995, Manley freshmen racked up 18 arrests for mob action. At about the same time, a school policy kicked in that requires all 9th-graders to register for ROTC, a program that teaches self-control and promotes student comradery. Since then, freshman student arrests have fallen off dramatically. This September, there were only two.”
Does Chicago need another airport? The Metropolitan Planning Council (which has taken no position on the issue) explains that it depends on whether the city objects to losing some passengers who use O’Hare simply to transfer from one flight to another. If American and United divert such connecting passengers to less busy hubs, leaving O’Hare to passengers who are actually coming here, then Chicago needs no new airport. “All of the consultants who have done recent studies for the Chicago area agree that, with this shift, there is sufficient capacity at existing airports to accommodate growing O/D [origin-destination] travel through 2020,” states an article on the issue in the MPC’s “Aviation Fact Sheet #5” (October). Would this hurt the city? Maybe not, since the average connecting passenger spends only about $7 here, while each O/D passenger feeds hundreds of dollars into the local economy.
Department of Social Justice and Envy Studies. Reynolds Farley in The New American Reality: Who We Are, How We Got Here, Where We Are Going: “Those in the bottom quintile [fifth] of the income distribution might rejoice in the fact that their average purchasing power went up 9 percent during the prosperous 1980s. However, the purchasing power of those in the top quintile went up much faster–24 percent–so the poor might feel they fell deeper into the well since they dropped quite a bit further behind those at the top.”
