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Jacobin
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[...] Shoppers can donate their bag credits — the five-cent rebate they receive by forgoing plastic bags — to a microfinance fund.
Combining this with traditional donations, Whole Foods hopes to raise $5 million to fund 40,000 small loans to “impoverished entrepreneurs” around the globe. They say that these direct financial transfers, unmediated by government agencies, can “empower the poor and the communities around them.”
a couple of things
* kinda obvious, but: Whole Foods does NOT need shoppers to "donate" anything; they are perfectly capable of donating excess profits on their own if they so choose to, without involving the consumer at all. this is just so blatantly PR-focused that i wanna vomit. reminds me of when BA makes its flight attendants collect donations for some children's charity
* why on earth would anyone believe that direct financial transfers (which require repayment) from shareholder-beholden corporations are a way of EMPOWERING the poor, compared to governments that are at least theoretically accountable to the people? surely the govt is always the right org for the job here, and if it's not, the solution should be to fix that problem first of all? whence does this libertarian belief that an institution NOT beholden to the people it's trying to serve is the best way to serve those people come from??? i am dying
If community programs have consistently floundered, both in the past and today, what’s left? A return to the rule of experts? Bigger dams and better seeds? If faced with two approaches — that of the development expert, asking “What can we do for the poor?” and that of the community developer, asking “What can we do with them?” — then the grassroots approach seems at least less condescending.
Yet there is a third question that inhabitants of the Global North might ask, one that would be far more productive. “What have we been doing to them?”
That question implies a different framework, one that proponents of participatory development rarely consider. It raises the possibility that there might be some causal relationship between government policies in the Global North and the continued poverty of the Global South. Rather than focusing merely on poor people in poor places, it zooms out, capturing the North and South together through a wide-angle lens.
^^^^^
[...] One consequence of rapid industrialization was bringing huge numbers of former peasants together into new factories where they rapidly got absorbed into trade unions and were quickly radicalized. But now since workers don’t stick around in the factory long enough to be politicized, to be drawn into organizations, it means that economic development and urbanization isn’t bringing with it a kind of radicalized working class the way you saw in the past.
that is actually quite a good insight and not really one I'd thought about before
I think the first step towards that is to see that the fundamental problem these days is not North versus South, the fundamental problem is that in any country where working people try to raise their voice, the first power they come up against and they have to confront is their own ruling classes.
“You never responded to Michigan,” he said.
“I said no to Michigan,” she said.
“You didn’t,” he said.
“Well,” she said. “No. I don’t want to go to Michigan for vacation.”
“Where do you want to go?” he said.
“You need a want, Miles,” she said. “You brought it up, so you should know where we’re going. I should be hearing why where you want to go is right.”
“You don’t want to be with someone like that,” he said.
“Someone who knows what he wants?” she said. She gripped the glass, watching the foam recede into her last inch of beer.
“Wanting to go isn’t a want?” he said.
She sat with that a moment before saying, “We’ll go to Texas,” as if they’d been discussing Texas as an option all along. “West Texas for two weeks.”
this is so brutal. horrible relationship
“Are we having a fight?” he said.
It came out like a burp. But if it was going to get asked, he was glad he’d managed to ask it before she did. If they were, that is. Having a fight.
“What do you mean?” she said.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Then why did you ask it?” she said.
“I don’t know,” he said again, officially giving up any advantage he’d gained by demonstrating he had no idea what to do with it.
“Well, then think about it,” said his wife, “and get back to me.”
oh god
“Okay, well,” she said, stopping the chair again with her foot, “when you say it like that, I start filling in blanks. I know it’s not that you don’t know, or don’t think so; it’s that you don’t want to tell me what you actually think. Or you think you’ve already told me, and you’re trying to make me work it out on my own. So. I start trying to think of things you might know but wouldn’t want to say. I look at something like what you just asked, about quitting your job, the way you’re letting it hang there in the air between us, and I start thinking things like maybe it’s a threat. Like maybe you’re saying that if I can’t figure out some way to appease your chronic insecurity, you’ll come home one afternoon with your tie all loosened and your job all gone. Is that what you’re saying?”
urggh
“How could you not know?” she said.
He shrugged.
“Fuck that,” she said. “Tell me.”
In truth, he’d wanted to talk it through with her since the problem first came to his attention. His wife was an expert at coring the layers of Miles’s anxiety for nuggets of relevant truth. She saw him faster than he could see himself, which was how she’d managed to be right from the start—he was scared of her—and also why he hadn’t realized it until now.
When she did speak, Miles’s wife was careful. She was attentive to what she said, how she said it, and why, making her pauses more loaded, her half of the conversation more compelling, and her criticisms more devastating. Miles was messy by comparison, but he preferred to think of it as a strategy. It wasn’t that he was incapable of getting it together; he was messy because carefulness in communication made him uneasy. It was too tactical, too close to dishonesty. It was a technique for people who were unwilling to confront the consequences of their true feelings. When Miles wasn’t ready to reveal something, he’d made a practice of forcing himself anyway, at least when he could remember to, and he almost always felt better after doing so. Whatever the aftermath, he’d done what he could. The weight was lifted. A burden shared is a burden halved. Having it out beat holding it in.
“I am,” he said. “You’re saying how quickly the winds can change. I’d better watch my step.”
“No,” she said. “I’m saying, I’d like to love you.”
“But?” he said.
“But you’re making it hard,” she said.
Miles felt his skin sloughing off. His bones had quit too. He’d be nothing but a mess of hair and organs and blood after this, and she would like to love him.
“I think it’s fair,” he said, “to want to be able to live my life without feeling that I’m about to lose you to a grocery trip.”
“A hike,” she said.
“And you wanted me to know all this for what?” he said. “You wanted to leave, and now you’re not, and you’d like to love me, and you wanted me to carry all this around with me for the rest of my life, for what?”
“This is what you asked for,” she said.
“This is not what I asked for,” he said.
“It’s what you ask for all the time,” she said.
“What do I ask for?” he said.
“How I feel,” she said. “You ask me to tell you. So, this is how I felt.”
“Well, shit,” he said. “It’s a little late.”
ouch