5LL #4 - Universal Basic Income, Capitalist Climate Change, Social Housing, Queer Eye, Luxury Leftism

Could a Universal Basic Income Become a Political Reality?
Clio Chang, The Nation
The Democratic Party has often written off good policy as too expensive and improbable. But if the most “radical” ideas on the left like a UBI aren’t political nonstarters, even when they include large tax increases, then Democrats shouldn’t be afraid to explore other big, nontraditional policy ideas. Progressive challengers like Ocasio-Cortez have already sounded the charge, endorsing policies like a jobs guarantee, the abolition of ICE, and transition to a 100 percent renewable-energy system. Other leftist insurgents are also thinking of big out-of-the box ideas, like Michigan gubernatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s plan for a public option for the Internet.
Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not "Human Nature"
Naomi Klein, The Intercept
If, on the other hand, we humans really were on the brink of saving ourselves in the ’80s, but were swamped by a tide of elite, free-market fanaticism — one that was opposed by millions of people around the world — then there is something quite concrete we can do about it. We can confront that economic order and try to replace it with something that is rooted in both human and planetary security, one that does not place the quest for growth and profit at all costs at its center. And the good news — and, yes, there is some — is that today, unlike in 1989, a young and growing movement of green democratic socialists is advancing in the United States with precisely that vision. And that represents more than just an electoral alternative — it’s our one and only planetary lifeline.
Why We Need Social Housing in the U.S.
Matt Bruenig, The Guardian
In a paper released by People’s Policy Project (3P) on Thursday, my colleagues Peter Gowan and Ryan Cooper propose that municipal governments across the country build millions of units of social housing. An influx of publicly owned, efficiently built apartments would add to the housing supply while minimizing the displacement risks caused by luxury developments.
The Queer Art of Failing Better
Laurie Penny, The Baffler
The crisis of capitalism is also, as theorist Nancy Fraser puts it, a “crisis of care”—of reproductive labor. The work that the world most urgently requires is work that women have traditionally done for low wages or for no wages, and this is work that cannot be effectively automated or subsumed within the profit model. Someone has to do the dishes. This is not to say, of course, that the subjects of Queer Eye are first-order victims of global capitalism’s concerted campaign to hollow out working-class life. These men are not marginalized, but they are nonetheless living in the margins of the lives they had perhaps expected. There are people with far more pressing problems than simply having no idea that clothes don’t live on the floor. In their own way, though, these men are quietly drowning, and a lot of the people who love this show the hardest have spent years of our offscreen lives trying to serve as—or at least to inflate—the life-rafts.
For a Luxury Leftism
Current Affairs Staff, Current Affairs
There is, broadly speaking, something sound to the charge of hypocrisy around left-wing extravagance. The mansions possessed by Al Gore and the Obamas are an outrage. But they are an outrage because they exist in a time of great suffering, not because the world should not have mansions in it. The problem is not the existence of riches, but the failure to allow all to share equally in them. Progressives who wall themselves off from the poor, buy themselves beautiful things, and stop caring seriously about equality are monsters. But this is no indictment of beautiful things, or of human beings possessing them. The crime is the failure to share.
Subscribe to 5 Lefty Links
Check out the 5 Lefty Links archives