In Case You Missed It: April

Philadelphia Guaranteed Income Pilot

By I. Pliskin

A subtle part of the “American Dream” is the idea that even if someone is poor themselves, their children will have a decent opportunity at a better life than their parents. Yet there are recent findings that, in the city of Philadelphia, not only is it unlikely that children will do better economically than their parents—the stats are that they will likely earn significantly less than their parents. It’s reported that Philadelphia ranks as the worst city in the country when it comes to economic mobility. Xiente, a non profit organization, is running a study to supposedly get a better understanding of what is causing that immobility, and to help families get out of poverty and move into the middle class. A big part of this project is a 14 month pilot program where 10 select low income families will receive $500 cash each month from the organization and access to a “housing and economic mobility coach.”

To be quite honest, fuck all of that financial coaching stuff. It’s the kind of approach to “addressing poverty” that could only make sense if you only look at economics on an individual-to-individual basis, and refuse to look at the big picture of things. You could do a million studies and pilots and whatever like this, and as long as you’re only focusing on individual outcomes it’s going to look like you’re making progress but it would only serve to ultimately reinforce our existing class systems. Even a non-Marxist framing of economics will show this. Supply and demand and all that.

Let’s say you convince a household to live an ascetic, monk-like lifestyle. They only eat rice porridge and drink tap water—only read library books by candle light for entertainment, so on and so on. Let’s say this allows them to save up an ok margin at the end of each month that they could use to, say, build up their credit. From that point they would need to put that accumulated money into schooling to increase their chance of earning a higher paying job – or invest that money in some type of business venture that would earn them a higher amount of money than they were already making. Statistically, trying to build a business is a dud plan even on the individual level. Most businesses fail and ultimately lose money. Most of the businesses that don’t fail outright barely make the owner more than minimum wage when you add up the amount of time the owners put into them. If you invest that money into the stock market, your best likely outcome is to earn about a 6% gain year over year—and that’s presuming you don’t need any of that money during a time when the market is down. The best case is to put money into a degree or something so you can maybe get a better paying job and stop living like a monk—unless that debt is greater than your increase in pay, in which case you better go back to the monk life.

But let’s say we decrease a household’s expenses and increase their spending power long enough for them to find a better paying job or to start a successful business. The more you try to repeat that success, the less it’s going to work. It just doesn’t scale up in our existing systems.

We have a consumer economy—saving money won’t scale up. Less people buying stuff is a reduction in demand, which would mean existing production rates would cause a surplus in supply. Funnily enough, in the short term this would cause a drop in prices, but it would also mean the simultaneous closing of many stores and factories to adjust production to the new lower level of demand. That is to say, a large amount of businesses would fail and close and a great deal of jobs would be lost in that process. This would be worse than going back to square one—there would be a lot less gainful employment available, and the price of even basic goods would be higher than they were before.

Business ownership as a solution to poverty is oxymoronic. Fundamentally, a successful business buys low and sells high—and the easiest person to buy low from is a worker who doesn’t have any better options but to sell their labor as cheaply as possible. For every single person that gets wealthy from a business, they are directly financially incentivised to push and keep an ocean of others into poverty.

How about putting time and money into schooling in the hopes of getting a better job? I have to say again that this may work very well for an individual person but doesn’t do much on a larger scale. We know that as the supply of something increases in a market its price goes down. This holds true when we are selling our labor. If we are one of few in a rare field, we’re in a good position to name our price. But if others are readily able to learn and take on that work, the price that you can charge for that work will not resist the increase in supply—and it would be a couple years at best trying to school yourself into a different, better paying field.

When we aren’t looking at the big picture of things, the same steps we take to push ourselves forward end up taking us ten paces back. We can’t afford to continue thinking about the challenges we’re facing solely as individuals. We have to come together and develop a deep understanding of the systems we live in, how we play into those systems, and how they affect us all. There are many great community based systems that actually do scale up—that don’t have us working twice as hard to get half as much. And when we begin to interface with each other in those ways, we can ultimately dismantle those systems that are designed to pit us against each other and build new systems that allow us to better cooperate with one another on a more fundamental level.

Peeing while trans: Florida makes its first bathroom bill arrest

By E.P.

On March 19th, in the midst of her yearly trip to visit her grandparents in Florida, 20-year old Illinois college student Marcy Rheintgen entered the Florida State Capitol Building in Tallahassee in order to wash her hands and was promptly arrested.

The incident has since been referred to as the first such arrest made under Florida’s Facility Requirements Based on Sex Act. Passed in 2023, the Act mandates that individuals use the bathroom, locker room, and changing facilities corresponding with the sex they were assigned at birth. It has been met with controversy for the violation of privacy that it necessitates. 

This is far from the only “bathroom bill” on the books and part of a wave of discriminatory transphobic laws. The bathroom bills are one facet of the transphobic playbook and have only recently found success due to tangential talking points bubbling up into the mainstream. By the admission of Terry Schilling, president of conservative think tank the American Principles Project, the manufactured debate over the place of transgender women in women’s sports was the “magic formula” that allowed conservatives to push for these bills. 

Marcy Rheintgen’s arrest marks the first recorded case in which such a law is being challenged. She was met by two Capitol police officers who initially told her that they would issue a notice for her to appear before a judge, meaning she wouldn’t need to go to jail. The officers described her as “sassy” and subsequently arrested her. Her rosary was confiscated and she was taken to the Leon County Detention Facility, where she was held overnight in the men’s ward. The police affidavit, which Rheintgen provided, reported that she was ineligible for the aforementioned notice. It also listed her deadname and used the incorrect pronouns. 

A week before she visited the Capitol, Rheintgen penned a letter to Florida lawmakers outlining that she planned to use the restroom, as well as her reasons for doing so. Said Rheintgen simply, “I am going to break the law.” The letter is heartfelt and appeals to the better nature of the Florida legislature. She implores officials, “I know that you know in your heart that transgender people are human too […] I know that you know that I have dignity. That’s why I know that you won’t arrest me”. By her own admission, Rheintgen had faith in lawmakers seeing the error of their ways and was devastated to be arrested. 

Rheintgen points out the danger of her situation, writing that “I understand that I could go to jail for up to sixty days in a men’s prison, where, if the statistics are true, I would likely be raped.” She reinforces the humanity of transgender people, the unjustness of the law, that transgender people go to the same churches, restaurants, schools, sports events, and movie theaters as the very people who wrote the law. 

Truthfully, while these arguments are poignant, the transphobic lobby has heard it all before. The cruelty is the point. The violation of civil liberties is the point. As Nadine Smith of political advocacy group Equality Florida said in a statement, “The true goal is intimidation. If you can’t safely or legally use a restroom, your time in any public space is limited”. Rheintgen asserted in her letter that “you can’t arrest us away,” but the Facility Requirements Based on Sex Act and all laws like it are attempting to do just that. They are part of a concerted effort to excise transgender people from public life.

Marcy Rheintgen’s act of civil disobedience was incredibly brave, but places her under a new level of danger and scrutiny. She is due to appear in court in May.

Texas Heat: Judge Rules Prison Conditions Unconstitutional

By I. Pliskin

It won’t be too long until we’re all cooking in the swampy Philadelphia heat. Last year my partner got me one of those personal neck fans, and I have to say it really came in clutch for dealing with the heat. Of course, there are many who don’t have those types of conveniences, whether it be personal fans or access to air conditioning. Despite living in modern times in a so-called developed country, many in the US are hospitalized or die due to heat-related stress on their body. This is especially pervasive in prisons around the country. A judge in Texas has recently ruled that dangerously high heats, commonly found in US prisons, are not just bad but are unconstitutional.

The Constitution does not allow the government to put people into cruel or unusual punishments. Many would say it’s pretty cruel to stuff people in a box while getting cooked alive. At the same time, there are a decent amount of people who take on a if-you-can’t-do-the-time-don’t-do-the-crime type of attitude. In their view, if you don’t want to face cruel living conditions, then you shouldn’t have done anything that would have put you in jail to begin with.

Let’s say that we ignore that our legal system has flaws and that there are innocent people who find themselves in prison—there are a wide range of offenses that put people in prison. Someone who was sentenced for, say, a few months by a jury of their peers for nonviolent offense definitely shouldn’t have to be slowly cooked alive. Even if you’re in favor of the death penalty, wanting that death to be slow, tortuous, and wanting it to be applied even to the people who haven’t been sentenced to death by judge or jury – puts you on par with some of the worst people locked up in the joint.

At the end of the day, however you feel about prisoners in general, any individual person in prison—they are all still entitled to protections they’re granted under the Constitution. That is important in its own right. Yet still, how the government treats prisoners shows us how the government looks at its responsibilities overall. Uncruel treatment of prisoners is not some optional bleeding heart courtesy—it’s baked into the very Constitution of the United States. If rights to that degree are something that the government takes lightly, how can we trust that they will preserve our interest when it comes to anything else, whether or not it’s baked into the Constitution? Existing structures are showing us plainly that we should not put that trust in them. Instead, we should be working to build our own structures of support that we can ensure have our interest in mind, while at the same time pressuring these existing systems to live up to their own promises.

SEPTA Would Rather Implode

By Ellis Morten

Back in November 2024, SEPTA received an infusion of $153 million from the state. This injection was facilitated by Gov. Josh Shapiro and was meant to be a relief for the ever-underfunded public transit service. Compared to the overall budget of $2.6 billion, this injection doesn’t seem huge, but it supposedly was the only thing preventing disaster… for a time.

Just six months later, that time is running out.

With incredible audacity, SEPTA announced a truly shocking budget for this upcoming year: a 45% reduction in services and a 21.5% increase in fares, eliminating 32 bus routes, reducing a dozen more, and of course, hiring and wage freezes.

This has not gone uncontested, though residents and Democratic politicians are focused more on acquiring additional state support and not enough, in my opinion, on SEPTA’s backwards priorities. While it’s true that the Republican-led state Senate is responsible for blocking a new funding proposal, are we really okay with SEPTA’s response?

Would you ever be allowed to stop working nearly half as much, while also asking for a 21% raise? If so, please tell me where I can apply.

Democrats are happy to remind us that they voted for more funding, but those mean Republicans just don’t understand the economic importance of working-class people in the suburbs. What do you expect them to do, exercise any of their authority? Impossible. They’re especially powerless when things are getting worse for you. Let’s all play a sad song for them on the violin.

To be clear, I am in full support of state-funded public transit. There’s a key difference between requiring funding for an essential service, though, and the 15-member board of said service constantly threatening a worse time without it.

How is SEPTA spending this money anyway? Last year SEPTA allocated part of its budget to hire 40 additional police officers and 30 “safety professionals.” They paid $12.3 million to Flowbird America Inc. to make parking lots that will “streamline fee collection.” They also fixed up those broken fare gates so it’s harder for us peasants to sneak past. Would you like more vehicles, cleanliness, improved infrastructure, and better accessibility? They have a 12-year plan for that, so be patient, do you think they’re made of money?

It’s hard to believe this is just a budget problem, or even an incompetence problem. Instead of fighting against the politicians making public transit a partisan issue, SEPTA’s board seems eager to lean into the political game and put on a theatre of poverty every fiscal year. The (unelected) board has almost no accountability, especially when they can just leverage our reliance on them to get what they want. Does the board genuinely think this will save money, and not hurt them in the long run? I doubt it. I think they would rather destroy SEPTA than change their corrupt financial webs, though. Our lives, our wellbeing, are just negotiating fodder between the powerful.

When announcing this disastrous new proposal, board members of SEPTA expressed their remorse, as if their hands were tied. They, too, lose all power as soon as things get more difficult for us. Funny how positions of authority always work like that.

Three Penn students have had their immigration statuses terminated

By: Pierce Corvant

Early Monday, April 7th 2024, the University of Pennsylvania emailed its campus announcing that three students had their visa records terminated. Penn has stated that these terminations were not in relation to student protest but to “immigration status violations” The university also mentioned that it received notification from the Department of Homeland Security confirming that the students’ immigration status has been “deactivated in the federal Student and Exchange Visitor Information System.” Penn also says it’s aware that there have been reports of ICE agents on and around campus but did not wish to provide any additional details on this matter.

“We want to reassure the community that we are monitoring and investigating all reports and providing appropriate support to people when these incidents arise,” wrote Ezekiel J. Emanuel, vice provost for global initiatives, and Karu Kozuma, vice provost for university life. “This is an extremely unsettling time for international students and scholars at Penn and in the United States.”

This is not an isolated incident in Philadelphia. Just a week prior, Temple University reported that one student’s visa had been revoked; that student chose to self-deport. As for the three Penn students, the university has not indicated whether they plan to self-deport or fight the revocations. 

All of this comes in response to the Trump regime’s loyalty to Israel’s genocidal state, with authorities now targeting pro-Palestinian students—particularly those on visas and green cards.