Melançon Enterprises • a multidivision multinational since 1980

from Kanawha county.

Businessman facing home foreclosure commits suicide
http://www.dailymail.com/News/Kanawha/201303070085

Sponsor’s death shocks Little League community
http://www.dailymail.com/News/201303120287

if our media understood or allowed themselves to see context, this would be used to talk about the need for economic justice and institutional compassion for a solid week at minimum.

Originally via badly titled http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/elderly_man_facing_foreclosu...

[very disorganized and the tangents need to be re-planted elsewhere but there's good stuff here]

An unabashed Milton Friedman acolyte made the point (a quotation?) that as long as exchanges are freely made between people, the net benefit has to be positive by definition.

Yes-- exactly-- but-- and there is a huge but-- there's little practical difference between a force-coerced exchange and an economic-coerced exchange. Indeed, it's the history and present of inequality to use force to back up the imposition of economic injustice.

Climate Justice Can Help End Poverty

History teaches us that when decent people take risks and engage in struggle for principles, peacefully and courageously, pursuing civil disobedience where necessary, then those who occupy the instruments of power, whether in government or in the financial sectors, will listen and understand.

[This is a Facebook comment left in response to a New York Times article by Ted Fishman, "As Nations Age, A Chance for Younger Nations", which the always fascinating and engaging Kara Andrade posted a link to.]

In case we needed reminding that the fight against injustice is a fight needing to be fought everywhere, here's a brief article on slave-labor conditions of immigrant workers in oil-rich countries:

A 2005 article on hot young economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. by Stephen J. Dubner got me thinking about my thesis again.

About all I need to know to want to keep track of his work is that his model is W.E.B. DuBois.

But this statement is disturbing, and the author is an economist himself. Following up on examples of Fryer's willingness and capacity to look at all things that might affect black achievement, including genetics, Dubner wrote:

So here is Fryer's final anomaly: he is a man who revels in his blackness and yet also says he believes, as DuBois believed, that black underachievement cannot entirely be laid at the feet of discrimination.

What sort of fool, let alone a self-described rogue economist, would frame the question as a matter of discrimination? Kidnapping and slavery and no compensation hardly fit neatly under discrimination. Follow history a tad longer and you get to sharecropping, which puts the problem squarely in an economic context.

Make wealth and resources equal, and I bet black people will overcome racism – with great difficulty, but ultimately overcome it – and achieve just about anything professors and bureaucrats care to measure.