Scott Littlehale
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slittlehale.bsky.social
Scott Littlehale
@slittlehale.bsky.social
1.3K followers 580 following 1.1K posts
Build Housing, Protect All Workers, Organize. California construction labor union research analyst and campaigner since 2003. Research finds that union membership, collective bargaining, and quality jobs are good for people and society, actually.
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Recent replies question my approach to housing construction challenges, summarized as:
1) Pay workers a locally appropriate self-sufficiency wage, with retention-promoting, intra-industry-portable fringe benefits
2) Attack other socially negative sources of production costs.
Here's my argument👇
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"X shouldn't be political." OK but it is. Now what?
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JD Vance claims that diversity weakens unions, as people end up distrusting each other and not organizing.

Let me tell you two menswear stories related to this claim. 🧵
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In this moment, coal miners turned their red bandanas into a symbol of solidarity — both to distinguish themselves from the enemy and to show that, across racial lines, coal miners were united along class interests

For this reason, they were known as the "Redneck Army."
I've had anger issues for 40 years about the powerful lying &/or distorting facts beyond recognition about life-shaping matters.
I've never sought counseling and the triggers are increasing in number & severity. Any recommended antidotes?
(consistent volunteering is constrained by long work weeks)
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Yup. Young people are experiencing serious pain… which is not felt by most prime age workers
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2/ Weak hiring gets far less attention than mass layoffs but has played a *much* bigger role in labor market cooling over the past 3.5 years than layoffs.

People who already have a job have been pretty secure in most industries. But it’s really tough to find a new job.
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The hope is that this can be a tool for left-YIMBYism, drawing on the lessons of Québec's actually-not-missing missing middle housing stock and universal rent stabilization policies. And the broader hope is that this is engaging enough, tight enough, smart enough to make readers curious.
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NEW Economist/YouGov
Net favorability of Donald Trump [at the start of his second term | now] among...
White Americans +13 | -3
Hispanic Americans -12 | -34
Black Americans -31 | -70
today.yougov.com/politics/art...
Seems like www.bea.gov (Bureau of Economic Analysis) website is completely down. (pretty sure it was working a couple of weeks ago).
Double-plus ungood.
www.bea.gov
Asymmetrical opposition to political violence.
Breaking on MSNBC:

Two federal prosecutors have been placed on leave at the direction of the White House after filing a sentencing memo seeking 27 months in prison for a pardoned Jan. 6 rioter who brought illegal guns and ammunition to President Obama's house in 2023.
that was my plan. tried to download on the phone, getting a 0 byte file that Dropbox won't read. Will have to try on a PC.
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New Lewis Center at UCLA report by Paavo Monkkonen on French social housing.

Is the cost rental and financing model upstream of France’s ability to build large number of units without deep subsidies?

escholarship.org/content/qt8d...
What do you think of this NBER Working paper on the politics of predistribution vs redistribution policies?

bsky.app/profile/slit...
good to hear this NBER paper about the politics of "predistribution" vs. tax-and-transfer redistribution policies get a shout out on Klein's podcast about Dems losing working class voters.
As I said before, I think the authors really are on to something...
www.nber.org/papers/w31794
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This is a US citizen and father who served in our armed forces.

He was tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, pinned to the ground, then imprisoned naked for three days with no explanation—during or since.

No crime. No charges. No conviction. No phone calls. No appeal.
"They put me on suicide watch and they put me in the cell, I'm naked, in like a hospital dress and just a concrete bed with like a mattress, like a thin mattress and, they leave the light on 24/7."

@timmiller.bsky.social talked to a veteran who ICE wrongly detained and brutalized
Nvm I figured it out finally
it's the Y-axis and associated +- values. are you subtracting a base year's starting value?
I love FRED but I hate its default lines due to difficulty with color
please help me understand this chart. What are the constants that you're subtracting? It would be helpful to some folk (me, with older, semi-color-blind eyes) if the lines had symbols (or dash-dots) to help distinguish them. I really want to get what you're illustrating.
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THIS is the reason why I have consistently tried to emphasize that Border Patrol and ICE are different agencies with different duties and different leadership and different styles.

Border Patrol are the aggro cowboys compared to ICE. Now they're going to be the ones running the show.
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A stat we don't talk about enough: Newspapers have lost 77% of their jobs over the last 20 year, more than any of the 532 other industries tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
sheesh I meant "... also recommended *BY* Jared Abbott..."
Started listening to "We're Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America" by Jennifer Silva, also recommended Jared Abbott, Klein's interviewee about working class politics. The Intro is attention-grabbing.
(Trying to balance quantitative research with ethnographic qualitative research)
good to hear this NBER paper about the politics of "predistribution" vs. tax-and-transfer redistribution policies get a shout out on Klein's podcast about Dems losing working class voters.
As I said before, I think the authors really are on to something...
www.nber.org/papers/w31794
good to hear this NBER paper about the politics of "predistribution" vs. tax-and-transfer redistribution policies get a shout out on Klein's podcast about Dems losing working class voters.
As I said before, I think the authors really are on to something...
www.nber.org/papers/w31794
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Fun fact: Tammy Baldwin, one of the four Democratic senators who the #NYTimes claims won because they were "moderates," has the 6th leftmost voting record in the Senate.
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Klein is repeating the story that elite consultants from the 2012 Obama campaign have been pushing. Trying to sell Dems more of the same. It's better to stick with the data. The CES shows that every Dem and Republican nominee is seen as essentially the same except Trump in 2016.