Jobs bill not enough

Is the jobs bill the Dems are so proud of (well, not the Blue Dogs) truly a good, albeit insufficient, start? Es posible. Certainly it makes more sense than the POP (Party of Palin) ever-twisting nonsense: so it's too hard for struggling small business owners/managers to figure out some "fancy" tax credit, eh?

GM, the new Conrail

Here's a shock: the media are reporting this story all wrong. "GM files for bankruptcy protection," "...a low point in the carmaker's 100-year history...," "... a powerful reminder of how far GM has fallen ...," blah, blah, blah.

The closest they come to the real story is generally on the jump page: "To achieve the lower break-even point, GM will have to shed thousands of employees, several car brands, hundreds of dealerships, health care and pension benefits, and a mountain of debt."

Whoa, rewind there: " ... GM will have to shed thousands of employees, ... health care and pension obligations ..."

Lemme get this straight. The US Government now has controlling interest in GM. The same US Government that has been telling us we have to pump millions of our dollars into GM, et al., because if por exemplo the Big Three go down we could lose jobs big time. The same US Government has also been talking about creating jobs, public works, etc., etc. Now they own GM (mostly), and the jobs go down the toilet anyway? On their watch? On their orders?

Admittedly we're now talking 40,000 jobs instead of 2 million, but the game ain't over yet. We still have more bankruptcy tickets.

This is the wrong kind of restructuring, folks! This is the (now discredited?) IMF all over again, just the opposite of what we need, what we need being what we might call a Social Monetary Fund - that would fund job creation, not "job shedding"; expanded health care that would cover more people, not fewer; likewise pensions.

Instead we seem to be getting, as Greg Palast puts it, "Grand Theft Auto:" nevermind ERISA, nevermind the fact that the pension money isn't theirs to take, and how DO you walk into to the doctor's office and pay with a bankrupt car company's stock?

That's clearly what we should be pissed about. But I'd like to add one more little observation, while we're on the subject (or I am). A little history, just a sort of after dinner mint to tip us right over the edge. It concerns Conrail, pretty well named in retrospect.

You see, this has all happened before. Before 1975 there were a number of old private, for-profit railroad lines running in the Northeastern US. Only they went bankrupt. So the Government bought them, and restructured them, downsized them, "shed" some of their operations and the attendant workers, etc. At the same time, with the same Act, the Government began a program of "regulatory reform" - i.e. deregulation. Several such "reforms" followed, but that's another story.

The long and the short is, by 1980 Conrail turned a profit (NB: as a government run enterprise it became profitable). So the Government took the next logical step - claro. It re-privatized the company, the largest sale of public stock in US history!

Get it? Private enterprise not working - government/taxpayers assume debt, invest billions to rebuild and repair - then hand it back to the profiteers, this time with far fewer regulations, like, for example, secret contracts, etc., etc.

They call this 'socialism'? The smart guys have a better way to describe it: "Socialized risk, privatized profit." What it means is, socialism for the rich, while the rest of us get to take our chances with wild west capitalism.

The People's Potluck

Last summer a solid union friend of mine named Gene Vanderport got together some people he knew to talk about ways that communities could address the economic crisis.

This was well before the financial sector locked up and job losses really spiked in October and November. Of course the economists-that-be now admit that the recession started last year (at least), but at that time they had not admitted anything. What Paul Krugman tells us is a "liquidity crisis" some of us - including Gene's members - were already experiencing as a big fat "cash flow" problem, a housing problem, a job problem, a wages and benefits and paying-the-bills sort of problem. Of course it means the same thing.

The idea hatched at Gene's house was to hold a "People's Thanksgiving" just before the holiday of a similar name, and bring together activists and service providers from across the community with people who need food and housing and jobs, and put our heads together and see how we could help one another. The assumption was that we cannot rely on the government, certainly not on capitalism, to rescue our communities.

It was prescient.

The first potluck supper, which actually happened the weekend after Thanksgiving, turned into regularly monthly get-togethers - and spun off working subgroups focused on various aspects of the problem, and built ties to other local movements with potential for what my old hippy editor at the Buffalo Alternative Press used to call synergy: housing, food, jobs, union rights, health care, veterans' benefits and war, urban justice and racism, immigration and migrant farm work in the area.

One group is planning community gardens and teach-ins on container gardening, cooking on a low budget, canning what you grow, working with food pantries, etc. The Catholic Worker in town is involved and already fighting evictions in a nearby town, presenting ideas on how to put "stimulus money" to good use. A couple groups are collaborating on compiling a directory of services, discussing ways to fill the void left by our town's sudden loss of its Urban League, which had provided so many services and referrals.

Homeless participants are taking an active and integral role. Felons are telling their stories. Unionists and Greens and tenants' union advocates are working together, talking about nationalizing banks, collecting clothes for abused women and children, eating together and talking and sharing ideas on a "People's Bailout" or "Social Monetary Fund" and demands to make on elected officials as well as direct actions and organizing for mutual aid.

At first we talked about building towards a "Central Illinois Social Forum" in May. Now that event promises to bring in such new energy, so many exciting new ideas and connections, such excellent new community, that it will ikely be just the beginning.

I recommend the model. Highly.

Diversify or die

In today’s news there’s another stark reminder of the need for a Social Monetary Fund, which would push the economy in general and bailout recipients in particular toward a new, social kind of diversification. The worse the economy gets, the more people hold onto their old cars, and the more people hold onto their old cars, the more we need to convert some of that capital that’s frozen up now in making cars that people aren’t buying into some more useful purpose (more useful to us chickens, that is).

I heard someone on the radio the other day mention Zipcars, and the speaker raised the following I think very timely question: Will the business of Ford, Toyota, whoever, be selling more cars to people [whether they need them or not – ed.] or will it be providing the means for people to get from one place to another?

But the stimulus money being released now, though it may have been necessary to get the ball rolling in the very shortest of runs, is not what we’re looking for. Building more roads and bridges, willy-nilly, is ultimately self-defeating. It’s not “sustainable” (as we say these days), laying more pavement and concrete we can’t afford to maintain for cars people are driving less and less to jobs they are losing more and more.

How much money do we have to spend to create every 60 jobs? That’s a drop in the unemployment bucket – especially since the workers who need these jobs the most aren’t getting them.

Clearly there are some profound needs that are being addressed by the stimulus discussion. But there are also colossal needs being missed, some that have been metastasizing for more than a generation, screwing up the federal poverty numbers, etc. The point is, there is a much better way.

The thin edge - we're hoping

OK, I admit it. I am more satisfied making $8.50 an hour, and even happy making $10 an hour, because my feet remember so well making $3.25. I gladly sit in front of a computer for $350 a month, or stock produce or run a cash register for $300 a month, because it seems like only yesterday I was toting a claw bar down a dry, dusty railroad track - pines in the distance wavering in the 110F heat - through Sharp's Bottom, a snake pit punctuated by coyotes and pistols just far enough from the paper mill that the acid rain that hung around the smoke stacks didn't take the skin off unless you had to service that part of the track ... for $4 an hour.

So after Reagan and Bush, and Clinton, and then another Bush - meaner, nastier - yeah, I'm positively goo-goo over some of Obama's doings. Like today: anybody who wants bailout money from here on in, he says, pays no more than $500,000. See, I just got no problem at all with that. In fact I'll take half. Easy. And I'll throw in a bonus even though nobody has asked: if I manage to screw up the business, any business, let alone the world economy, even a fraction as monumentally as my predecessor(s) ... hell, I'll give back half of the salary I did keep.

I'm actually pretty confident that bonus would never be implemented. But that's beside the point: how come nobody's asking?

But even if they were, seriously, would it be enough? Do we really believe the executive's out-frigging-rageous pay grades are the biggest kink in our collective hose? It's so micro.

Sure, it's longterm stupid to pay people a commission to dismantle our economic base one factory at a time - that is, assuming a perspective of "promoting the general welfare," which I don't - but the hole we're dug into is way too deep for a long, sloping incline out. We've got to get macro on their asses.

How about, just for starters, something like: You want bailout money? Stop spending it busting unions and conspiring to block the Employee Free Choice Act. Stop dodging OSHA regs, the EPA, overtime protections and discrimination cases with merit. You want the money? Settle those legitimate lawsuits, fix that pollution problem, and pay your damn workers what they've earned. And by the way, federal inspectors get unfettered access to every square inch of your operations - including offshore subsidiaries - and 24-7 access to all the books (both sets). Congress calls you up and says, How'd you spend the money? and you say, Dunno, and if I did, wouldn't sing - and you can just whip out that big, fat corporate checkbook and pay it all back - at about 15% APR.

Still want it? I got some ideas for a "Social Monetary Fund" to talk to you about. There's a certain flexibility we expect from you, too. No, I don't mean logistics or whatever you call outsourcing these days. I mean you need to be about developing technology that will re-tool for new trends in the economy, and new priorities for energy and social margins, not just for the latest model of the miracle of built-in obsolescence you sold us last year. We - it is we who will have to demand it - want to see swords beat into plowshares, just about literally: military capital converted for local and global standards of living. And so on.

Is Obama the savior who'll bring us all that? It's the wrong question. The real question is what are we going too do to get started in that direction?

Happy Human Rights Day!

http://www.humanrightsactioncenter.org/petition/index.php

Here's an idea: along with all that crap our rulers think we need to carry with us whenever they deign to let us move around on our own home planet, how about carrying something valuable and humane (even eye-opening, since the US won't recognize the economic rights that are part of the UDHR, signed or not, and of course routinely violates other parts or supports violations, which amounts to the same thing).

More free time? Instead of squishing your butt into the couch in front of the TV, how about calling Congress at 877-331-1223 and telling them, while we're bailing the corporate "artificial persons" who created this mess we're in, to bail out the people who are this country.

Tell them we need a Social Monetary Fund, not IMF-style Friedmanomics. Tell them to get those damn troops home yesterday - all of them! And tell them to close down Guantanamo and every othet torture camp in the world, CIA or otherwise. And tell them if we don't want to be the world's favorite target, we could start helping the struggling peoples of the world instead of propping up their murderous, torturing governments and manipulating their economies to serve us (and by "us" I mean primarily "the rich who are not us, but who want us to think they are.")

State capitalism ascendant

Apparently when a new president enters the Oval Office and eases his butt into the big chair for the first time, on his desk is a copy of something called a "Global Trend Report" prepared by the National Intelligence Council, a sort of crystal ball for the CIA et al. Now, the NIC is no ordinary think-tank with a bone to pick. They answer to the Director of National Intelligence, and their job is to assess trends, not hopes or dreams, in as unbiased a way as possible. The prez and the chief spooks need the real stuff, whatever they try to sell us.

According to NIC Chairman Thomas Finger, this year's Global Trend Report predicts that in 2025 the US will no longer sit atop the world, and "state capitalism of the kind they have in Russia and China will be ascendant." This is like the polar opposite of the report they turned in last time around.

The so-called "Western model," they now say, hasn't worked out so well for most of the world. Imagine that!

Now, after we all say, "I told you so" (1-2-3 ... "I told you so!"), let's all say the next part again: Social Monetary Fund.

Course there's always the prison call center model.

Structured by cows

"It could be structured by cows and we would rate it": another fascinating peek into the parallel universe that, unfortunately in the end, did intersect with ours ...

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/11/it_could_be_structured_by_cows.php

Maybe it’s the whole economy that was structured by cows. The focus has been Wall Street, and there’s plenty of craziness there to focus on. People buy and sell hogs that aren’t born yet, fer chrissakes! Crops that haven’t grown yet, all kinds of insanity. They take bets – essentially bets – on which loans will go bad, and so on. It’s nuts, and that’s even with regulation. Without regulation it gets downright bestial.

But it’s obviously much more than Wall Street.

There’s been a lot of talk about debt – private debt, public debt – and how it’s been ballooning for 30 years. It was already considered problematic when Reagan, the balance-the-budget president, jacked the federal deficit to record levels. And as we all know, Bush had to pull out all the stops. Jack Rasmus (Z, Nov. 08) has a very thorough rundown of US debt accumulated during the ‘W’ years, including $8 trillion in new debts to banks (speculative, etc., added to $6 trillion in household mortgages), $1 trillion to credit card companies (largely because people don’t earn enough to pay bills), $3 trillion in government debt (Iraq mostly) and over $3 trillion in “non-financial” business debt: it adds up to around $21 trillion in new debt just since 2000.

Credit card and mortgage companies are now pushing new debt with ads that center around the bailouts!

Yesterday the Senate killed the vote on the auto bailout - playing 'chicken' with maybe 2 million jobs, and possible economic depression - but they keep talking about this the wrong way. It isn't clear at all to the American people why these humongous companies are in debt in the first place. It isn't just because sales have been declining. And it isn't really, except just in the immediate, because of the Wall Street crunch. Why would that bother big manufacturers? Don’t they have money? Or if they don’t, why didn’t they realize it before now?

It’s the way they run their businesses, by trading on their status - in a way that small businesses can never do, so really on their size. (Similar, you have to admit, to the way the big financial institutions were running: these are not bad loans, not irresponsible reckless screwball cowboy ventures, we wouldn’t risk our business that way, we’re big and well respected!)

Turns out, really big businesses don’t run the show on the money they take in, or on their savings or cash reserves, or even on loans that they plan for and include in annual or even monthly budgets. It’s more proof, in case we needed it, that capitalism doesn’t actually work, at least not without passing a giant collection plate around the plebes, sometimes (and always at least indirectly) at the point of a gun – serfs, Native Americans, African slaves, taxpayers, somebody has to prop up this façade at all times.

The dirty secret is, the Captains of Industry keep their show on the road by borrowing money, tens of millions, on a near-daily basis, and pay it back almost daily, too, usually. Your typical manufacturing giant or other towering edifice of capitalist potency will have, secreted away in the bowels of the organism, a small office that swings into action at the end of every business day, or at some point near the end. The function of this office is to check the daily balance – take versus layout – and if there’s a shortfall, borrow, say, $10 million or so, over the phone, just to tide the big boss over until tomorrow. Or, on days when there’s a surplus, pay it out.

There was a recent episode of “This American Life” that told the story, and jaws hit the ground in kitchens and living rooms all over America. They depend on these day-to-day loans so heavily that, in the case of the carmakers (and others), when the loans locked up, the businesses started to bleed out immediately. That’s why the crisis seems to have exploded out of nowhere with every major institution, bar some, whimpering about mountains of debt – mountains of debt that moreover continue to grow at least arithmetically even as they struggle to slow it down. They can’t stop it. They have no other resources. They have been operating miles beyond their actual capacities for decades. Their very capital, the physical existence of the corporation itself is constructed out of this fact. It is literally who they are.

For some like GM the unwinding is happening so fast, they may code by the new year or soon after, taking 2 million or so jobs with them (in addition to the million-plus already down the crapper this year). That’s a lot like a depression, folks.

Talk about a house of cards.

But it’s an inescapable fact, it seems to me, that the kind of free money the carmakers are or were hoping for, sans fundamental restructuring, is just feeding the bad wolf. It wouldn’t even seem to delay the inevitable very long, maybe just long enough for stockholders to pull out but probably not long enough for 10-plus year employees to find another home, especially not nowadays. So the “free” marketeers don’t like it because it enables bad practice. But there’s a good reason for social progressives not to like it either: we could wind up paying them to kick people out of work.

And I know I’ve said it before, but we need to pay them to put people back to work. We need the opposite of an IMF, something like a Social Monetary Fund, and it needs to be one with a vision beyond the WPA or CCC. It needs to encourage investment in what economists might call “externalities”: infrastructure needs; gainful employment, yes, but also alternatives – a kind of social diversification – renewable energy, public transportation, etc.; we need to encourage freight to move by rail, not over public roads; so many things.

Now, GM can’t do that alone, no matter how much we lend them. But that’s where the Fund’s management comes in, a sort of coordinating function – “planning” you might call it. GM, for example, gets a bailout and it required to participate in restructuring, not just internal restructuring but external restructuring, of the whole economic mess.

It doesn’t have to be structured by cows. We are smarter than cows, in theory. The economy can be structured by people. It is anyway, just not by the right people, and not by enough people.