Don't leave the ACA out of Xmas

Sorry, it's been a while.  Work, work, work.  But I have been arguing with a friend of mine (both of us are members of Labor for Single-Payer, but he's more active in it), and here's my latest spew:

First let me say I do think the ACA is "woefully inadequate."  Single payer is what we need, or nationalized health care, but some business interests (and not others, interestingly enough) and their lapdog politicians have blocked anything close to that (along with much that is not even close).  And since we failed to get either of those things, it would have been nice for elected representatives (especially Democrats) to at least include what was called "the public option" at the time.  I don't think any of those things would have necessarily solved the problem this poor guy [see below] is bringing up, but I'll get back to that.  I still have to say the ACA helped millions of people get coverage, and that is nothing to sneeze at.

Demand demand

We demand more demand!

And an economic policy that goes with it.

P.S.  It's the opposite of 'supplyside' baloney, and it's based on the crazy idea that when workers make money, we spend it; when our wealthy overlords make money, they hoard it or play the stock market with it.  Duh!

Occupy Everywhere!

Well, it's happening on Wall Street, so why not Main Street?

Krugman: Obama gives away the store

Um, what he said.

Not that the Dems have given us much reason to care if they win lately ... like in the last, oh, 30 years. At least. (Even then, in the South, well ... ) [OK, maybe never. Sorry, Krugman.]

But in a way in the last few years the Donkeys've seized almost every last parcel of previously Elephant territory now. (... the GOP having mostly vacated their old political home, not to mention their original one around the American Civil War period, for their new home in Outer Space.) And, yeah, it looks like this Democrats-to-the-right rebound just keeps happening.

Oops, I forgot: we elected these clowns. Well, sort of. Funny how many people I run into, and how many people that people I know run into, in kitchens and on docks and at the gas station and the grocery store and bus stop, everywhere really, who come up with the same idea: throw 'em all out and start over.

Of course, we'd have to be ready and organized or we'd just get the same Shinola, different day. Hm. Maybe could start getting that way now.

Satan sandwiches over a barrel

So, let me get this straight -- Obama gives away half the store, and still loses the AAA rating?

IMF protesters used to get at least honorable mention in the small presses on the problem with "Third World debt". No matter what we learned in high school about democracy of the marketplace, and so on, Haitian slaves and others who overthrew their European overlords found themselves unable to buy goods they needed, not for lack of money, but because most traders simply wouldn't sell to them, or demanded punitive prices ... and because former colonial governments insisted that the newly freed peoples should pay the debts of (you guessed it) the former colonial governments, international loan sharks made up phony debts or jacked up interest rates specially for the liberees. You might call it a conspiracy, or just co-piracy, but either way these folks suddenly didn't care so much about supply and demand, and sellers and buyers in an open marketplace: they just wanted to stick it to the little guy.

Sound familiar? It should. The US economy is being held hostage, and the coolest thing about negotiating with hostage-takers is, paying them often fuels the fire. We talk about investors, bankers, capital gains recipients -- it amounts to one thing: the rich. For 40 years the rich have been demanding, and getting, deeper and deeper tax cuts. That has not been enough. Union busting has run rampant. Private sector unions have dropped to less than 10 percent of the workforce, which means they have little effect any more on anyone's wages outside their own membership. Bad. For everybody, union or no. Cuts to social services (what the government does for the poor and working people) soon followed. The rich and their own politicians thinly justify the cuts based on reduced revenues and increased debt (which of course is a result a result of the tax cuts, etc.), and then these reductions impact working people's ability to spend an pay taxes, and so on, and so on, and so on.

They have us over a barrel. I would argue it's not necessary or permanent, but there it is. They crash, we bail them out. We crash, they say sorry but we'll have to raise our interest rates because you cats aren't buying enough of our (friends') garbage. So we have a phony debt crisis. And we bargain. Obama seems to have no desire to fight, at least not for us. And we lose big, with no tax increases, etc., from the other side. Whew, crisis averted, right? Wrong. They are just getting started with this little shakedown. And if we have any sense at all, we will have just begun to fight it.

SEIU stands up at UI

I may have mentioned before how proud I am to have worked for ACORN. I am also proud to work for SEIU once again, this time for ass-kicking Local 73 in Illinois and Indiana.

Recently I had the honor of working with approximately 750 building service and food service workers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who were fighting back against an Administration that has been crying broke and at the same time handing out fat, juicy raises to top administrators and coaches, raising tuition every year, raising student fees, and dropping millions on pet projects. (Did they think we wouldn't notice?)

But we did, we stuck together, we fought back, and we won!

Wisconsin, Indiana union-busting

Somebody said to me recently, "the Democrats are at their best when they are not there." Actually, I think that's a little harsh, but there is an important point there. Workers in this country have only rarely been able to count on politicians of any political stripe to back us up, much less pitch in with improvements.

Most often we have to fight like hell just to not get robbed, for example in the state sector when workers' contributions to their own pensions are used -- we should say "stolen" -- to pay the employer's other bills. (Somehow this little tidbit gets lost when the public debate begins over public employee pensions, along with the "pension holidays" we get in Illinois for example when the employer doesn't have to pay its obligations: maybe because so many in office are guilty of this legal racketeering?)

Democrats are often as guilty as Republicans on that score, sometimes moreso.

But these legislators who have fled their states to deny quorum to these reprehensible anti-worker bills are very close to heroes at the moment, , like a kind of more creative Mr.-Smith-goes-to-Washington-type-filibuster. See them as a suit-and-tie 300 in the pass at Thermopylae, if you like. (I actually think of the workers in Wisconsin more that way.) But these legislators are not avoiding their responsibilities, which are after all not to the governor and his nutcase agenda, or to some misbegotten sense of decorum, but to the people.

Don't let anyone tell you they are avoiding anything. They are doing the only responsible thing.

Jobs AND Justice

Hitting the nail on the head as usual, Jobs with Justice and allies are demanding -- whaaat? -- jobs?? publicly funded? in the middle of a recession? a "Great Recession"?!?

But aren't we all lucky hold on to what we have without some Big Brother World Government Belgian Queen Elizabeth-Osama bin Laden Jr. Great Satan stepping in and taking away all our tea and freedoms, especially our filthy rich brothers and sisters, who are sitting on a mountain of cash and won't give us a job at the moment, but if we just give them a few more tax breaks they might?

In other words, you my innocent friend may ask, don't taxes take money out of the economy?

The only rational response when you hear this (all over the fracking place) is: WRONG!
(Actually it should be "Wrong, YOU DIPSTICK!") In fact what is taking money out of the economy is giving it to the rich! They aren't investing it. They're hoarding it! (See above.)

OK, carefully, now, carefully: Taxes on the rich, especially on money they are stashing away or blowing on the markets, and using that money to create jobs for working class folks who will certainly spend it, probably locally, is ... what? Taking money out of the economy? Or putting it back in? Hmmm... tough one, eh?

Every indicator

More bad news: foreclosures, unemployment, you name it.

It's starting to stack up on us. Earlier layers include the big news - recession since 2008 - and the barely made the news - real income spiral-down over the last few decades.

Back to that recession thing, and Rasmus, he points out: this recession is impressively worse by every economic indicator than every preceding recession this century - but not at depression -- yet.

Until now, recession meant GDP declined 2-4 percent for a couple quarters. This time it's 5-15%. Depressions have been much worse, but we could get there.

Until now, recession meant 10 percent unemployment or less. This time we hit 17%, including a million job losses per month from Nov. 08 to May 09. It's complicated by the fact that the government keeps changing how it calculates unemployment, but controlling for that, it seems clear that we are looking at much worse unemployment now than previous recessions. Depressions have been over 20%. And as public employers continue slashing deep, we could move that way.

Industrial production, exports, and stock markets, all worse than previous recessions. But not hitting levels we had in depressions -- yet. If you want a jolt, read this book.

Epic Recession

Reading Jack Rasmus is one of those 300 Club effects. Worse, reading him over time, it now appears that he was an optimist in 2008.

Anybody who reads about the economy who also may happen to work for a living (or try to) ought to notice that Rasmus combines two types of observation that don't often coexist in the same paragraph, like matter and antimatter.

El primero is a critical and intelligent look at what other economists are saying, what they skip over, and how we can fill in the blanks. This includes people like Krugman, who's pretty smart, so pegging his blindspot lands Rasmus a sweet starting gate. Also sends up a red flag about Obama's half-uh-way fixes: color them doomed.

Maybe they'd work if we were in a regular recession, but "epic recession" isn't just a word for a "really bad" one. It's different in some fundamental ways. It's in fact more like the early stages of the d-word.

The recent economy is a house of cards (we noticed) and the Obama gang is just blu-tacking some of the cards together. Maybe it's some of the lower ones, but not even the bottom.

Then, the sin, the thoughtcrime - el secundo - Rasmus pays attention to the man behind the curtain. He must be kicked out of any economists' clubs he's in, because this is bound to designate him Skunk - at - Picnic. He says, the ultimate cause of the antisocial over-zeal for speculation over real investment, over-reliance on debt (and lots of it), und so weiter, is massive accumulation of, well, money among the Richie Riches and the (not unrelated) lack of money on the other side of town.

Funny that it comes back to that, isn't it? And particularly funny when we listen to what the rightwing is still saying about the fix for this mess: lower taxes and regulations and so on, so the rich can make more money and (hocus pocus) create jobs. Only, when they do get a lot of money (meaning a lot more), as in the last 40 years or so, they don't invest it - they play the ponies - er - market. They ... BLOW IT! And when the party's over, the debt unwinds, however you want to say it, they take the whole precarious economy down, not with them, but with their dividends, stock prices, etc. They are still fine. In fact, some of them are sitting even prettier than before - while longterm unemployment continues climbing, unemployment benefits run dry, political sympathy with it, and foreclosures hit ten times the normal rate with only more fun in sight.

Hm, what did Rasmus say this could turn into, again?

Happy New Year

Good bye, 2009, don't let the door knob hit you in the ass on your way out.

Over 20 million of us Amerischmucks got unemployment in '09, which of course doesn't count millions more who didn't qualify for various reasons, were forced to work only part-time, or dropped off the U-3 rolls when their clocks ran out.

We didn't get out of Iraq, dug in deeper in 'AfPak', didn't let those poor slobs go home from Gitmo - held for years without charge ("land of the free," ya know!), didn't get national health care, single-payer insurance, OR a good solid public option. AND we didn't get a right to unionize. But, hey, at least there was a "jobs summit," right?

I don't know. Looks like in 2010 we might have to raise a little hell.

Butterflies caused the financial collapse

They just can't bring themselves to say the word: deregulation. Zachary Roth finds the obnoxious tip of an obscene iceberg at McGraw-Hill. Or maybe the metaphor is upside down: propaganda like this aimed at kids must be the lowest dung in the proverbial hill.

Hold your butts!

OK, if you haven't seen this yet, brace yourself; it's worse than expected (and we expected pretty bad):

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081205/ap_on_bi_go_ec_fi/financial_meltdown

“[…] employers slashed 533,000 jobs in November, the most in 34 years […]"

By the way, that's around twice what the experts were predicting. And the most dire warnings had us around 300,000 job losses per month by the end of the year - optimistic, it seems!

“As companies throttled back hiring, the unemployment rate bolted from 6.5 percent in October to 6.7 percent last month, a 15-year high."

Remember, that's official unemployment, which doesn't count millions of people by design.

“These numbers are shocking," said economist Joel Naroff [… And ...] The unemployment rate would have moved even higher if not for the exodus of 422,000 people from the work force. […]”

That means they gave up, so the feds just stop counting them. That happens every month, but usually not this many. With "underemployment" estimated around 11%, the real deal is a whole lot spookier than these spooky numbers!

How to Save Capitalism - in case we want to

I’ve just been reading Harper’s Magazine –which I don’t usually do. But this month there are a number of articles on “How to Save Capitalism” – which I don’t normally advocate, either. But it seemed pertinent, and there are quite a few interesting ideas.

Joseph Stiglitz (“The Three Trillion Dollar War”), who I think some of our friends were praying would be Obama’s Treasury Secretary, has an almost impenetrable article on Wall Street and tulip mania in the 1600s – arguing that the long-neglected purpose of financial institutions is to *manage* risk, not just auction it off for fun and profit. That sounds hard to argue with. He has ideas about fixing this, like requiring the troublemakers to invest their own money with ours, but he doesn’t seem to me to get at the larger picture we’re grappling with at the moment.

(From the revised job loss figures for late summer (even more people kicked out of work even before this fall than they told us, which was already a lot), as if we didn’t already know it, that the recession was locked in well before the Fannie & Freddie extravanganza. Well over a million jobs lost this year – job losses may hit 300,000 a month by the end of December. Merry Christmas!)

Similarly Barry Lynn (“The Rise and Coming Fall of Global Capitalism”), who advocates abolishing stock options or at least reforming them so that corporate managers don’t get quite so much encouragement for short-term profits while if not giving away then selling (low) the proverbial store (e.g. GE CEO proposal to sell off their R&D! That must be right up there with a passenger on the Titanic selling his spot on a lifeboat?) Again, I think he makes a good case for the reform he’s advocating – it just doesn’t seem like enough.

And, Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi (“The Two-Income Trap”) suggest something like a Consumer Product Safety Commission for financial ‘products’ – a “Financial Product Safety Commission” – to detoxify the financial environment. Probably a great idea, but the most interesting part to me was their story that “each year millions of credit-card offers go out with tiny print detailing ‘double-cycle billing’ and ‘trailing interest,’ terms which have enormous financial implications but are meaningless to most people.” Include me. What the hell?

Then they get more radical.

Michael Hudson (“Super Imperialism”) – after a short history of the rise and untimely demise of the progressive income tax – says tax the land. He says tax breaks on property and capital gains, plus tax deductions for mortgage interest amount to “powerful incentives for buyers to go into debt.” He says we should be taxing the privilege of owning land, not socially useful activities like producing and earning money. Especially, he says, tax “’unproductive’ incomes” like hereditary estates and monopolies – e.g. currently privatized natural resources, public airwaves, etc.

At first I thought, wait a minute! No tax deductions for mortgage interest? What will we struggling homeowners do? Then I remembered: those of us who are struggling don’t actually earn enough to itemize deductions anyway. Not sure how this ‘tax the airwaves’ idea would affect small operations like WEFT and WRFU, etc. but I’m sure there’s a way to tweak it. The solution might be as simple as a kind of standard deduction that effectively exempts small operations. Same could work for the land tax, really, when it comes to lower-middle-income folks trying to buy their first house … not their first *ten*, of course. (Can you really live in ten houses?)

James Galbraith (“The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should, Too”) jut comes right out and says we should “plan.” Dude!

No kidding, Galbraith is pointing out once again that the myth of ‘free enterprise’ is just that. It doesn’t exist. The trick is to acknowledge, I think he means officially, that the government always has and of necessity must and should intervene to manage and shape the direction of the economy. It isn’t clear to me exactly how he thinks we should do this, except that he says his idea “is not coercive” but based on budget priorities and such – to encourage the *kinds* of development we want. Clearly, I think, he’s right.

He seems a little short on what exactly those kinds of development are, too, but he mentions one example: a Federal Department of Energy and Climate, which would be “independent” of lobbyists and other evildoers – even Congress – (how?) and (miraculously) free to evaluate new ideas for renewable energy, etc. Our local experience, which may or may not be a useful guide, I think is that the ‘independence’ part is a humongous ‘if.’ To the extent to which city planners around here have been ‘independent’ of elected officials it seems to me they have been ‘independent’ of social considerations, even more than the elected officials: they just listened to developers and trusted their business school training. To the extent to which the planners have been ‘dependent’, well, it has depended on who was in office and what their (election-dependent) priorities were. I just don’t see it working this way.

Galbraith may have some great ideas, and he’s certainly right on about the faith-based nature of “free enterprise”. But it seems to me he’s trying to take a shortcut around the truly back-breaking work of this thing: the organizing, the building of public or cultural or national will, the social will, the social demand for radical changes like these. Maybe it’s because in the process a lot of good ideas will be shitcanned because the huddled masses don’t get them – in favor of gettig paid now. But that is the uphill battle. The biggest public relations industry in human history is against us, not to mention the monopolies on resources and organized violence currently aligned (maybe a little more loosely since last month) with property interests and so on. Tough question, but we can’t just skip it, IMO.

Finally, Eric Janzen (pres., iTulip Inc.) and Bill McKibben (“The End of Nature”) have I think related but different suggestions all to do with what kinds of development we want to foster. Janzen says we have to “reindustrialize”: and he’s talking innovative startups, publicly encouraged. McKibben says “localize”: farmer’s markets and other smaller, more localized economic developments make more sense (as we run out of oil, he says – not so sure that we are any time soon, but) and are much more deserving of public investment – *social* investment again – that ADM and the oil industry & co.

Janzen presents a more destructive version of a similar notion, in my view, advocating that we allow the financial and insurance sector, and the 4-million-job US auto industry to sink or swim on its own. Now. He’s not even just saying don’t bail them out; he’s saying withdraw the subsidies we already give them. No weaning, no methadone. Economic Armageddon.

I think that’s an even steeper ramp down to economic (and medical) depression, myself. You have to remember why we bother to discuss this at all. It’s not a board game. It’s people’s lives. And we don’t want to destroy this village in order to save it.

But in the long run I think Janzen’s got something there: he says in essence that our economy needs to be based on producing things and not just on insuring things that other people make and lending money to buy things that other people make, and then gambling on who will lose the most money when it all comes crashing down. Hm, you think?

He has a zillion ideas for startup businesses – that’s what he *does* – and the model is “public-private partnerships” (i.e. joint ownership). I’m skeptical of this on the scale and with the suddenness he seems to be proposing, at least in the contemporary capitalist context; seems like a tender box. I see armies of scam artists swarming to make living while the tourists wander the burning cities in a daze. But I think we can begin to reorganize our society along lines that are at least informed by these sorts of ideas.

McKibben, for example, addresses the human cost of some of these proposed changes. We don’t want to “beggar the populace,” he says. He’s a little slim on the specifics, but he says there are all sorts of schemes for rebates and discounts and things to ease the burden of yanking the carpet out from under tens of millions of individuals and families. They’d better be damn good ones, is all I can say. I like a lot of these ideas, but we must keep perspective. The biggest problem with the solutions we keep seeing come out of Washington (and downtown Manhattan, and Detroit, etc.) is that they ignore who they are (at least allegedly) *for*.

We must be the nagging reminders.