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Friday, February 10, 2012
2010--A transitional year upward for our economy
by Matthew Mahood, published on December 18, 2009 at 12:41 PM
Storyline: Chamber View
In 2010, will our economy be half empty or half full? I view next year as a “transitional” year—a year in which our region’s economy will begin to grow and flourish again.
But to move our economy forward, we need our friends in the public sector to do their part. They must create a more business-friendly environment that eliminates the stranglehold that our current political and regulatory atmosphere holds on businesses—large or small, privately or publicly held. And in turn, the business community must hold our elected representatives, at all levels, accountable for this kind of good governance.
Recently, the Sacramento Metro Chamber held the Sacramento City Council accountable by supporting Nestle Waters bottling plant. We confronted a sudden whipsaw started by a single city council member after the city shut down construction work on the new plant. The Metro Chamber mobilized the “voice of business,” generating more than 800 emails to council members asking them to consider the very chilling, anti-business and anti-jobs message they were sending. Rational minds prevailed, and Nestle was allowed to restart construction the very next day.
Business 101: If you create conditions where businesses thrive, they create jobs, citizens go to work, make money, pay taxes, buy goods thus causing more people to get jobs, pay taxes and buy goods, and so on. It’s an upward spiral to prosperity. The roots of our economic success is business, thriving companies—not a regulatory or political process that chokes them out.
Let’s remember, 2010 is an election year. If we want our elected officials to enable businesses, not disable them, as was tried with Nestle Waters, I know of no better way than by supporting business-friendly candidates. We ask then that our 2,200 members and all of the region’s businesses to choose wisely.
I would also ask you to join us and our political action committee to further this cause. In gearing up for 2010, we can use your support, now more than ever. Visit www.metrochamber.org for details.
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How are "we" shaping our "politicians" they do as they please, and almost always ignore the People.
Obama inherited this mess, and on his first day, applied conditions and repayment obligations to these bailouts, and we've even made some money off of them....
Unfortunately the toxicity of the Bush/Cheney years hasn't begun to subside, and next year it will become evident through massive commercial real estate defaults, such as those now being encountered by noneother than Thomas Enterprises, the Railyards developer, among so many others.... and it is THIS little blip that is going to play hard and heavy with Sacramento's overleveraged development community -- the ones who aided and abetted your friend KJ to, through whatever quirk of electoral 'magic', to be seated as mayor.... In fact, it's already begun -- the SAG group supporting the SMI has had to already regroup twice to survive, and the campaign hasn't even begun -- especially after a pending AG investigation into just how they got people to sign those 'petitions' that brought the measure into being...
Should be an interesting spring...
Now, if you're talking about regulation of Wall Street, I'm with you. But I believe Matt's talking about business here in Sacramento. And while government is an industry, it is not an economy, and like other healthy regions, Sacramento needs a broad based economy.
Just like when one branch of government oversteps, another steps in to check it; when one branch of the economy oversteps (business, labor, government) others step in. Here, now, many believe political maneuvering threatens to restrain trade, so business is stepping up.
Regulation on Wall Street is the macro picture, but that doesn't mean regulation on K Street isn't needed. The rules of government should be fair and neutral, and special regulations designed to favor a certain class of companies (like the FPP) is neither fair nor neutral.
Government is not an economy--at best, it can only facilitate the growth of the private sector. We both agree on that. Regulation stabilizes that growth, in order to avoid things like the real estate bubble and the derivatives market. It levels out the highs, and balances the lows, favoring long-term stability over short-term gain and the frequent crashes that come with it.
It is easier to get an abortion, go on welfare, or get a prescription for marijuana than it is to open a business in Sacramento. This city council, along with many of the unelected so-called neighborhood groups look at every business proposal as something to be green mailed.
The only areas of Sacramento that have been surviving the recessions are outside the city limits...
Shawn Eldredge
The problem with letting fat cat developers start projects before they are approved...if they have any problems with the City later..they immediately scream.. "WE ALREADY SPENT MILLIONS!" Just like Nestle did... well as far as I am concerned, they did so at their own peril. But, as with what happened with Nestle..when a big developer screams.. the council immediately bends over on behalf of the community.
Oh thats right... 20-30 million illegal immigrants taking lower rung jobs drives down wages and takes up affordable housing stock while raising rental rates...
Oh yeah..and those lower rung jobs..the ones that Americans used to fill...have been filled by mostly illegal immigrants, which raised the rungs, or filled the positions on the ladder, for the working poor...driving many poor and uneducated onto the welfare roles or to homelessness...And now that most of the lower rung jobs are filled with illegal immigrants...they tend to only hire other illegal immigrants who speak Spanish...
Hmm but Americans wont do those jobs? Well Seth...guess what would happen if your friends didn't import cheap illegal labor into the country....Geez the employers just might be forced to raise wages enough to attract Americans who don't live three or four families in one house to survive.
Dam Seth....how do you rationalize your positions?
What causes people to leave home to search for paid work? Could part of the answer be so-called “free-trade” policies such as the NAFTA?
Recall that the NAFTA passed, barely, under a Democratic president 15 years ago. The NAFTA increased U.S. agribusiness exports to Mexico. This has destroyed the livelihoods of its peasant farmers. They immigrate north to find paid work, mainly in agriculture and construction.
Oh, and the stagnation of U.S. workers’ real wages? This trend precedes the NAFTA by over two decades.
What triggered this wage trend? The answer is market competition that creates winners and losers.
Corporations in Germany and Japan rose from their deathbeds after WW II. They began to compete with growing success against U.S. corporations for profits and market share.
To try and restore profitability, U.S. corporations attacked labor unions and social programs. A leading thinker in this corporate campaign was Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell. He, as a corporate lawyer, wrote a 1971 memo that urged business to ideologically and politically confront the popular movements (Civil Rights and Vietnam War) of the day. Later, Democrats and GOPsters did that via laws to deregulate, deunionize, etc. to satisfy their corporate donors. Jim, you, I and tens of millions of working people in the U.S. live in the present moment of this recent history.
I end with a rough draft of a question that leaves behind description for prescription. Who benefits from groups of workers being at odds with each other over buyers for their labor services?