Social Darwinism lives!

Date of event?

What in part accounts for the trend of stagnating wages is employer-friendly labor law. This paved the way for private-sector employers to weaken unions and organizing campaigns. The outcome was predictable. Nonunion workers earn lower pay and fewer benefits than those in unions.

Stagnant wages for tens of millions of U.S. workers over decades helped to create the home bubble’s growth.

Rhonda is no more demonizing black males than I am the man in the moon. She is my friend, yes, and also a tireless advocate for those in pain of all backgrounds. Advocacy for them every day is what Rhonda does and who she is. We need more people like her.

Have you heard of the housing market crash? That brought down the private economy, on its deathbed now. Does cutting government spending help to revive the patient?

Goldman Sachs was an investment bank. Then the housing bubble burst. As a result of that, Goldman Sachs faced collapse. So the Federal Reserve Bank let Goldman Sachs become a financial holding company to get access to the Fed’s discount window and to Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.’s insured loans.

A big question for the current decade concerns jobs. Where will the investment come from for new employment in the capital city of the nation's most populous state, and how does the jobs crisis connect with pro sports? California's jobless rate has doubled since Dec. 2007: http://www.economytrack.org/mainchart_3.php?_tab=unemployment Reducing state and local government spending can only deepen the jobs crisis. This is the current policy choice of our lawmakers. Note I assume that private investment is the key to economic recovery. That private investment is largely absent, and there appears to be little of it ahead. Therefore, I conclude that federal deficit spending to help the states is the key to recovery in the short-term. Oh, and one other minor thing. If our taxpaying dollars can flow to big banks to save them from bankruptcy, the same tax money can bail out the states to save and create jobs.

Bright students. Concerning number 2, there was an overbuilding of homes. That was a result of the rise in residential real estate prices. Note that the vast bulk of economists, column writers and reporters missed the home price bubble. They chose to be bubble cheerleaders, instead.

I support human beings, Jim. Is that clear? 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?

Real wages (what people can buy) with their pay has been stagnant for more than 30 years. At the same time, people’s productivity (output per-person each labor hour) has boomed. But workers have not reaped the benefits of their productivity gains. Guess who has? Sure, this trend is a bit hard to see. Yet it is the root of the economic crisis now. To sum up, the current recession is the result of inequity between the working majority and a sedentary minority since the early 1970s. Since then, U.S. households have coped with wage stagnation two main ways. One is to work longer hours. The other is to borrow more money. Together, both practices have helped them to maintain their living standards. I end with a brief word on financial bubbles, most recently in housing. This bubble and those before it boost consumer spending absent a rise in real wages. Financial bubbles are the effect, not the cause, of the widening gap between the upper class and everyone else.

Rhonda Erwin is my friend. In our age of rising home entertainment and personal disappointment, she shows how to learn with and from others in pursuit of equity and justice. If that sounds old school, well, I guess it is. All that is decent and humane in our society is the result of people such as Rhonda working collectively besides like-minded folks. They rarely make it into the history books. No matter. It is people in motion, mass movements, that ended slavery, gave women the vote, smashed legal segregation, won the eight-hour workday, Social Security and Medicare, etc. Wealth and the political power it controls cede nothing without demands from below. When folks educate, organize and mobilize they can move mountains. Rhonda can’t do it alone. Nobody can. It’s time for more “I” people to become “we” people.

The LA Times reported on this hospital practice in Southern CA three years ago: http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-me-dumping16nov16,0,2734413.story

Did Christopher Columbus and his crew have their citizenship papers in order?

The governor just vetoed SB 218, a bill introduced by State Senator Leland Yee, D-SF, after questions raised about the business practices of foundations on California State University campuses from Fresno to San Francisco, Sonoma to Sacramento. As Kimberly writes, students are paying more for less education at Sacramento State. For the current budget year, Sac State is sending $5.12 million to University Enterprises, Inc., $4.8 million of which is for its CalSTRS building on Folsom Blvd., in part to plug the gap of lease revenue from nonexistent tenants. CSU Chancellor Charles Reed’s office has added $1.5 million for the UEI building this year. The property, which UEI bought in July 2007 as the home bubble burst, has an annual mortgage payment of $3 million in 2009-10. That rises to $3.86 million per year through 2038-39. SB 218 would have increased the transparency of Sac State’s long-term financial liability to UIE by compelling it and other higher education foundations to conform to the protocol for information requests that state and local agencies must comply with under the California Public Records Act now.

The deficit as a percent of the economy is the key thing to watch. President Clinton left the White House with the federal budget in surplus. President George W. Bush turned that surplus into a deficit. The spike in the federal deficit over the past year is in the main a result of Main St., taxpayers on the left, center and right, bailing out Wall St. These big firms contribute about equally to Democrats and Republicans.

Your source(s), Jim?

What is the source of your fact on homelessness and substance abuse, Jim?

Long live the grey dog!

Before buying the daily newspaper chain of Knight Ridder Inc., I presume that the board of the McClatchy Co. employed financial advisors. They probably did not labor for the federal minimum wage, which rises 70 cents to $7.25 per hour on July 24th. These advisors did, however, miss the largest housing bubble in U.S. history. If the advisors on the Knight Ridder acquisition could have been more incompetent, it is a stretch to see how. Has there been any accountability for this failure? If so, what has it been? If there has been none, why not? Good journalists would dig this out.