Thursday, July 25, 2013

Summing Things Up

Couldn't ask for a better summary of our shared economic history than this:


"In the period after World War II, a growing middle class was the engine of our prosperity. Whether you owned a company, swept its floors, or worked anywhere in between, this country offered you a basic bargain – a sense that your hard work would be rewarded with fair wages and benefits, the chance to buy a home, to save for retirement, and, above all, to hand down a better life for your kids.
But over time, that engine began to stall. That bargain began to fray. Technology made some jobs obsolete. Global competition sent others overseas. It became harder for unions to fight for the middle class. Washington doled out bigger tax cuts to the rich and smaller minimum wage increases for the working poor. The link between higher productivity and people’s wages and salaries was severed – the income of the top 1% nearly quadrupled from 1979 to 2007, while the typical family’s barely budged.
Towards the end of those three decades, a housing bubble, credit cards, and a churning financial sector kept the economy artificially juiced up."

You may be surprised to learn who said it.

Sunday, June 9, 2013

Frame the Debate: We're Not Broke, Check the Other Pocket

I challenge ANYONE to counter this argument. But you can't, can you Libertarians? You Republicans have no answer to this, do you?

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Immigration: Progressive perspective

from: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/16/us/16immig3.html?pagewanted=print


April 16, 2006
THE ADVOCATE

A Liberal's Contrarian Views

DENVER, April 15 — Sitting at the Auraria Community Center here on a recent morning with his cat, Tails, perched before him on the desk, Waldo Benavidez gestured to a large portrait of Emiliano Zapata, the leader of the 1910 Mexican revolution — and Mr. Benavidez's personal hero.
Mexicans here illegally, Mr. Benavidez said, should take a lesson from those days and return home to fight for change in their own country.
"If you're tough enough to cross the desert, you're tough to take on your own government and change it," he said.
Mr. Benavidez has spent most of his adult life working on behalf of the poor. For the last 25 years he has managed the community center and a food bank here on Denver's west side, where low-income families can get groceries. He marched for civil rights in the 1960's and relishes the memory of his first vote for president, for John F. Kennedy, in 1960.
But immigration's tangled implications have pushed him out of his comfortable old political box with its predictably liberal labels and causes. Supporting the poor in America, he said, now means shutting down the system that has created a flood of even poorer immigrants from Mexico.
"It has nothing to do with whether I like Mexicans, or whether I've got one foot in Mexico myself because of my ancestry — I'm an American first," said Mr. Benavidez, 67. "I'm very liberal on a lot of issues, but on this one I've taken a stand because of the impact it has on the working people of this country."
Mr. Benavidez, whose ancestors have been in the West for 250 years, since the days of the Spanish empire, supports sealing the Mexican border, and is working for a proposed ballot proposition here in Colorado that would deny government social services to illegal immigrants.
He rails against multinational corporations that he says have rigged the political systems of the United States and Mexico to keep the border porous as a tool for suppressing wages and labor unions.
A Democrat, he nonetheless says he may vote for his first Republican ever this fall because he thinks many Democrats are "pandering" to Hispanic voters on the immigration issue and not keeping their eyes on what is good for the country.
Mr. Benavidez said he had been offended by the recent waves of protests around the country, with illegal immigrants demanding rights, and by the comparisons that had been made between those efforts and the civil rights struggles of the past over things like voter registration.
"This is not a civil rights issue," he said. "These people are not citizens demanding their rights — that's different."
Hispanics, like all Americans, are divided in their thinking about illegal immigrants. In a poll in February and March by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press and the Pew Hispanic Center, about one in five Hispanics said that illegal immigrants should be required to go home, compared with just over half of the respondents as a whole who said that. Almost one-third of Hispanics in the survey said they thought illegal immigrants should not be eligible for social services provided by state and local governments, compared with about two-thirds of the respondents as a whole who thought services should be denied.
Mr. Benavidez also acknowledged that his position was not without its inconsistencies. Many illegal immigrants are poor people, too, like his multigeneration Hispanic neighbors here in Denver, just from a different place. And immigration is not the only source of poverty or downward wage pressures in a society.
"It's a complicated issue, and I don't have all the answers," he said. "I do know that there's injustice."
Mr. Benavidez said that to him, the issue is not about ethnicity at all. It is about governments allowing poor people to sink further into poverty by indifference or direct action — and both the United States and Mexico, he said, are guilty.
In places like Denver, he said, the social safety net of job training programs and educational support efforts embodied by the Great Society programs of the 1960's would once have made illegal immigration less of a blow to the American poor. But those protections have largely been stripped away over the years.
In Mexico, the oligarchy of wealthy families that he said controlled most of the power had exploited the poor just as callously, shipping them north as a safety valve to diffuse political pressure for economic reform.
What is changing this year, and putting the immigration issue on the burner in Washington and in state capitals, Mr. Benavidez said, is that the middle class suddenly cares about immigration, and he thinks a political thunderclap could result in this fall's elections if people are still aroused.
"There is a revolt out there," he said. "Change will come."

Monday, March 11, 2013

On Immigration

This is by P.Gold:
"The devil is in the details--most people want immigrants to be treated fairly--but what about not enforcing fair labor laws and what about allowing 11 million illegal immigrants (which equates to about 7.5 % of the American work force) to work legally in the USA--when there is 14.5 unemployment in America. Immigration negatively impacts on the American labor market and negatively impacts wages and job conditions for everyone. Already we have seen the ill effects of jobs going overseas to third world workers. Deregulation here would just exacerbate the problem. JCUA says its a partner with the "Fair" Immigration Movement --(FIR) FIR wants all 11 million illegal immigrants to work in the USA quickly. You can talk about how the average Mexican is better off by taking a low wage job here vs. a no wage job in Mexico--or the average Chinese person is slightly better off with a job that used to be here---the fact is they are not much better off--and they are only slightly better off at great expense to the working class in America all to the benefit to the world bourgeois. As we have seen already the move of American jobs to China has benefited the bourgeois at the expense of the working class. Social justice should be evaluated at how it impacts society as a whole and with an eye to all the effects--not just how it impacts one aspect of society. Social Justice does not mean removing one bad policy in exchange for another. Social Justice should be about shared responsibility --but the proposal to allow 11 million illegal immigrants to work in the USA benefits the bourgeois at the expense of the working class--by putting downward pressure on the labor market. 20 years ago the same kind of well-meaning people we see in the picture were marching for the Free Trade Act--we see where that got the world's workers. I'm afraid those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Helping 3rd world workers is a noble ideal --but we have to find a way to do this without driving down the working class in America--America has been great and a driver of the world economy because of its strong middle class --helping the world's downtrodden on the backs of working people in the USA is not the answer. The solution to world poverty is not allowing third world people to compete for American jobs in a laissez -faire manner but in a way that allows world peoples to enjoy work at standards most Americans enjoyed before the Free Trade Act and ensures that American work standards are not brought down. We must not achieve parity by bringing America down to third world standards (wake up and smell the coffee because that's what's happening). Rather, third world workers must be brought up to the standards that had recently existed here. JCUA should be opposed to immigration "reform" packages that call for the 11 million illegal immigrants to be able to fast track to being legal workers here. Liberals should stop being for equality when it means equally bad or equally worse---or as in this case equally worse for a segment of society while another segment exploits the policy to its advantage. Instead, liberals should embrace what could be done for progress holistically."