The Bloom’s Already Off the Rose

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Despite rising unemployment and a cratering economy, the GOP has placed a hold on the nomination of President Obama’s choice for Secretary of Labor, the pro-worker Hilda Solis. The issue at stake is the Employee Free Choice Act, which aims to give workers a level playing field by allowing workers to choose a majority sign-up approach, dubbed “card check” by anti-union flacks, for selecting a union — rather than keeping that option in the hands of employers.

But the original Wagner Act in the 1930s gave workers the right to use a majority sign-up process if they so choose, rather than the current election system that allows widespread intimidation by employers.

Studies of hundreds of organizing campaigns have found that a fifth of all pro-union activists are fired during a campaign, half of all employers threaten to shut down their plant and roughly 80% of employers hire unionbusting consultants. Employers are still free under the proposed Employee Free Choice Act to hold intimidating one-on-one “sweat” sessions to legally discourage workers from joining a union. And, as I found out while going undercover to a unionbusting seminar, it’s equally legal for employers to just lie about the dire consequences facing workers if they join a union, from closed plants to somehow losing seniority and benefits. That’s the system the Employee Free Choice Act was designed to reform, by increasing penalties for corporate lawbreaking, allowing employees to choose the majority sign-up approach but still retaining the employees’ rights to hold a secret-ballot NLRB election if they want.

Art Levine, Posted January 24, 2009

The inauguration of President Obama was breathtaking, there’s no doubt about it. We’ve done something unprescedented in the developed world– elected a member of a historically oppressed minority as president. President Morales, of course, who’s Indian, was elected a few years ago in Bolivia. Still, this is one of those turning points that happen only once in a lifetime.

On the other hand, unlike President Morales, President Obama may not be fully what at least some expected. He’s begun the process of shutting down the base at Guantanamo, for example, and the so-called secret CIA bases, but he wants the military to use an interrogation standard that may be just as bad as the old policy, which endorsed torture. His economic team, too, includes people who’ve demonstrated a freakish love of the market.

And Noam Chomsky, among others, can’t see much difference yet between Obama’s position and the Bush position in Gaza. All this seems very healthy to me. As Naomi Klein says, “free your base, and the rest will follow.” That’s why we need the Employee Free Choice Act. But we should give credit where credit is due– the Bush family planning policy had to end– but if progressive people don’t push back, nothing good will come of all of this.

Posted in: Economics, Language, Online Places, Writing

How Change Happens

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Economic storms historically have prompted more adults to seek shelter in the classroom. But this time around, two-year colleges and private for-profit institutions are especially optimistic about attracting more students—and many of those older students will probably take courses online, according to one of the authors of a recent survey.

The 2008 Sloan Survey of Online Learning, released in November before the extent of the recession was clear, found that while all types of colleges anticipate enrollment bumps because of high unemployment, two-year and private for-profit institutions expect to increase their rolls more than others since they “tend to offer programs that have traditionally been tailored to serve working adults.

Recession May Drive More Adult Students to Take Online Courses, STEVE KOLOWICH, January 9, 2009

Step by step, we are creating a new education system without any sense of where we are going. The outlines of the new system have begun to become a little clearer, however. Much of this change is dependent on historical timing. There was the internet boom, which led to the dot-com crash, and then the housing boom. This created a new sort of infrastructure fed by an Utopian ideology that said these technologies ought to be in every home and classroom.

The internet boom jump-started the internet infrastructure, and the collapse of that bubble fed the housing boom, which bought everyone enough time to get these technologies to the point where their effects cannot be reversed. Utopia got us over the rough spots. Now that the housing bubble has burst, dragging the entire economy with it, more people will take advantage of the new infrastructure to use education to improve their chances on the job market, once the bust plays itself out.

All of this is just the public theater of change; behind the scenes, more profound transformations are taking place. As a profession and a public service, higher education has become lopsidedly bifurcated. An increasingly small minority have what was once a relatively secure position in full-time, tenure track positions. The majority do not. Similarly, the old liberal arts model of education threatens to become the privileged experience of a minority.

I understand the funding concerns but I don’t think this is a funding problem. if something is a priority– say, a bank or auto bail out– the money is available. The real questions have to do with the nature of jobs and job security and with the purposes of education. Conservative ideology has made the notion of job security seem antiquated. That magical force, “the market” has supposedly made such a thing impossible. Why should professors be any different?

And technology, rather than education in the old liberal arts mode, has the Utopian edge that pushes people into long term commitments and projects. Don’t get me wrong. I make my living teaching on the internet and I can see the reality of how these new infrastructure has made a certain kind of education more accessible. I worry, though, that as we are busily trying to get through this recession we are normalizing some deep cuts in our expectations.

Posted in: Economics, Language, Professional, War, Writing

It Sucks to be Poor, Part II

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BERKELEY — University of California, Berkeley, researchers have shown for the first time that the brains of low-income children function differently from the brains of high-income kids.

In a study recently accepted for publication by the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, scientists at UC Berkeley’s Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and the School of Public Health report that normal 9- and 10-year-olds differing only in socioeconomic status have detectable differences in the response of their prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that is critical for problem solving and creativity.

Robert Sanders, Media Relations |02 December 2008

When I lived in the Philippines I quickly discovered that poverty had more subtle effects than I had imagined. Like most Americans, I had seen the television images of crumbling houses and starving kids with their swollen bellies. I am not sure if that is exactly what I expected to see in my little town of Conception, Tarlac, but it is pretty close. And there were certainly lots of crumbling houses and ill fed children. The house next door to mine was a single room, about 12 feet by 12 feet (perhaps 4 meters by 4 meters), occupied by an extended family that often included a dozen people.

That’s the least of it, of course. Maybe even more importantly, poverty had to do with infrastructure. There were the ongoing ‘brown outs’ and ‘black outs’ and minimal indoor plumbing. There were lots of bad roads and poorly running buses; there were no dentists in the rural areas, and no optometrists. People went blind with cataracts from the dust and lost their teeth from eating sugar cane raw. There were also families who had brand new cars; my district was the home district of the Aquino family so we had some good new roads, too. After a while, you noticed that many of the kids at school had small wounds that never quite healed.

They certainly had a lot of energy but these wounds were evidence of chronic, low-level malnutrition. As it turns out, you can be half or one-third or one-fourth starved to death. What happens, often enough, is that your body stops working very well. If you’re a kid, and like all kids, you are constantly scratching your knees or something, these tiny cuts never quite heal. Eventually, we also learned that this low-level malnutrition has cognitive effects as well. Among other things, kids don’t concentrate well when they are poorly fed. I wasn’t surprised, then, to find out that poverty also shapes so-called higher cognitive functions, too, such as creativity.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Economics, Writing

Bourgeois Economics

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Next, back to basics. Remember that houses are homes, not abstract transactions that can be made profitable with unreasonable levels of leverage/borrowing. I am not advocating a return to the horse-and-buggy days of lending. There is still a role for more conservative securitization, in which packages of home mortgages are sold to the restructured Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and a well-regulated private market. However, preserving the connection between originator and borrower is more likely to reduce fraud and consumer abuse.

This will require political and economic leadership to encourage Americans to return to the tough, unpleasant discipline of saving. At the heart of the current meltdown is a stark reality: America is the world’s biggest debtor in both the public sector (budget deficits) and the private sector (financial institutions and corporations). The U.S. financial system is now at the mercy of foreign sovereigns and institutions sitting on enormous piles of cash, much of it from the sale of oil and other products to us.

Back To Basics: Restoring the Human Connection in Mortgage Lending, Emma Coleman Jordan

It sounds like standard vulgar Marxist criticism, but this sort of faux economic talk does no one any good at all. It’s not just the awful sentimentality of the ‘it’s a home, not just a house’ variety, although that is bad enough. It’s the pig-headed insistence that the solution to our economic problems, and by implication the origins, lie in individual discipline, or the lack there-of.

It seems only logical to assume that the savings rate must be related to several structural factors, all beyond the control of any individual. Wages, to start, have not exactly been climbing in the last thirty years or so. The ‘Second Gilded Age” initiated by Reagan’s “Morning in America” promoted hyper-consumption as the highest value. Then you have those pesky medical bills.

What we need is strengthened organized labor and higher wages, national health care, and a vigilante government regulation system. The entire point of the current system is to insulate capital from its own excesses by neutralizing the checks and balances in a democracy. It’s capital, not labor, that needs the ‘tough discipline’ of markets designed to meet human need.

Posted in: Economics, War