By Karl Frisch, Media Matters for America
Posted on October 14, 2009, Printed on October 17, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143294/
In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, her classic work from 1818, Dr. Victor Frankenstein brings life to the lifeless. Larger and more powerful than an average man, Dr. Frankenstein's creation strikes fear in the hearts of those it encounters. Remember, this monster was only man-like -- a far cry from the real thing.
With Halloween just around the corner, Fox News president Roger Ailes -- a former Republican communications guru -- is looking more and more like the news industry's Dr. Frankenstein. For months now, he has been putting the finishing touches on his first monster, Fox News Channel, just as its bride, Fox Business Network, is showing signs of life.
His main tactic has been all too apparent: steal conservative media figures from real news networks like CNN, MSNBC, and ABC in order to build something new from the pieces -- something that only superficially resembles a legitimate news outlet.
Last spring, conspiracy-loving crybaby Glenn Beck claimed that Ailes wooed him over to Fox News from CNN Headline News by stressing the conservative network's opposition to the president. Beck even told one newspaper that Ailes had likened Fox News' battle against Obama to the Alamo.
Then there was Tucker Carlson in May. Fresh off yet another canceled show -- first with CNN and then with MSNBC -- and a brief stint on ABC's Dancing With The Stars, the conservative man-boy cable host known for his bow-tie fetish landed with a bang at Fox News, declaring, "I've waited a long time to get here."
Luring two big right-wing names to Fox News Channel's roster allowed Ailes to focus on Fox Business Network, his answer to NBC Universal's successful business news outlet, CNBC.
Since its launch in late 2007, Fox Business has been plagued with horrible ratings. In fact, CNBC sometimes outperformed the new conservative business outlet by a margin of 10-to-1. It's hardly surprising, then, that Ailes has turned his focus to the struggling network.
Just last month, Fox Business announced that it would begin carrying a weekday simulcast of Don Imus' radio program. Imus is, of course, far better known for his long history of outrageous and at times racist and sexist comments than for his business-reporting chops. In fact, he'll likely represent the word "business" in his new employer's name about as well as his new colleagues represent the word "news" in Fox News Channel.
Imus comes to Fox Business from the little-known and little-watched RFD-TV, his television home following his high-profile firing from MSNBC and CBS radio in 2007 for referring to the Rutgers University women's basketball team as "nappy-headed hos."
September would prove to be a barn burner of a month for Ailes. In addition to Imus, John Stossel, a correspondent for the ABC newsmagazine 20/20, also announced his intention to join Fox Business. Stossel will no doubt feel right at home -- he has a long history of denying the scientific reality of global climate change and promoting a cornucopia of right-wing myths and distortions. So much so that Fox's Chris Wallace described Stossel as a "very natural fit at Fox because he is a contrarian, and he's a conservative."
So what's next for Fox Business? Well, according to recent reports, CNN's immigrant-bashing conspiracy theorist Lou Dobbs met with Ailes over dinner last month. Could Dobbs be taking his loony quest for President Obama's already-available birth certificate to Fox Business? It seems plausible. Years before CNN turned over its airwaves to Dobbs for his nightly broadcasts of immigrant-smearing hysteria and right-wing fringe causes of the day, Dobbs was something of a respected financial news anchor.
Surely, Imus, Stossel, and Dobbs won't be enough to breathe new life into Ailes' monster bride of a network. He's going to need a few more high-profile names before he's able to shout "It's alive!" from the rooftops. But who?
Perhaps Ailes could sign Michael Savage, the third-highest-rated radio host in America, who was fired by MSNBC in 2003 for describing a caller as "a sodomite" and telling him to "get AIDS and die." While he's at it, he could also snatch up Pat Buchanan, the former CNN and MSNBC host who currently serves as resident cranky uncle and political commentator for the latter. Surely, they could use someone with his decades-long history of racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, defending of Hitler, and whitewashing of the Holocaust.
We might as well refer to Ailes as Dr. Fox-enstein at this point. After all, his relentless abuse of the journalistic form is just as frightening as Shelley's chilling fictional tale of scientific experimentation run amok -- perhaps more so.
© 2009 Media Matters for America All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/143294/
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Politicians Have Failed in Efforts to Stave Off Climate Change, Now It's Up to Us
By Bill McKibben, Mother Jones
Posted on October 17, 2009, Printed on October 17, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143282/
I didn't make the trip to Thailand for the pre-Copenhagen negotiating session last week, and I'm glad I didn't. For one thing, the weather was doing its best to remind delegates what global warming feels like: Bangkok can do hot and muggy like no place on Earth. For another, nothing much was happening -- the big countries continued to refrain from making any promises about how much they'd cut emissions or how much they'd fork over to help the developing world leapfrog past fossil fuel. As Kevin Grandia, editor of the invaluable DeSmogBlog put it, "At the pace I have seen here in Bangkok there is little hope that these issues will be resolved by the time the negotiations end here on Friday. If these issues couldn't be resolved in two weeks here, it would take a miracle for them to be in the can for Copenhagen."
Meanwhile, in Washington, senators John Kerry and Barbara Boxer issued the Senate version of climate change legislation, which most environmentalists took as a modest improvement on the modest bill the House has already passed. It works the same cap-and-trade way, at the same all-too-deliberate speed. And it had barely been introduced before the president's climate czarina, Carol Browner, said there was no chance it would make its way through Congress in time for Copenhagen anyway. Which everyone kind of already knew -- but still, if there had been any buzz to begin with it would have been a buzzkill. About the only good news: Norway announced it will aim for even deeper cuts, reducing its carbon emissions 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2020 if other developed countries will go along. Given Norway's position in the world carbon league, this is akin to the guy who stopped drinking in 1967 announcing he's getting on the wagon -- it somehow served only to underscore the depressing reality of climate gridlock.
In short: The scientific method has successfully identified the biggest problem the world has ever faced. It's worked great. The political method has not worked so well. In fact it's lurching toward something between abject and embarrassing failure.
And yet the game isn't quite over yet, because one team has barely begun to take the field. And that's the team you're on -- the, uh, people. For 20 years we've left climate policy up to the kind of people now failing to solve things in Bangkok. We've had experts of every kind, but we haven't had -- outside of, say, Norway -- enough of a movement to be heard.
Which is why, all the bad news aside, I'm in a good mood. We're just under two weeks away from our global day of action at 350.org, and the movement has gone viral, turned into a monster. It's the first campaign ever built around a scientific data point (scientists now tell us that 350 parts per million is the most carbon we can safely have in the atmosphere, a number we're already past). Every day new people appear who are organizing big actions; yesterday we found out that organizers in Iran have managed to organize four actions for the October 24 day. They've even set up a website in Farsi. Ditto for events in Yemen, ditto Palestine, ditto Burundi. Thousands of actions, each more creative than the last. Artists too: Here’s Barry Lopez writing an exactly 350-word short story, the first in a series of writers that will be popping up in the next two weeks. I'm going to be in organizing mode these next 14 days, with not much time for reflecting: If you hear from me it will be in a hectoring tone. Like this: If people in Iran can get it together to organize an action, so can you.
This article is part of our Assignment 2020 project, a long-term reporting effort on the most important story of our time.
Bill McKibben is the author of 10 books, most recently Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College in Vermont.
© 2009 Mother Jones All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/143282/
Posted on October 17, 2009, Printed on October 17, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143282/
I didn't make the trip to Thailand for the pre-Copenhagen negotiating session last week, and I'm glad I didn't. For one thing, the weather was doing its best to remind delegates what global warming feels like: Bangkok can do hot and muggy like no place on Earth. For another, nothing much was happening -- the big countries continued to refrain from making any promises about how much they'd cut emissions or how much they'd fork over to help the developing world leapfrog past fossil fuel. As Kevin Grandia, editor of the invaluable DeSmogBlog put it, "At the pace I have seen here in Bangkok there is little hope that these issues will be resolved by the time the negotiations end here on Friday. If these issues couldn't be resolved in two weeks here, it would take a miracle for them to be in the can for Copenhagen."
Meanwhile, in Washington, senators John Kerry and Barbara Boxer issued the Senate version of climate change legislation, which most environmentalists took as a modest improvement on the modest bill the House has already passed. It works the same cap-and-trade way, at the same all-too-deliberate speed. And it had barely been introduced before the president's climate czarina, Carol Browner, said there was no chance it would make its way through Congress in time for Copenhagen anyway. Which everyone kind of already knew -- but still, if there had been any buzz to begin with it would have been a buzzkill. About the only good news: Norway announced it will aim for even deeper cuts, reducing its carbon emissions 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2020 if other developed countries will go along. Given Norway's position in the world carbon league, this is akin to the guy who stopped drinking in 1967 announcing he's getting on the wagon -- it somehow served only to underscore the depressing reality of climate gridlock.
In short: The scientific method has successfully identified the biggest problem the world has ever faced. It's worked great. The political method has not worked so well. In fact it's lurching toward something between abject and embarrassing failure.
And yet the game isn't quite over yet, because one team has barely begun to take the field. And that's the team you're on -- the, uh, people. For 20 years we've left climate policy up to the kind of people now failing to solve things in Bangkok. We've had experts of every kind, but we haven't had -- outside of, say, Norway -- enough of a movement to be heard.
Which is why, all the bad news aside, I'm in a good mood. We're just under two weeks away from our global day of action at 350.org, and the movement has gone viral, turned into a monster. It's the first campaign ever built around a scientific data point (scientists now tell us that 350 parts per million is the most carbon we can safely have in the atmosphere, a number we're already past). Every day new people appear who are organizing big actions; yesterday we found out that organizers in Iran have managed to organize four actions for the October 24 day. They've even set up a website in Farsi. Ditto for events in Yemen, ditto Palestine, ditto Burundi. Thousands of actions, each more creative than the last. Artists too: Here’s Barry Lopez writing an exactly 350-word short story, the first in a series of writers that will be popping up in the next two weeks. I'm going to be in organizing mode these next 14 days, with not much time for reflecting: If you hear from me it will be in a hectoring tone. Like this: If people in Iran can get it together to organize an action, so can you.
This article is part of our Assignment 2020 project, a long-term reporting effort on the most important story of our time.
Bill McKibben is the author of 10 books, most recently Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College in Vermont.
© 2009 Mother Jones All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/143282/
"Clean, Safe and High-Value" Neighborhoods Are Nice Ways of Saying "White" Without Bringing Race into It
By Rich Benjamin, Hyperion Books
Posted on October 16, 2009, Printed on October 17, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143337/
The following is an excerpt from Searching for Whitopia by Rich Benjamin (Hyperion, 2009).
In twenty-first-century America, how do so many Whitopias hatch and flourish?
A few white readers may protest that their neighborhood’s appeal has nothing to do with its racial composition. The homogeneity of where they live is “irrelevant” or “coincidental,” they say. But divorcing a Whitopia’s appeal from its predominantly white composition is like extracting the marshmallow from the s’more. Impossible. Each is fundamental to the other.
Whites may not move to a place simply because it teems with other white people. Rather, to many Americans, a place’s whiteness implies other qualities that are desirable. Americans associate a homogenous white neighborhood with higher property values, friendliness, orderliness, hospitability, cleanliness, safety, and comfort. These seemingly race-neutral qualities are subconsciously inseparable from race and class in many whites’ minds. Race is often used as a proxy for those neighborhood traits.
Through most of the twentieth century, racial discrimination was deliberate and intentional. Today, racial segregation and division often result from habits, policies, and institutions that are not explicitly designed to discriminate. Contrary to popular belief, discrimination or segregation do not require animus. They thrive even in the absence of prejudice or ill will.
It’s common to have racism without “racists.”
The law does not forbid segregated or discriminating neighborhoods. It simply forbids intentional discrimination. Successful plaintiffs in a discrimination lawsuit must prove that someone intended racial bias.
And the legal standard to establish proof of that intent is very high: The plaintiff must present a “smoking gun” and this particular gun is often impossible to furnish. The 1973 Supreme Court decision San Antonio v. Rodriguez held that a school funding system based on local property taxes that perpetuated egregious disparities in per-pupil spending between mostly white districts and mostly minority districts does not violate the Constitution, because the plaintiffs could not prove that the funding differences emerged from intentional racial discrimination. Another landmark Supreme Court decision, Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp (1977), reinforced this “intent doctrine”: The court ruled that a suburban village did not discriminate, because it did not intend to discriminate when it set-up zoning that disproportionately harmed racial minorities.
There is a terrible disconnect between our everyday experiences and the law: In day-to-day life, racial inequity continues without intent, yet courts require evidence of intent before the law can acknowledge or effectively confront discrimination. Regrettably, the absence of explicit intent has become a common crutch that justifies private decisions that wreak racial havoc upon minorities.
Not to know what has been transacted in the past is to be always a child, said Cicero.
The history of the U.S. housing market shows the corrosive influence of discriminatory public policy on private decision-making: For many decades, private lenders, neighborhoods, and citizens adopted intolerant public policies. Discriminatory government behavior was aped by the public, and blended seamlessly into the “free market.” Covert and overt, these segregating and unjust public and private practices made it difficult, if not impossible, for blacks to own homes in broad swaths of America’s suburbs.
From 1934 to 1962, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) underwrote $120 billion in new housing. Less than 2 percent of that went to nonwhites. From 1938 to 1962, the FHA insured the mortgages on nearly one third of all new housing in the United States. Its Underwriting Manuals, however, considered blacks an “adverse influence” on property values and instructed personnel not to insure mortgages on homes unless they were in “racially homogenous” white neighborhoods. Under its eligibility ranking system, the FHA often refused to lend money to or underwrite loans for whites if they moved to areas where people of color lived. Some scholars now call the government’s handiwork a “$120 billion head start” on white home ownership, on white equity, and on whites’ ability to pass along wealth from one generation to the next.
The private sector then played its part. Banks regularly “redlined,” denying credit to qualified black borrowers. Individuals and neighborhoods, taking the Federal Housing Administration’s cue, maintained “restrictive covenants” to ban blacks from purchasing homes.
Home ownership through a thirty-year mortgage has long been the primary mechanism by which most American families created wealth. So deferred home ownership opportunities have compounded economic disadvantages for racial minorities.
Segregation is no longer codified by law; it is propped up by the “innocuous” and “nonracial” choices local governments and average citizens eagerly make. One warm afternoon, Brian Dill, the vice president for economic development in Forsyth County, Georgia, a lily-white upscale exurb north of Atlanta, tells me that his county has resisted zoning for apartments and condos in fear of future “blight.” A dissenting voice in his county, Dill wishes Forsyth would allow for more varieties of housing in order “to recruit and retain a diverse workforce.” Nationwide, municipal governments enact suburban land-use and zoning policies to promote larger lot development, to sustain private property values, to restrict suburban rental housing, all of which limit the influx of black and Latino households.
Such public and private behavior continues residential segregation, inflicting a double whammy: The residential segregation furthers unacceptable disparities in wealth between the races, and it creates a geography of opportunity, determining who has access to the valuable resources that improve one’s life.
Thirty years after the civil rights era, the United States remains a residentially segregated society in which non-Hispanic whites, Latinos, and blacks inhabit different neighborhoods with a vastly different quality of services and opportunities.
In spite of decades-long income gains among Latinos and blacks, non-Hispanic white households enjoyed a median net worth of $79,400 — eight times the net worth of Latino households and ten times the net worth of black households. Even at similar income levels, significant wealth gaps between the races remain. In terms of wealth, America is now the most unequal country in the industrialized world.
Most Whitopians I encounter don’t purposefully practice racial discrimination and don’t give segregation much thought. Rather, they engage in a form of “opportunity mapping.” Like geocachers on a treasure hunt, they chase communities according to “opportunity indicators”: housing, education, medical facilities, crime rates, perceived sense of safety, outdoor amenities, and social comfort (simpatico values). James, who is over the moon in Whitopia, says he literally created a spreadsheet charting his “wish list” and “won’t list,” then identified five communities congenial to those lists, crunched some numbers, checked the results against his wife’s common-sense sniff test, and settled on Utah’s Dixie.
Voilà.
Not only do whites follow the opportunity, they leverage their connections and capture public resources (e.g., tax dollars) to bring opportunity along with them. The geography of opportunity — or, the geography of homogeneity — is becoming frighteningly entrenched. Such geography forecasts trouble for our democracy.
“Geography is more important than before because spatial segregation has not just residential but economic implications,” according to Roberto Suro, founder of the Pew Hispanic Center and a preeminent scholar of race in America. “The wholesale shift of the middle class to the suburbs has been followed by the movement of economic activity outside the urban core. As a result, the landscape is clearly demarcated into zones of privilege and zones of abandonment. Society concentrates its best resources — green spaces, doctors’ offices, new schools, and sewer lines — in some areas, neglecting others. In the United States, this separation still has an important racial component, because most of the people living in the zones of privilege are white, of course, and those in the zones of abandonment are not.”
Over all, levels of residential segregation remain high for Latinos and blacks, says Douglas Massey, the Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University, and a world-renowned expert on race. “According to the latest data, half of all urban African Americans live under extreme conditions of racial isolation and another third live under conditions that would qualify as high segregation for any other group.” Modest declines in blacks’ segregation have occurred in cities with small black populations like Seattle, Tucson, San Jose, and Minneapolis, according to Massey.
“Asians and light-skinned blacks and Hispanics seem to be able to take advantage of socioeconomic mobility and gain entrée to advantaged, integrated neighborhoods,” he adds. “The black/non-black divide continues to loom as a major cleavage in American society. And segregation on the basis of class has been rising. Poor dark-skinned minorities are confined to very disadvantaged neighborhoods, while affluent and educated minorities share more advantaged neighborhoods with similarly situated whites, especially if the minorities have light skin.”
The philosophy and policies that underlie desegregation are under intense assault from administrative actions, voter initiatives, and court cases. The Supreme Court’s 2007 landmark rulings in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District and in Meredith v. Jefferson prohibited assigning students to public schools for the purpose of achieving racial integration. These court rulings also declined to recognize racial balancing as a “compelling state interest.”
The rise of Whitopia dovetails with the nationwide decline in support for racial integration. In 1964, 41 percent of Americans wanted the federal government to integrate our public schools. By the early 1990s, 95 percent of Americans wanted integrated schools in principle, but only 34 percent wanted the federal government to help make integration a reality. By the early 2000s, our public schools continued their slide toward re-segregation: They are less integrated now than in 1970.
Prepositions can help orient us around the varieties of racism. Interpersonal racism exists between people. Institutional racism exists within institutions. Structural racism exists across institutions, public policy, and other important domains (education, the judiciary, real estate, etc.).
The difference between interpersonal racism and structural racism is huge. In combating each, we might consider C. Wright Mills’s distinction between troubles and problems. Troubles are what individuals have. Problems are what groups create and then like to ignore. Interpersonal racism is only a trouble. Structural racism is a problem.
Structural racism is baked into our national psyche and behavior. It is “the blind interaction between institutions, policies and practices, which inevitably perpetuates barriers to opportunities and racial disparities,” according to the Center for Social Inclusion, a non-partisan research organization. So the PC-diversity racket badgers us into “sensitivity,” but has little to say about structural racism. And the conservative echo chamber upbraids black leaders for churlish racial asides, with no regard to the target of the leaders’ agitation: structural racism. We fumble in defining and identifying structural racism, so we are reluctant to acknowledge it. Even when structural racism is acknowledged, its ambiguity and enormity frighten us out of action.
Picture this. A government agency decides to build low-income housing for low-income Latinos and blacks. The agency “fails to look for locations near jobs and important infrastructure, like working schools, decent public transportation and other services,” the Center for Social Inclusion’s literature explains. In fact, the new housing is built in a poor, mostly black and Latino part of town. “When the housing is built, the school district, already under-funded, has new residents too poor to contribute to its tax base. The local government spends its limited resources on transportation to connect largely white, well-to-do suburban commuters to their downtown jobs. The public housing residents are left isolated, in under-funded schools, with no transportation to job centers. Whole communities of people of color lose opportunities for a good education, quality housing, living wage jobs, services and support systems.”
When asked about his county’s white homogeneity, Norman Baggs, a longtime resident of Forsyth County, Georgia, and former editor and publisher of the Forsyth County News, replies: “There’s a suburban elitism among people who move into communities like this.” Baggs remembers attending a public meeting years ago where a woman stood up to say she lived in a $150,000 house, but didn’t want to look out her window at a $100,000 house. “By that elitism, you restrict, negatively, the ability of certain groups of people to come here and live.” Baggs attributes the “elitism” to county officials, developers, and residents.
On my journey through Whitopia, examples of structural racism surface over and over—from how towns and neighborhoods are zoned, to how chambers of commerce favor or discourage certain newcomers and businesses, to how political and business establishments address social conflict (stay tuned on Forsyth County, Georgia). If whites and nonwhites interact pleasantly on a one-to-one basis, how does a Whitopia mushroom? Structural racism is what we need to train our eyes to see.
Some Whitopians are indifferent to their community’s homogeneity with downright orneriness: Why do you have to make race an issue!? And others with Zen serenity: We don’t let it be an issue for us ;-> Whitopia is a tale of racial segregation, abetted by Uncle Sam, by local governments, by business interests, and by individuals, all of whom say they are offering or chasing powerful “nonracial” incentives.
Copyright (c) 2009 Rich Benjamin. Published by Hyperion. All Rights Reserved. Available wherever books are sold.
Rich Benjamin is the author of Searching for Whitopia(Hyperion, 2009).
© 2009 Hyperion Books All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/143337/
Posted on October 16, 2009, Printed on October 17, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143337/
The following is an excerpt from Searching for Whitopia by Rich Benjamin (Hyperion, 2009).
In twenty-first-century America, how do so many Whitopias hatch and flourish?
A few white readers may protest that their neighborhood’s appeal has nothing to do with its racial composition. The homogeneity of where they live is “irrelevant” or “coincidental,” they say. But divorcing a Whitopia’s appeal from its predominantly white composition is like extracting the marshmallow from the s’more. Impossible. Each is fundamental to the other.
Whites may not move to a place simply because it teems with other white people. Rather, to many Americans, a place’s whiteness implies other qualities that are desirable. Americans associate a homogenous white neighborhood with higher property values, friendliness, orderliness, hospitability, cleanliness, safety, and comfort. These seemingly race-neutral qualities are subconsciously inseparable from race and class in many whites’ minds. Race is often used as a proxy for those neighborhood traits.
Through most of the twentieth century, racial discrimination was deliberate and intentional. Today, racial segregation and division often result from habits, policies, and institutions that are not explicitly designed to discriminate. Contrary to popular belief, discrimination or segregation do not require animus. They thrive even in the absence of prejudice or ill will.
It’s common to have racism without “racists.”
The law does not forbid segregated or discriminating neighborhoods. It simply forbids intentional discrimination. Successful plaintiffs in a discrimination lawsuit must prove that someone intended racial bias.
And the legal standard to establish proof of that intent is very high: The plaintiff must present a “smoking gun” and this particular gun is often impossible to furnish. The 1973 Supreme Court decision San Antonio v. Rodriguez held that a school funding system based on local property taxes that perpetuated egregious disparities in per-pupil spending between mostly white districts and mostly minority districts does not violate the Constitution, because the plaintiffs could not prove that the funding differences emerged from intentional racial discrimination. Another landmark Supreme Court decision, Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp (1977), reinforced this “intent doctrine”: The court ruled that a suburban village did not discriminate, because it did not intend to discriminate when it set-up zoning that disproportionately harmed racial minorities.
There is a terrible disconnect between our everyday experiences and the law: In day-to-day life, racial inequity continues without intent, yet courts require evidence of intent before the law can acknowledge or effectively confront discrimination. Regrettably, the absence of explicit intent has become a common crutch that justifies private decisions that wreak racial havoc upon minorities.
Not to know what has been transacted in the past is to be always a child, said Cicero.
The history of the U.S. housing market shows the corrosive influence of discriminatory public policy on private decision-making: For many decades, private lenders, neighborhoods, and citizens adopted intolerant public policies. Discriminatory government behavior was aped by the public, and blended seamlessly into the “free market.” Covert and overt, these segregating and unjust public and private practices made it difficult, if not impossible, for blacks to own homes in broad swaths of America’s suburbs.
From 1934 to 1962, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) underwrote $120 billion in new housing. Less than 2 percent of that went to nonwhites. From 1938 to 1962, the FHA insured the mortgages on nearly one third of all new housing in the United States. Its Underwriting Manuals, however, considered blacks an “adverse influence” on property values and instructed personnel not to insure mortgages on homes unless they were in “racially homogenous” white neighborhoods. Under its eligibility ranking system, the FHA often refused to lend money to or underwrite loans for whites if they moved to areas where people of color lived. Some scholars now call the government’s handiwork a “$120 billion head start” on white home ownership, on white equity, and on whites’ ability to pass along wealth from one generation to the next.
The private sector then played its part. Banks regularly “redlined,” denying credit to qualified black borrowers. Individuals and neighborhoods, taking the Federal Housing Administration’s cue, maintained “restrictive covenants” to ban blacks from purchasing homes.
Home ownership through a thirty-year mortgage has long been the primary mechanism by which most American families created wealth. So deferred home ownership opportunities have compounded economic disadvantages for racial minorities.
Segregation is no longer codified by law; it is propped up by the “innocuous” and “nonracial” choices local governments and average citizens eagerly make. One warm afternoon, Brian Dill, the vice president for economic development in Forsyth County, Georgia, a lily-white upscale exurb north of Atlanta, tells me that his county has resisted zoning for apartments and condos in fear of future “blight.” A dissenting voice in his county, Dill wishes Forsyth would allow for more varieties of housing in order “to recruit and retain a diverse workforce.” Nationwide, municipal governments enact suburban land-use and zoning policies to promote larger lot development, to sustain private property values, to restrict suburban rental housing, all of which limit the influx of black and Latino households.
Such public and private behavior continues residential segregation, inflicting a double whammy: The residential segregation furthers unacceptable disparities in wealth between the races, and it creates a geography of opportunity, determining who has access to the valuable resources that improve one’s life.
Thirty years after the civil rights era, the United States remains a residentially segregated society in which non-Hispanic whites, Latinos, and blacks inhabit different neighborhoods with a vastly different quality of services and opportunities.
In spite of decades-long income gains among Latinos and blacks, non-Hispanic white households enjoyed a median net worth of $79,400 — eight times the net worth of Latino households and ten times the net worth of black households. Even at similar income levels, significant wealth gaps between the races remain. In terms of wealth, America is now the most unequal country in the industrialized world.
Most Whitopians I encounter don’t purposefully practice racial discrimination and don’t give segregation much thought. Rather, they engage in a form of “opportunity mapping.” Like geocachers on a treasure hunt, they chase communities according to “opportunity indicators”: housing, education, medical facilities, crime rates, perceived sense of safety, outdoor amenities, and social comfort (simpatico values). James, who is over the moon in Whitopia, says he literally created a spreadsheet charting his “wish list” and “won’t list,” then identified five communities congenial to those lists, crunched some numbers, checked the results against his wife’s common-sense sniff test, and settled on Utah’s Dixie.
Voilà.
Not only do whites follow the opportunity, they leverage their connections and capture public resources (e.g., tax dollars) to bring opportunity along with them. The geography of opportunity — or, the geography of homogeneity — is becoming frighteningly entrenched. Such geography forecasts trouble for our democracy.
“Geography is more important than before because spatial segregation has not just residential but economic implications,” according to Roberto Suro, founder of the Pew Hispanic Center and a preeminent scholar of race in America. “The wholesale shift of the middle class to the suburbs has been followed by the movement of economic activity outside the urban core. As a result, the landscape is clearly demarcated into zones of privilege and zones of abandonment. Society concentrates its best resources — green spaces, doctors’ offices, new schools, and sewer lines — in some areas, neglecting others. In the United States, this separation still has an important racial component, because most of the people living in the zones of privilege are white, of course, and those in the zones of abandonment are not.”
Over all, levels of residential segregation remain high for Latinos and blacks, says Douglas Massey, the Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University, and a world-renowned expert on race. “According to the latest data, half of all urban African Americans live under extreme conditions of racial isolation and another third live under conditions that would qualify as high segregation for any other group.” Modest declines in blacks’ segregation have occurred in cities with small black populations like Seattle, Tucson, San Jose, and Minneapolis, according to Massey.
“Asians and light-skinned blacks and Hispanics seem to be able to take advantage of socioeconomic mobility and gain entrée to advantaged, integrated neighborhoods,” he adds. “The black/non-black divide continues to loom as a major cleavage in American society. And segregation on the basis of class has been rising. Poor dark-skinned minorities are confined to very disadvantaged neighborhoods, while affluent and educated minorities share more advantaged neighborhoods with similarly situated whites, especially if the minorities have light skin.”
The philosophy and policies that underlie desegregation are under intense assault from administrative actions, voter initiatives, and court cases. The Supreme Court’s 2007 landmark rulings in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District and in Meredith v. Jefferson prohibited assigning students to public schools for the purpose of achieving racial integration. These court rulings also declined to recognize racial balancing as a “compelling state interest.”
The rise of Whitopia dovetails with the nationwide decline in support for racial integration. In 1964, 41 percent of Americans wanted the federal government to integrate our public schools. By the early 1990s, 95 percent of Americans wanted integrated schools in principle, but only 34 percent wanted the federal government to help make integration a reality. By the early 2000s, our public schools continued their slide toward re-segregation: They are less integrated now than in 1970.
Prepositions can help orient us around the varieties of racism. Interpersonal racism exists between people. Institutional racism exists within institutions. Structural racism exists across institutions, public policy, and other important domains (education, the judiciary, real estate, etc.).
The difference between interpersonal racism and structural racism is huge. In combating each, we might consider C. Wright Mills’s distinction between troubles and problems. Troubles are what individuals have. Problems are what groups create and then like to ignore. Interpersonal racism is only a trouble. Structural racism is a problem.
Structural racism is baked into our national psyche and behavior. It is “the blind interaction between institutions, policies and practices, which inevitably perpetuates barriers to opportunities and racial disparities,” according to the Center for Social Inclusion, a non-partisan research organization. So the PC-diversity racket badgers us into “sensitivity,” but has little to say about structural racism. And the conservative echo chamber upbraids black leaders for churlish racial asides, with no regard to the target of the leaders’ agitation: structural racism. We fumble in defining and identifying structural racism, so we are reluctant to acknowledge it. Even when structural racism is acknowledged, its ambiguity and enormity frighten us out of action.
Picture this. A government agency decides to build low-income housing for low-income Latinos and blacks. The agency “fails to look for locations near jobs and important infrastructure, like working schools, decent public transportation and other services,” the Center for Social Inclusion’s literature explains. In fact, the new housing is built in a poor, mostly black and Latino part of town. “When the housing is built, the school district, already under-funded, has new residents too poor to contribute to its tax base. The local government spends its limited resources on transportation to connect largely white, well-to-do suburban commuters to their downtown jobs. The public housing residents are left isolated, in under-funded schools, with no transportation to job centers. Whole communities of people of color lose opportunities for a good education, quality housing, living wage jobs, services and support systems.”
When asked about his county’s white homogeneity, Norman Baggs, a longtime resident of Forsyth County, Georgia, and former editor and publisher of the Forsyth County News, replies: “There’s a suburban elitism among people who move into communities like this.” Baggs remembers attending a public meeting years ago where a woman stood up to say she lived in a $150,000 house, but didn’t want to look out her window at a $100,000 house. “By that elitism, you restrict, negatively, the ability of certain groups of people to come here and live.” Baggs attributes the “elitism” to county officials, developers, and residents.
On my journey through Whitopia, examples of structural racism surface over and over—from how towns and neighborhoods are zoned, to how chambers of commerce favor or discourage certain newcomers and businesses, to how political and business establishments address social conflict (stay tuned on Forsyth County, Georgia). If whites and nonwhites interact pleasantly on a one-to-one basis, how does a Whitopia mushroom? Structural racism is what we need to train our eyes to see.
Some Whitopians are indifferent to their community’s homogeneity with downright orneriness: Why do you have to make race an issue!? And others with Zen serenity: We don’t let it be an issue for us ;-> Whitopia is a tale of racial segregation, abetted by Uncle Sam, by local governments, by business interests, and by individuals, all of whom say they are offering or chasing powerful “nonracial” incentives.
Copyright (c) 2009 Rich Benjamin. Published by Hyperion. All Rights Reserved. Available wherever books are sold.
Rich Benjamin is the author of Searching for Whitopia(Hyperion, 2009).
© 2009 Hyperion Books All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/143337/
Sunday, October 11, 2009
UPDATE 1-VeriChip shares jump after H1N1 patent license win
Mon Sep 21, 2009 3:11pm EDT
Sept 21 (Reuters) - Shares of VeriChip Corp (CHIP.O)
tripled after the company said it had been granted an exclusive
license to two patents, which will help it to develop
implantable virus detection systems in humans.
The patents, held by VeriChip partner Receptors LLC, relate
to biosensors that can detect the H1N1 and other viruses, and
biological threats such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus
aureus, VeriChip said in a statement.
The technology will combine with VeriChip's implantable
radio frequency identification devices to develop virus triage
detection systems.
The triage system will provide multiple levels of
identification -- the first will identify the agent as virus or
non-virus, the second level will classify the virus and alert
the user to the presence of pandemic threat viruses and the
third level will identify the precise pathogen, VeriChip said
in a white paper published May 7, 2009.
Shares of VeriChip were up 186 percent at $3.28 Monday late
afternoon trade on Nasdaq. They had touched a year high of
$3.43 earlier in the session.
(Reporting by Mansi Dutta in Bangalore; Editing by Mike Miller
and Anil D'Silva)
© Thomson Reuters 2009 All rights reserved
http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssTechMediaTelecomNews/idUSBNG49295720090921
Sept 21 (Reuters) - Shares of VeriChip Corp (CHIP.O)
tripled after the company said it had been granted an exclusive
license to two patents, which will help it to develop
implantable virus detection systems in humans.
The patents, held by VeriChip partner Receptors LLC, relate
to biosensors that can detect the H1N1 and other viruses, and
biological threats such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus
aureus, VeriChip said in a statement.
The technology will combine with VeriChip's implantable
radio frequency identification devices to develop virus triage
detection systems.
The triage system will provide multiple levels of
identification -- the first will identify the agent as virus or
non-virus, the second level will classify the virus and alert
the user to the presence of pandemic threat viruses and the
third level will identify the precise pathogen, VeriChip said
in a white paper published May 7, 2009.
Shares of VeriChip were up 186 percent at $3.28 Monday late
afternoon trade on Nasdaq. They had touched a year high of
$3.43 earlier in the session.
(Reporting by Mansi Dutta in Bangalore; Editing by Mike Miller
and Anil D'Silva)
© Thomson Reuters 2009 All rights reserved
http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssTechMediaTelecomNews/idUSBNG49295720090921
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Health Insurers Threaten Rate Hikes
Friday 09 October 2009
by: Robert Parry | Consortium News
Though looking forward to millions of new customers who would be compelled by the U.S. government to buy health insurance, the insurance industry is threatening to raise premiums across the board if more of its demands are not met.
Industry representatives put Congress and the Obama administration on notice that if health-reform legislation doesn’t send even more new customers the industry’s way or if a windfall profits tax is included, the industry would hit businesses, individuals and the government with higher premiums, effectively defeating one of the initiative’s top goals, reining in ever-rising costs.
The industry’s chief complaint, which was raised in connection with an already-industry-friendly bill cobbled together by Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus, is that the legislation would push 29 million more Americans into the insurance market, but that they might be the sickest and thus costliest people.
The industry wants more of the estimated 25 million still uninsured – especially healthy, young people – to be compelled to buy policies, too. Without more healthy customers added to the mix, the industry says it will have no choice but to raise rates.
"The consequences of this would be an upward spiral; rate shock to everyone who stays in," Karen Ignagni, president of the industry group America's Health Insurance Plans, told the Washington Post. "This legislation will fail the test of affordability for individuals." [Washington Post, Oct. 9, 2009]
The industry’s warning comes after its lobbyists won an important victory in the Senate Finance Committee, defeating amendments that would have added a public option, a government-run program that would compete with private insurers to hold down costs.
Private insurers also bristled at an idea floated by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a windfall profits tax on extra money the industry might make from the influx of millions of new customers, many qualifying for government subsidies.
Robert E. Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, told the New York Times that a tax on windfall profits "would lead to higher premiums for families and businesses" because the added expense would be passed through to customers. [NYT, Oct. 9, 2009]
However, it was not clear why insurers would worry about a windfall profits tax if they were also concerned that new customers would be a financial burden.
Still, by the industry throwing its weight around with threats of higher premiums, it may be risking a backlash from Congress, which could still turn to the public option as the only feasible method for constraining ever-rising health insurance costs.
The industry fears the public option because it could piggyback on the existing Medicare bureaucracy and thus save substantial money, which the insurance industry spends on administrative expenses, executive pay and profits.
Those costs eat up 20 percent or more of an average dollar that businesses and individuals spend on health insurance premiums, compared to about 2 percent for Medicare.
The latest threats suggest that industry lobbyists believe they have enough senators lined up to back a Republican filibuster and block the public option, although some congressional liberals contend that some form of the public option, which is contained in four other committee-approved bills, still has a decent chance of winning final congressional approval.
But Democrats especially have reason to worry, because if they enact a reform package without the public option – and insurers then jack up rates – Democrats could be blamed for the unintended consequence of higher costs and thus pay a steep political price at the polls.
[For more on the Democrats' dilemma, see Consortiumnews.com's "Democrats Ponder Health-Care Suicide."]
----
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.
http://www.truthout.org/101009C
by: Robert Parry | Consortium News
Though looking forward to millions of new customers who would be compelled by the U.S. government to buy health insurance, the insurance industry is threatening to raise premiums across the board if more of its demands are not met.
Industry representatives put Congress and the Obama administration on notice that if health-reform legislation doesn’t send even more new customers the industry’s way or if a windfall profits tax is included, the industry would hit businesses, individuals and the government with higher premiums, effectively defeating one of the initiative’s top goals, reining in ever-rising costs.
The industry’s chief complaint, which was raised in connection with an already-industry-friendly bill cobbled together by Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus, is that the legislation would push 29 million more Americans into the insurance market, but that they might be the sickest and thus costliest people.
The industry wants more of the estimated 25 million still uninsured – especially healthy, young people – to be compelled to buy policies, too. Without more healthy customers added to the mix, the industry says it will have no choice but to raise rates.
"The consequences of this would be an upward spiral; rate shock to everyone who stays in," Karen Ignagni, president of the industry group America's Health Insurance Plans, told the Washington Post. "This legislation will fail the test of affordability for individuals." [Washington Post, Oct. 9, 2009]
The industry’s warning comes after its lobbyists won an important victory in the Senate Finance Committee, defeating amendments that would have added a public option, a government-run program that would compete with private insurers to hold down costs.
Private insurers also bristled at an idea floated by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a windfall profits tax on extra money the industry might make from the influx of millions of new customers, many qualifying for government subsidies.
Robert E. Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, told the New York Times that a tax on windfall profits "would lead to higher premiums for families and businesses" because the added expense would be passed through to customers. [NYT, Oct. 9, 2009]
However, it was not clear why insurers would worry about a windfall profits tax if they were also concerned that new customers would be a financial burden.
Still, by the industry throwing its weight around with threats of higher premiums, it may be risking a backlash from Congress, which could still turn to the public option as the only feasible method for constraining ever-rising health insurance costs.
The industry fears the public option because it could piggyback on the existing Medicare bureaucracy and thus save substantial money, which the insurance industry spends on administrative expenses, executive pay and profits.
Those costs eat up 20 percent or more of an average dollar that businesses and individuals spend on health insurance premiums, compared to about 2 percent for Medicare.
The latest threats suggest that industry lobbyists believe they have enough senators lined up to back a Republican filibuster and block the public option, although some congressional liberals contend that some form of the public option, which is contained in four other committee-approved bills, still has a decent chance of winning final congressional approval.
But Democrats especially have reason to worry, because if they enact a reform package without the public option – and insurers then jack up rates – Democrats could be blamed for the unintended consequence of higher costs and thus pay a steep political price at the polls.
[For more on the Democrats' dilemma, see Consortiumnews.com's "Democrats Ponder Health-Care Suicide."]
----
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.
http://www.truthout.org/101009C
The Economic Revolution Is Already Happening - It's Just Not on Wall St.
Wednesday 07 October 2009
by: Maria Armoudian | AlterNet
photo
The worker-owned Kootenay Bakery. (Photo: donkeycart / Flickr)
America is in the midst of a new revolution. But this revolution is quiet, incremental, nonviolent and traveling beneath the mainstream media's radar.
The new American revolution challenges the current notions of dog-eat-dog capitalism - through the building of a parallel economic system that shares, co-operates, empowers and benefits fellow workers and community members.
Over the past few decades, thousands of alternatives to the standard, top-down corporate model have sprouted up - worker-owned companies and co-operatives, neighborhood corporations and trusts, community-owned technology centers and municipally owned enterprises.
In fact, today, involvement in these alternative models of business outnumber union membership as the means by which private-sector workers and community members are taking their economics into their own hands. The story is revealed in the 4-year-old book, America Beyond Capitalism, written by University of Maryland political science professor Gar Alperovitz.
Maria Armoudian: How big is this economic movement in the United States?
Gar Alperovitz: It's a huge development. But the president doesn't cover it, and the press, on the surface, is not aware of it.
At the grassroots level, there is a lot of activity that is changing the ownership of wealth and making it benefit neighborhoods, workers, cities and communities, at large. There are 11,000 worker-owned companies in the United States, and more people involved in them than are members of unions in the private sector. There are also 120 million Americans who are members of co-operatives - a huge number, about a third of the population.
About 20 percent or 22 percent of our energy is done under public utilities of one kind or another. There are another 4,000 or 5,000 neighborhood corporations, in which neighborhoods own productive wealth to benefit the neighborhood. Much of that is related to housing and land development, but also stores, businesses and factories.
One estimate is that there are 4,500 of these. One, called Newark New Communities, does several million dollars a year in business and pours profits back into helping service the neighborhood - health care and nutrition, education and jobs. So when you really begin to take the lid off of what is emerging in society, there are many forms of decentralized public ownership, social ownership or democratized wealth.
MA: Are there also new developments on the municipal level?
GA: Yes, because of fiscal crises, many cities, even under Republican mayors, are putting cities into enterprises. It was once called municipal socialism, but Republicans call it the "enterprising city," and it includes development of [municipally owned] cable television, Internet services, land and hotels.
Many cities are capturing methane from garbage areas and using it to produce electricity, create jobs and make money. They're dealing with greenhouse gases as an enterprise.
On a larger, regional scale, the Tennessee Valley Authority is a gigantic, ecological operation that controls the river systems and is an energy system. On the state level, Alaska derives a great deal of money from its energy resources, oil. It captures the profits and pays dividends to every Alaskan as a right. In the year 2000, every person in Alaska, as a legal right, received $2,000 [through this process]. So a family of five [together receive] $10,000.
MA: Worker-owned cooperative seem to be the most progressive and democratic models. They're usually nonprofit with profit circulating back to workers and communities, and they practice democracy in the workplace - one person, one vote. How would you compare this model with other models?
GA: The one-person-one-vote worker co-operatives in the United States are the most democratic, advanced and ideal. But they number at about 500 maximum, maybe 1,000. These co-ops are on the cutting edge of the democratization process and where the learning will be taking place for the rest of the movements. People are experimenting with full democracy and full equality.
Of course, many co-ops are not that kind - they don't have equal pay and have other differentials. And most of the [for-profit] worker-owned companies in the United States are employee stock-ownership plans, or ESOPs. In many cases, they are not democratic, and have a long way to go.
But as workers get more ownership, they demand more control. And as they participate more, they gain productivity and profits. So a key question is: How do we begin to democratize what is already owned? That is the likely trend.
MA: How might the American models compare to the giant cooperative in the Basque region of Spain - Mondragon?
GA: Mondragon has over 100,000 workers in a very complicated group of 100 or more integrated co-ops. They pay back loans to a central fund and then build more co-ops in an integrated fashion. In 90 percent of them, the ratios of pay from top to bottom are 4 to 1. In others, it's 9 to 1. Compare that with American corporations, which are 200 or 300 to 1.
These co-ops are highly productive and state of the art with advanced technology, not your corner kind of tiny co-op. In the city of Cleveland, some groups are creating a large-scale Mondragon-type of cooperative. It will include a worker-owned laundry, with high-tech, green advanced technology, a solar-installation cooperative company, a land trust with a large-scale industrial-scale greenhouse and solar and geothermal heating.
They're going online over the next year and will produce 2,000-3,000 heads of lettuce each day. It's linked to the public purchasing of hospitals and universities, which provide some of the contracts for food and laundry. The model makes green jobs and green ownership and shows that worker ownership is practical.
MA: There are advocates who believe that building these types of cooperatives are the single most important form of activism that people can do. Do you agree?
GA: Ultimately there needs to be systemic change. But it is very important, and it's one thing that can be contributed. At this point, two central principles are developing in these "schools of democracy" - they are changing who gets to own and benefit from capital, and they are changing the participatory process.
And in addition to cooperatives, neighborhood corporations and organizations, cities and land trusts, state pension funds are being used in [socially responsible] ways. These are very American means of decentralizing ownership of productive wealth - as well as some central forms. We see a picture emerging of an America that is beyond capitalism. These [activities] give us a possible model.
If we build on what we are already doing, make it part of a political program and develop it, we could create something that is far better than what we now have and better than traditional socialist models.
It's time for people working in these sectors of cooperatives, worker ownership, land trusts, neighborhood corporations to begin calling meetings, share what they've learned and establish networks. In many cases they don't do this. People in the specific communities don't even know how much is going on.
Other interesting things are happening in Virginia, the District of Columbia and Maryland where, like in the '60s, people are meeting, reading, thinking and taking action from that. They are staging "action book clubs," where they read a political book and discuss, "What can we do in the direction of building something for the long haul?"
So if you don't like capitalism or state socialism, what do you want? What is your vision, your knowledge and theory? It's time for us to do that again.
MA: Do you have a sense of how this economic movement is impacting our current political and economic system?
GA: It's like what happened with the New Deal and the civil rights movement. A good [part] of the New Deal [began] as experiments of the '20s and '10s. But when the time was right, they became national.
Similarly, in the civil rights movement, the real heroes were those who laid the groundwork in the 1930s and '40s for what came next. That's what is happening at the grassroots level, economically. The most important things pertain to ownership of capital, wealth and assets.
Today, the top 1 percent owns almost 50 percent of the investment capital. The alternative state socialist idea was that the government should own it, but that had real problems with bureaucracy, centralization of power and so forth.
There is another alternative, which is what is emerging now. They are old historic ideas. But just over the last 30 years, these 11,000 companies that are substantially owned by workers have [emerged] from ground zero.
MA: So this movement has increased at a pretty rapid pace since the 1970s?
GA: Yes, amazing, and no coverage of it. Almost at the same pace at which the negatives have gone down, you're seeing the rise of these kinds of companies. They have many trial-and-error-related problems, but on the whole, they're moving towards greater ownership and democratization. They are very good for communities and workers. Because they are owned by the workers, they do not get up and run to get cheaper labor sources, so they keep jobs in local communities.
MA: Some of these employee-owned companies have not performed well - financially or for their employees. United Airlines was one example of pretty dismal results. How are the others doing?
GA: It's important to know that United is a case study in what you shouldn't do. It was done in the midst of a strike in a very large corporation. That's not the best place to do worker ownership.
Most of the ones that work well are under 1,000 employees. United has numerous reasons why it failed, really, without worker ownership. On balance, the worker-ownership companies, particularly when there's good training, are more profitable; they have higher productivity; better pensions and better working conditions.
So on almost every indicator they are unquestionably equal or better than comparable firms of the same kind in the same field. It's not surprising, because people who have a stake in what they're doing tend to do better at it.
MA: In the face of globalization, how do these alternatives hold up?
GA: I think the globalization argument has been trumpeted in the press. They talk about manufacturing jobs being stolen, etc. That is true. But it is also the case that 90 percent of the American workforce is not involved in manufacturing, and over the next 15 years it'll be 5 percent. That's the trend.
What's really happening is within cities. This is a service economy and a trade, retail and wholesale economy - that's the real action. It has gone from 40 percent of employment within cities to 50 percent and now closer to 60 percent. There are a lot of things people can do with that.
So the bogeyman of globalization is something we can challenge with stopping the so-called free-trade policies. But there's also a lot that can be done locally and not be put off by the fact that the press concentrates on these scare stories.
MA: You have been somewhat dismissive about the left's emphasis on messaging, ostensibly suggesting that what makes change are serious ideas and a coherent and powerful understanding of what makes sense. Can you elaborate on that?
GA: I don't disagree with better language, political rhetoric and framing. But that's often used as a substitute for programs that are out of date or for not thinking through alternatives.
So if a central issue is how to change the economy's organization, that's not a matter of framing. It's a matter of building up a vision and organizing a long-term strategy.
The framing argument can be positive, but it can also stand in the way of people rolling up their sleeves and getting down to work for the long haul.
MA: Are the alternative models being taught in the business schools yet? If not, how can people learn alternatives to the dominant corporate models?
GA: They aren't being taught yet, although in Cleveland, one of the business schools is beginning to design a course.
We are seeing business schools working on "social enterprise," which is another form of democratized wealth ownership, in this case, usually a nonprofit corporation making money for a public service.
For instance, in Seattle, there is Pioneer Services, which began as a drug-rehabilitation nonprofit. It began training people who had gone through the rehabilitation program, then produced some businesses so they can do their training on the job. They began making money in the businesses to finance their whole program.
I think they're a scale of about $60 million now. It went from 1 percent profits and 99 percent grants to almost 99 percent profits, used for public purposes.
This is now being developed in other parts of the country. Some of the business schools, Harvard and Yale, are teaching these principles in business school, and I think we're going to see them begin moving into the co-op area as more experience develops on the ground.
For people who are interested in doing this, www.community-wealth.org is a tool. There are people who are doing it and help others. That's a major change historically, upon which I think we can really build.
--------
Maria Armoudian is a Commissioner at the City of Los Angeles and Producer and On-Air Host at KPFK radio station. Her site is Armoudian.com.
http://www.truthout.org/101009G?print
by: Maria Armoudian | AlterNet
photo
The worker-owned Kootenay Bakery. (Photo: donkeycart / Flickr)
America is in the midst of a new revolution. But this revolution is quiet, incremental, nonviolent and traveling beneath the mainstream media's radar.
The new American revolution challenges the current notions of dog-eat-dog capitalism - through the building of a parallel economic system that shares, co-operates, empowers and benefits fellow workers and community members.
Over the past few decades, thousands of alternatives to the standard, top-down corporate model have sprouted up - worker-owned companies and co-operatives, neighborhood corporations and trusts, community-owned technology centers and municipally owned enterprises.
In fact, today, involvement in these alternative models of business outnumber union membership as the means by which private-sector workers and community members are taking their economics into their own hands. The story is revealed in the 4-year-old book, America Beyond Capitalism, written by University of Maryland political science professor Gar Alperovitz.
Maria Armoudian: How big is this economic movement in the United States?
Gar Alperovitz: It's a huge development. But the president doesn't cover it, and the press, on the surface, is not aware of it.
At the grassroots level, there is a lot of activity that is changing the ownership of wealth and making it benefit neighborhoods, workers, cities and communities, at large. There are 11,000 worker-owned companies in the United States, and more people involved in them than are members of unions in the private sector. There are also 120 million Americans who are members of co-operatives - a huge number, about a third of the population.
About 20 percent or 22 percent of our energy is done under public utilities of one kind or another. There are another 4,000 or 5,000 neighborhood corporations, in which neighborhoods own productive wealth to benefit the neighborhood. Much of that is related to housing and land development, but also stores, businesses and factories.
One estimate is that there are 4,500 of these. One, called Newark New Communities, does several million dollars a year in business and pours profits back into helping service the neighborhood - health care and nutrition, education and jobs. So when you really begin to take the lid off of what is emerging in society, there are many forms of decentralized public ownership, social ownership or democratized wealth.
MA: Are there also new developments on the municipal level?
GA: Yes, because of fiscal crises, many cities, even under Republican mayors, are putting cities into enterprises. It was once called municipal socialism, but Republicans call it the "enterprising city," and it includes development of [municipally owned] cable television, Internet services, land and hotels.
Many cities are capturing methane from garbage areas and using it to produce electricity, create jobs and make money. They're dealing with greenhouse gases as an enterprise.
On a larger, regional scale, the Tennessee Valley Authority is a gigantic, ecological operation that controls the river systems and is an energy system. On the state level, Alaska derives a great deal of money from its energy resources, oil. It captures the profits and pays dividends to every Alaskan as a right. In the year 2000, every person in Alaska, as a legal right, received $2,000 [through this process]. So a family of five [together receive] $10,000.
MA: Worker-owned cooperative seem to be the most progressive and democratic models. They're usually nonprofit with profit circulating back to workers and communities, and they practice democracy in the workplace - one person, one vote. How would you compare this model with other models?
GA: The one-person-one-vote worker co-operatives in the United States are the most democratic, advanced and ideal. But they number at about 500 maximum, maybe 1,000. These co-ops are on the cutting edge of the democratization process and where the learning will be taking place for the rest of the movements. People are experimenting with full democracy and full equality.
Of course, many co-ops are not that kind - they don't have equal pay and have other differentials. And most of the [for-profit] worker-owned companies in the United States are employee stock-ownership plans, or ESOPs. In many cases, they are not democratic, and have a long way to go.
But as workers get more ownership, they demand more control. And as they participate more, they gain productivity and profits. So a key question is: How do we begin to democratize what is already owned? That is the likely trend.
MA: How might the American models compare to the giant cooperative in the Basque region of Spain - Mondragon?
GA: Mondragon has over 100,000 workers in a very complicated group of 100 or more integrated co-ops. They pay back loans to a central fund and then build more co-ops in an integrated fashion. In 90 percent of them, the ratios of pay from top to bottom are 4 to 1. In others, it's 9 to 1. Compare that with American corporations, which are 200 or 300 to 1.
These co-ops are highly productive and state of the art with advanced technology, not your corner kind of tiny co-op. In the city of Cleveland, some groups are creating a large-scale Mondragon-type of cooperative. It will include a worker-owned laundry, with high-tech, green advanced technology, a solar-installation cooperative company, a land trust with a large-scale industrial-scale greenhouse and solar and geothermal heating.
They're going online over the next year and will produce 2,000-3,000 heads of lettuce each day. It's linked to the public purchasing of hospitals and universities, which provide some of the contracts for food and laundry. The model makes green jobs and green ownership and shows that worker ownership is practical.
MA: There are advocates who believe that building these types of cooperatives are the single most important form of activism that people can do. Do you agree?
GA: Ultimately there needs to be systemic change. But it is very important, and it's one thing that can be contributed. At this point, two central principles are developing in these "schools of democracy" - they are changing who gets to own and benefit from capital, and they are changing the participatory process.
And in addition to cooperatives, neighborhood corporations and organizations, cities and land trusts, state pension funds are being used in [socially responsible] ways. These are very American means of decentralizing ownership of productive wealth - as well as some central forms. We see a picture emerging of an America that is beyond capitalism. These [activities] give us a possible model.
If we build on what we are already doing, make it part of a political program and develop it, we could create something that is far better than what we now have and better than traditional socialist models.
It's time for people working in these sectors of cooperatives, worker ownership, land trusts, neighborhood corporations to begin calling meetings, share what they've learned and establish networks. In many cases they don't do this. People in the specific communities don't even know how much is going on.
Other interesting things are happening in Virginia, the District of Columbia and Maryland where, like in the '60s, people are meeting, reading, thinking and taking action from that. They are staging "action book clubs," where they read a political book and discuss, "What can we do in the direction of building something for the long haul?"
So if you don't like capitalism or state socialism, what do you want? What is your vision, your knowledge and theory? It's time for us to do that again.
MA: Do you have a sense of how this economic movement is impacting our current political and economic system?
GA: It's like what happened with the New Deal and the civil rights movement. A good [part] of the New Deal [began] as experiments of the '20s and '10s. But when the time was right, they became national.
Similarly, in the civil rights movement, the real heroes were those who laid the groundwork in the 1930s and '40s for what came next. That's what is happening at the grassroots level, economically. The most important things pertain to ownership of capital, wealth and assets.
Today, the top 1 percent owns almost 50 percent of the investment capital. The alternative state socialist idea was that the government should own it, but that had real problems with bureaucracy, centralization of power and so forth.
There is another alternative, which is what is emerging now. They are old historic ideas. But just over the last 30 years, these 11,000 companies that are substantially owned by workers have [emerged] from ground zero.
MA: So this movement has increased at a pretty rapid pace since the 1970s?
GA: Yes, amazing, and no coverage of it. Almost at the same pace at which the negatives have gone down, you're seeing the rise of these kinds of companies. They have many trial-and-error-related problems, but on the whole, they're moving towards greater ownership and democratization. They are very good for communities and workers. Because they are owned by the workers, they do not get up and run to get cheaper labor sources, so they keep jobs in local communities.
MA: Some of these employee-owned companies have not performed well - financially or for their employees. United Airlines was one example of pretty dismal results. How are the others doing?
GA: It's important to know that United is a case study in what you shouldn't do. It was done in the midst of a strike in a very large corporation. That's not the best place to do worker ownership.
Most of the ones that work well are under 1,000 employees. United has numerous reasons why it failed, really, without worker ownership. On balance, the worker-ownership companies, particularly when there's good training, are more profitable; they have higher productivity; better pensions and better working conditions.
So on almost every indicator they are unquestionably equal or better than comparable firms of the same kind in the same field. It's not surprising, because people who have a stake in what they're doing tend to do better at it.
MA: In the face of globalization, how do these alternatives hold up?
GA: I think the globalization argument has been trumpeted in the press. They talk about manufacturing jobs being stolen, etc. That is true. But it is also the case that 90 percent of the American workforce is not involved in manufacturing, and over the next 15 years it'll be 5 percent. That's the trend.
What's really happening is within cities. This is a service economy and a trade, retail and wholesale economy - that's the real action. It has gone from 40 percent of employment within cities to 50 percent and now closer to 60 percent. There are a lot of things people can do with that.
So the bogeyman of globalization is something we can challenge with stopping the so-called free-trade policies. But there's also a lot that can be done locally and not be put off by the fact that the press concentrates on these scare stories.
MA: You have been somewhat dismissive about the left's emphasis on messaging, ostensibly suggesting that what makes change are serious ideas and a coherent and powerful understanding of what makes sense. Can you elaborate on that?
GA: I don't disagree with better language, political rhetoric and framing. But that's often used as a substitute for programs that are out of date or for not thinking through alternatives.
So if a central issue is how to change the economy's organization, that's not a matter of framing. It's a matter of building up a vision and organizing a long-term strategy.
The framing argument can be positive, but it can also stand in the way of people rolling up their sleeves and getting down to work for the long haul.
MA: Are the alternative models being taught in the business schools yet? If not, how can people learn alternatives to the dominant corporate models?
GA: They aren't being taught yet, although in Cleveland, one of the business schools is beginning to design a course.
We are seeing business schools working on "social enterprise," which is another form of democratized wealth ownership, in this case, usually a nonprofit corporation making money for a public service.
For instance, in Seattle, there is Pioneer Services, which began as a drug-rehabilitation nonprofit. It began training people who had gone through the rehabilitation program, then produced some businesses so they can do their training on the job. They began making money in the businesses to finance their whole program.
I think they're a scale of about $60 million now. It went from 1 percent profits and 99 percent grants to almost 99 percent profits, used for public purposes.
This is now being developed in other parts of the country. Some of the business schools, Harvard and Yale, are teaching these principles in business school, and I think we're going to see them begin moving into the co-op area as more experience develops on the ground.
For people who are interested in doing this, www.community-wealth.org is a tool. There are people who are doing it and help others. That's a major change historically, upon which I think we can really build.
--------
Maria Armoudian is a Commissioner at the City of Los Angeles and Producer and On-Air Host at KPFK radio station. Her site is Armoudian.com.
http://www.truthout.org/101009G?print
Friday, October 9, 2009
What are you complaining about? My glass is only half-full, too.
http://www.zcommunications.org/FCKFiles/image//oct09zmoimages/Corbett-GlassHalfFull-Big.jpg
Fla. appeals court chastises judge over compassion in foreclosure cases
October 8, 2009
The Associated Press
MIAMI — A judge who routinely granted extensions in foreclosure cases for compassionate reasons has been chastised by a state appeals court, which said her rulings amounted to an abuse of discretion.
The Third District Court of Appeal said “benevolence and compassion” were not legally sufficient grounds for Circuit Judge Valerie Manno Schurr to allow a Miami couple an extra month to try and sell their home before a foreclosure sale.
The appeals judge’s called her decisions “an abuse of discretion in the most basic sense of that term.”
Schurr had granted the one-month extension in the case of Joseph and Blanca Doyle because, she explained in court, “I give extensions on these because I don’t want anybody to lose their house.”
She went on: “Businesses are failing. People are losing money in the stock market.
You know, unemployment is high. It’s just everybody knows that we are in a bad time right now and I hate to see anybody lose their home.”
The bank involved, Republic Federal Bank, appealed in part because officials there hoped the court would give Miami-Dade County judges “some guidance” on granting extensions, bank attorney Charles M. Rosenberg told the Daily Business Review for a story published Thursday.
In its ruling for the bank, the appeals judges quoted from a well-known 1921 judicial process work by former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo, who wrote that a judge must not “yield to spasmodic sentiment, to vague and unregulated benevolence” and is “not a knight-errant roaming at will in pursuit of his own ideal of beauty or of goodness.”
“He is to draw his inspiration from consecrated principles,” Cardozo wrote.
Schurr declined comment, citing judicial rules preventing her from discussing specific cases.
The Doyles’ house sold at foreclosure auction last week for $1.3 million.
http://www.news-press.com/article/20091008/NEWS01/91008064/1002/RSS01
The Associated Press
MIAMI — A judge who routinely granted extensions in foreclosure cases for compassionate reasons has been chastised by a state appeals court, which said her rulings amounted to an abuse of discretion.
The Third District Court of Appeal said “benevolence and compassion” were not legally sufficient grounds for Circuit Judge Valerie Manno Schurr to allow a Miami couple an extra month to try and sell their home before a foreclosure sale.
The appeals judge’s called her decisions “an abuse of discretion in the most basic sense of that term.”
Schurr had granted the one-month extension in the case of Joseph and Blanca Doyle because, she explained in court, “I give extensions on these because I don’t want anybody to lose their house.”
She went on: “Businesses are failing. People are losing money in the stock market.
You know, unemployment is high. It’s just everybody knows that we are in a bad time right now and I hate to see anybody lose their home.”
The bank involved, Republic Federal Bank, appealed in part because officials there hoped the court would give Miami-Dade County judges “some guidance” on granting extensions, bank attorney Charles M. Rosenberg told the Daily Business Review for a story published Thursday.
In its ruling for the bank, the appeals judges quoted from a well-known 1921 judicial process work by former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo, who wrote that a judge must not “yield to spasmodic sentiment, to vague and unregulated benevolence” and is “not a knight-errant roaming at will in pursuit of his own ideal of beauty or of goodness.”
“He is to draw his inspiration from consecrated principles,” Cardozo wrote.
Schurr declined comment, citing judicial rules preventing her from discussing specific cases.
The Doyles’ house sold at foreclosure auction last week for $1.3 million.
http://www.news-press.com/article/20091008/NEWS01/91008064/1002/RSS01
Dem-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee extends PATRIOT Act provisions
Thursday, October 8th, 2009 -- 10:21 pm
Key US lawmakers passed legislation Thursday extending three key provisions of the PATRIOT Act, the sweeping intelligence bill enacted after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Backing a White House request, the Senate Judiciary Committee passed the measure 11 votes to 8 to extend until 2013 three clauses that would have expired by 31 December. The bill now heads to the full Senate for a vote.
The provisions include the "roving wiretap" clause, used to monitor mobile communications of individuals using multiple telephone lines, and the "lone-wolf" provision, which enables spying on individuals suspected of terrorist activity but with no obvious connection to extremist groups.
Lawmakers also extended the life of controversial section 215, known as the "library records provision" that allows government agencies to access individual's library history.
The committee had earlier met in a closed-door meeting with members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the intelligence community on ensuring their actions would not impede investigations already underway.
Story continues below...
The senators also debated freeing up law enforcement actions that have been hampered by legislation and court rulings since the first program was launched by former president George W. Bush in the wake of 9/11, which enabled collecting sensitive information for years without a court order.
Republicans senators have remained critical of placing restrictions on the intelligence community, saying they should more of a free hand in the early stages of investigations.
But their Democratic counterparts have decried the fact that the provisions still do not in their view adequately respect the privacy of ordinary Americans.
Democratic Senator Russ Feingold said he feared handing a "blank check" to law enforcement agencies and criticized the Democrat-controlled committee for not passing safeguards that even Republicans supported during the Bush administration.
"Among the most significant problems is the failure to include an improved standard for Section 215 orders, even though a Republican controlled Judiciary Committee unanimously supported including the same standard in 2005," he said in a media advisory.
"But what was most upsetting was the apparent willingness of too many members to defer completely to behind the scenes complaints from the FBI and the Justice Department, even though the administration has yet to take a public position on any of the improvements that I and other senators have proposed. ... [While] I am left scratching my head trying to understand how a committee controlled by a wide Democratic margin could support the bill it approved today, I will continue to work with my colleagues to try to make improvements to this bill."
Michael Macleod-Ball, acting director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Washington legislative office said the rights group was "disappointed" that further moves were not made to protect civil liberties.
"This truly was a missed opportunity for the Senate Judiciary Committee to right the wrongs of the PATRIOT Act," he said.
"We urge the Senate to adopt amendments on the floor that will bring this bill in line with the Constitution."
With AFP.
http://rawstory.com/2009/10/dem-controlled-senate-judiciary-committee-extends-patriot-act-provisions/
Key US lawmakers passed legislation Thursday extending three key provisions of the PATRIOT Act, the sweeping intelligence bill enacted after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Backing a White House request, the Senate Judiciary Committee passed the measure 11 votes to 8 to extend until 2013 three clauses that would have expired by 31 December. The bill now heads to the full Senate for a vote.
The provisions include the "roving wiretap" clause, used to monitor mobile communications of individuals using multiple telephone lines, and the "lone-wolf" provision, which enables spying on individuals suspected of terrorist activity but with no obvious connection to extremist groups.
Lawmakers also extended the life of controversial section 215, known as the "library records provision" that allows government agencies to access individual's library history.
The committee had earlier met in a closed-door meeting with members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the intelligence community on ensuring their actions would not impede investigations already underway.
Story continues below...
The senators also debated freeing up law enforcement actions that have been hampered by legislation and court rulings since the first program was launched by former president George W. Bush in the wake of 9/11, which enabled collecting sensitive information for years without a court order.
Republicans senators have remained critical of placing restrictions on the intelligence community, saying they should more of a free hand in the early stages of investigations.
But their Democratic counterparts have decried the fact that the provisions still do not in their view adequately respect the privacy of ordinary Americans.
Democratic Senator Russ Feingold said he feared handing a "blank check" to law enforcement agencies and criticized the Democrat-controlled committee for not passing safeguards that even Republicans supported during the Bush administration.
"Among the most significant problems is the failure to include an improved standard for Section 215 orders, even though a Republican controlled Judiciary Committee unanimously supported including the same standard in 2005," he said in a media advisory.
"But what was most upsetting was the apparent willingness of too many members to defer completely to behind the scenes complaints from the FBI and the Justice Department, even though the administration has yet to take a public position on any of the improvements that I and other senators have proposed. ... [While] I am left scratching my head trying to understand how a committee controlled by a wide Democratic margin could support the bill it approved today, I will continue to work with my colleagues to try to make improvements to this bill."
Michael Macleod-Ball, acting director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Washington legislative office said the rights group was "disappointed" that further moves were not made to protect civil liberties.
"This truly was a missed opportunity for the Senate Judiciary Committee to right the wrongs of the PATRIOT Act," he said.
"We urge the Senate to adopt amendments on the floor that will bring this bill in line with the Constitution."
With AFP.
http://rawstory.com/2009/10/dem-controlled-senate-judiciary-committee-extends-patriot-act-provisions/
White House-backed plan to slash health care costs advances in Senate
By Jerry White
8 October 2009
People wait outside the North entrance of Cobo Hall
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/oct2009/heal-o09.shtml
8 October 2009
An estimated 50,000 residents of Detroit filed into Cobo Hall convention center on Wednesday seeking assistance to pay utility bills and keep from being evicted from their homes. City officials, who expected around 3,000 people to apply for the aid, were overwhelmed by the turnout.
In a scene reminiscent of the crowds of jobless workers who lined up for free soup during the Great Depression, a queue of tens of thousands of workers and unemployed people wound around the downtown arena. Young mothers pushing baby carriages, disabled workers in wheelchairs, senior citizens and throngs of young workers and youth stood for hours waiting. Many had slept on the streets the previous evening to be the first served.
Several people fainted during the wait and were treated by medical personnel on the scene. By 11:30 a.m., Detroit’s mayor, David Bing, made a public appeal for citizens to stop coming to Cobo Hall. Hundreds of police, including officers from Detroit’s special Gang Unit, stood guard at the entrances to hold back the crowd.
Several people were reportedly injured in the rush to enter the building after the police finally opened the doors around noon. Those in line were funneled through the glass doors and quickly sped toward a table where they were handed applications and told they had to fill them out and deposit them in boxes before a 2 p.m. deadline.
Wednesday was the last day for residents to apply for the city’s Homeless Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program (HPRP). The program, funded by a $15.2 million grant from the Obama administration's stimulus program, will provide assistance to only about 3,400 people, according to Constance Bell, a spokesperson for the program. In addition to the 50,000 applications given out Wednesday, an additional 30,000 were distributed previously, Bell said. This means that only about one out of 23 people who applied will see any money.
The large turnout was based on fast-spreading rumors that the city was providing $3,000 to low-income families in need of aid. Such is the level of economic desperation in the city—where the official jobless rate is 29 percent and more than one-third of the population lives below the official poverty line—that tens of thousands showed up.
The vast majority will not qualify for the aid, the city spokesperson admitted. The HPRP program only provides temporary assistance to pay utility bills for those who are already homeless or facing pending evictions or foreclosures. Moreover, it will be paid only to those who are able to keep up their housing payments after receiving the aid. No money will be used to make mortgage payments.
People wait outside the North entrance of Cobo HallRather than informing those who showed up that their efforts were likely to be in vain, city officials continued to hand out and collect applications for the program. Their overwhelming concern was to prevent an angry outburst from people who had suffered the indignity of waiting for hours and being manhandled by the cops.
The lack of preparation and disorganization at the event is an indication of how distant government officials are from the reality confronting the working class and the extent of the social crisis. The 80,000 households that applied for assistance represent roughly a third of the city’s population.
The real jobless rate in Detroit is much higher than the official figure of 29 percent, due to the tens of thousands who have given up looking for nonexistent jobs. This crisis has been exacerbated by the forced bankruptcies and restructuring of General Motors and Chrysler by the Obama administration, which, with the support of the United Auto Workers, destroyed thousands of jobs and slashed the wages and benefits of auto workers and retirees.
Particularly striking were the thousands of young workers lining up for assistance. Thirty years ago, a large number of these young people would have been employed in city’s many auto factories. Since 1970, however, the city has lost three-quarters of its manufacturing jobs, wiping out the jobs of 250,000 workers. Today, there is nothing but low-paying jobs for young workers, without the slightest economic security.
Last month, tens of thousands of workers lined up at the state fair grounds in Detroit after the regional gas and electric company, DTE Energy, announced it was offering help to distressed homeowners and renters. According to a report last month in the Detroit News, Michigan’s two largest power companies, DTE Energy and Consumers Energy, last year cut off heating to a total of 181,000 customers. DTE has already shut off energy to 115,000 households, a pace that will far surpass last year’s 142,000 cutoffs.
Detroit—which used to boast one of the highest rates of home ownership in the nation--had the top home foreclosure rate in 2006 and 2007, and still ranks among the highest in the US.
Detroit’s economic decline has been long in the making. The living standards won by auto workers gave the Motor City the highest per capita income in the nation in the 1950s. The last three decades, beginning with the Chrysler bailout of 1979-80, has seen an unrelenting assault on the working class by big business and the government, culminating in Obama’s restructuring of GM and Chrysler. The deindustrialization of Detroit was symbolic of the shift by American capitalism from manufacturing to the most parasitic forms of financial speculation.
At 15.2 percent, the state of Michigan has the highest unemployment rate in the US. Over the past decade, as the auto industry was downsized, Michigan lost 870,000 jobs. The number is expected to rise to one million by late next year.
Even as the demand for social services increases, state and city governments are slashing spending for housing, education and health care to cope with large budget deficits. The Obama administration, which handed trillions to Wall Street, has offered no similar bailout to the states or the estimated 15 million people who are now unemployed.
The state of Michigan—facing a $2.8 billion deficit—is slashing programs across the board. On the same day that thousands lined up for housing assistance, Detroit’s Democratic Mayor David Bing, a multi-millionaire businessman, announced a “turnaround” plan to cut $500 million over the next two years by permanently shrinking city government, selling off public assets, privatizing and cutting services, and laying off more than 1,000 city workers.
The economic crisis is bringing much of the rest of the country to similar straits as in Detroit and Michigan. Scenes of economic desperation are increasingly common throughout the country, with free clinics attracting crowds of thousands in California, Texas and other states, and thousands of people lining up for a handful of available jobs.
The US is experiencing a social crisis unparalleled since the 1930s. In the face of this crisis, the Obama administration is offering no serious relief to the tens of millions of working people who face economic ruin.
The tragic scene that unfolded Wednesday in Detroit underscores the derisory character of Obama’s so-called “stimulus” and “recovery” schemes. The White House has rejected out of hand any public works program to put the unemployed to work. Instead, all of its policies—from the Wall Street bailout, to the attack on auto workers, to its plans to slash health care costs—are designed to protect the wealth and power of the financial elite.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/oct2009/heal-o09.shtml
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