Check It Out for Thursday, May 28th
Martha C. White at The Washington Independent reports on underemployment in this country.
"While the steady rise of the nation’s unemployment rate has become shorthand for the recession’s impact, many economists say the grim figures — 8.9 percent in April — don’t tell the whole story of Americans’ financial distress. While the plight of the jobless tends to dominate social policy conversations and media coverage, a less-exposed but equally vulnerable population is the millions of underemployed. This diffuse, often poorly tracked cross-section of citizens who bear the individual and collective challenges living on the economic fringes often go overlooked by policy makers and elected leaders.
“ 'The number of people under economic stress is much bigger than the official unemployment rate,' said Chad Stone, chief economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Who are these people? The Bureau of Labor Statistics takes a stab at quantifying these people to create a more comprehensive picture of who’s not working and why not. The Bureau identifies categories of Americans it labels as “marginal,” meaning that they are unemployed and have looked for a job in the past, but not recently, and “employed part time for economic reasons,” referring to workers who would take full-time schedules if they could. Once these groups are added to the base unemployment rate, the number climbs all the way up to 15.8 percent in April, the highest number since the BLS began tracking these sub-groups in 1994.
"Yet there are some who say even these numbers don’t tell the whole story. Progressive think tanks talk about “skill underemployment.” “It’s the computer engineer who lost [his] job and is now working at 7-11,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute. “They show up as employed, not as a bad labor market outcome,” she said. In reality, though, these workers, are both earning and contributing far less than their potential — one definition of underemployment. The labor bureau’s data-collection also doesn’t take into account the millions of Americans who have had their hours or wages cut in recent months.
"There’s no single agency that tracks the underemployed, so researchers have to cobble together data from all corners of the economy to come up with an estimate on disenfranchised workers. According to Philip Harvey, a professor of law and economics at Rutgers School of Law, the United States is short by nearly 23 million jobs, a far greater number than the 13.7 million of officially unemployed workers.
"Underemployment also means that a worker’s Social Security benefits could be reduced when he or she collects them in retirement. This combination of reductions in private and public income streams means that when these potentially millions of underemployed Americans exit the workforce, the government could be facing a crisis of underfunded retirees.
"Implications for health insurance are also troubling. Elise Gould, health economist at the Economic Policy Institute, says that in 2007, the most recent year for which statistics are available, only 55 percent of part-time employees had employer-sponsored health insurance, as compared to 74 percent of their full-time counterparts. It’s likely that these numbers have dropped further since then, she added. “There’s been a downward trend in these since 2000, and I would expect these to have only gotten worse.”
Lewis H. Lapham at Harper's writes about the "achievetrons" in high level positions in the Obama administration.
"President Barack Obama’s Christmas shopping for cabinet officers in December of last year prompted the national news media to rejoice in the glad tiding that his campaign slogan, “Change you can believe in,” was just and only that, a slogan. Instead of showing himself partial to “closet radicals” who might pose some sort of deep downfield threat to the status quo, Obama was choosing wisely from the high-end, happy few, dispensing with “the romantic and failed notion” that individuals never before seen on the White House lawn could provide the “maturity” needed “in a time of war and economic crisis.”....
"The mood was not as festive in the workshops of the romantic left, but even the churls who thought the appointees insufficiently progressive in their views of the American future took comfort in the remembrance of their candidate saying somewhere in a post-election speech, “Understand where the vision for change comes from. First and foremost, it comes from me.” David Corn, the Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones, told the Washington Post that although the hotheads among his acquaintance were “disappointed, irritated or fit to be tied,” they held fast to the belief that Obama (Columbia, Harvard Law) would set the agenda, reprogram the operatives complicit in the stupidity and cynicism of the Bush and Clinton administrations....
"The Harvard wunderkinds (a.k.a. “the best and the brightest”) who followed President John F. Kennedy into the White House in 1961 hung around the map tables long enough to point the country in the direction of the Vietnam War. Henry Kissinger, another Harvard prodigy, imparted to American statecraft the modus operandi of a Mafia cartel. The Reagan Administration imported its book of revelation from the University of Chicago’s School of Economics (“privatization” the watchword, “unfettered free market” the Christian name for Zeus) and by so doing set in motion what lately has come to be seen as a long- running Ponzi scheme. Take into account the Ivy League’s contributions to the Bush Administration—Attorney General John Ashcroft (Yale), Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (Princeton), director of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff (Harvard)—and I can imagine a doctoral thesis commissioned by the Kennedy School of Government and meant to determine which of the country’s leading institutions of higher learning over the past fifty years has done the most damage to the health and happiness of the American people.
"It’s conceivable that the Obama Administration will prove itself the exception to the rule, but when the president says that his vision for change “comes from me” he leaves open the question as to whether he intends to generate it ex cathedra or ex nihilo. Neither method offers much chance of success if what is wanted or required is a recasting of the American democracy on a scale comparable to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal... during the Great Depression of the 1930s, FDR composed a “Brain Trust” of individuals (some of them academics, others not, none of them rounded up from the quorum of usual suspects) as willing as the president to “take a method and try it; if it fails, admit it frankly, and try another.”
"Achievetrons learn to work the system, not to change it, to punch up the PowerPoints for Citigroup and Disney and figure the exchange rate between an awkward truth and a user-friendly lie. Where is the percentage in overthrowing the idols of the marketplace or the tribe? If you’re not in, you’re out, and when was out the better place to be?
"Summers in 1998 as President Bill Clinton’s deputy secretary of the Treasury served as one of the principal sponsors of our current financial debacle, facilitating repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and joining with Secretary Robert Rubin (Harvard, Yale Law) and Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Alan Greenspan (New York University) to force the resignation of Brooksley Born, chair of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, who urged regulation of the markets in new derivatives. The motion to block the large-scale accumulation of toxic debt ran counter to the belief, then all the rage among the bankers at JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs as among the members of the Palm Beach Country Club, that money, deftly cultivated by its cronies, grows on trees.
"Obama, in his custom-tailored personae both as a United States senator and as a presidential candidate, draped himself in the same accommodating cloth—careful to avoid offending the people who count, content to leave the management of the country’s finances to the discretion of the Wall Street banks, its Middle Eastern policy to the judgment of the Israeli lobby, its public-health care under the supervision of the insurance syndicates, its bankruptcy laws in the hands of the credit-card companies, its military spending to the wisdom of the Pentagon. During last year’s election campaign he enjoyed the advantage of an incoherent opponent, a faltering economy, and the incumbent Bush Administration’s record of failure and disgrace. His efficient acquisition of money and votes proved him to be a capable entrepreneur, his eloquence showed him to be a charismatic politician. The greater achievement—the act of electing a black man to the White House, not the image of the actor—is that of the American citizenry, a collective enterprise drawing together the energies of the democratic spirit contained in the belief that what is great about America is not the greatness of its gross domestic product but the greatness of its love of liberty.
"Our leading voices of informed opinion like to say that America now finds itself in a state of unprecedented crisis, the whole of our political and economic enterprise trembling on the verge of extinction. They call upon the president to be “bold,” to throw the moneychangers out of the temple, bail out the banks and the automobile industry, disgorge from the Augean stable on Capitol Hill its dungheap of cowardice and self-congratulation. I don’t know anybody who questions President Obama’s willingness to perform the labors of Hercules, but where does he find the lionskin and the club? The redistributions of the society’s rich and poor require the hiring of domestic help willing to move the furniture. Achievetrons don’t do floors and windows. As individuals they make very good company, and at the tables down at Mory’s the magic of their singing no doubt casts its spell, but if they have paid attention to their studies, they can be trusted to know, as does the valedictocracy otherwise known as the national news media, that it’s a far, far better thing to live in comfort under a government they hold to be wrong than in discomfort under a government they hold to be right."
Phyllis Bennis at Institute for Policy Studies and her comments on the Obama-Netanyahu meeting are interesting in light of Netanyahu's subsequent actions.
"Overall, yesterday's White House meeting between President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has to be seen as a draw...
"So the public gap between stated U.S. and Israeli positions remains. Obama reassured Israel of a reassessment of Iran policy at the end of the year, but made no commitments to or even hints regarding support for military force against Iran, and left plenty of room to continue diplomatic engagement even without harsher sanctions — an option, presumably, to be chosen only if his administration faces enough serious pressure to maintain diplomacy and not to escalate.
"As expected, Obama also didn't refer directly to Netanyahu's public rejection of a two-state solution...
"Obama did refer to the need for humanitarian and reconstruction assistance in Gaza, specifically mentioning the border closures, but again there was no hint of pressure for implementation; Netanyahu refused to acknowledge the point.
"So publicly, there is no indication yet that this initial meeting, at least, will lead to anything different from the last 18 years of "serious" Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Unfortunately, whether this reflects actual policy or the extraordinary caution and discipline of a still-new White House, it's probably still too early to tell.
"Obama's acceptance of mere words from Netanyahu, on the other hand, whether he "accepts" a settlement freeze or "agrees" to a new round of talks about talks with the Palestinians, and not imposing any conditions to make sure it happens, will indicate that so far, at least, U.S. support for Israeli occupation and apartheid remain intact.
"And any "deal" that offers Israel any promise of U.S. support for or involvement in a military strike against Iran, will undermine whatever small move towards justice might be possible from a settlement freeze or removal of roadblocks.
"This was a first meeting; at least in public, both politicians were playing primarily to their home audiences. The indicators so far were disappointing. But this was only round one. What happens next, privately and publicly, will be determined largely by the level of pressure that is brought to bear on Obama.
"We know the capacity of Israel's U.S. supporters to raise that pressure. The question for us is how to challenge it, for diplomacy instead of threats towards Iran, and an end to U.S. support for Israeli occupation and apartheid and for a U.S. policy based on equality for all. We have to raise our own claims — regarding Iran and Palestine — based on holding Obama to his own promises — for a changed foreign policy, for an end to the mindset that leads to war.
"There's a lot of work ahead."
"We should remember that these institutions, taking to heart the “robber baron” accusation, were not intended to dispense charity, but to apply resources and “social engineering” to forestall the “evils of capitalism....”
"In addition to the billions donated to non-profit organizations, economic development, and policy-oriented think tanks, foundations have been prime creators of international organizations designed to promote and defend capitalism against any and all threats....
"While promoting/saving/improving capitalism over the long term, foundations are also deeply entrenched in the corporate sector, including the military-industrial complex and finance capitalism, through their trustees and investments. In 1971, the Ford Foundation established the Commonfund for managing the investments of private universities, schools, and foundations. Its charge was to break away from the traditional conservative investment policies of these entities in order to produce more robust returns.
"As a consequence, the largest foundations became “powerhouses” in investing, seeking to increase their yields through hedge funds, distressed debt, venture capital, buyouts, real estate, and international resource and energy ventures. The investment committee of the Ford Foundation’s board is headed by Afsaneh Beschloss, who was recruited from the Carlyle Group where she was a specialist in hedge funds. According to Commonfund’s report, about 40% of foundations screen their investments; however, the major evil avoided is tobacco.
"While critical scrutiny of foundations is rare, it is almost entirely absent from major media. A notable exception was Charles Piller’s 2007 investigation of Gates Foundation investments (published in The Los Angeles Times) that concluded: “The Gates Foundation reaps vast profits every year from companies whose actions contradict its mission of improving society in the United States and around the world, particularly the lot of people afflicted by poverty and disease.”
"Foundations are quick to publicize their 'cause-related' investments, but for the bulk of their portfolios they go along with the crowd, and that has made all the sameness."
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