The NeoCon Economic Pilot Test Failed

Whatever else it is, the Bush economy is unarguably Milton Friedman's "free" market theory in application. And it is a collosal, catastrophic failure.

The wreckage is strewn from one coast to the other and from Gulf to Great Lakes. Bodies lie everywhere.

I've lost count of the number of Wall Street tyrannosauri that have died, are dying, or were rescued. (It seems that the "free" market is "free" except when it isn't "free.")

We're still waiting the count of foreclosed homes.

The stock market teeters perilously, disastrously for Boomers with little hope of ever making up the losses incurred while Bush has been in office.

Oil prices are in the stratosphere, dragging the prices of everything else along for the ride.

Equity in a home that has lost half its value is half the equity--a crippling blow for everyone, but especially debilitating for those who are retiring or need to finance assisted living through the sale of their homes. That would be everybody I know. What about you?

Yesterday afternoon, I heard MSNBC's David Schuster interview an American Spectator editor on the foreclosure crisis. Incredibly, the editor--I didn't catch his name--said that the foreclosure crisis wasn't the result of deregulation. It was the result of the socialist expectations of buyers, he said, who knew they'd be bailed out.

Well, ain't that just a Republican NeoCon for ya? I didn't get a chance to cross-examine him myself, but if I had, here's what I'd have asked him. Do you have any data on that? Can you show us the lending houses' marketing materials that promised a bail-out to an oversold buyer? Any examples? Anyone? If that's the case, why aren't there national foreclosure crises twice a year? I mean, consumers have been consuming homes for quite a while now. And, how's that expectation working out for the "socialists"?

Such a lot of lies.

The truth, of course, is that the steady dismantling of banking and lending regulations, including repeal of New Deal jewel Glass-Steagall (pushed through when Clinton was President and hostage to a GOP-dominated Congress), is exactly what caused the foreclosure pig wallow. (If you've nothing better to do, search the New York Times using "Glass-Steagall" or "banking deregulation." It's an interesting historical flashback.)

Actually, there's a fine (and readable) article about the causal connection between both W's deregulation and--heads up--the economic legislative policy of John McCain's chief economics advisor Phil Gramm to the foreclosure crisis. It's worth your time.

Honey, trust me. You don't want Phil Gramm anywhere near the country's economic policy. Didn't you learn anything from George W. Bush?

Next time you hear a conservative blame the people for the foreclosure crisis, ask him this: "Did you REALLY read EVERY SINGLE WORD in the stack of papers you had to sign for every one of your mortgages?"

I didn't think so. You just trusted your realtor and your mortgage broker, didn't you.

Rick Galeener's Chicken

Today on NOVA, I heard the usual outrage. Asked if an American would work a 12-hour day in a [dangerous, highly exploitative, blood-slick, bone-chilling, puke-inducing] meat packing plant for $6.25 an hour, the caller yelled, irate: “No! Americans won’t work for that! ‘Illegals’ are holding down the wages at these places!”

Whoever he was, he doesn’t know whether to wind his watch or run.

He could be any Anglo camped outside the Macehualli worker’s center at 25th St. and Bell Road. We may even have seen him pounding his flagpole, screaming curses through his bullhorn at the (obviously legal) immigrants waiting inside the chain link fence for somebody like us to give them a day job. He might have been Rick Galeener himself, that wrinkled, publicly urinating racist old rattlesnake who, probably, was the guy videotaping my license plate and my face as I got out to make arrangements with Sal Reza, beloved de facto leader of pro-migrant Phoenicians.

I wanted to say to him, “So Rick. You’re saying you “Christian patriots” do want to pay $15 a pound for raw, uncut chicken, right?”

Guys like Galeener can’t have it both ways. No undocumented, exploited immigrants, no $1.99/lb roasters. No $4.95 Church’s fried, either.

This is the bottom line that American racist-nativists happy to have cheap chicken as long as they don’t have to see who makes it aren’t willing to talk about. The self-limited choice, the sublimely short-sighted and settle-for-nothing choice they offer is this: Grow your own or tolerate “illegals.” Which will it be?

For those of us with considerably higher self esteem and a much more wholesome vision for tomorrow, there’s a way better way. We don’t advocate exploiting anybody. Read on.

American haven’t really thought through what it means to us to kick out undocumented workers, although here in Phoenix, watching the tax base erode and the For Sale signs sprout like stink weeds, we’re beginning to get a glimmer. We’re gradually catching on that no real “Christian patriot” capitalist worth his salt would run large numbers of hard-working good consumers out of town just pretty much for the hell of it.

I’m saying that Nativist America needs to rub one of its two brain cells against the other in hopes of igniting a spark of recognition.

Immigrant workers sustain this country’s economy. Its lowest-wage earners, they are the floor on which the rest of us stand. If they aren’t able to report for work, either we must or the businesses and the economy that depends on them will fall. Alternatively, the fact is, if the floor rises, so will everybody on it. That’s what Roosevelt understood, and so must we. Fast.

This is a window on the life of one meat packer in Sholom Rubashkin’s Agriprocessors, Inc., the meat processing plant in Postville, IA much in the news. This is about a 21-year -old Guatemalan woman named Emilsa Monzon Gutierrez, why she came here, how she got here, and what she does at Agriprocesors, Inc. It is provided by Tony Leys at the Des Moines Register:

Guatemala is still recovering from a 36-year civil war that ended in 1996. Average income there is only 12 percent of income in the United States, and 43 percent of the average income in neighboring Mexico. Income inequality is starker in Guatemala, with the richest 10 percent of people controlling 43 percent of the wealth, compared with 37 percent in Mexico and 30 percent in the United States.
That is why so many poor Guatemalans risk robbery, arrest and heat exhaustion to make the trek to the United States.

Emilsa Monzon Gutierrez, a Guatemalan immigrant who worked at the Postville plant, made the journey last winter.

Monzon is the daughter of a farmhand in rural Guatemala. She is a soft-spoken woman who wears braces and looks younger than her 21 years. She sat at a picnic table outside the Postville church on Friday and described her homeland and her life.
She said her hometown is a place of tiny wooden houses with metal roofs and dirt floors. Food costs are rising, she said, and jobs are scarce. Violence, which is tied to the drug trade, keeps getting worse.

Monzon's family borrowed money so she could try to make it to the United States. She took a bus for nearly a thousand miles from her hometown in southern Guatemala to the U.S. border. Most of the trip was through Mexico, where she saw people with nicer clothes and better houses than most Guatemalans she knew. The roads were in much better condition, she said, and more people had cars.

Despite being better off than Guatemala, Mexico is a poor place with few opportunities. So after reaching northern Mexico, Monzon walked across a desert border area with four other people and made it into the United States. Then she took buses for more than 1,300 miles to Postville, where she joined her brother. The total journey took 27 days.

12-hour shift, 30-minute break

Monzon said she had no trouble landing a job at Agriprocessors, where she worked from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m., with a half hour break for lunch. She spent her nights in a cold, refrigerated room, always rushing to cut feathers off chickens and slap labels on them. She said the work was more grueling than she expected, but it was the only job available.

Yo, that fried chicken there. Want some fries with that?

According to Leys, Agriprocessor workers like Monzon make $6.25 to $7.50 an hour at jobs many of them borrowed thousands of dollars just to reach. When they are deported, they will lose their homes and farms in Guatemala that served as collateral, and the money they sent back home to stave off starvation for their families will be no more. What then?

The notion that these same workers will just turn around come back to Agriprocessors is a fantasy. They can’t afford to in any sense, and as word spreads across Central America about our terrorizing chicken-shit raids on the least of the least, nobody else will come, either. It may be desperate at home, but at least it’s not desperate and grotesque.

When they’re run out of Postville and Agriprocessor is forced to hire the locals, the price of chicken will hit the stars.

What Tancredo and Dobbs and Galeener and the rest don’t want to get into is that this and every other capitalist country has made a devil’s bargain to exploit anybody who’s vulnerable and has no leverage, in exchange for a decent, affordable standard of living for everyone else. Slaves, immigrants, refugees, poor people, women (what is it now? $.79 on the $1.00?) and old people, but especially poor immigrants: It’s a deal pretty much bred in the bone of capitalism itself, because capitalism is about profits, not about people.

So long as the people and the profits can peacefully co-exist—as they did during the country’s New Deal glory days—guys like Galeener can pretend that they're on the winning end. But when, as now, profit lust has slimed the country, gas is $4 a gallon and food prices are getting scary high, they can either question their priorities or blame the “illegals.”

Their choice is foolish. It’s like voting for a Republican if you're not Dick. It’s circling the wagons and firing.

No, Virginia. It’s not the “illegals” who are holding meat-processing and re-bar workers’ wages down. It’s Ronald Reagan and the rest of the GOP, then and since, who collaborated both to block sane immigration policies and to impose “free trade” and globalization on the rest of us. With the help of the Clintons and a whole bunch of craven, complicit, sell-out congressional Democrats.

Here's a clue. “Free trade” and NAFTA and its spawn amount to a wholesale declaration of war on American labor, domestic and imported. It started when the Idol of the Right broke the Air Traffic Controllers strike in 1980 and shot labor unions in the chest.

That wound has festered and grown these 28 years. Now the economy created by Roosevelt’s high-wage/pro-union policies—you know, the one that gave your parents cheap university degrees, two cars, fine houses for 6% fixed 30-year mortgages, and employer-paid health insurance and pensions, weekends, and overtime pay--has gone, gone away.

Because tell me: What, if not unions and government enforced workplace regulation, stands between exploitative bosses like heavy GOP contributor Sholom Rubashkin and Monzon and, well, Linda Green, Bobby Ray Lee, and Tyrone Washington? It isn’t corporate ethics and it isn't Bush's "free trade."

Galeener either doesn’t know this or he doesn’t see what it has to do with him. He also doesn’t know that “free trade” means no unions and no workers’ comp or minimum wage enforcement and no benefits and all the investment safeguards of Enron, just as it means no regulation of predatory mortgage lenders and a flood of people like Monzon across our borders, fleeing from the wreckage of carnivorous multinationals.

He doesn’t even get that the same low-wage/no regulation conditions that drove Monzon to the United States are being replicated here by George Bush’s low-wage, anti-union, pro-corporate, anti-middle-class, tax-only-wage-earners policies.

But he’s about to get a clue.

So, either he can recognize that his half of the boat rises with Monzon’s and stand with her for higher wages, good benefits, a path to citizenship, and decent working conditions, or he and she and all the rest of us can all fall together. That’s the deal, locally and globally.

The choice is not between continuing to exploit immigrants and other vulnerable people or being wrung out and hung out. It’s not between an unacceptable status quo + an unacceptable (exploitative) guest worker program.

It’s between global workplace fairness and decency, and profits redirected into research, innovation, clean production, and real value, or global decline for 99% of us and immeasurably obscene profits for the rest.

Yes, propers for Monzon will mean higher food prices for you and me, but with a global New Deal and priorities re-centered on people and the planet that sustains us, we can afford it. If you don’t believe me, quit drinking the Kool Aid.

It’s just a question of will.

Rebate Schmeebate

No, it won't help us. It's ridiculous.

Here's what would help: Let's start with a fair share of the return on the productivity we escalated over the last 7 years. You know, the one Bush always talks about. Instead of 90% of that return going into the CEO suite, how about significant raises for all deserving, neglected, hard-working people? How about a tax cut for us?

Then, how about a regulated mortgage industry so we have a hope of getting a fair deal on our houses? Or say: How about a new New Deal. It worked before and is the only thing that will work now.

I don't know why this is rocket science. How on earth do the "free market" creeps expect us to keep on consuming when our cost of living is sky-rocketing, our savings and house values and wages are tanking, and our jobs are being outsourced or cut altogether? I mean, DUH.

See why John Edwards needs to be President?

Which Way, America?

let's make this simple.

There are two distinctly American ways to do this capitalism thing.

One is represented by Bush and the Republicans. Under that vision, society is divided into opposing camps: the haves and the have-nots. Those who have are entitled by "having" to write the laws, and the laws are written to favor them. Regulations that evolved to correct abuses flowing out of concentrated wealth and power are regarded as restraints on free trade, and are discarded. These include labor rights, workplace health and safety protections, environmental protections, and safeguards on banking and investment behavior. taxes are viewed as infringements on personal property, and wealth as an inheritable form of power that leads to "money aristocrats," great estates, and dynasties. We saw the consequences of that worldview in the era of the "robber barons" and the crash of the stock market that led to the Great Depression. We are seeing it again in the economy that has prevailed since Bush took office in 2000: job outsourcing, record trade deficits, deregulation (Enron), crashing home values, declining wages and salaries, and a super=wealthy CEO class that comprises something under 5% of the population. That is the "free market" being espoused by today's Republican party.

The other view was best articulated by FDR. In that view, generally espoused by Democrats, society is seen as having divisions, but is viewed as a joint enterprise in which everyone has a shared interest, Government -- law and regulation -- is seen as a legitimate tool for leveling the playing field, encouraging personal and economic growth and development, and providing safeguards for the weakest members of the social family, and the environment is viewed as a precious commonwealth that deserves its own protections. Taxes are viewed as an appropriate payment for enjoying the benefits of infrastructure, defense, and security, and as a means to prevent the concentration of vast wealth in the hands of a few -- an anti-aristocracy perspective consistent with the anti-monarchy perspective of the Constitution. Education is viewed as an investment and therefore is subsidized by the government. A minimum level of healthcare and income security are viewed as essential to the stability of the state and of the society. Ergo, Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid. The consequences of that worldview were evident in the growth of the American middle class, the New Deal, and the 50-year reign of prosperity between the end of WWII and the market plunge in 1999.

Which looks better to you?