“During Wednesday’s debate on the Farm Bill, the Senate unanimously agreed to ban certain ex-convicts from receiving food assistance for life. Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) claimed his amendment would prevent “murderers, rapists, and pedophiles”from ever receiving food stamps through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Under this amendment, anyone convicted for a violent crime or sexual assault will be shut out of the program for life, even if they served their time or committed the crime long ago. Their families will also suffer, as their share of SNAP benefits will exclude the convicted family member.

Saturday Morning Market accepts Food Stamps EBT

As Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes, these sentences have historically been handed down to more minorities than white offenders:

Given incarceration patterns in the United States, the amendment would have a skewed racial impact. Poor elderly African Americans convicted of a single crime decades ago by segregated Southern juries would be among those hit. The amendment essentially says that rehabilitation doesn’t matter and violates basic norms of criminal justice.”

 

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/05/23/2053351/senator-uses-farm-bill-to-ban-some-ex-convicts-from-food-stamps-for-life/

 

Criminalizing poverty. This coming from a patron of D.C. madame. And the amendment passes unanimously. What is wrong with these people?

In America a dollar today is worth much less than a dollar in 1980. Americans marvel at how much cheaper things used to be in the past, when Coca-Cola and movies only cost five cents.

In Japan the story is quite different. For long periods in the past two decades, nominal prices have in fact declined.

These facts reflect a conscious decision made by the authorities of both countries. The United States, like most of the world, has accepted and even encouraged a slight degree of inflation. The belief is that this will encourage spending, providing a continuous boost to the economy.

Japan – for better or worse, probably for worse – has done things differently. It has not encouraged inflation; prices have stayed the same or even decreased in nominal terms. This reflects the strong power of the often elderly Japanese saver, who doesn’t want her savings to lose value. Today Japan’s new government is undertaking a bold course by forcing the Central Bank to print as much money as possible until inflation hits 2%.

These different policies have created different attitudes towards saving in both countries. In the United States saving is often associated with the stock market. Americans ought to invest their money in the stock market for retirement because “the stock market will always go up.” Japan’s stock market has done poorly over the past few decades, however. As of this writing, the Nikkei 225 is at 14,937.56 – far below its high of 38,957.44 in 1989. A Japanese saver who invested all his earnings in stocks during the 1980s would have lost a lot of money. Instead, Japanese households keep their earnings in cash. This graphic, from the Wall Street Journal, shows this:

Cash is a much safer way of saving in Japan than in the United States; it doesn’t lose as much value over time, unlike here.

There is much to be said about the Japanese way of saving. The American method is complicated. Investing in stocks requires lots of tough decisions: how much money to put in, how conservatively to invest it, which mutual fund or plan is best, how to diversify, etc. There are lots of big words which the typical person might not understand. The whole process often takes a considerable amount of time and effort. The poor often lack this.

In a sense, then, the American system of saving exacerbates income inequality. Wealthy Americans save in stocks and bonds and are shielded from inflation. Poor American save in cash and bear the brunt of the blow. Is it a coincidence that Japan is much more equal than America?

For all its disadvantages, however, the American system is probably better than the Japanese system. It is Japan which is trying to create inflation and make itself more like America, not the other way around. What is more, Shinzo Abe’s government is wildly popular for doing so.

Still, few policymakers consider how a system of saving based on the stock market, due to inflationary pressures encouraged by the government, widens income inequality. Perhaps the overall economic advantages still outweigh the disadvantages. But more people ought to pay attention to the disadvantages.

–inoljt, http://mypolitikal.com/

by Beverly Bell, Alexis Erkert, and Deepa Panchang

May 23, 2013

Over the past few weeks in this article series, we’ve heard firsthand from Haitian garment workers about low wages, sexual abuse, labor rights violations, and work-related injuries they suffered in sweatshops.

Meanwhile, the world has watched the death toll in last month’s factory collapse in Bangladesh creep to above 1,100. Global activists have joined the calls of protesting workers, ramping up pressure on clothing retailers against the regular mistreatment and deaths of workers. Slowly, the public is realizing that exploitation within the garment assembly industry is not the exception, it’s the rule. Today, we take a deep dive into the economics of this sector in Haiti to look at how it has come to be, and at what alternative pathways might look like.

Haiti Presidential Palace

In discussions among foreigners about working conditions and wages in the assembly industry, we often hear, “But Haitians need jobs. Wouldn’t things be worse without them?”

The question creates a false choice between no job and a grinding, exploitative job. Looking at the factors that led to low factory wages in the first place helps expose the myth. Western governments and their international financial institution (IFI) partners have played an active role in creating the dearth of options that exists for Haitian workers. For example, trade policies from the 1980s onward caused the decimation of the Haitian agricultural sector. Out-of-work farmers fled on masse to cities, and many had no better option but a factory job. Foreign policies imposed on the Haitian government have also contributed to a near-complete lack of public services and a weak, dependent domestic economy, which ramp up desperation; desperation, in turn, forced workers to accept the low wages.

The offshore assembly model creates a race to the bottom. In it, businesses circle the globe seeking the lowest cost of production – which involves the lowest health and safety standards and suppressed union organizing. As factories move to the next country, they create dirt-poor workers.

Despite this, governments, the UN, and the IFIs tout the garment assembly industry as a path to development in global South countries. The UN places the expansion of free trade zones (groupings of export-producing factories that enjoy tax exemptions and fewer safety, health, and environment regulations) toward the center of its development road map for Haiti. A 2009 report it commissioned argued that Haiti’s duty-free, quota-free preferential access to the American market, combined with low labor costs and a lack of protectionist policies, makes the country “the world’s safest production location for garments.” Weeks after the earthquake, that paper’s author, Oxford University economics professor Paul Collier, likened the catastrophic moment to 19^th Century development of the US West, with its “investment booms, financed by enthusiastic outsiders. The earthquake could usher in such a boom in Haiti.”

Apparently sharing this view, four months after the earthquake the US Congress extended US trade preferences for assembled garments to Haiti in a law that was portrayed as a relief measure. Also since the earthquake, the US and other global players came up with $224 million to subsidize the development of a new free trade zone in northern Haiti, Caracol. Developers, who displaced 366 farmers from arable farmland for the project, promised more than 20,000 jobs. In actuality, fewer than 1,500 people are employed in the park; and after paying for transportation and meals, workers reportedly end each day with an average of US $1.36. More free-trade zones are in the offing.

For all the funding and attention the sector has received, the 24 factories currently making garments for export to the US employ very few people: 25,924, or approximately 0.5% of the working-age population. No matter the numbers, the industry’s contribution to the national economy is false development, said economist Camille Chalmers with the Platform to Advocate Alternative Development in Haiti. “Almost all of the primary materials used in manufacturing come from outside. When they say that Haiti exports hundreds of millions of dollars in products, a lot of that goes to [foreign companies to] pay for the inputs like cloth and equipment. Once assembled, the goods aren’t consumed in Haiti but are shipped abroad. The government doesn’t even benefit from taxes or tariffs. Haiti’s only role is as a stopover in the production process, where cheap labor keeps profit margins high.”

Haiti does need work opportunities, as any cash-desperate person there will tell you. But not at any price or under any conditions. Former factory worker Ghislene Deloné said, “It can’t be based on the exploitation of people. We need to be treated like human beings.” And Camille Chalmers said, “When we speak of employment, we have to talk about the quality of employment. [This sector] doesn’t create work that can develop our human resources or reduce poverty. These comparative advantages just reproduce misery.”

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Terracide and the Terrarists 
Destroying the Planet for Record Profits 
By Tom Engelhardt

We have a word for the conscious slaughter of a racial or ethnic group: genocide.  And one for the conscious destruction of aspects of the environment: ecocide.  But we don’t have a word for the conscious act of destroying the planet we live on, the world as humanity had known it until, historically speaking, late last night.  A possibility might be “terracide” from the Latin word for earth.  It has the right ring, given its similarity to the commonplace danger word of our era: terrorist.

The truth is, whatever we call them, it’s time to talk bluntly about the terrarists of our world.  Yes, I know, 9/11 was horrific.  Almost 3,000 dead, massive towers down, apocalyptic scenes.  And yes, when it comes to terror attacks, the Boston Marathon bombings weren’t pretty either.  But in both cases, those who committed the acts paid for or will pay for their crimes.

Global Warming

In the case of the terrarists — and here I’m referring in particular to the men who run what may be the most profitable corporations on the planet, giant energy companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BP, and Shell – you’re the one who’s going to pay, especially your children and grandchildren. You can take one thing for granted: not a single terrarist will ever go to jail, and yet they certainly knew what they were doing.

It wasn’t that complicated. In recent years, the companies they run have been extracting fossil fuels from the Earth in ever more frenetic and ingenious ways. The burning of those fossil fuels, in turn, has put record amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. Only this month, the CO2 level reached 400 parts per million for the first time in human history. A consensus of scientists has long concluded that the process was warming the world and that, if the average planetary temperature rose more than two degrees Celsius, all sorts of dangers could ensue, including seas rising high enough to inundate coastal cities, increasingly intense heat waves, droughts, floods, ever more extreme storm systems, and so on.

How to Make Staggering Amounts of Money and Do In the Planet

None of this was exactly a mystery. It’s in the scientific literature. NASA scientist James Hansen first publicized the reality of global warming to Congress in 1988. It took a while — thanks in part to the terrarists — but the news of what was happening increasingly made it into the mainstream. Anybody could learn about it.

Those who run the giant energy corporations knew perfectly well what was going on and could, of course, have read about it in the papers like the rest of us. And what did they do? They put their money into funding think tanks, politicians, foundations, and activists intent on emphasizing “doubts” about the science (since it couldn’t actually be refuted); they and their allies energetically promoted what came to be known as climate denialism. Then they sent their agents and lobbyists and money into the political system to ensure that their plundering ways would not be interfered with. And in the meantime, they redoubled their efforts to get ever tougher and sometimes “dirtier” energy out of the ground in ever tougher and dirtier ways.

The peak oil people hadn’t been wrong when they suggested years ago that we would soon hit a limit in oil production from which decline would follow.  The problem was that they were focused on traditional or “conventional” liquid oil reserves obtained from large reservoirs in easy-to-reach locations on land or near to shore.  Since then, the big energy companies have invested a remarkable amount of time, money, and (if I can use that word) energy in the development of techniques that would allow them to recover previously unrecoverable reserves (sometimes by processes that themselves burn striking amounts of fossil fuels): fracking, deep-water drilling, and tar-sands production, among others.

They also began to go after huge deposits of what energy expert Michael Klare calls “extreme” or “tough” energy — oil and natural gas that can only be acquired through the application of extreme force or that requires extensive chemical treatment to be usable as a fuel.  In many cases, moreover, the supplies being acquired like heavy oil and tar sands are more carbon-rich than other fuels and emit more greenhouse gases when consumed.  These companies have even begun using climate change itself — in the form of a melting Arctic — to exploit enormous and previously unreachable energy supplies.  With the imprimatur of the Obama administration, Royal Dutch Shell, for example, has been preparing to test out possible drilling techniques in the treacherous waters off Alaska.

David Koch

Amid concerns that Koch Industries could buy several major U.S. newspapers from Tribune Company, industrial billionaire David Koch was forced to step down as trustee of WNET, New York City’s largest public TV station, after the New Yorker revealed how WNET gave Koch inappropriate influence over its programming. Mr. Koch was floating a seven-figure donation over WNET’s leadership as the station aired a movie that portrayed him as a particularly greedy Manhattan resident.

Sure enough, WNET didn’t get David Koch’s hefty donation.

Last Thursday, David Koch submitted his resignation at a WNET Board of Trustees meeting, and Brad Johnson at Forecast the Facts* reports that Koch’s name was scrubbed from WNET’s website several days prior to the resignation. Koch Industries’ public relations website, KochFacts, released a preemptive response to the New Yorker article (which it has now urgently elaborated on), attempting to stifle New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer and the details of her newest piece. David Koch’s resignation as a WNET Trustee, coupled with telling quotes from WNET president Neal Shapiro and other sources, makes it clear that Koch had too much influence at the decreasingly-public TV station in New York.

The article is a fascinating culmination of two portions of the ongoing legacy of the Koch brothers: their desire to influence media, which is playing out with their company’s bid for the Tribune Company’s eight national daily newspapers, and their attempts to intimidate journalists and silence reporting they consider unfavorable.

Collapsed I-5 Skagit River Bridge, Washington State

Just after 7pm PT, a central portion of the I-5 Skagit River bridge in Washington State collapsed dumping several cars in the water. People were seen sitting on top of the cars, on top of the bridge wreckage waiting for rescue.

Live stream reporting from KIRO 7.

Live stream reporting from KOMO 4.

Continuing updates here.

Technical Details of the ‘riveted steel truss bridge’ from uglybridges.com. “Evaluation: Structurally deficient” “This website highlights the “ugly” condition of our nation’s bridges thanks to years of neglect and deferred maintenance.”

Infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure.

From Peterr:

That “all of our bridges” quote ought to shame the Austerians. Right now,
money can be borrowed for pennies if governments want to do capital
projects, making repairs/replacements of bridges like these so much cheaper
than they would be when the economy is perking along. But that makes too
much sense . . .

8:51 pm PT: Fingers crossed, but no reported fatalities.

Pic

Pic

Various reports that a wide load truck hit it.

Sour apple for the teacher?

Some employers, both large and small, have announced plans to limit their part-time workers to 29 hours a week specifically so they can avoid paying for health care for employees working 30+ hours a week, as required by the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare. Under the law, most of which takes effect in 2014, large employers are exempted from contributing anything towards healthcare costs of employees who work fewer than 30 hours a week. For full-time workers, companies must offer affordable insurance or face steep fines. Employers seeking to avoid this responsibility could impose a 29-hour ceiling on workers, and many are doing just that.

Obamacare prompts fears for low-wage workers as employers exploit the rules

Three years after the passage of Barack Obama’s signature healthcare law, labor advocates are warning that it could have the unforeseen consequence of harming some of the very low-wage employees it seeks to aid. The legislation’s incentive scheme, they say, could cause a shift toward part-time work that extends beyond companies like Papa John’s and Darden Restaurants, which last year publicized their plans to cut employee hours to avoid costs under the new law.

Other large businesses have announced plans to raise the prices of their burgers or widgets to recover the health care costs. There has been blowback, but probably not nearly enough, since the likes of Wendy’s, Darden (Olive Garden, Red Lobster), Taco Bell, etc. already make huge profits and pay minimum (or less for waitstaff) wages. Darden Restaurants tried reducing full-time staffing at some of its restaurants last fall, but after a lot of negative publicity, the chain said it would not change its staffing in 2014. At Whole Foods, workers who put in 30 hours a week already get full health benefits, but the company may consider reducing the number of those employees because the proposed rules include more expensive benefit requirements. So workers just scraping by in minimum-wage jobs will see their pay reduced even more. In a very real way, these workers are taking another pay hit so that more well paid full-time employees can get company-provided health insurance benefits.

Many of you will remember that my daughter is a teacher whose writings I’ve posted here occasionally. But she is not a contracted teacher with her own classroom, she is a full-time “instructional assistant” who teaches technology to every student in her elementary school. Each child in the school attends several “specials” in the course of a week, and my daughter teaches one of the specials. This scheme is supposed to help make up for the elimination of valuable enrichment programs such as art, music and gym in cash-strapped school systems all over the country. As an instructional assistant, my daughter is paid a smaller, hourly wage, and has very limited personal and sick days compared to a contract teacher, and no health benefits, even though she has the same workload as a regular classroom teacher, and instructs every student in the school each week. She also works with children who need extra help to keep up with their assignments, as part of an intervention program. She is a full-time teacher in every sense of the word.

But my daughter and her colleagues were just informed that her school system may reduce the hours of certain classes of employees to 29 hours per week to avoid providing health care benefits. They also propose to limit substitute classroom teachers to four days per week, as another way to avoid incurring the health care costs. The letter from the superintendent spells out the problem, and it is very real:

We currently pay approximately 1,700 employees–1,000 of which are benefit eligible, 700 of which are not benefit eligible. If hours are not reduced, [the school system] could incur an annual expenditure of $4,952/Single Plan, and $13,278/Family Plan for each employee working over thirty (30) hours per week, which could result in increased insurance costs and PPACA fines to the School Corporation in the amount of $1,000,000 – $2,600,000 annually.

I have no sympathy whatsoever for Wendy’s or Taco Bell and their desire to wiggle out of providing health insurance benefits to their underpaid workers, but what is an already cash-strapped public school system to do? They’re too large to get any exclusions offered to small businesses, and too large to qualify for subsidies. It’s not just MY family; this situation will be replicated all over the country, in schools that already are eliminating programs just to be able to continue to provide the basics. A lot of school systems use part time workers not only as support staff, but for instruction of children.

This is one way that the Affordable Care Act, whatever its good points — and there ARE some — will disadvantage not only low-paid workers in retail companies who will see their pay even further reduced, but also our public school children, as the schools are forced to make even more cuts. It is unlikely that in a 29-hour week, the “specials” teachers will be able to instruct all of the students every week.

I don’t have an answer. It is a problem I hadn’t even considered until it touched my own family. I wonder how many more surprises are in store for us as the ACA rolls out? This is a provision that could be tweaked, and some states have begun to draft legislation to address the problem. The Republican legislators who want nothing more than to see the ACA fail, are unlikely to cooperate in a fix. So we are between the proverbial rock and hard place, I fear.