David Bacon to speak in Boston, 9/9/08
Photojournalist David Bacon, a frequent contributor to Dollars & Sense, will be speaking on Tuesday, Sept. 9, at the Jamaica Plain Forum in Boston. If you live in the area, please attend his talk, which is sure to be enlightening. ... and come over to the Dollars & Sense table and introduce yourself to members of our collective!Speaking of Jamaica Plain Forum: Please save the date--Friday, Nov. 7, 2008--when Dollars & Sense will sponsor our own JP Forum event, "Ask Dr. Dollar," with longtime D&S contributor Arthur MacEwan, professor of economics at U.Mass-Boston. MacEwan will answer questions from the audience about the latest economic crises and what to expect from the new administration in Washington.
Here's more information about David Bacon and the Sept. 9 event:
"There are no Illegal People"
Lecture and discussion with David Bacon, photojournalist and author.
The Jamaica Plain Forum (http://www.jamaicaplainforum.org/)
First Church in JP, UU
6 Eliot Street, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008, 7:00 p.m.
FREE
David Bacon will share first-hand observations on how the United States' trade and economic policy sets off a domino effect which ends in high immigration rates. In seeking to create a favorable investment climate for large corporations, socioeconomic conditions are created that displace communities and set migration into motion. Trade policy and immigration are intimately linked, Bacon argues, and are, in fact, elements of a single economic system. Bacon powerfully traces the development of illegal status back to slavery and shows the human cost of treating the indispensable labor of millions of migrants—and the migrants themselves—as illegal. He also analyzes NAFTA's corporate tilt as a cause of displacement and migration from Mexico and shows how criminalizing immigrant labor benefits employers.
Award-winning photojournalist David Bacon spent thirty years as a labor organizer and immigrant rights activist. His articles appear in The Nation, American Prospect, Dollars & Sense, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Bacon hosts a weekly radio show on KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California.
David's new book "Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants," will be available for purchase. This event is free and open to the public.
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Visit the Jamaica Plain Forum at
http://www.jamaicaplainforum.org/
http://www.myspace.com/jamaicaplainforum
Labels: David Bacon, globalization, immigrants, Jamaica Plain Forum, labor organizing
We're Not All Friedmanites Now
From Thomas Frank's WSJ column last week, unrest at the University of Chicago over the soon-to-be unveiled Milton Friedman Institute:We're Not All Friedmanites Now
By Thomas Frank
Once upon a time there was a master narrative, and a neater little theory-of-everything you never did see. In its 19th century heyday it rationalized the having of the haves and commanded the deference of the have-nots; it spoke from the pulpit, the newspaper and the professor's chair.
Its name was market, and to slight it in even the smallest way was to take your professional life into your hands. In 1895, the economist Edward Bemis found this out when he was dismissed from John D. Rockefeller's University of Chicago thanks to his "attitude on public utility and labor questions," as he put it in a letter to Upton Sinclair. Professors elsewhere paid the same price for intellectual independence.
But the orthodoxy lost its power of life and death. Academia developed protections for scholars who pursued unpopular ideas. Rockefeller's University of Chicago went on to become the pre-eminent research university in the land, a temple of free inquiry and a magnet for Nobel prizes. I studied there and loved its atmosphere of endless debate.
-snip-
What ought to alarm us, though, is the Milton Friedman Institute's apparent plan to transform free-market orthodoxy into a bankable intellectual product. What is evidently going to reel in the dollars here is not research but ideology.
Labels: Free Market, Milton Friedman, University of Chicago
Obama Tilt Toward Rubinomics
This is from Bloomberg.com; hat-tip to Doug Henwood of Left Business Observer.Obama Tilt Toward Rubinomics Stirs Warning From Organized Labor
By Kristin Jensen and Matthew Benjamin
Aug. 18 (Bloomberg) -- AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka delivers a slap at former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin in a slide show exhorting union members to back Democrat Barack Obama for president.
Blaming unfettered global trade and inadequate government regulation for lost manufacturing jobs and a staggering economy, Trumka's presentation cautions that "it will do us little good if, when the next Democrat moves into the White House, Wall Street takes command of our country's economic policy."
Trumka leaves no doubt that the rebuke is aimed at Rubin, Wall Street's most prominent Democrat. It's "hard to tell the difference" between Rubin and Republican Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the presentation says. Trumka's critique reflects the concern among organized-labor officials that Rubin and like- minded Democrats may win the behind-the-scenes battle to shape Obama's economic thinking.
"I'm hearing Rubin's name more and more associated with the campaign's economic policy," says James Torrey, a top Obama fundraiser and chief executive officer of New York-based Torrey Associates LLC, a hedge-fund investor.
Rubin, who became chairman of Citigroup Inc.'s executive committee after leaving President Bill Clinton's Cabinet, represents policy priorities that would favor free trade and more emphasis on deficit-cutting budget discipline if Obama beats Republican John McCain on Nov. 4. Meanwhile, Trumka and his boss, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, are pushing trade policies that would protect U.S. industries, universal health care, and spending on highway construction and other projects that would create union jobs.
Read the rest of the article.
Labels: Doug Henwood, labor, Left Business Observer, Richard Trumka, Robert Rubin
Bill Black on McCain on Fox News
William K. Black, who wrote the cover story of our November/December issue, (Mis)Understanding a Banking Industry in Transition, was interviewed for a Fox News special on John McCain's role in the "Keating Five" scandal, which was the major political fallout of the savings & loan scandal. The special will air at 8pm on Tuesday, August 19th (but check your local listings to see exactly when it will air.) He was also interviewed for a CNN special on the same topic.McCain's central (negative) role in that scandal has been underreported in this year's presidential election, so this coverage by Fox and CNN is most welcome, especially if Bill Black can provide his perspectives. As we mentioned on the D&S blog in February, Bill played a central (positive) role in that scandal:
Black was deputy director of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation when McCain, along with the rest of the "Keating Five" (Sens. Alan Cranston, Dennis DeConcini, John Glenn, and Don Riegle) tried to influence regulators on behalf of Charles Keating, chairman of the then-failing Lincoln Savings & Loan. Black was one of the regulators the senators tried to influence; Edwin J. Gray, chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, was another. Keating had donated to all the senators' campaigns, and McCain's wife, Cindy, whom the Times describes as "the heiress to a beer fortune" in Arizona, had "joined Mr. Keating in investing in an Arizona shopping mall."
The collapse of the Lincoln S&L cost taxpayers approximately $3.4 billion; the S&L crisis as a whole cost taxpayers more than $124 billion, according to the General Accounting Office.
(Side note: the scandal did not end the careers of any of the Keating Five; Cranston, DeConcini, and Riegle all served out their terms; Glenn and McCain both stood for re-election and won. Perversely, after his senate term ended, DeConcini was appointed by President Clinton to the the Board of Directors of the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, aka "Freddie Mac".)
Click here and here for earlier postings on Bill Black, McCain, and the S&L crisis.
The Fox special will apparently be a one-hour documentary on McCain that "looks at the character and conduct of the candidate, both pro and con"; a subsequent one-hour Fox News documentary on Obama will examine "the tragedies of his early years, growing up with his grandparents and going to college, his job as a community organizer and later as a Harvard Law School student and Illinois legislator," according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Labels: Bill Black, CNN, Fox News, Freddie Mac, john mccain, Keating Five, savings and loan crisis, William K. Black
The Great Crash of 2008, by Mason Gaffney
This crash is The Big One; it has signs of becoming a Category 5. How do we know? We've "been there and done that" so many times before, roughly every 18 years over the last 800 or more. Major wars and, rarely, plagues have broken the rhythm, along with the little ice age, reformation and counter-reformation, political revolutions and reactions, the rise of nation-states, the enclosure movement, the age of exploration, massive European imports of stolen American gold, the scientific and industrial revolutions, the Crusades, Mongol and Turkish invasions, and other upheavals. Yet, the endogenous cycle keeps returning, as soon as we find peace, and economic life returns to its even tenors. What President Warren Harding famously called "normalcy" soon evolved into another boom and a shocking bust, as so often before. Calm and routine prosperity has never been man's lot for long: it somehow leads to its own downfall, cycle after cycle.
Follow the link to read on...
John Miller on the Radio
Economist and Dollars & Sense columnist John Miller is on the radio--on the program Justice or Just Us? on KUCI in Irvine, Calif. He's talking about the recent GAO report showing that many corporations pay no taxes at all in the United States.John's latest Up Against the Wall Street Journal column, just posted to the D&S website, is on cap-and-trade programs: "For the Wall Street Journal's editors, fear of a bigger government outweighs the fear of a warmer planet."
Labels: cap-and-trade, corporate taxes, GAO, John Miller, Wall Street Journal
Economists' Letter on Offshore Drilling
See below for information about how to add your signature to this letter.Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
House Minority Leader John Boehner
Dear Senators Reid and McConnell and Representatives Pelosi and Boehner,
As economists, we write out of concern that you are being pressured to lift the Congressional ban on most oil drilling off our coasts, despite the fact that this would do nothing in the short term and almost nothing in the long term to reduce gas prices. Simpler measures that don't threaten our environment would do much more.
The federal government's Energy Information Administration projects that this would have no impact on gas prices in the near-term since it will be close to a decade before the first oil could be extracted. The EIA projects production would reach 200,000 barrels a day at peak production. It describes this amount as too small to have any significant effect on oil prices, even when production is at its peak. [1]
If the US had raised auto fuel efficiency standards between 1985-2005 by a quarter of the amount it raised them annually from 1980-1985, instead of leaving them virtually unchanged, the result would roughly have been the equivalent of 3.3 million barrels of oil per day in new production,16 times the projected impact of offshore drilling. [2] It is reasonable to assume that modest increases in fuel efficiency in the future would have a similar effect. If we negotiated an agreement with Iran that led to the lifting of US sanctions, oil production in Iran could increase 1-2 million barrels a day. That would be 5-10 times the projected impact of drilling off our coasts.
U.S. oil companies are not doing all they can do boost production. In May, the Washington Post reported that Exxon had spent $8 billion buying back shares in the first quarter as a way to boost the value of the stock for shareholders. That far exceeded the company's $5.5 billion capital spending budget.[3] In 2006, Exxon spent $25 billion buying back its stock, again more than its capital spending budget. [4] The industry spent $52.4 billion on stock buybacks in 2006, nearly double the amount in 2005. [5]
It would be far better to pursue modest conservation and negotiations with Iran, having the effect of bringing 20-25 times as much oil on the market, rather than endanger tourism, fishing, and beaches on our coasts for a long-term effect on gas prices that we won't even notice.
Thank you for your consideration of our concerns.
Michael Perelman, Economics Dept., California State University, Chico
James Devine, Economics Dept., Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles
Hadi Salehi Esfahani, Economics Dept. University of Illinois, Urbana
Mark Weisbrot, Center for Economic and Policy Research, Washington
Rudy Fichtenbaum, Economics Dept., Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio
Michael Brun, Economics Dept., Illinois State University, Bloomington-Normal
Hank Leland, Research Analyst, SEIU, Washington
Edward S. Herman, Finance Department, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Jeffrey Stewart, Economics Dept., University of Cincinnati
Laurence Shute, Economics Dept., California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
References:
[1] Annual Energy Outlook 2007 with Projections to 2030, Energy Information Administration, February 2007.
[2] Offshore Drilling and Energy Conservation: The Relative Impact on Gas Prices, Dean Baker and Nichole Szembrot, Center for Economic and Policy Research, June 2008.
[3] "Up $10.9 Billion, Exxon Worries About New Tax," Steven Mufson, Washington Post, May 2 2008.
[4] "Higher Oil Prices Help Exxon Again Set Record Profit, " Steven
Mufson, Washington Post, February 2, 2007.
[5] "Big Companies Put Record Sums Into Buybacks," Ian McDonald,. Wall Street Journal, June 12, 2006.
Please send signatures to naiman--at--justforeignpolicy.org, with subject
line: sign economists letter. Please include some affiliation broadly
consistent with the notion of "economists' letter."
Deadline: end of day Friday August 15.
Robert Naiman
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
naiman--at--justforeignpolicy.org
Labels: offshore drilling, oil, oil prices
The Beijing Olympics by the Numbers
We just posted a web-only article on the Beijing Olympics that explains why global corporations are salivating while more than 1.5 million people have been displaced. The Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions has documented the massive displacement that "mega-events" like the Olympic Games regularly cause, but the Beijing games have far outpaced its predecessors.Please also check out Julie Hollar's excellent article, Carrying a Torch for Anti-China Protests, from the most recent issue of Extra!. "For once, mainstream media have found an anti-government protest to embrace," Hollar explains. The same media outlets that barely registered antiwar protests over the past few years fell over themselves to cover the most minute details of the pro-Tibet protests interrupting the Olympic torch relay. Why? Because China is an "official enemy." (The whole issue is great--but Extra! always is, ioho.)
Labels: Beijing, COHRE, Extra/FAIR, Olympics
Now Wall Street Wants Your Pension, Too
JPMorganChase, Citi, Cerberus, and Morgan Stanley are among the firms lobbying Washington to let them take over and run corporate pension funds.[Hat-tip to Ira Glazer on lbo-talk for alerting us to this article.]
by Matthew Goldstein | BusinessWeek | August 8, 2008
The folks who brought you the mortgage mess and the ensuing hedge fund blowups, busted buyouts, and credit market gridlock have another bold idea: buying up and running troubled corporate pension plans. And despite the subprime fiasco, some regulators may soon embrace Wall Street's latest scheme.
The Treasury Dept. on Aug. 6 offered a blueprint for lawmakers on Capitol Hill to allow "financially strong entities in well-regulated sectors" to acquire pension plans , after the IRS ruled that the concept needed legislative approval. "The Administration's proposal says these deals should only be permitted when the acquiring entity has a higher credit-rating than the seller," says Charles Millard, director of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. (PBGC), the federal insurer of last resort of corporate pension plans. "Such a transaction creates greater security for retirees and the pension system." The issue will now, no doubt, move to Congress after the election.
In preparation for that moment, the world's biggest big investment banks, insurers, hedge funds, and private equity shops have been quietly laying the groundwork for such deals over the past year. They would be a big prize for Wall Street. The $2.3 trillion pension honey pot has $500 billion in "frozen plans" that are closed to new employees and whose benefits are capped, including those at IBM IBM, Hewlett Packard (HPQ), Verizon (VZ), and Alcoa (AA). And that figure could triple by 2012, according to consulting firm McKinsey. By managing those troubled plans, Wall Street also gains entrée to an appealing set of customers to whom it can sell a broad array of fee-generating products. "We have identified several clients who would be willing to be first to sell a plan," says Scott Macey, a senior vice-president at Aon Consulting. "But the question is, when is a good time for this?"
The concept of off-loading pension funds sounds great. For businesses it's a chance to rid themselves of struggling plans, which can weigh down a balance sheet. It's especially good timing now. New accounting rules take effect in the next year or so that will require companies to mark their pension assets to prevailing market prices each quarter—a change that could devastate some companies' profits. Meanwhile, many companies no longer want to pay for pensions, troubled or otherwise. A recent report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that most companies freeze their pension plans merely to avoid "the impact of annual contributions to their cash flows."
But the gambit to turn pensions into for-profit enterprises raises troubling questions. Critics, including some on Capitol Hill, worry that financial firms don't have workers' best interest at heart, which would put some 44 million current and future retirees at risk. "We think it's just a terrible idea," says Karen Friedman, policy director for advocacy group Pensions Rights Center. "In the wake of the subprime crisis, it would be crazy to allow financial institutions to manage these plans."
Read the rest of the article.
Labels: pensions, subprime crisis, Wall Street