Dog Gone at Penigma
Dog Gone at Penigma's Journal
Another example of the high cost of low prices - in lives
Those low prices at WalMart do not come as a result of happy elves in cozy Northpole workshops working amidst candy cane pillars and leisurely hot cocoa breaks with fresh baked cookies made by Mrs. Claus.
Those low prices result from other people being exploited and even killed in other countries, keeping their wages at a poverty level, and artificially forcing down our compensation for hard work here too.
It is an illusion which is a kind of shell game, a trick, that puts money in the pockets of the rich, but ultimately takes that money out of our pockets too... and which kills people in foreign countries. We used to have these kinds of tragedies in the United States, before we improved our own labor standards, like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire back in 1911.
News accounts indicate that when the fire broke out, and workers wanted to leave, they were ordered back to work, and prevented from evacuating before the fire advanced. That was reported in the 1911 fire as well; and in both fires, women jumped to their deaths when they could not escape the flames.
Shouldn't we have come further than this in 101 years?
A hundred and one years later......we haven't learned from those mistakes, or we have forgotten how bad it is when labor is paid to little, valued too little, exploited and treated as expendable, which is what this is. The people who died in this fire are human beings, every bit as much as those American women who died in 1911. We need to find the same outrage in our hearts for these people. That outrage, to be sincere, means not participating in the exploitation of low prices that come at this cost in human life and suffering. Don't trust the assurances that these factories are safe or humane; they are not. They are not paid fairly, they work in horrible and unsafe conditions, men, women and children, but especially women.
from CBS news and the AP:
Bangladesh fire kills 112 at Wal-Mart supplier
Garment factory had received 'medium risk' assessment in 2011
A fire engulfed a garment factory outside Bangladesh's capital Dhaka, trapping many workers and killing at least 112 people in the building without emergency exits.
Authorities said the fire started on the ground floor late Saturday and spread upward, cutting off staircases and preventing workers' escape. Some survivors were rescued from the eight-storey building's roof.
The building was a factory operated by Tazreen Fashions Ltd., a subsidiary of the Tuba Group, which supplies Wal-Mart, Ikea and other major retailers in the U.S. and Europe.
An army employee inspects the burnt interior of the factory in Savar.An army employee inspects the burnt interior of the factory in Savar. (Andrew Biraj/Reuters)By Sunday morning, firefighters had recovered 100 bodies, fire department Operations Director Maj. Mohammad Mahbub told The Associated Press. He said another 12 people who had suffered injuries after jumping from the building to escape the fire later died at hospitals. The death toll could rise as the search for victims was continuing, he said.
Local media reported that up to 124 people were killed in the fire. The cause of the blaze was not immediately clear, and authorities have ordered an investigation.
Army soldiers and paramilitary border guards were deployed to help police keep the situation under control as thousands of onlookers and anxious relatives of the factory workers gathered at the scene, Mahbub said. He would not say how many people were still missing.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2012/11/25/bangladesh-garment-factory-fire.html
sad but all too true - so you have to ask why ...
some people still believe this stuff, under all the different names it has had, dating back to when it helped create the problems of the Gilded Age.
cross-posted from penigma.blogspot.com:
A smart t-shirt
While I generally reject bumper sticker thinking, this is longer, and summarizes the reality very well.
I was dragged as a kid to hear economists and market / investment analysts (stock market) for years. Nothing that I am hearing from the right makes sense as demonstrable, proven effective economics. It seems to be theory that the economic illiterate take as gospel when it is preached to them by the right wing propaganda machine. They don't fact check it, they don't question it, they proceed with the logic that no one can create a job or start a business unless they are already rich, as if that conveys some sort of magical powers.
The reality is that people who have ideas start up businesses all the time, and that large or small, business expansion tends to occur using borrowed money rather than being fully financed by the start up individual. What is absolutely necessary for any success is a market, customers, buyers, clientele. Those are what you get with people who are paid adequately. Supply side economics do not work. Demand side economics does.
An interesting analysis of Hayek, Friedman and their contribution to modern conservative ecoomics
As I read the thinking from the right on economics, and in particular the references to Hayek and the Austrian School, I frequently wonder just how well those who name drop those two names really know and understand the totality of their thinking. But then I also find that to be true of those who claim to be supporters of Ayn Rand. Too often, too many on the right seem to have only the most shallow knowledge of the actual works of those they claim to follow or promote.
The following book review from the New Republic seems to come to some of those same conclusions.
From the New Republic:
Hayek, Friedman, and the Illusions of Conservative Economics
The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression
By Angus Burgin
(Harvard University Press, 303 pp., $29.95)
(Hayek on the left)
JUST AS I WAS wondering how to start this review, along came the Sunday New York Times Magazine with a short article by Adam Davidson with the title “Made in Austria: Will Friedrich von Hayek be the Tea Party’s Karl Marx?” One Tea Party activist reported that his group’s goal is to fill Congress with Hayekians. This project is unlikely to go smoothly if the price of admission includes an extensive reading of Hayek’s writings. As Davidson remarks, some of Hayek’s ideas would not go down well at all with the American far right: among them is a willingness to entertain a national health care program, and even a state-provided basic income for the poor.
The source of confusion here is that there was a Good Hayek and a Bad Hayek. The Good Hayek was a serious scholar who was particularly interested in the role of knowledge in the economy (and in the rest of society). Since knowledge—about technological possibilities, about citizens’ preferences, about the interconnections of these, about still more—is inevitably and thoroughly decentralized, the centralization of decisions is bound to generate errors and then fail to correct them. The consequences for society can be calamitous, as the history of central planning confirms. That is where markets come in. All economists know that a system of competitive markets is a remarkably efficient way to aggregate all that knowledge while preserving decentralization.
But the Good Hayek also knew that unrestricted laissez-faire is unworkable. It has serious defects: successful actors reach for monopoly power, and some of them succeed in grasping it; better-informed actors can exploit the relatively ignorant, creating an inefficiency in the process; the resulting distribution of income may be grossly unequal and widely perceived as intolerably unfair; industrial market economies have been vulnerable to excessively long episodes of unemployment and underutilized capacity, not accidentally but intrinsically; environmental damage is encouraged as a way of reducing private costs—the list is long. Half of Angus Burgin’s book is about the Good Hayek’s attempts to formulate and to propagate a modified version of laissez-faire that would work better and meet his standards for a liberal society. (Hayek and his friends were never able to settle on a name for this kind of society: “liberal” in the European tradition was associated with bad old Manchester liberalism, and neither “neo-liberal” nor “libertarian” seemed to be satisfactory.)
The Bad Hayek emerged when he aimed to convert a wider public. Then, as often happens, he tended to overreach, and to suggest more than he had legitimately argued. The Road to Serfdom was a popular success but was not a good book. Leaving aside the irrelevant extremes, or even including them, it would be perverse to read the history, as of 1944 or as of now, as suggesting that the standard regulatory interventions in the economy have any inherent tendency to snowball into “serfdom.” The correlations often run the other way. Sixty-five years later, Hayek’s implicit prediction is a failure, rather like Marx’s forecast of the coming “immiserization of the working class.”
http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/110196/hayek-friedman-and-the-illusions-conservative-economics#
The Demos Report
I was impressed with the research and conclusions of the report done by Demos, intro below:
Retail's Hidden Potential: How Raising Wages Would Benefit Workers, the Industry and the Overall Economy
November 19, 2012 Catherine Ruetschlin
With more than 15 million workers in the sector, and leverage over workplace standards across the supply chain, retail wields enormous influence on Americans’ standard of living and the nation’s economic outlook. It connects producers and consumers, workers and jobs, and local social and economic development to the larger US economy. And over the next decade, retail will be the second largest source of new jobs in the United States.1
Given the vital role retail plays in our economy, the question of whether employees in the sector are compensated at a level that promotes American prosperity is of national importance. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the typical retail sales person earns just $21,000 per year. Cashiers earn even less, bringing home an annual income of just $18,500.2
The continued dominance of low wages in this sector weakens our nation’s capacity to boost living standards and economic growth. Retail’s low-wage employment means that even Americans who work full-time fail to make ends meet, and growth slows because too few families have enough remaining in each paycheck to contribute to the broader economy.
Tracking the emerging effectiveness and extent of the protests today - Black Friday - I wrote about it here:
[link:http://penigma.blogspot.com/2012/11/where-i-am-not-going-today-is-shopping.html|
Where I am NOT going today is shopping at WalMart]
It appears Minnesota will be part of the larger national effort to gain social justice and a living wage from WalMart. I'm not sure for whom I have the greater sympathy - those who spent long hours in single-digit wind chill weather for cheap stuff, crowding into stores with other combative shoppers, or the people who have to assist them in those stores, or who are standing outside to protest.
The most worthwhile effort seems to be those opposing greed, not acting on it.
For an estimated/ approx. $0.15 per shopping trip, it is estimated in a recent study by Demos that we could simultaneously improve the economy, pay retail workers a living wage so that the government would not need to subsidize the profits that go to the Walton family as just one more example of extracting wealth from the 99% for the 1%. AND requiring a living wage, along with the provisions of the ACA / 'Obamacare' would also ultimately benefit business as well.
However because of the focus by business on short term maximum gain that extracts every possible profit, at the expense of long term benefit and sustainability, that is something that will have to be brought about by regulation, rather than voluntary participation. I am not optimistic that protests alone, no matter how widely supported, will overcome that short term greed driven thinking.
What you do on Friday makes a difference
There are things I like and things I do not like about the Obama administration; but one thing I give a standing ovation to is his efforts to increase manufacturing in the U.S. Now we need to give a priority to buying American made, to complete the process.
NO New Gilded Age, Thank You...
crossposted from penigma.blogspot.com:
No Second Gilded Age for America!
A little economic and art history lesson combined, as an intellectual alternative to football, institutionalized gluttony, and glorified shopping greed promoted under the guise of Christian capitalism.
Mitt's on R-money represented the policies of those who would accelerate the redistribution aka class warfare that extracts money from the 99% and relocates it to the 1%. This is evidenced by the grotesque excessive compensation without corresponding merit or accomplishment, that has been paid to the 'C-class' (CEOs CFOs COOs etc.) and other executives in contrast to increased labor productivity that has gone unrewarded, replaced with stagnating or declining compensation. Add in taxation and other policies which create an unequal playing field, and billionaires who try to buy elections, effectively owning politicians at all levels of government. Add in the vulture capitalism of political wannabes like Mitt Romney, and you have a recipe for a repetition of an era of our history that was exemplified by destructive and destabilizing boom and bust cycles, brutal attempts at union busting, and the conspicuous consumption of a few in contrast to the widespread and increasing impoverishment of the majority, in place of the American Dream and the possibility for upward mobility.
Also associated with the era were rampant swindles that eventually gave rise to the term we now know as a Ponzi scheme in the 1920s, named for Charles Ponzi, although similar scams and swindles using the same blueprint occurred in the era between the Civil War and WW II. American financial regulation arose to curb the excesses and outright swindles of the era that contributed tremendously to the financial collapse that resulted in the Great Depression. Those who seek a new gilded age want to abolish such regulation in the name of being 'business friendly', a euphemism for unfettered class warfare. Those who want to avert such disasters consistently seek regulation that keeps business honest, maintains a fair and equitable even playing field for competition, and tend to protect equally the consumer, the investor, and the small innovator from corporate greed, unfair practices and unfair competition.
In this Gilded Age as it was called, a term coined by Mark Twain to represent gaudy wealth as represented by gold leaf and gold plate, overlaying the social problems rotting underneath, an illustrator who worked mainly in pen and ink became internationally famous, Charles Dana Gibson, creator of the Gibson Girl(s), a series of iconic illustrations over several decades of American women who were both beautiful and intelligent, idealized among other things, for marrying into European aristocracy. Real life examples of these beautiful women of wealth include the mother of Sir Winston Churchill, Lady Randolph Churchill (nee Jeanette Jerome) and the model for my blogging icon, Virginie Gautreau (nee Avegno) who posed for famous artists, including the portrait of Madame X by expat American painter John Singer Sargent.
I recognized the illustration in the image below as a particularly well-known Gibson illustration, circa 1900. Now women have the right to vote, and while still paid less than men, we have more opportunity to aspire to success than we did in the Gibson Girl era -- although the right wing war on women would send us back to those bad old days where all women could aspire to was to be the arm candy / trophy wife of powerful and wealthy men, not powerful in their own right. I am truly thankful as a woman that I will not ever have to say 'President Romney' OR Vice President Ryan.
Four Score and Seven Years Ago.....the 149th Anniversary of the Gettysburg Address
cross posted from penigma.blogspot.com
Monday, November 19, 2012
Today in history 149 years ago - the Gettysburg Address
This anniversary could not be more appropriate as ignorant, shallow, foolish people bring up stupid issues of secession. Shame on them, and never more so than on this anniversary. How appropriate that it was Texas v. White that decided that states may not leave the union by simple declaration - or petition, but that rather in the same way that a state had the approval of the other states to join the Union, they must have the formal consent of those other states that form the United States to leave that Union.
From that decision, by way of Wikipedia:
The Union of the States never was a purely artificial and arbitrary relation. It began among the Colonies, and grew out of common origin, mutual sympathies, kindred principles, similar interests, and geographical relations. It was confirmed and strengthened by the necessities of war, and received definite form and character and sanction from the Articles of Confederation. By these, the Union was solemnly declared to 'be perpetual.' And when these Articles were found to be inadequate to the exigencies of the country, the Constitution was ordained 'to form a more perfect Union.' It is difficult to convey the idea of indissoluble unity more clearly than by these words. What can be indissoluble if a perpetual Union, made more perfect, is not?[7]
When, therefore, Texas became one of the United States, she entered into an indissoluble relation. All the obligations of perpetual union, and all the guaranties of republican government in the Union, attached at once to the State. The act which consummated her admission into the Union was something more than a compact; it was the incorporation of a new member into the political body. And it was final. The union between Texas and the other States was as complete, as perpetual, and as indissoluble as the union between the original States. There was no place for reconsideration or revocation, except through revolution or through consent of the States.[7]
Considered therefore as transactions under the Constitution, the ordinance of secession, adopted by the convention and ratified by a majority of the citizens of Texas, and all the acts of her legislature intended to give effect to that ordinance, were absolutely null. They were utterly without operation in law. The obligations of the State, as a member of the Union, and of every citizen of the State, as a citizen of the United States, remained perfect and unimpaired. It certainly follows that the State did not cease to be a State, nor her citizens to be citizens of the Union. If this were otherwise, the State must have become foreign, and her citizens foreigners. The war must have ceased to be a war for the suppression of rebellion, and must have become a war for conquest and subjugation.[7]
The authority for the performance of the first had been found in the power to suppress insurrection and carry on war; for the performance of the second, authority was derived from the obligation of the United States to guarantee to every State in the Union a republican form of government. The latter, indeed, in the case of a rebellion which involves the government of a State and for the time excludes the National authority from its limits, seems to be a necessary complement to the former.[7]
It is not necessary to attempt any exact definitions within which the acts of such a State government must be treated as valid or invalid. It may be said, perhaps with sufficient accuracy, that acts necessary to peace and good order among citizens, such for example, as acts sanctioning and protecting marriage and the domestic relations, governing the course of descents, regulating the conveyance and transfer of property, real and personal, and providing remedies for injuries to person and estate, and other similar acts, which would be valid if emanating from a lawful government must be regarded in general as valid when proceeding from an actual, though unlawful, government, and that acts in furtherance or support of rebellion against the United States, or intended to defeat the just rights of citizens, and other acts of like nature, must, in general, be regarded as invalid and void.[7]
http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSb5d76x5tJJrj1mUjTpZPaJTF8UU-NBVHDltHrvAZaRxNCQFbDus9iiT9iGg
Address Delivered at the Dedication of the Cemetery at Gettysburg
Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
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