Category: Uncategorized

It’s a monetarist bubble that is popping under the global economy argues Asia Times economist Henry CK Liu, and throwing future debt into past debt is only going to result in a decade of hard times.

From Liu’s point of view, 2008 was a year mis-spent. First there was complacency and denial. Then, future debts were applied directly to past debts in a colossal waste of wealth and opportunity.

In the end, says Liu, the average taxpayer is being forced to assume “risks” made by financial elites. In return, the same elites will demand leaner capital budgets. The result? Average workers will soon be financing their own unemployment.

At some point, says Liu, emergency attention needs to turn to average worker wages. This is where the battle for economic health will be lost or won.

On the supply side of the argument, as we hear daily from CNBC, the “bailout” funds are being tossed onto assets that will some day recover their worth, keeping the tax burden low.

Since banks are now asking for even more billions, it seems sensible that taxpayers should demand assets in return for any money spent upon a banking institution. If worse comes to worst, banking functions should be nationalized.

Trillion dollar priorities are being reordered at a rapid rate these days, and workers are feeling the pain of being left outside. Yet as Henry George very sensibly observed, there is no good reason why busy people cannot be merged into an economy where each busy person helps to meet some other busy person’s needs.

Henry CK Liu puts it this way:

When unemployment of 6% of willing workers is accepted as structural in an economic system, the fault is with the system, just as if a hospital accepts an annual mortality rate of 6% of its curable patients as structural, the hospital’s operation needs to be reexamined. The fundamental flaw in market capitalism is its inherent failure to deliver full employment as a social goal.

The hard times are already hitting our Texas neighborhoods, and everyone who knows anything about it only promises that times will soon get harder.

Against the hard times we have voices that can demand: keep us working together for the things that all of us need. The average worker can afford to pay for a program like that.–gm

By Nick Braune
Mid-Valley Town Crier
by permission

The Border Patrol is planning on doing some aerial spraying (herbicides) near Laredo, Texas. Because Laredo and the Mexican city across the river from it, Nuevo Laredo, each have about 350,000 people (not exactly one of Texas’ sparsely populated county areas), concern about the spraying has been growing.

However, the Border Patrol says it is not going to be spraying people, it is simply intending to spray a herbicide over a one mile-long stretch of unpopulated land, the purpose being to kill a tall plant (carrizo cane, similar to bamboo) which has been growing wildly there. The Border Patrol thinks it is too easy for undocumented people to hide in the carrizo where the Patrol does not have a clean line of sight.

The Border Patrol argues that spraying the carriso is a practical, common sense, solution, although quite a few people in the Laredo area, on both sides of the border, are not convinced it is necessary and are not staying quiet. Logically, the burden of proof falls heavily on the Border Patrol — they are not spraying in a desolate region and the spray must be pretty powerful to knock out these bamboo-like shoots. The stretch lies between the Laredo Railroad Bridge and the Laredo Community College, directly across from a populated area in Mexico, according to an article in Frontera NorteSur on March 21st.

According to the Frontera article, the manager for Nuevo Laredo’s water utility said that the Border Patrol advised his office to start turning off water pumps when the spraying takes place. The fact that the Border Patrol has warned the Mexican side that it should not pull water from the Rio while the spraying is taking place made a water manager for Nuevo Laredo raise the obvious question: The utility manager is quoted as saying, “If there is no problem, why are they asking us to do this?” And in a phone interview for this column, Jay Johnson-Castro, the Executive Director of the Rio Grande International Studies Center at Laredo Community College, said that the U.S. authorities are actually suggesting the Mexicans not draw off any river water for a day or two after the spraying as a precaution.

Johnson-Castro was at a meeting of the city council in Nuevo Laredo where they voted 20 to 0 to call on the U.S. to stop the spraying. No doubt many people felt there was a danger and felt confused about the necessity of the project: if the carrizo cane is such a problem, why doesn’t the Border Patrol just hire some crews to cut it down? The Border Patrol has two million dollars for the project, according to Johnson-Castro.)

Johnson-Castro, in the phone interview, said bluntly, “The Border Patrol has not been upfront.” They have been talking about “eradication” of the carrizo cane for some time, but they were not telling many people that they were intending aerial spraying with herbicides. “Back in July, they advertized for one day that they were carrying out an environmental assessment. People just didn’t know this was being discussed.”

Later, according to Johnson-Castro, government people said that they had done an environmental assessment, although the city council members and the city’s environmental department personnel told Johnson-Castro that they hadn’t even seen the report. “The environmental assessment process was abused.” And as far as Mexico goes, says Johnson-Castro, “I myself sent out the initial warning to the health and water departments in Nuevo Laredo and Tamaulipas. If I hadn’t done that, I wonder if the Border Patrol, now sending warnings on the water, would have ever informed them.”

The chemical being used is Imazapyr. Versions of this are made by BASF and Monsanto. Is it safe for people, plants, animals, water? Well, chemical safety standards vary by country. It is labeled as relatively safe in the U.S., but Mexican regulators label it as more toxic and dangerous. And the Europeans have virtually banned it for these defoliation uses, according to Johnson-Castro.

How does the matter stand at present? An association of citizens called Barrio De Colores, composed of residents of the barrios El Cuatro and De Colores, whose homes are near the proposed Border Patrol pilot project site for helicopter spraying, filed suit against the Department of Homeland Security to prevent the planned action. It was filed one day before the March 25th starting date for the spraying. A judge has responded and the spraying is temporarily being held off. This may be extremely important in the long run because the Laredo spraying is intended as a “pilot project” for several stretches of the river, Great Bend to Brownsville.

(Just some thoughts-in-progress. In the above discussion, I didn’t connect this arrogant Border Patrol spraying plan to the increased militarization of the Border. But President Obama and Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano have just this week pushed — good grief — for more Feds down here on the Border. And they are deliberately, it seems, giving mixed (friendly/unfriendly) messages to Mexico and seem to want to run Mexico’s anti-drug campaign.)

As the politicos of Washington, Dallas, and Austin scurry to keep the capital infrastructure from falling down (see notes below) the Bush administration today published new Agriculture rules that labor advocates say will roll back rights of farm workers to bargain for higher pay and better working conditions.

“The Bush Administration has released midnight regulation changes to slash wages, make it easier to hire foreign workers, and reduce worker protections under the H-2A agricultural guestworker program,” argues a summary report from Farm Worker Justice [in pdf format].

DOL [Department of Labor] has changed the recruitment requirements so that employers claiming a labor shortage will not have to engage in meaningful recruitment of U.S. farmworkers and the state job service
agencies will not be permitted to be effective in referring job applicants to H-2A employers.
The DOL has decided that H-2A employers need not engage in positive recruitment in known areas of farm labor supply if those areas have agricultural employers looking for farmworkers.

Despite their claim to be free market supporters, the Administration’s officials are by regulation ending competition among employers. Furthermore, DOL is withdrawing the obligation to engage in the same kind and degree of recruitment for US workers as it does for foreign workers. This allows employers to claim that they can’t find any US workers, while not making any real effort, while at the same time engaging in huge recruitment campaigns in Mexico, Guatemala, Thailand and other nations in the effort to find exploitable guestworkers.

The new Bush plan drives back protections along two fronts, say advocates. On the one hand, the new rules will make it easier for employers to sidestep requirements to first exhaust local labor supply.

In a report titled “Litany of Abuses” the Farmworker Justice organization recalls how agricultural employers can make deceptive commitments to local labor as a pretext for claiming that foreign workers need to be imported [in pdf format].

Meanwhile, the new rules make it more likely that so-called guest workers will be more easily subjected to labor rights abuses such as summary firings, lowered wages, and poor working conditions.

The Dallas Fed chief today made fond references to historical lessons learned. In labor rights also we find that the steel gears of the business cycle act in familiar ways. Hard times crush down against the lowest rungs of labor at home and abroad even as an almighty determination is applied to lift the axles of global capital from the muck of its own discharge.–gm

See also: the Harvesting Justice commentary by Barb Howe.

By Greg Moses

When Art Laffer and the Dallas Fed converge on message, who can doubt that Texas elites are listening to what they most want to hear? In a 2008 review of Texas taxes, Reagan-era supply-side guru Laffer co-authored a report that ranked Texas seventh in the nation on an “Education Freedom Index” that tested for “vouchers, tuition credits, and corporate tax-deductible scholarship programs.” Yet, seventh place is no reason for celebration argued the “Laffer Report”:

“The U.S. rankings are clustered so closely together that a high score, on a curve, still means the state is a long way from potential levels of education freedom. If other states implement choice systems, Texas’ relative rank would fall precipitously. Texas should not see its high rank as a reason to celebrate; rather as evidence that Texas is making important first steps in a crucial and lengthy reform process.” (p. 24: pdf format)

On Friday the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas agreed that 2009 will be no year for higher education complacency:

“The Texas higher education system faces many challenges in enrolling students from low- and moderate-income households. The state has a low overall graduation rate and, compared with other states, one of the smallest percentages of college-age population enrolled in college. A recent study by the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Center for Higher Education suggests that the state’s public university system may be promoting a growing elitist society where only those students from families with considerable assets have access to the state’s top universities. In the U.S. as a whole, about 35 percent of American undergraduates receive federal Pell Grants, need-based grants to low-income students. Texas’ top-ranked universities (ranked by U.S. News & World Report), and those that receive the most state resources, have a significantly smaller percentage of students receiving Pell Grants.”

The Dallas Fed posts a graph of the “top Texas universities” and their lack of educational freedom as measured on a Pell Grant scale.

Of course, the ideological packaging for Laffer and the Dallas Fed precludes any outright call for more government spending. The “Laffer Report” favors an environment of low wages, low taxes, and less government. The Dallas Fed is touting “asset building” for low income families. If public money is spent, it would be used to “match” higher education savings accounts for qualified low-income families (see Smart Savings Accounts). Banks would get the money first.

Between the two publications we get a call for improved bootstraps, the better for the poor to lift themselves higher. And so far as that goes, who could oppose them? But neither report tells us that the hurdles in this race for educational freedom are getting higher by the year as elite incomes move further and further ahead of low- and middle-income Texans, and as tuition increases cater to the elites who don’t need to bring Pell Grants with them.

When the history of the 21st Century is written, it will record early years when Texas enjoyed an infusion of young talent from the South. What Texas did with that bounty of youthful labor and talent is what the next chapter will tell.