Economics – Page 11

The Mortgage Crisis: Blame the Brown and Black People

Ann Coulter says that the mortgage crisis is caused by “affirmative action.” That is, efforts by the Clinton administration to prevent racial discrimination in lending led to a situation where:

Instead of looking at “outdated criteria,” such as the mortgage applicant’s credit history and ability to make a down payment, banks were encouraged to consider nontraditional measures of credit-worthiness, such as having a good jump shot or having a missing child named Caylee.”

Michelle Malkin blames “illegal immigrants,” a term she uses interchangeably with “Hispanics.”

And this is why we have the “assholes” tag.

Bailout FAIL. Working Americans PWNED.

It seems as though Congress and the Bush administration are nearing approval of the $700 billion Wall Street bailout package. It was clear from the get go that low- and middle-income people were not going to be the winners here, no matter the specifics of the package; some details that are coming out now about the current state of the deal are only confirming that prediction. From the Washington Post:

Democrats also made a number of concessions, abandoning demands that bankruptcy judges be empowered to modify home mortgages on primary residences for people in foreclosure. They also agreed not to dedicate a portion of any profits from the bailout program to an affordable housing fund that Republicans claimed would primarily assist social service organizations that support the Democratic Party, the official said.

The New York Times does report that the package “requires the government to use its new role as owner of distressed mortgage-backed securities to make more aggressive efforts to prevent home foreclosures,” but reaffirms that “some Democrats had sought to direct 20 percent of any such profits [from the governmental purchase of assets at prices lower than they may one day be worth] to help create affordable housing, but Republicans opposed that and demanded that all profits be returned to the Treasury.”

I don’t claim to be any expert on economics, but it seems to me that the benefit to normal working Americans (i.e. “Main Street”) will be quite limited. The whole rigmarole about taxpayers (hopefully) being repayed for the bailout through the government receiving equity stakes in rescued companies is cold comfort given that we can’t trust or expect the government to spend that recovered money on things that actually help improve the lives of low- and middle-income Americans, like education, health care, affordable housing, or welfare.

Well, I should be clear – corporate welfare is a-ok, as this entire bailout package demonstrates. But welfare for individuals and families who are just trying to survive? Nah, that kind of welfare doesn’t fly, nor does the affordable housing that might help rescue them from this collapsing housing market. So Wall Street screws working-class Americans with the sub-prime mortgage fiasco, which then backfires and contributes to Wall Street getting screwed, and then Wall Street are the only ones who can really count on being bailed out? Sounds like a big ol’ FAIL to me.

Cross-posted at AngryBrownButch

Healthy Transitions for Adolescent Girls: working session at the CGI

Yesterday I watched the live video feed of a Global Health working session at the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting. (The press can’t attend the actual working sessions, so we had to sit and watch from the press room.) A bit of background – at the CGI Annual Meetings, government, corporate, and NGO leaders get together to discuss major world issues and figure out ways to tackle them. Each day they break out into working sessions, each one devoted to one of this year’s four focus areas: Poverty Alleviation, Energy and Climate Change, Education, and Global Health. This particular Global Health working session was entitled “Healthy Transitions for Adolescent Girls,” which immediately jumped out at me as a topic of great interest, both personally and for folks at Feministe.

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Meeting Bill Clinton

(Note: details of the meeting follow my personal narrative!)

A couple of weeks ago I received an invitation to represent Feministe as a credentialed blogger at the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting, which kicks off today in NYC. I was psyched, a tad skeptical, and more than a tad nervous all at once. I’ve never been invited to participate in anything as A Blogger, much less something this high-profile. I tend to think of myself as a relatively little fish in the blogosea, and all sorts of self-doubt about whether I was really qualified for this or deserved it started running through my head.

All of this anxiety was amped up exponentially when I got the additional invite to participate in a blogger meeting with President Bill Clinton before the start of the CGI meeting. I responded to the invite right away, but then all that doubt flooded in I nearly wrote back and said never mind. I mean, really – was I good enough or important enough to deserve a spot?

But then I thought to my self, now hold up, Jack. These doubts were certainly due in part to the sorts of insecurities that everyone gets from time to time about their skills, and also due in part to some rational acknowledgment of the fact that, for sure, I haven’t busted ass posting or networking or engaging in the public discourse as much as some other folks out there, so I’m understandably gonna be smaller potatoes. But I think they were also fueled in no small part by internalization of the sort of dynamics that permeate the blogosphere as much as the rest of the world; dynamics of privilege and power that automatically lend higher degrees of traction, legitimacy, or “authority” (as Technocrati puts it) to certain voices than to others for reasons entirely apart from the quality and quantity of their thoughts and words. The kind of dynamics, for example, that led to a 2006 blogger meeting with Bill Clinton being all white (and that helped this year’s meeting be predominantly white, too.) [1] Internalization is all about oppressed people learning to help keep themselves down, so I checked myself and decided not to help out on that count.

There was also an entirely different set of misgivings: how would I reconcile my politics with this meeting?

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Can We Call It a Recession, Yet?!

The economic picture over here in “flyover country” isn’t very rosy. The overall unemployment rate in Illinois is 7.3%, but there are sections of the state where the rate is even higher. The State of Illinois is laying off 450 of its employees, and closing 11 state parks and 12 historic sites (including the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Dana-Thomas house). Illinois has been hammered with job losses, wages have stagnated (actually fallen 0.6% per year since 2000), the cost of gasoline is up (163% since 2000—and don’t get me started on hipsters moaning about how we should all just take the nonexistant bus), the cost of healthcare premiums is up (29.1% for family coverage, 19.8% for individual coverage—and those folks can count themselves “lucky” as they aren’t among the 13.9% of Illinois residents without health insurance), child care costs, utility costs, food costs—no wonder 1.4 million Illinois residents (11% of the population) and 15.3% of Illinois children are below the poverty line.

How’s the economy where you live? How is your personal economy? Have you ever checked the Senate’s Joint Economic Committee website for the state-by-state snapshots?

South Central Farm to Forever 21?

This just in: Turns out the former site of the South Central Farm – where low-income, indigenous/immigrant Latino farmers grew food in the midst of a toxic industrial area for 14 years before being evicted two summers ago in one of the saddest, most maddening examples of private business interests trumping community and environmental good that I’ve ever personally witnessed – is being developed as a Forever 21 warehouse.

You know, that clothing company that was the subject of a national boycott for exploitative labor practices a few years ago? Turns out LA’s supposedly progressive mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa – who campaigned at the then-flourishing farm several years ago and claimed to support it, only to fail to find a way to help save it despite massive community (and celebrity) support, clear social and environmental benefits, and his own celebrated promises to “green LA”—“has received nearly $1.3 million in contributions and commitments from Forever 21 and its executives over the past two years.”

The former site of the South Central Farm has sat vacant for the past two years. The South Central Farmers are now growing food at a new site about an hour outside of LA. They sell food at several farmers’ markets in the area, and they recently set up a CSA.

(Background: A few years ago, I wrote several articles about the South Central Farm for the late and lamented NewStandard, including this history of how the community has used the land since 1985.)

Enough: The Personal Politics of Resisting Capitalism

I was planning to post about this awesome project anyway, but Octogalore’s post about capitalism below made it feel especially timely, so:

If you haven’t already, you might want to spend some time at Enough, a new web project created by the marvelous Tyrone Boucher and Dean Spade to explore

how a commitment to wealth redistribution plays out in our lives: how we decide what to have, what to keep, what to give away; how we work together to build sustainable grassroots movements; how we challenge capitalism in daily, revolutionary ways.

You can read and respond to the diverse ideas of lots of different contributors, and also submit writing of your own!

(I’ve also responded to Octogalore’s post directly with a comment there.)

The Democratic Party Platform: A Feminist Document?

That’s what Dana Goldstein argues. I personally wouldn’t go so far, but I do have to say that I’m very pleasantly surprised. From Dana:

The draft of the Democratic Party platform, principally written by Obama’s Senate policy director, the estimable Karen Kornbluh, is a remarkably feminist document, one befitting of a political party that, this year, came exceedingly close to nominating a woman. In the summer of 2006, I heard Rep. Carolyn Maloney of New York speak on the Hill, lamenting that the lily livered John Kerry team had, for the first time in decades, removed support for the Equal Rights Amendment from the party platform. Well, this year the ERA is back, alongside a truly unequivocal statement of support for reproductive rights, an unprecedented statement in opposition to sexism, and new sections on equal pay, women’s economic struggles, work-family balance, and violence against women. Read the whole platform here.

It’s clear that care was taken to involve members of Hillary Clinton’s circle in the document’s drafting (perhaps Dana Singiser), or to at least take their concerns to heart. Clinton’s run is presented in the document as a feminist historical feat, and in the foreign policy section, the draft borrows the language of Clinton’s celebrated 1995 speech to the United Nations Conference on Women in Beijing: “Our policies will recognize that human rights are women’s rights and that women’s rights are human rights.” Reflecting Obama’s own long-standing interest in international development, the documented continues, “Women make up the majority of the poor in the world. So we will expand access to women’s’ economic development opportunities and seek to expand microcredit.”

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Grasping

The Washington Post is beginning a series on low-wage workers, a demographic I happen to occupy. The first article in the series covers the basics of who low-wage workers are (most likely to be young, female, and/or Hispanic), how much they earn (less than $27,000 for single people, or $42,000 for a family of four), and what it means when jobs are scarce, pay poorly with little to no perks or benefits, and the anxiety one feels when she realizes she’s without a safety net should she stumble. Some of the information in this first article are things we hear repeated daily in newspapers and nightly news — low confidence in the market, growing anxiety, trying to find expenses to cut once you’ve already tightened the belt — but I think these are things we need to keep hearing.

About half said they would only be able to survive a month before landing in financial trouble if they suddenly lost their jobs, while a third said they would last two weeks or less. A third of those polled said that someone in their families has been laid off or lost a job in the past year, while many others said their own or a family member’s work hours had been reduced…

…With inflation up 5 percent in the past year, the vast majority of those surveyed are having trouble paying for gas, saving for retirement or for their children’s educations. Most find it difficult to afford health care and housing, and nearly half struggle to pay for food.

For many, their jobs contribute to the stress. Three in 10 work for companies that do not offer them health insurance or paid vacations. About 4 in 10 get no sick days or retirement benefits.

Anxiety, loss, worry, difficulty, helplessness, failure. Most people in low-wage jobs blame themselves, not their employers, for their circumstances, no matter the skill level of the job at hand.

Even with two incomes, we fit easily into the family demographic provided by WaPo. My family would last two weeks or so on savings if Chef or I lost a job, and while I have access to benefits that are quite generous, they’re expensive enough to take a sizeable portion of my post-tax paycheck. Chef’s job, second-ranking kitchen guy in a local restaurant, actually affords him more than me per hour, but affords him no benefits or paid time off whatsoever. We get paid two times a month, and one sum goes almost exclusively to rent while the other goes almost exclusively to bills. The rest goes to groceries, maybe a night out every couple of months, and our one real extravagance, wine. Sundries, clothing, school fees. Loans, taxes, gasoline. What comes in goes out. Financial advice consists of curbing trips to Starbucks, cancelling that elusive gym membership your never use, and other Ways You Can Stop Being Poor If You Weren’t So Damn Stupid.

One thing I indicated I wanted to write about during my blogging stint as Feministe is life as a low-wage worker, and while I can’t devote too much time tonight to that (the child starts school tomorrow and I worked a ten hour day), feel free to share some of your experiences in the comments below while I brew up a few more substantial posts.

John Edwards

It may be hip, detached and cynical, as befits the Third Wave, to deny that marital affairs are relevant in evaluating a politician.

But being burdened by none of those particular attributes, I disagree. I think there are some fine presidents who’ve had affairs. But I disagree it’s not a factor that should be considered, especially where accompanied by other factors.

Bill Clinton and JFK, two presidents rumored to have had large numbers of affairs in addition to those we know about, were consistent in their views of the privacy of human relationships. Edwards, on the other hand?

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