An unforgiving national unemployment rate of nine percent and stagnant – or declining – wages for the average household for the last ten years dominate the minds of Americans worried about the economy. As important is the number of business closings, though it seldom gets the same amount of ink. More than 1.5 million businesses have closed since the start of the current recession. A high unemployment rate and extenuated business closures feed off each other in an economy with little demand. Continue reading
Category Archives: Economy
Seriously?
An Associated Press story last week quoted Alabama’s Gov. Republican Robert Bentley, who signed legislation that targets any HispanicLatino who might appear to be in the state illegally. The law would have kicked every brown kid out of school had a federal court not intervened. Bentley, not intending to draw guffaws, wondered why his state is being laughed at across the nation.
“Why are we getting all the publicity? I think it has to do with Alabama’s past and the perception that people have of Alabama over the years…and really don’t recognize the amount of progress we’ve made in Alabama over the last 50 to 60 years,” Bentley said.
If you did not know he was serious, it would indeed be a laughing matter. Continue reading
Surely Al Sharpton or Sheldon Cooper Can Help
The scripted HispanicLatino stood up to ask his question at the Republican presidential debate in Nevada last week. The incisive power of the question sucked the air out of the room. Viewers were left reeling. “What is your message to the Hispanic community?” was Robert Zavala’s riveting question.
Not: Hey, guys, who has caused the nation more harm in the past 10 years: Bankers and Wall Street investment companies or immigrants in the country illegally?
Not: Riddle me this: You say you want to create jobs. Why do corporations and banks with more than $2 trillion and perhaps $3 trillion in assets not invest in economic development in the HispanicLatino community – or any community?
Not: Say, I do not know if you have noticed but Mexico right next door each day edges closer to be taken over by narco-traffickers. You got anything to say about that? And I have a follow-up question: If the United States did not have a massive drug-consumption problem would Mexico have a massive drug-cartel problem?
Not: I’m curious. What is going to happen in Cuba when Fidel Castro dies? A massive migration northward? And is there anything to fear from Hugo Chávez in Venezuela?
Not: Ah, don’t you get that your trash-talking on immigration makes HispanicLatinos who might vote for you uneasy and is making many more of them angry?
Not: Excuse me, but: No one is taking the jobs that HispanicLatino laborers are abandoning in Alabama in wake of that state’s anti-immigration law. Aren’t we losing jobs and hurting the economy when tomato crops rot in the fields? Would you as President allow states to override federal law at will?
Not: You know, insured children are an economic development tool and preventive health care keeps kids out of expensive emergency rooms: Aside from beating each other up about who had the most uninsured kids in their state when some of you were governor, what do plan to do about it as President?
Not: With the country nearly bankrupt, how are we going to convince HispanicLatinos – like John F. Kennedy asked the country in 1961 – that they are being called upon to do more for the country than the country can do for them?
Not: I know you guys are really smart, but HispanicLatinos are, too. They make up more than 15 percent of the population but only about 6 percent of doctors. Don’t you think this is something that we should be concerned about as the Anglo population ages? And wouldn’t some form of affirmative, strategic action help?
I do not know Mr. Zavala but I have a question for him: What planet do you live on? Perhaps the geeks on CBS’ The Big Bang Theory can help. Koothrappali, who cannot speak to girls, whispers into Wolowitz’ ear to ask questions.
At least Koothrappali knows what to ask.
Blogs published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays or invariably in between.
The Unreality of Being Lola
Everything seems unreal. The economy is stuck with no prospect of renewal. We are still in Afghanistan and Iraq. Greece, its economy about the size as that of Massachusetts, could set off the next financial contagion. Millions of additional homes and properties are still underwater and face foreclosure. Next door in Mexico 40,000 people have lost their lives since 2006 as the drug cartels metastasize. And no one talks about America’s impending decline. Unreal.
Adding to the unreality was the Republican presidential debate Tuesday in Las Vegas. Vegas. The city in the desert that should not be. The most unreal of cities. A desperate city of desperate people.
The debate undid the German expression Einmal ist keinmal (once is never), the idea being that if something happens only once it did not happen at all, for how is anyone to know anything about it relative to something similar. And so the debate was just like the last one, another example of our collective race to the bottom.
The idea that Herman Cain is really in contention to be the nominee of a party dominated by white southerners is unreal. That Willard Mitt Romney as governor of Massachusetts signed a version of the Obama health care plan and now disowns it is unreal, but not as unreal as the Republican rank and file willing to forget that fact in their single-minded blood-thirst to beat the President. That Newt Gingrich – who abandoned his sick wife in the hospital – can talk about the need for the nation to come together as a community to provide heath care is unreal. And any race in which two Texans are running for office after the spectacular fiasco that was George W. Bush is beyond any reality.
That Michelle Bachman is on stage is equally surreal. When Harry S Truman became president, the pundits bemoaned his ascension, thinking him unfit, barely educated and corrupt. Yet Truman was real, and he had studied Latin and Greek and was not the illiterate, uneducated phony the press expected him to be. That the country countenances someone like Bachman as a candidate for president shows the depths of the unreality that has gripped the country – and the superficiality.
Who are these people?
That is the question the Republican electorate seems to be asking itself. One survey suggests that almost 70 percent of Republican voters remain undecided about the current lineup. I have to wonder how many will still be undecided after the nominee is chosen.
The GOP debate on Tuesday started at the same time as the telenovela on Telemundo that chronicles the life of the tragic Lola Volcán. Over-the-top soap operas on Univision and Telemundo are easy ways to re-enforce one’s Spanish. Dashing dudes and curvacious women do much to conjugate. Verbs, too. Thinking that the candidates’ show on CNN was more important and real than Lola’s latest travails, I started watching the debate. Lola was hands down more real. And so I escaped into that reality, at least for an hour, as she battles yet another demon in her life, an evil named Diana Mirabal.
If we could only stand up to the demons confronting the country as bravely and as resolutely as Lola does hers.
But our unreality, alas, is real.
Blogs published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays or invariably in between.
The Manchurian Candidate as the next Steve Jobs
The 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate was a great movie for the days when communism aimed to dominate the world. The movie narrates the Chinese government’s attempt to take over the United States by subverting the mind of a solider who is the son of a would-be President of the country. Chinese intelligence agents turn him into a political assassin bent on eradicating the opposition. The film’s most iconic image is the crosshairs of his rifle.
The remake of the movie in 2004 was a flop. That is about the only thing regarding anything Chinese that has flopped lately. Fifty years after the original movie, the Chinese are closer than Mao ever imagined to global predominance. And who would have thought back then that the United States would create its own Manchurian candidate by allowing its middle class to be hollowed out and by failing to develop a HispanicLatino population that daily is becoming a greater part of the nation’s population.
Experts disagree on how quickly China is going to develop into a superpower and “overtake” the United States. If the question boils down to a debate about the wealth of the “average Chinese household” and the “average American household,” the United States wins. The standard of living for individuals in the United States is higher – by many times over – than for individuals in China. That is important until one considers that the Chinese number 1.3 billion and the United States 315 million. A ratio of more than 4 to 1.
The numbers tell a more subversive story than any movie ever could: If only a third of China’s population achieves middle class status before its demographic growth levels off, that amounts to almost 400 million people – by far more than the current population of the United States, whose middle class currently is shrinking and whose HispanicLatino population makes the story more interesting more quickly.
Since 1970, the actual income of the average HispanicLatino household has decreased – this for a group whose proportion of the national population is increasing while the size of the rest of the white population is decreasing. For a country the size of the United States to remain relevant, those lines should be trending upward, but two of the three are not.
Aside from the demographic drama being played out, the reason why China will overtake the United States in due course is that it will have more people doing more things and probably more people doing more things better. The future of the world will also be decided by those with harder – not necessarily better – societal values, so that any population that does not have hard work, focus and attention as core values will suffer.
It leaves an impression on the mind, indeed, to walk by a college library – almost any library – late on Saturday nights and early on Sunday mornings. Only Asian students from foreign lands are working and studying – with literally no one else around. In the new world of absolutely maniacal global competition, the most absolutely maniacal workers will win.
Thinking that somewhere in a room off campus a Steve Jobs is inventing the next economic revolution is sadly simplistic and shortsighted. We need scores of Steve Jobs – and those willing to sacrifice as he did throughout his life but certainly early in his career.
All of us – HispanicLatinos especially – are in the crosshairs of history, and we probably won’t get a shot at a remake.
Blogs published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays or in between if essential.