I've got a recommendation: stop whining and start bettering your lives. Compare yourselves to the off-the-boat immigrants that come here, live on bird feed for a few years, and end up owning the American dream. The obstacles that those people face make your worries look like neurotic tics and yet you dismiss your privileged station in life as someone else's responsibility. Weak. Pathetic.
What's really pathetic here is the fact that Mr. Budge's hallowed hard-workin' immigrants are even more likely to be affected by the economic inequities Matt describes and are thrust on working- and middle-class families. According to the US Census (pdf), Immigrants are much less likely than native Americans to have finished high school and they're much more likely to be living in poverty. Because, in large degree, level of education dictates income, and income acts as a barrier to secondary education, it's not hard to see why a disproportionate number of immigrants turn to welfare and government-subsidized programs.
Of course, if you look closer at the census data, you'll also see that European and Asian immigrants have education levels equal to Americans and typically make a helluva lot more than Americans. No doubt that's because immigration quotas ensure that many immigrants come to the country already educated and also already likely to have a skilled profession in, say, medicine or technology.
But Mr. Budge once knew somebody that worked really, really hard.
Of course the financial problems that Matt was talking about - high cost of health care and education, specifically - are institutional elements of our society that benefit the richest among us at the expense of hard-working regular folks. You can push dirt around 80 hours a week and still not be able to buy health insurance for your family or send your kid to college.
That's why health care costs drove 2.1 million Americans were driven to bankruptcy in 2001. Of course, they're just a bunch of lazy ingrates.
That's why you're "25 times more likely to run into a rich kid as a poor kid on America's elite campuses." Of course, poor people are stupid. Mr. Budge knows. He's actually had a drink with a poor person once.
That's why tax rates, with the payroll tax and loopholes aimed specifically at the wealthy, are twice as high for middle-class families than the ueber-rich. But then Johnny Hedge Fund Manager needs his seventh house.
Of course Matt and I and folks like us are fighting just to tip the scales so that they're in balance. Everything is rigged to favor those that already have everything. We just want to balance it out, tip it back in our direction for a change. Apparently that makes us socialists. Or worse, we believe in democracy.
There's a meme that goes around in "free market" circles, that unregulated markets and "free trade" pacts with other countries works not only to spread democratic institutions, but serves to uplift people in the third world from poverty and general oppressive conditions.
The Bush administration and China have both undermined efforts to tighten rules designed to ensure that lead paint isn't used in toys, bibs, jewelry and other children's products.
Both have fought efforts to better police imported toys from China.
According to the report, a 4-year-old boy died of lead poisoning after swallowing a Chinese-manufactured metal charm that comprised more than 90 percent lead.
Steven Benen notes that the Bush administration's reluctance to ensure product safety of Chinese imports is based on philosophical reasons:
"The overall philosophy is regulations are bad and they are too large a cost for industry, and the market will take care of it," said Rick Melberth, director of regulatory policy at OMBWatch, a government watchdog group formed in 1983. "That's been the philosophy of the Bush administration."
Except, whadaya know, the market hasn't been taking care of it.
The lack of oversight is also due to the Bush administration's penchant for politicizing government agencies. His first appointment to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which is responsible for overseeing product safety in the country, Hal Stratton, was a big-donor New Mexico attorney who was initially angling for a post in the Department of Interior, but settled for head of the CPSC. After Stratton, Bush installed Michael Baroody, lobbyist for the National Association of Manufacturers, to the post. Neither are exactly what you would call consumer activists.
But I'd argue that it's not just "free market" ideology that prevents scrutiny of Chinese products. I'd argue that we're inextricably bound to the Chinese, and that this prevents us from making substantial changes in our relationship.
First, as mentioned by CNBC's Erin Burnett, tougher trade regulations would mean prices go up. China produces goods, cheap. And cheap goods are like crank. Once you get a taste... Suffice to say you won't find much support from American manufacturers that we need to put consumer safety ahead of cheap goods.
Second, as mentioned at Montana Main St. blog, China holds a sizeable amount of our national debt, and has threatened to liquidate its debt holdings and cause a crisis in the dollar. They have a powerful hold over our economy and are apparently willing to use it to their advantage, politically. That means we are forced to make compromises to the Chinese on issues like product safety. And you can bet that they don't want to make the infrastructure investment necessary to ensure that exports are safe.
The ramifications of the allure of cheap labor and China's economic hold on us are becoming evident. Not only are our standards of living declining, as unsafe products enter our market and bottom-tier wages shrink, American corporations are helping the Chinese suppress its ailing democratic movement.
There's a Stage 1 Air Alert in effect for Missoula, as of 4pm Thursday, August 16. That is, the air quality is unhealthy for "sensitive groups," such as seniors, children, and smokers. Stay indoors. The effects of smoke exposure ain't pretty: sore eyes, tearing of eyes, cough, runny nose, and possible cold-like symptoms and headaches, dizziness, nausea, etc.
Meanwhile, the Black Cat fire has sprung up on the edge of Missoula, so it doesn't look like the fires are abating.
Wheee.
Speaking of forest fires, there's an interesting article in today's Missoula Independent on the Jocko Lakes fire. Here's the money quote:
"What's happening is that climate change is colliding with past land-management abuses," says Tim Ingalsbee, executive director of the Oregon-based Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology.
Decades of patchwork clear cutting, forest thinning and road building has left a landscape ripe for extreme fire behavior, says Ingalsbee. Increasingly extreme weather-stronger winds, lower humidity, higher temperatures-is combining with hotter, more open, dryer and windier forests, creating disastrous conditions.
So much for the meme that logging helps alleviate forest fires.
Data on the chip will include not just the citizen's name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord's phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China's controversial "one child" policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card.
Brought to you by China Public Security, incorporated in Florida and funded by Texas investment funds and California investment banks.
Got concerns about our cozy relationship with China? Not liking how doing business with the Communist government that contracts American firms to do unethical, anti-democratic projects? (You wouldn't want to be left out in case the domestic market opens up!) Unnerved that free-market ideologues in our government have decided that risks associated with product consumption properly lies with the consumer? (Like say, watching out for lead in your toys or antifreeze in your toothpaste? By the way, the Chinese official responsible for the lead paint debacle offed himself. Gotta love the Chinese attitude towards white-collar crime.)
A lot of people like to say, uh, scare monger about China, right? A lot of politicians - and I know you talk about that issue all the time. I think people should be careful of what they wish for on China, you know, if China were to revalue its currency, or if China is to start making, say, toys that don't have lead in them or food that isn't poisonous, their costs of production are going to go up, and that means prices at WalMart here in the United States are going to go up, too. So I would say that China is our greatest friend right now. They're keeping prices low, and they're keeping prices from mortgages low, too.
So what if your kid's got lead poisoning! It's for the good of the nation! Suck it up!
(In a side note, check out the last bit of the video. While I certainly don't agree with Burnett's economic Machiavellianism, she doesn't deserve the weird sexual harassment Matthews dollops on her, on the air!
Anyone who doesn't understand the insidious nature of sexual harrassment should take a look at the video of that exchange. Here you had a professional woman discussing a very serious and urgent subject on a news program. And Chris Matthews, (in an apparent attempt to disprove the fact that he has a sexual fetish for mature, beefy men) treated her like someone he was trying to pick up in a bar (very clumsily, as you would expect.) She was confused, embarrassed and knocked completely off balance by his inappropriate remarks, made all the worse because she was on the air. (It would have been just as wrong, however, if she'd been in a meeting or in a regular workplace conversation.) The woman was trying to do her job and this moron got all cute acting as if he couldn't hear a word she said. How "nice" of Matthews to make her feel and look like a fool in front of hundreds of thousands of people. I'm sure she really enjoyed that "compliment."
If you haven't seen it, check it out. Very strange. Will anybody call him out on it?)
Chair of the University of Montana Economics department, Thomas Power, recently wrote an op-ed for KUFM that neatly explains the point I was trying to make earlier this weekend about the futility of relying on a massive and impersonal market for any kind of economic justness:
Democracy, freedom, and prosperity, we are told, demand the acceptance of whatever outcomes business decisions and markets deliver to us. It is then our job, individually, to cope as best we can with whatever set of forces are unleashed on us. The challenge of that constant change and our struggles to adapt to it will be the creative force driving our social evolution forward in a positive and rational direction. Of course, as with natural selection and the survival of the fittest, many of us will fail, suffer, and, even, die. But that is necessary for the ongoing evolution of the larger society.
This, of course, is poppy cock. In the name of "freedom" it empowers large collective bureaucratic organization called corporations to amass wealth and power that allows them to exercise considerable control over our political, social, and economic evolution. Meanwhile we are told that we have to respond as isolated individuals. We are not to organize ourselves collectively to try to control our destinies or, even, to try to protect ourselves against the damage being done to the natural world and the communities that we in habit.
Markets and corporations are human institutions. They are tools designed to help us accomplish certain things. There have always been customs, laws, and regulations that set the sideboards, enforced commitments, and encouraged honesty within commercial institutions. Without those neither markets nor complex business organizations would be possible. It is human purpose that brought them into existence and continues to guide them. It can be no other way. In that sense it is and always will be we citizens who have to judge the rationality and attractiveness of the outcomes and modify the rules and regulations when the outcomes are unacceptable to us.
Anything else empowers the corporate adventurists to manipulate the world to pursue their vision of the profit potentials available while condemning the rest of us to fatalistically cope as best we can. That outcome has nothing to do with freedom, democracy, or prosperity.
For anyone who missed it, Tim Russert went on Hannity and Colmes recently and agreed to Sean Hannity's claim that "liberal bloggers" are pulling the Democratic Party to the left:
HANNITY: ...I think these bloggers have really gotten to them. I think they're really positioning themselves that they're going to have a very difficult time moving center. Do you see that?
RUSSERT: Absolutely, because what has happened -- the Democrats will acknowledge -- for example, on the war. The major candidates were very reluctant to consider voting and cutting off funding. Now, they will -- a year ago. Now, they will say that the circumstances on the ground have changed so much they want to make that vote. It was interesting to me that three senators elected this year, Democrats, Webb of Virginia, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, and Jon Tester of Montana, all voted for the funding, different than Obama and Clinton.
If it is true that "liberal bloggers" are pulling the Democratic Party left, that's a good thing. Not just because it happens to align with my own personal political opinions, but because it also aligns with the beliefs of a majority of Americans.
