SavvySugar

New York Tackles Wage Theft Against Immigrants

mydiadem — Wed, 20 May 2009 08:21:33 -0700

NPR All Things Considered, May 19, 2009

· On a bustling sidewalk in the Dominican neighborhood of New York City's Washington Heights, Carmen Calderon reaches over a folding table to wave a pamphlet at a sandwich delivery man, shouting in Spanish, "You know your rights as a worker?" The man smiles and keeps biking.

But in the course of an afternoon Calderon manages to lure others and deliver her message, part of a new effort by New York State's Labor Department to combat wage theft among this city's enormous immigrant workforce.

Calderon says it's amazing what immigrants don't know about: the minimum wage, overtime, lunch breaks or that labor laws apply to them even if they're in the U.S. illegally. Several people stop to confide about bad treatment at work, but want to know if they'll be deported if they complain. Even if they're legal, Calderon says, typically humble immigrants are unlikely to report abuse.

"They don't want to ruffle any feathers," she says. "It's like, 'Wow, he's doing me a favor, he gave me a job.' But they don't realize they're being abused by the person supposedly doing them the favor."

With the foreign-born making up half of New York's work force, labor officials say wage and hour violations are stunningly widespread, from upscale restaurants where bathroom attendants are paid only in tips, to the city's car washes, where inspectors last year found three-quarters did not pay minimum wage or overtime.

Faced with such an overwhelming problem, the Labor Department has joined forces with immigrant advocacy groups for what they call "wage watch" - an approach taken straight from the concept of Neighborhood Watches.

On a cool evening, four teams of state investigators descend on the tony neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn. They no longer wait to respond to complaints. Instead, clipboards in hand, they're paying surprise visits to 22 restaurants. They scope out any basement exits first and post a member outside; this is in case kitchen workers mistake them for immigration agents and try to flee.

At a family-friendly chicken place, one team heads inside and investigator Aristoteles Rodriguez slides his department ID across the counter.

"I work for the New York State Department of Labor," he tells the cashier. "We're basically conducting an investigation of your business, and we need to speak with some of your employees."

The cashier looks wary and picks up the phone to call the manager. A few customers near the front window don't seem to notice anything. Rodriguez heads to the back bar to start interviewing waitstaff.

"Sunday, what time do you come in?" he asks a nervous looking young man.

Rodriguez goes through each day of the week, asking about hours worked and then pay. The man says he gets $25 for an eight-hour shift, less than half of New York's minimum wage for waiters. He also works several 12-hour days, but says he gets no overtime.

Deputy Labor Commissioner Terri Gerstein has come along on this sweep, something she's been doing every couple of months as the department takes its more aggressive approach. On the sidewalk out front, an employee tells her he is paid in cash and describes a grueling workweek of more than 80 hours.

"How many days off do you have?" Gerstein asks.

"I don't have time off," he says with a slight hint of indignation. "The only rest I get is three hours at most," once a week.

The interview suddenly ends as the restaurant manager arrives, asking, "What's the problem?" Some workers scurry inside while others come out to watch. Gerstein explains they're investigating a number of restaurants in Brooklyn and after a tense exchange takes down his name and hands him her card.

Then she adds, "I also just want to make sure you know it's against the law to retaliate against workers for talking to us."

The manager, Fernando Tisoc, says his accountant will call to clear up any problems. Later, he tells NPR his workers' tips make up for their low hourly pay. He insists the restaurant isn't breaking any laws, though says he isn't aware of any provision on overtime pay.

After the sweep, labor officials will decide which restaurants to formally audit. They used to investigate individual employees' allegations, only to see some workers fired. Now, Labor Commissioner Patricia Smith says her department works hard to protect the identities of those who claim abuse.

"So we will go in and we will audit the whole establishment, so that the employer is much less likely to know who, if anyone, complained," she says.

The department has also asked for higher penalties against businesses that retaliate.

Smith, who took over as New York's labor commissioner two years ago, says that for too long, labor enforcement both in New York and at the federal level was lax. Smith says the challenge isn't only that so many workers are vulnerable immigrants, but that many of their employers are also foreign born and may know little of U.S. labor laws.

"I talk to a lot of employers who are in violation of the law," she says. "And when you ask them what was the story they basically say, 'I bought the store from Joe X, and this is what Joe X did and so this is what I did."

Smith says education is key, and so as part of the Wage Watch program her department has teamed up with Make the Road New York and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. Each week local activists in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn make their own workplace visits, handing out pamphlets on labor laws to both management and workers.

They're also on the lookout for possible violations to report to the Labor Department. Nieves Padilla of Make the Road New York says she can gather tips better than any labor department official. She knows this neighborhood, and everyone knows her.

"Even if I'm just in a store to buy something, all the managers think I'm investigating," says Padilla. "They say, 'Ah, here's the troublemaker!' They follow me around and try to keep me away from their employees. But the workers know me too, and actually, we have a way of communicating without even speaking."

Padilla demonstrates this knack in a health and beauty store, where one employee seems too nervous to talk with her manager nearby. As the woman watches, Padilla strolls into an aisle, slips a workers rights pamphlet between boxes of hair color and then leaves. The employee gives her a smiling glance as she moves to discreetly retrieve the pamphlet. The manager has seen nothing.

New York's Wage Watch is just a few months old, and officials say it's too soon to measure success. But the pilot program is set to expand across the state this summer.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104087809&sc=emaf

Countries with the Biggest Gaps Between Rich and Poor- Is this Capitalism?

tiff58 — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 09:23:43 -0700

I generally have a strong stance on Capitalism being the best economic system in existence. However, now and then I think it's good to question this, especially when I see things like this, which don't help to proove my point. Basically, most countries on this list are the most capitalist nations in the world- with Hong Kong having the biggest gap, and being the "most Capitalist." I do believe that Capitalism is good for the whole, that it does not cause the rich to get richer, etc. But this shows that the rich are just taking over all of the wealth in these nations. What are your thoughts?

Countries with the Biggest Gaps Between Rich and Poor

October 21, 2009 by admin Filed under World

Part 6 of 12 Parts - The Audacity of Socialism by Investor's Business Daily

BeachBarbie — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 12:21:39 -0700

Hi, I hope everyone is having a wonderful day. Today is part 6, Obama Finds An ACORN, from The Audacity of Socialism by Investor's Business Daily. As usual you can read Part 6 below, or you can choose to listen or read Part 6 from the direct link: http://www.ibdeditorial.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=302914868143810 Also, here is the link to all 12 Parts if you want to read ahead: http://www.ibdeditorial.com/series8.aspx

SOURCE:

Obama Finds An ACORN

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, August 06, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Election '08: The man who includes being a community organizer on his short resume has a long association with a far-left group that would organize our communities into socialist gulags.

IBD Series: The Audacity Of Socialism

In 1995, Illinois Gov. Jim Edgar balked at implementing the federal motor voter law out of concern that letting people register via postcard and blocking the state from pruning voter rolls might invite vote fraud.

A young lawyer, a community organizer himself, sued on behalf of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (Acorn) and won. The young lawyer was Barack Obama. Acorn later invited Obama to train its staff.

When Obama served on the board of the Woods Fund for Chicago with Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers, the Woods Fund frequently gave Acorn grants to fund its agenda and voter registration activities.

Acorn has been in the lead in opposing voter ID laws and other efforts to ensure ballot integrity. Acorn has been implicated in voter fraud and bogus registration schemes in Ohio and at least 13 other states. Acorn staffers will presumably be out registering voters again this year.

Obama also opposes voter ID laws. He believes they disenfranchise voters. Last year, Obama put a hold on the nomination of Hans von Spakovsky for a seat on the Federal Election Commission. It seems von Spakovsky, as an official in the Justice Department, had supported a Georgia photo ID law. Acorn espouses the leftist view that voter ID laws are racist.

In addition to subverting American democracy to promote a leftist agenda, Acorn's radical agenda amounts to "undisguised authoritarian socialism." wrote Sol Stern in the 2003 City Journal article, "Acorn's Nutty Regime for Cities."

Acorn opposed welfare reform and opposes securing American borders to stem the flow of illegal immigrants. Acorn was heavily involved a few years back in opposing Rudy Giuliani's efforts to privatize failing New York schools.

Acorn also has been in the lead supporting the "living wage" and opposing efforts by big-box retailers such as Wal-Mart to bring the bounty and benefits of free-market capitalism to inner cities.

Wal-Mart has faced resistance to its plans to expand into urban centers - most notably Chicago and Los Angeles - where unions and liberal orthodoxy remain strong. Opponents there charge that such big-box stores exploit workers, depress wages and drive out community businesses.

Acorn, Obama's former client, supported a big-box living-wage ordinance vetoed by Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley to require stores of at least 90,000 square feet operated by firms with $1 billion or more in annual sales nationwide to pay workers a minimum of $10 an hour plus $3 in benefits.

Critics such as Acorn, who complain that Wal-Mart employees live paycheck to paycheck, forget that many of Wal-Mart's customers also live paycheck to paycheck and seek quality merchandise at decent prices, which is why 100 million people shop there every week.

How can they oppose "low" wages for Wal-Mart employees while in effect supporting higher prices for Wal-Mart customers? They can because they believe the socialist orthodoxy that capitalism is bad, government is good and that the solution to poverty is to make everyone equally poor.

Wal-Mart gives people what they want at a price they can afford. It believes a fair wage is one agreed upon between employee and employer. It is the poster child for roll-up-your-sleeves capitalism. It is efficient, innovative, successful and nonunion - everything government is not - and is opposed for all these reasons.

Advocates of the so-called living wage see their efforts as putting money directly into workers' pockets. But it merely transfers money from one person's pocket to another person's pocket. This is classic socialist income redistribution - not economic justice, but economic extortion.

In the real world, companies that pay workers more than the value of the goods and services they produce go out of business. Workers should be paid what their labor is worth, not what their lifestyle requires.

On his Web site, Obama embraces Acorn's socialist goal, pledging to "raise the minimum wage and index it to inflation to make sure that full-time workers can earn a living wage that allows them to raise their families and pay for basic needs such as food, transportation and housing."

That money would come from taxpayers and business owners or, as Marx would say, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

How The NYT makes its first coment on ACORN scandel

Grandpa — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 13:02:43 -0700

Conservatives Draw Blood From Acorn

By SCOTT SHANE (NYT)
Published: September 15, 2009

WASHINGTON - For months during last year’s presidential race, conservatives sought to tar the Obama campaign with accusations of voter fraud and other transgressions by the national community organizing group Acorn, which had done some work for the campaign.

But it took amateur actors, posing as a prostitute and a pimp and recorded on hidden cameras in visits to Acorn offices, to send government officials scrambling in recent days to sever ties with the organization.

Conservative advocates and broadcasters were gleeful about the success of the tactics in exposing Acorn workers, who appeared to blithely encourage prostitution and tax evasion. It was, in effect, the latest scalp claimed by those on the right who have made no secret of their hope to weaken the Obama administration by attacking allies and appointees they view as leftist.

The Acorn controversy came a week after the resignation of Van Jones, a White House environmental official attacked by conservatives, led by Glenn Beck of Fox News Channel, for once signing a petition suggesting that Bush administration officials might have deliberately permitted the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Even before Mr. Jones stepped down, Mr. Beck had sent a message to supporters on Twitter urging them to “find everything you can” on three other Obama appointees.

Conservatives believe that they have hit upon a winning formula for such attacks: mobilizing people to dig up dirt, trumpeting it on talk radio and television, prompting Congress to weigh in and demanding action from the Obama administration.

In response to the Acorn videos, an instant hit on YouTube, the Senate voted 83 to 7 on Monday to prohibit the Department of Housing and Urban Development from giving federal housing money to the organization. The bill’s advocates said the group had received $53 million in such financing since 1994.

Last Friday, the Census Bureau dropped Acorn as one of 80,000 national unpaid “partners” helping promote the 2010 census, saying the group’s involvement might “create a negative connotation” and discourage participation in the population count.

On Tuesday, the House Republican leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, wrote to President Obama asking him to cut off all federal financing to Acorn and its affiliates. “It is evident that Acorn is incapable of using federal funds in a manner that is consistent with the law,” Mr. Boehner wrote.

The undercover videos showed a scantily dressed young woman, Hannah Giles, posing as a prostitute, while a young man, James O’Keefe, played her pimp. They visited Acorn offices in Baltimore, Washington, Brooklyn and San Bernardino, Calif., candidly describing their illicit business and asking the advice of Acorn workers. Among other questions, they asked how to buy a house to use as a brothel employing under-age girls from El Salvador.

Mr. O’Keefe, 25, a filmmaker and conservative activist, was dressed so outlandishly that he might have been playing in a risqué high school play. But in the footage made public - initially by a new Web site, BigGovernment.com - Acorn employees raised no objections to the criminal plans. Instead, they eagerly counseled the couple on how to hide their activities from the authorities, avoid taxes and make the brothel scheme work.

On one of the videos, an unidentified Acorn employee in Washington, told that the pair were engaging in prostitution, explained how to disguise their activities in dealing with bankers and the government. “You don’t put down ‘I’m a prostitute’ or ‘I’m a lady of the night, and this is where I’m getting my income,’ ” the Acorn worker said.

At the Baltimore office, a helpful worker suggested describing the prostitute on a loan application as a “freelance performing artist” and said she and the pimp might want to claim some of the young Salvadoran prostitutes as dependents and collect the child tax credit for them.

In an account of their escapades on BigGovernment.com, Mr. O’Keefe delights in quoting Saul Alinsky, the Chicago leftist who was considered the father of community organizing of the kind that Acorn performs. He explains how he and Ms. Giles, a 20-year-old college student, chose their methods.

“Instead of railing against their radicalism, it is best to bring out this type of radicalism,” he wrote. They decided upon “posing the most ridiculous criminal scenario we could think of and seeing if they would comply - which they did without hesitation.”

In a statement over the weekend, Bertha Lewis, the chief organizer for Acorn, said the bogus prostitute and pimp had spent months visiting numerous Acorn offices, including those in San Diego, Los Angeles, Miami and Philadelphia, before getting the responses they were looking for.

“I cannot and I will not defend the actions of the workers depicted in the video, who have since been terminated,” Ms. Lewis wrote. But she defended the group’s overall record and said it had become “the boogeyman for the right wing and its echo chambers.”

Robert L. Borosage, co-director of the liberal Campaign for America’s Future, called the tactics used to go after Mr. Jones and Acorn “McCarthyite,” and said the critics were harping on minor failings and distorting records that over all were admirable. “This is dangerous stuff,” Mr. Borosage said. “I don’t think progressives will sit back and let this gain momentum.”

Mike Gonzalez, vice president for communications at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said the episodes simply reflected a Web-based democratization of investigative reporting, made necessary in part by the failures of the mainstream news media. “It should have been ‘60 Minutes’ doing this stuff - not two people whose combined ages are 45,” Mr. Gonzalez said.

Acorn describes itself as the nation’s largest grass-roots community organizing group, claiming 400,000 low- and moderate-income families as members. Founded in Arkansas in 1970, it has worked in recent years for higher minimum wages, more affordable housing and increased voter registration.

It was Acorn’s election activities that drew opponents’ attention last year, including registration cards filled out by Acorn workers in the name of Mickey Mouse and other imaginary voters. Republicans highlighted the fact that the Obama campaign had paid more than $800,000 to an Acorn affiliate for get-out-the-vote efforts.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/us/politics/16acorn.html?_r=1&sq=acorn...

Adam Smith would not be optimistic in today's economic world (From Great Britain)

Grandpa — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 17:04:28 -0700

Adam Smith would not be optimistic in today's economic world
Adam Smith once commented that "there is a great deal of ruin in a nation". He meant that bungling governments imposed only a limited check on the economic performance of a Great Nation.

UK Telegraph article (no auther listed)

As Nathanael Smith and I show in our study of US economic contractions, Adam Smith would be much less sanguine were he confronted by today's financial crisis and the US government's response. Indeed, it is not impossible that the US will experience the kind of economic collapse from first- to third-world status experienced by Argentina under the national socialist governance of Juan Peron.

The US economy suffers from a growing culture of indebtedness that has increasingly contaminated the federal government since 2001 and has spilled over dramatically into private household behaviour. The combination of the ill-conceived fiscal-furnace fired by President Bush and the US Congress and the reckless monetary-furnace fired by Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke throughout the period 2001-2007, created unsustainable housing market and stock market bubbles whose collapse brought on the financial crisis and economic contraction of 2008-2009.

The policy responses to the debt bubble demonstrate crude political consideration rather than economic understanding. If excessive government indebtedness is a major source of the problem, why increase the government debt? Why encourage households to go yet further into debt?

The prognosis is catastrophic if projected government policies are not cut back. According to the White House's own estimates, the federal budget deficit in 2009 will be $1.6 trillion, approximately 11.2pc of the overall economy, the highest on record since the end of the Second World War. In 2019, the national debt will represent 76.5pc of the US national economy, the highest proportion since just after the Second World War. In such circumstances, the international reserve status of the US dollar will not survive. As it fades, so interest rates on government securities will rise and the real burden of servicing the debt will increase. In such circumstances, the US economy will teeter on the edge of a black hole.

Prosperity and full employment in the US will only be restored by a return to laissez-faire capitalism. Our study outlines a radical, but politically feasible, approach. Monetary policy should be expansionary. But, on the micro-economic side, tariffs and other trade barriers should be repealed unilaterally; a "Right-to-Work" Act should reduce the minimum wage and curtail the powers of unions; and business regulation should be reduced. Individual banks and their counterparties should not be bailed out, although the system should be protected by ensuring that failing banks are wound up in an orderly fashion – this is the only way to restore market discipline.

Charles K Rowley is Duncan Black Professor of Economics at George Mason University and general director of The Locke Institute

Report: Iraqi Refugees in US Need More Help

stephley — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:20:43 -0700

Thousands of Iraqi refugees resettled in the U.S. are living in poverty and need additional federal aid to survive the nation's economic crisis, according to a new report by an international aid agency.

The report - issued Tuesday by the International Rescue Committee, a New York-based refugee resettlement organization - found that the U.S. government's resettlement program is "dangerously underfunded" and fails to meet refugees' basic needs.

The report's findings were echoed by Houston resettlement workers and refugees who said they are struggling to find jobs and make ends meet. More than 19,000 Iraqi refugees have been resettled in the U.S. since 2007, including hundreds in Houston.

The IRC report called for an overhaul of the U.S. program and an infusion of millions of dollars from Congress to ensure that refugees do not end up homeless.

"In Iraq, we did not feel safe because of the violence," said Hassan Al Jaber, a 52-year-old Iraqi who said he worked as a CNN cameraman in Iraq and arrived in Houston as a refugee in January 2008 with his family. "Here, we do not feel safe because we do not have jobs."

A spokesman at the State Department, citing an agency policy of not speaking on the record about such matters, said $5 million in funds initially designated to go to Iraqi refugees overseas has been funneled into an emergency housing allowance for those resettled in the U.S. Those funds have not yet been distributed to volunteer agencies at the local level, but will be soon, he said.

Refugees from across the globe are finding a difficult economic reality in much of America, including Houston, according to multiple resettlement organizations. Caseworkers in Houston said they are dealing with a major influx of refugees while the available job pool continues shrinking.

"Things are getting rough here, but they're not yet in a critical stage," said Geleta Mekonnen, the assistant director for refugee services with Interfaith Ministries in Houston, which helps resettle refugees from countries including Iraq. He said some refugee families, particularly those with children, are struggling. In some cases, he said, even when both parents are working minimum-wage jobs, they are having trouble paying the rent, utilities and groceries.

"In order to make up the deficit, I think people need some kind of assistance," Mekonnen said. "We are lucky, though, to live in Houston, where people are a little bit better off than other areas."

The State Department gives local resettlement agencies an initial stipend of $900 for immediate needs, like rent, utilities and services that aid groups provide. Refugees can apply for additional cash assistance and health care for up to eight months.

Al Jaber has not found employment, though his wife has a minimum-wage job and one of his sons has worked on and off since coming to the U.S. Al Jaber said his family is relatively better off than some of the newly arrived Iraqi families in his apartment complex at South Gessner Road near Richmond Avenue. He has helped translate for others having difficulty paying their electric bills, he said, or dealing with the apartment complex.

In general, Al Jaber said, Iraqi refugees in Houston live "on the edge, the very edge" of U.S. society. "They are in a very declining situation of poverty," he said. "There is a danger that they might fall down into homelessness."

The IRC reported that many Iraqis who came to the U.S. as highly educated professionals - including doctors, lawyers, scientists or accountants - have struggled with disappointment after finding even entry-level jobs out of reach.

The report also called for the U.S. to build more flexibility into the program to help the most vulnerable of new arrivals, including widows.

Al Jaber checks in periodically on an Iraqi widow in his apartment complex, 32-year-old Azhar Saleh. Saleh, who came to Houston as a refugee in April 2008, said she held a job as a baby sitter on the city's east side for a few months, taking two buses each way, to and from work. But she started to worry about her children arriving home to an empty apartment if she was stuck at work.

Saleh gave up the job, which paid $6.50 an hour, and has had to rely on charity for the past few months. Now she worries about paying rent, and whether the worn and stained carpeting in her apartment is contributing to her 5-year-old son's asthma attacks.

"It is very difficult for me," Saleh said through an interpreter. "I don't want to rely on help. I want to find a job so I can have a normal life."

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/6483747.html

Unrest in China Worse Than Widely Reported

Grandpa — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 00:25:03 -0800

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/02/unrest-in-china-worse-than-widely...

When we have featured articles that mention growing unrest in China, we've been told that it's overblown. The usual arguments: most of the people losing their jobs in Guangdong were young women who could go back to the provinces; that the violence wasn't organized and hence posed not real threat to the authorities; that the people who had lost their jobs could go back to doing what they did before, namely, subsistence farming.

I've had trouble with these arguments because they run afoul of history. Large scale internal migrations when driven by worsening economic conditions tend to be disruptive, as this Times Online article suggests (hat tip reader Paul):

Bankruptcies, unemployment and social unrest are spreading more widely in China than officially reported, according to independent research that paints an ominous picture for the world economy.

The research was conducted for The Sunday Times over the last two months in three provinces vital to Chinese trade – Guangdong, Zhejiang and Jiangsu. It found that the global economic crisis has scythed through exports and set off dozens of protests that are never mentioned by the state media.

While troubling for the Chinese government, this should strengthen the argument of Premier Wen Jiabao, who will say on a visit to London this week that his country faces enormous problems and cannot let its currency rise in response to American demands.....

Yves here, Note that Wen had taken the reverse line at Davos, that growth in China would remain "fast and steady". That had struck me as amazingly bad poker. Japan has played up its basket case status, when it has in fact (until recently) had a robust export sector. Why? If the rest of the world thinks Japan is in terrible shape, no one will bust their chops for keeping the yen weak, which worked until carry trade unwinding drove it from the 115-125 level versus the greenback to its recent high of 86 and change. Wen should instead be stressing how bad things are. Back to the article:

However, a growing number of economists say the unrest proves that it is not the exchange rate but years of sweatshop wages and income inequality in China that have distorted global competition and stifled domestic demand. The influential Far Eastern Economic Review headlined its latest issue “The coming crack-up of the China Model”.

Yasheng Huang, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said corruption and a deeply flawed model of economic reform had led to a collapse in personal income growth and a wealth gap that could leave China looking like a Latin American economy.

Richard Duncan, a partner at Blackhorse Asset Management in Singapore, has argued that the only way to create consumers is to raise wages to a legal minimum of $5 (£3.50) a day across Asia – a “trickle up” theory.

Yves again. Why does no one invoke Henry Ford? He recognized that paying workers well would create a middle class that could buy more goods. Back to the piece:

The instability may peak when millions of migrant workers flood back from celebrating the Chinese new year to find they no longer have jobs. That spells political trouble and there are already signs that the government’s $585 billion stimulus package will not be enough to achieve its goal of 8% growth this year.....

Yves here. I had read the hope was the newly unemployed would visit their families in the hinterlands during the New Year festivities and stay, Guess not. So much for the "of course they'll go home and take up subsistence farming again" theory. Back to the story:

Even security guards and teachers have staged protests as disorder sweeps through the industrial zones that were built on cheap manufacturing for multinational companies. Worker dormitory suburbs already resemble ghost towns...

The Communist party is so concerned to buy off trouble that in one case, confirmed by a local government official in Foshan, armed police forced a factory owner to withdraw cash from the bank to pay his workers.

“Hundreds of workers protested outside the city government so we ordered the boss to settle the back pay and sent police armed with machine-guns to take him to the bank and deliver the money to his workforce that very night,” the official said.

On January 15 there were pitched battles at a textile factory in the nearby city of Dongguan between striking workers and security guards.

On January 16, about 100 auxiliary security officers, known in Chinese as Bao An, staged a street protest after they were sacked by a state-owned firm in Shenzhen, a boom town adjoining Hong Kong.

About 1,000 teachers confronted police on the streets of Yangjiang on January 5, demanding their wages from the local authorities.

In one sample week in late December, 2,000 workers at a Singapore-owned firm in Shanghai held a wage protest and thousands of farmers staged 12 days of mass demonstrations over economic problems outside the city.

All along the coast, angry workers besieged labour offices and government buildings after dozens of factories closed their doors without paying wages and their owners went back to Hong Kong, Taiwan or South Korea.

In southern China, hundreds of workers blocked a highway to protest against pay cuts imposed by managers. At several factories, there were scenes of chaos as police were called to stop creditors breaking in to seize equipment in lieu of debts.

In northern China, television journalists were punished after they prepared a story on the occupation of a textile mill by 6,000 workers. Furious local leaders in the city of Linfen said the news item would “destroy social stability” and banned it.

At textile companies in Suzhou, historic centre of the silk trade, sales managers told of a collapse in export orders. “This time last year our monthly output to Britain and other markets was 60,000 metres of cloth. This month it’s 3,000 metres,” said one.

She said companies dared not accept orders in pounds or euros for fear of wild currency fluctuations. Trade finance has all but ceased. Some 40% of the workforce had been laid off, she added.

Nearby, in the industrial hub of Changshu, all the talk was of Singapore-listed Ferro China, which exported steel products to customers in Britain, Germany, Korea and Japan. Last October its shares were suspended.

The company is reported to have been weighed down by $800m in debts and, according to the specialist business magazine Caijing, has started a court-or-dered restructuring.

A researcher found the gates closed and under tight guard, 2,000 employees out of work and witnesses who told of company vehicles being seized by impatient creditors. Holders of Ferro China debt include Credit Suisse and Citi-group.

Even in the city regarded as the most entrepreneurial in China, Wenzhou, the business community is reeling. “We estimate that foreign companies have defaulted on payments for 20 billion yuan (£20 billion) owed to Wenzhou firms,” said Zhou Dewen, chairman of the city’s association for small and medium-sized businesses.

Yves here. Now these are all separate incidents, none mass scale, but consider: this report was prepared by a Western paper in a country with a controlled media and state apparatus that does not want news of unrest leaking out. For every incident they heard about, there are anywhere from two to ten more that they didn't.

"Tax me", Some Rich Americans Tell Obama

MartiniLush — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 20:35:25 -0700

Raise my taxes, says millionaire Chuck Collins.

The scion of the Oscar Mayer family supports a House panel’s healthcare plan that would boost taxes for families earning more than $350,000 a year. He also advocates ending the Bush tax cuts for the rich right away, rather than when they expire at the start of 2011, and closing foreign tax havens to Americans.

Although the financial burden would be sizable, Mr. Collins is busy urging other wealthy Americans to sign a tax-me petition.

“The good news is there are still people out there willing to pay for the common good,” says Collins, whose nonprofit Wealth for the Common Good is collecting the names.

As of July 21, some 210 wealthy people had signed. Collins hopes to get more than 1,000 signatures before delivering it to President Obama and House leaders. The idealist wealthy are “not as small a minority as one might think,” says Eric Schoenberg, an investor and Columbia University Business School professor, who also signed the petition.

It is “reasonable and fair” for “the people who have done best out of the economic system in the last 20 years” to pay in extra taxes the bulk of the cost of healthcare reform, says Mr. Schoenberg. “Healthcare ought to be a basic right of citizenship.”

His research suggests the really rich are more willing than the modestly rich to share their wealth for the common good.

There are other indications of idealism among business people and the well-to-do:

•Responsible Wealth, a nonprofit group that includes several wealthy members, has been advocating for years that the estate tax be retained.

•A group of business owners and leaders called Business for Shared Prosperity welcomed the July 24 rise in the federal minimum wage from $6.55 to $7.25 an hour, although it costs their firms more money.

“It is an unsustainable and dangerous downward spiral to push American workers into poverty and expect taxpayers to pick up the bill for the consequences,” states Margot Dorfman, CEO of the U.S. Women’s Chamber of Commerce.

But wait! Don’t these taxes on the rich burden the very people who start the most firms and create the most jobs? Statistics suggest the burden is not overwhelming. Households with incomes over $250,000 have saved more than $700 billion from the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. The proposed graduated surtax under the House Ways and Means Committee’s healthcare plan would take back $544 billion over the next 10 years, providing about half the cost of the entire plan, calculates the Joint Economic Committee of Congress.

What that means is that even after digging deeper to help pay for expensive healthcare reform, the wealthy would still be paying less in taxes than during the Reagan administration – and far less than in President Eisenhower’s time.

In 1955, the top 400 US taxpayers paid 51 percent of their average income of $12.3 million (adjusted to 2006 dollars), according to Sam Pizzigati, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. In 2006, the most recent data available, the top 400 paid 17.2 percent of their average income of $263 million in federal taxes.

That 17.2 percent rate is also “much lower” than tax rates for the rich in Britain, France, Germany, or Japan, he adds.

Nor, some economists note, did the US economy grow more slowly when taxes on the rich were far higher in the 1950s and 1960s – or grow more swiftly after the Bush tax cuts.

Source

Part 4 of 12 Parts - The Audacity of Socialism by Investor's Business Daily

BeachBarbie — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 13:11:21 -0700

Hi, all! Well, it’s a beautiful Tuesday here today, and it’s time for the fourth installment. Part 4 is called Obamanomics Flunks the Test, from The Audacity of Socialism by Investor's Business Daily.

As usual you can read Part 4 below, or you can choose to listen or read Part 4 from the direct link: http://www.ibdeditorial.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=302484020165482 Also, here is the link to all 12 Parts if you want to read ahead: http://www.ibdeditorial.com/series8.aspx

Source:

Obamanomics Flunks The Test
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, August 01, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Election '08: Barack Obama the lawyer-organizer could use a crash course in economics. His economic plan's assumptions, based on long-discredited Marxist theories, are wildly wrongheaded.

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IBD Series: The Audacity Of Socialism

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In arguing for a heavier mix of government, he assumes that capitalism unfairly favors the rich, almost exclusively so, and fails to spread prosperity.

"The rich in America have little to complain about," he carps. "The distribution of wealth is skewed, and levels of inequality are now higher than at any time since the Gilded Age."

Obama cites data showing a yawning gap between the income of the average worker and the wealthiest 1%. He thinks it's government's job to step in and close it - "for purposes of fairness" - by soaking the rich, among other leftist nostrums.

"Between 1971 and 2001," he complains, "while the median wage and salary income of the average worker showed literally no gain, the income of the top hundredth of a percent went up almost 500%."

But such a snapshot comparison would be meaningful only if America were a caste society, in which the people making up one income group remained static over time.

Of course that's not the case. The composition of the rich and poor in this country is in constant flux, as the income distribution changes dramatically over relatively short periods. Few are "stuck" in poverty, or have a "lock" on wealth.

Obama would discover this if only he'd put down his class-warfare manuals and look closely at the IRS' own data.

Take those megarich he vilifies - the top hundredth of a percent. According to a recent Treasury study, three-fourths of them in 1996 fell out of the group by 2005.

Meanwhile, more than half of those in the bottom income group in 1996 moved to a higher income group by 2005, with more than 5% leapfrogging to the richest quintile.

(It's no fluke: The same high degree of income mobility is seen in prior comparable periods, as well.)

Some poor moved up through personal effort, while many rode an expanding economy. Real median incomes of all taxpayers rose 24%, but the poor registered the biggest gains of all.

President Kennedy understood that a growing economy is like a rising tide that "lifts all boats." Obama, on the other hand, thinks some are lifted and others lowered, as if the economy were a system of locks operated by a cabal of evil capitalists.

He also fails to understand how taxes change behavior. He thinks raising taxes on the most productive members of society won't "curb incentives to work or invest." Even TV news anchor Charlie Gibson knows better.

During a primary debate, the ABC host took Obama to task for proposing a doubling in the capital gains tax. History shows, he pointed out, that raising the cap gains rate actually ends up costing the government revenues.

Obama just didn't get it. "Well, Charlie," he argued, "what I've said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness."

Forget growth and revenues. Let's just punish those "greedy" investors. It's the same Marxist reasoning behind his plan to repeal the Bush tax cuts: The rich must be made to pay their "fair" share, Obama asserts.

Never mind that the top 1% of taxpayers already pay 38% of the total tax burden, according to recent IRS data, while the bottom 50% bear just 3% of the load.

Obama's economic plan also calls for mandating a "living wage." He plans to saddle retailers with a $10 minimum wage indexed to inflation, along with a mandate to provide seven days of paid sick leave to workers.

Obama assumes business owners will just eat the added costs.

But restaurants, the nation's second-largest private-sector employer, already operate on razor-thin profit margins. Faced with such mandatory paid benefits, they'll have no choice but to cut staff.

In fact, the last major minimum-wage increase cost the restaurant industry more than 146,000 jobs, the National Restaurant Association says, while restaurant owners put off plans to hire an additional 106,000 employees.

So Obama would get his wage-and-benefits mandate, but lose jobs in an industry that employs the very minorities Obama claims he's trying to help.

"If restaurateurs had their way, every lawmaker would run a small business before starting to legislate," the industry opined in a recent press release.

Lawmakers aren't the only ones. Leftist presidential candidates also could benefit from such a mandate.

(To see the graph, not shown on this post, please click on this link: http://www.ibdeditorial.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=302484020165482 and scroll to the bottom of the page.)

The Cloward/Piven Strategy of Economic Recovery

Eleuthera — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 06:43:16 -0700

By Nancy Coppock
February 07, 2009

Using borrowed money for a band-aid bailout of the economy should seem backwards to most people. However, it likely is a planned strategy to promote radical change. Those naively believing that President Obama is simply rewarding his far-left base, and will then move to the political center, must wise up.

The assumption that Obama will need the nation to prosper in order to protect the 2010 mid-term election incorrectly assumes that he esteems free market capitalism. He does not. Rather than win through superior ideas and policies, the Democrat plan for success in the mid-term elections is to win by destroying political opposition.

Obama adheres to the Saul Alinksy Rules for Radicals method of politics, which teaches the dark art of destroying political adversaries. However, that text reveals only one front in the radical left's war against America. The Cloward/Piven Strategy is another method employed by the radical Left to create and manage crisis. This strategy explains Rahm Emanuel's ominous statement, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste."

The Cloward/Piven Strategy is named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. Their goal is to overthrow capitalism by overwhelming the government bureaucracy with entitlement demands. The created crisis provides the impetus to bring about radical political change.

According to Discover the Networks.org:
Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation. [Emphasis added]

Making an already weak economy even worse is the intent of the Cloward/Piven Strategy. It is imperative that we view the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan's spending on items like food stamps, jobless benefits, and health care through this end goal. This strategy explains why the Democrat plan to "stimulate" the economy involves massive deficit spending projects. It includes billions for ACORN and its subgroups such as SHOP and the Neighborhood Stabilization Program. Expanding the S-Chip Program through deficit spending in a supposed effort to "save the children" only makes a faltering economy worse.

If Congress were to allow a robust economy, parents would be able to provide for their children themselves by earning and keeping more of their own money. Democrats, quick to not waste a crisis, would consider that a lost opportunity.

The Cato Institute reports that the plan will harm a faltering economy, intentionally causing increased job losses leading to increased demands for the aforementioned programs. Even the jobs to be created are set apart to render social justice, not economic revival. Robert Reich believes new infrastructure jobs should not go to white construction workers. Meanwhile, workers at Microsoft, IBM, Texas Instruments, and the retail market find themselves experiencing the life of the welfare poor.

If highly educated and trained workers continue to lose jobs and business falters as a whole, where will these jobless workers go? Could this be construed as revolutionary social reorganization that puts the underachiever above the achiever? Where is the future economic strength when jobless professionals collect welfare and unemployment while dreaming of a minimum wage job? For whites, there's not even the hope of a good paying construction job.

Because these programs are financed with deficit spending, the effect of the Cloward/Piven Strategy becomes doubly destructive. Talk about a perfect storm! The Democrat stimulus plan is a mechanism whose goal is the destruction of the traditional American way of life. It is bitter irony that the American taxpayer will actually fund the destruction of his own ability to live according to the values of our Founding Documents. It is not alarmist to identify this situation as a coup d'etat.

As the flow of money from the top of the economy dries up, job losses and mortgage busts will mount exponentially. The Democrat stimulus plan provides for welfare expansion but not for a robust economy that creates high paying jobs. Is this what Obama means when he warns, "It's going to get worse before it gets better?" If we are not bailing out corporate America so they can regain profitability, we must conclude Obama is working toward another end goal. Recognizing these attack methods reveals the only logical response -- an unwavering wall of "No!"