The Conference Board reported Tuesday that the preliminary January figure for consumer confidence in the United States fell to its lowest level in more than a year.
The last time consumers were this bummed out was October 2011, when there was widespread talk of a double-dip recession.
But this time business news is buoyant. The stock market is bullish. The housing market seems to have rebounded a bit.
So why are consumers so glum?
Because they’re deeply worried about their jobs and their incomes – as they have every right to be.
The job situation is still lousy. We’ll know more this coming Friday about what happened to jobs in January. But we know over 20 million people are still unemployed or underemployed.
Personal income is in terrible shape. The median wage continues to drop, adjusted for inflation.
The Republican Party spent the better part of the past few years reaching back a century or more for ideas. Where liberals saw the dangers of a creeping Gilded Age on the horizon, conservatives cheered the true freedom that attends gross economic inequality. Paul Ryan, one of the GOP’s standard-bearers, repeatedly excited crowds with the promise of the true adventure and excitement that comes from riding the free market without a social safety net. By adopting the Republican vision, he explained, you choose against “a dull, adventureless journey from one entitlement to the next, a government-planned life, a country where everything is free but us.”
Similarly, there is currently a conservative attempt to rehabilitate the infamous 1905 Supreme Court decision of Lochner v. New York, which struck down on economic liberty grounds a New York state law that forbade bakers from working more than 10 hours per day and 60 hours per week.
» Read more about: Atlas Smirked: Why the GOP Kicks the Ladders to Prosperity »
(Editor’s Note: The following includes excerpts from remarks made on KPFK’s Uprising program, which focused on the Los Angeles mayoral debate held January 28 .)
The argument that framed the debate – that Los Angeles could go bankrupt – is ridiculous. L.A. is one of the richest cities in the world. Yes, we face some budget challenges, but the solution is not to gut the modest retirement benefits of hard-working people. We need to focus on creating good jobs, which will increase our tax base, and making sure that we are generating the revenues we should from our incredible city-owned assets.
When the focus of the majority of the discussion is pensions, which is an issue but represents only 10 or 11 percent of the budget, and really is one of many important issues facing the city – when that is the primary subject of conversation most people are left wondering,
» Read more about: The Politics of Bankruptcy: The UCLA Mayoral Debate »
The state of California has ordered a Southern California warehouse that processes merchandise for Walmart and other retailers to pay 865 workers more than $1 million in stolen wages.
The California Division of Labor Standards Enforcement issued the citations Monday, Jan. 28 against Quetico, LLC, a large warehouse complex in Chino, California. Back wages and unpaid overtime total more than $1.1million and in addition the state issued about $200,000 in penalties.
“Quetico is strict when it comes to enforcing its rules with workers so it is only fair that the state enforce the laws that the company broke,” said Abraham Guzman, a warehouse worker who has been at Quetico for about two and a half years. “I am satisfied that the law will now be followed and workers have won justice.”
Last year workers brought concerns to the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, an advocacy organization that works with Warehouse Workers United.
» Read more about: State Hits Walmart Contractor With Wage-Theft Ruling »
Last week’s annual national union membership numbers were eye-opening, and well, pretty depressing. The relentless attacks on unions nationwide have caused overall union density to drop to a startlingly low 11.3 percent. The share of union members as part of the workforce is the lowest it’s been in 97 years. That’s not just bad news for unions, that’s really bad news for everyone.
According to the Center for American Progress:
Without the counterbalance of workers united together in unions, the middle class withers because the economy and politics tend to be dominated by the rich and powerful, which in turn leads to an even greater flow of money in our economy to the top of the income scale.
Sound familiar?
But despite last week’s bad news on a national level, there were silver linings. Not the least of which is the trend here in California.
» Read more about: California Unions’ Growth Bucks National Trend »
Ask Los Angeles Times reporter Alana Semuels why union membership in California rose by 100,000 in 2012 and she’ll give you a simple answer:
“Latino workers.”
To explain the contrast between the trend in California and the U.S. as a whole – where union membership dropped last year by 400,000 – Semuels turned to some credible sources, including Steve Smith of the State Labor Fed who cited “an appetite among these low-wage workers to try to get a collective voice to give themselves opportunity and a middle-class lifestyle.”
Quoting Smith and others, Semuels finds that, “After working hard to get here, many Latino immigrants demand respect in the workplace and are more willing to join unions in a tough economic environment, organizers say.”
True enough: Immigrant workers have been particularly important for unions in California and Latino organizing has helped reignite the state’s labor movement.
Last year, Walmart gave $918,000 through its foundation to 33 California nonprofits. Amongst the types of organizations: job training, homeless shelters and health groups (see list below).
I scratched my head when I read this. Of course we want to see vital social service groups impacted by severe government funding cuts survive in this economy. Many of us have attended fundraisers for, or donated to these groups ourselves.
But there was something about the nature of the groups that caught my eye. I wondered: Why is Walmart funding groups that provide for such basic needs? Why is a corporation suddenly funding healthcare groups? Altruism? A love for Obamacare? Or is there something else?
Here’s what strikes me about Walmart’s seemingly benign charity efforts: The type of groups they’re funding addresses basic needs (jobs, health, shelter) that good jobs actually fulfill. Walmart, of course, is notorious for not providing such jobs.
» Read more about: Walmart’s Philanthropy Model: Charity and Poverty »
Ask Adela Valdez how it feels to hear public health experts on TV explain ways to limit a flu outbreak. Get a flu shot, wash your hands, they advise – and if you get the flu, stay home until 24 hours after your fever’s gone.
“One day, I had a fever but I went to work anyway,” Adela said. She’d worked for three years in a factory in New York making expensive lamps. “On the third day, I still had a fever. I felt very sick and I asked permission to go to the hospital.”
Her supervisor’s response? “Fine, go to the hospital, but don’t come back. I need people who come here to work, not to get sick.”
Adela lost her job.
Some management consultants acknowledge that sick workers may spread the flu to co-workers out of fear that they’ll be fired if they stay home to recover.
Brace yourself. In coming weeks you’ll hear there’s no serious alternative to cutting Social Security and Medicare, raising taxes on [the] middle class and decimating what’s left of the federal government’s discretionary spending on everything from education and job training to highways and basic research.
“We” must make these sacrifices, it will be said, in order to deal with our mushrooming budget deficit and cumulative debt.
But most of the people who are making this argument are very wealthy or are sponsored by the very wealthy: Wall Street moguls like Pete Peterson and his “Fix the Debt” brigade, the Business Roundtable, well-appointed think tanks and policy centers along the Potomac, members of the Simpson-Bowles commission.
These regressive sentiments are packaged in a mythology that [says] Americans have been living beyond our means: We’ve been unwilling to pay for what we want government to do for us,
It was a viral Internet sensation last year, but Boxing Lessons with Eric Kelly is worth a second viewing today, as we swing into a year that promises only sharper divisions between those who control wealth and those who don’t. Eric Kelly, a former amateur boxer from Brooklyn, works at New York’s Church Street Gym, where he trains Wall Street executives in the manly art of self-defense.
Actually, according to the video, he mostly insults these Masters of the Universe nonstop – and they love it. In a recent SB Nation piece on Kelly, writer Brin-Jonathan Butler asked one of the gym’s patrons, a JP Morgan banker, why he has taken up boxing under the dismissive gaze and trash talk of Kelly. Reports Butler:
“You know,” he began with a sheepish smirk, “maybe, deep down, we just miss that whole Occupy Wall Street movement a little bit.