November 15, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

THE EDUCATION MYTH

Corporations, business, and their political bedfellows consistently find ways to blame working Americans for our declining standard of living. We have to be "competitive," you see. It's all about "efficiency" and "maximizing profit." The reason we're sliding downhill, according to some pundits, is that we just aren't educated enough. Get that degree, Bucky, and you'll be fine. The data don't bear that out. People with degrees have been taking the biggest hits thanks to insane trade deals that allow outsourcing of American jobs. This commentary by David Sirota is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

Fortune magazine, for instance, recently reported that economic data proves that "the skill premium, the extra value of higher education, must have declined after three decades of growing." Specifically, "the real annual earnings of college graduates actually declined 5.2 percent, while those of high school graduates, strangely enough, rose 1.6 percent." Similarly, Businessweek has reported that "real wages for young Americans with a bachelor's degree have declined by almost 8% over the past three years" and "economists suspect that global competition has something to do with it."

That's an understatement, as shown in a stunning new report out today from the good folks at the Economic Policy Institute. Using government data, the think tank finds that "the educational group most vulnerable to offshoring are those with at least a four-year college degree." That vulnerability helps drive down wages for better-educated workers because they know that if they try to demand good pay, their employer could simply pick up and leave.

Obviously, this has everything to do with America's corrupt NAFTA-style trade policy - a policy that the U.S. House ratified last week in its vote for the Peru Free Trade Agreement, and that now awaits Senate ratification. This trade policy without enforceable labor, wage, environmental, human rights or product safety standards encourages large corporations to manufacture a race to the bottom in which workers have to keep accepting lower and lower wages (or other standards) in hopes of keeping their employer in their country.

THE RIGHT WING'S ROAD TO SERFDOM

Economist Friedrich von Hayek wrote an influential book called The Road to Serfdom whose central idea is that free market economies and political freedom go together, and that any government "encroachment" into the private sector leads to loss of political freedom. The great example of that for von Hayek and others is the Soviet Union. However, when you look at von Hayek's ideas put into practice in places like Chile you see a crushing and oppressive system. Augusto Pinochet's regime was a horror and right-wing systems everywhere are proving just as oppressive. This is an analysis of Naomi Klein's new book The Shock Doctrine and the dangers of right-wing economics. The article by Christopher Hayes is at www.inthesetimes.com:

Written in exile, while Europe burned, The Road to Serfdom’s simple but powerful thesis was that the encroachment of the state into economic affairs inevitably leads to an encroachment in all spheres. For Hayek and his intellectual descendants—from Friedman (Milton) to Friedman (Thomas)—political freedom and economic freedom were inseparable and mutually reinforcing. And over the last 30 years, the adherents of the Friedman/Hayek School have pointed to two coincidental trends in global political economy to back this grand claim: First, the fall of command-and-control economies and the dismantling of welfare states. The second, the rise of democratic governance. With cunning aplomb, neoliberal writers and historians have packaged these two distinct phenomena together as one single story of progress and development. Look: Freedom’s on the march!

Klein resurrects Hayek’s argument and inverts it, showing how time and again, the “economic freedom” envisioned by Hayek and his ilk has been imposed at the expense of political freedom, often, Klein writes, “midwifed by the most brutal forms of coercion.” From Chile to Iraq, majorities empowered to choose their own government don’t start clamoring for flat taxes, privatized post offices and an end to controls on foreign capital. Instead, they often form unions or call for increased social spending. The Shock Doctrine is an encyclopedic catalog of the tactics that governments, corporations and economists have used to impose— usually over popular opposition—what Klein calls the “policy trinity” of the Chicago-School program: “the elimination of the public sphere, total liberation for corporations and skeletal social spending.”