This is sent in by Lynn:
This could work:
Patriotic retirement: There are about 40 million people over
50 in the work force; pay them $1 million apiece severance with three stipulations:
1) They leave their jobs. Forty million job openings - Unemployment fixed.
2) They buy NEW American cars. Forty million cars ordered - Auto Industry fixed.
3) They either buy a house or pay off their mortgage- Housing Crisis fixed.
All National financial problems fixed!!!
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Florida Lawmakers Refuse to Accept Federal Funds
Florida lawmakers will not accept stimulus money as follows:
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act requires state legislatures to broaden the unemployment guidelines to allow more women, part-timers and low-wage workers to qualify.
And in Florida, lawmakers are the ones balking at expanding the rolls, though Republican Gov. Charlie Crist supports accepting the federal funds.
The Florida House leadership this week sent an email to members advising them how to respond if constituents complain about the state's not accepting $444 million in federal funds. Representatives should tell residents that the federal money will only last two months and then businesses will have to cover the costs, potentially prompting them to lay off more workers, the email said.
"This isn't about not being compassionate," said Adam Hasner, House Majority Leader in Florida, where unemployment is at 9.4%. "It's about not making a problem worse."
Read more at:,
http://money.cnn.com/2009/03/27/news/economy/unemployment_benefits/index.htm?cnn=yes
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act requires state legislatures to broaden the unemployment guidelines to allow more women, part-timers and low-wage workers to qualify.
And in Florida, lawmakers are the ones balking at expanding the rolls, though Republican Gov. Charlie Crist supports accepting the federal funds.
The Florida House leadership this week sent an email to members advising them how to respond if constituents complain about the state's not accepting $444 million in federal funds. Representatives should tell residents that the federal money will only last two months and then businesses will have to cover the costs, potentially prompting them to lay off more workers, the email said.
"This isn't about not being compassionate," said Adam Hasner, House Majority Leader in Florida, where unemployment is at 9.4%. "It's about not making a problem worse."
Read more at:,
http://money.cnn.com/2009/03/27/news/economy/unemployment_benefits/index.htm?cnn=yes
Friday, March 27, 2009
Hindus Invented the Number Zero We Use in Modern Society
This is from Dinshaw:
The Arabic numerals are neither Arabic nor Phoenician.
They are Hindu.
The Arabs and the Phoenicians traded between India and Europe. They found the Roman numerals too cumbersome for business purposes and so they adopted the Hindu Numerals.
The Europeans thought the numerals were of Arabic origin and so they named them Arabic numerals in their ignorance.
The numerals we use are an adaptation of the Hindu numerals, which unfortunately I can
not type on the computer to show you how close they look like the Hindu numerals. They have nothing to do with Angles or Algorithms.
The invention of the ZERO by the HINDUS was a tremendous breakthrough in Mathematics. The Romans had no such concept.
Without the ZERO we would have NO computers, No TVs, No machines of any sort that uses mathematics to run them. In short, NO civilization as we know it.
Dinshaw ( I am not a Hindu, but a Zoroastrian. As a historian I just want to
set the matter straight.)
The Arabic numerals are neither Arabic nor Phoenician.
They are Hindu.
The Arabs and the Phoenicians traded between India and Europe. They found the Roman numerals too cumbersome for business purposes and so they adopted the Hindu Numerals.
The Europeans thought the numerals were of Arabic origin and so they named them Arabic numerals in their ignorance.
The numerals we use are an adaptation of the Hindu numerals, which unfortunately I can
not type on the computer to show you how close they look like the Hindu numerals. They have nothing to do with Angles or Algorithms.
The invention of the ZERO by the HINDUS was a tremendous breakthrough in Mathematics. The Romans had no such concept.
Without the ZERO we would have NO computers, No TVs, No machines of any sort that uses mathematics to run them. In short, NO civilization as we know it.
Dinshaw ( I am not a Hindu, but a Zoroastrian. As a historian I just want to
set the matter straight.)
Geithner Open to China's proposal of One Global Currency?
The article below is sent in by Melanie.
Dear Free-Market Thinker,
To view the Thursday, March 26th, 2009 edition of the Daily Bell, click here now.
To view the Thursday, March 26th, 2009 edition of the Daily Bell, click here now.
Today's top stories:
Geithner 'open' to China's proposed IMF global currency?
American Treasury Timothy Geithner, at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the U.S. is "open" to a headline-grabbing proposal by the governor of China's central bank, which was widely reported as being a call for a new global currency to replace the dollar, but which Geithner described as more modest and "evolutionary." "I haven't read the governor's proposal. He's a very thoughtful, very careful distinguished central banker. I generally find him sensible on every issue," Geithner said, saying that however his interpretation of the proposal was to increase the use of International Monetary Fund's special drawing rights - shares in the body held by its members - not creating a new currency in the literal sense. "We're actually quite open to that suggestion - you should see it as rather evolutionary rather building on the current architecture rather than moving us to global monetary union," he said. "The only thing concrete I saw was expanding the use of the [special drawing rights]," Geithner said. "Anything he's thinking about deserves some consideration." The continued use of the dollar as a reserve currency, he added, "depends...on how effective we are in the United States...at getting our fiscal system back to the point where people judge it as sustainable over time." - Politico
Dominant Social Theme: Thoughtful men mull thoughtful change.
Free-Market Analysis: You could see them popping like metaphorical popcorn kernels yesterday, all over America and probably in Canada and the EU as well. So called conspiracy "nuts" jumping into the sky as if they'd been fried in oil and propelled heavenward. What likely bounced them upward were the above comments by American Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner that sounded as if he was endorsing a new global currency to take the place of the dollar.
read full story ...
EU leader condemns US and says it is on a 'road to hell'
Barely a week before Barack Obama is due to arrive in Europe on his first official visit as US president, Mirek Topolanek (Pictured left), the Czech Republic's prime minister, put the 27-nation EU on a collision course with Washington. His attack compounded the confusion that has engulfed EU policy after the Czech leader lost a no-confidence vote in the country's parliament on Tuesday, forcing him to offer his government's resignation midway through its six-month EU presidency. Mr. Topolanek said EU leaders had been disturbed at a summit in Brussels last week to hear calls from Tim Geithner, the US Treasury secretary, for more aggressive policies to fight the global downturn. "The US Treasury secretary talks about permanent action and we, at our spring council, were quite alarmed at that . . . The US is repeating mistakes from the 1930s, such as wide-ranging stimuluses, protectionist tendencies and appeals, the Buy American campaign, and so on," he told a European parliament session in Strasbourg. "All these steps, their combination and their permanency, are the road to hell." ... Mr. Obama has vigorously opposed the view that the Great Depression was caused by too much spending, rather than too little, a view held by a small handful of rightwing economists. - Financial Times
Dominant Social Theme: Those crazy Czechs!
Free-Market Analysis: We are having a fun week.
Recently the Chinese proposed "paper gold" and the American Treasury Secretary seemingly endorsed it. And now comes Mirek Topolanek, another Czech leader who like Czech President Vaclav Klaus seemingly "tells it like it is", to upset the Western world's socialist applecart. Klaus of course has lectured the irredeemably corrupt European Union about questions pertaining to global warming and about the EU leadership's general attraction to overwhelming masses of regulations and concomitant fees, imposts, etc. that are gradually strangling what is left of EU entrepreneurship.
read full story ...
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Outsourcing Taking High Tec. Jobs
(Note: IBM is receiving stimulus money inspite of the following actions)
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/mar2009/db20090325_626883.htm?campaign_id=rss_daily
Recent announcements of mass layoffs have created new scrutiny around the H-1B visa program, which brings foreign tech workers (mostly from India) to the US for work (at below-market wages, critics say). But IBM (IBM) is going with a novel tack: Instead of bringing cheap Indian workers to America, the company is demanding its American workers move to cheap India and get paid India-standard wages.- A better option than being laid off? IBM has been quietly eliminating thousands of jobs over the past few weeks.
- anyone who refuses to move will be considered a "voluntary departure" and denied severance benefits.
- Know more about IBM's layoffs or relocation plans? Email ekrangel@alleyinsider.com, anonymity guaranteed.
InformationWeek gets their hands on leaked IBM documents explaining the program:
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/mar2009/db20090325_626883.htm?campaign_id=rss_daily
Mexico says NAFTA Failed/ Reason Illegal Crossings
The following is from the New York Times:
In some cases, Nafta produced results that were exactly the opposite of what was promised (to Mexico). For instance, domestic industries were dismantled as multinationals imported parts from their own suppliers.
Local farmers were priced out of the market by food imported tariff-free. Many Mexican farmers simply abandoned their land and headed north.
Although one-quarter of Mexicans live in the countryside, they account for 44 percent of the migrants to the United States. The contradictions of Nafta are apparent in Guadalajara and the rich farmland around it.
After Nafta, the new factories imported parts from their global suppliers, wiping out local companies that had sold printed circuit boards or assembled computers under tariff protection, said Kevin P. Gallagher, a Boston University professor who has written about the Guadalajara information technology industry.
Things grew worse when the tech bubble burst, the American economy cooled and the companies moved to China, where they could pay even lower wages. Once China entered the World Trade Organization, Mexico lost much of the edge in exporting to the United States that Nafta had given it. Employment in Guadalajara’s I.T. factories dropped 37 percent in 2001 and continued to slide for two years.
“A new phenomenon has grown up under Nafta — high-productivity poverty,” said Harley Shaiken, chairman of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Low wages means low purchasing power. “It is not a successful strategy for globalization,” Mr. Shaiken said.
read more at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/24/business/worldbusiness/24peso.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
Mexico Says NAFTA has Harmed Mexico
In some cases, Nafta produced results that were exactly the opposite of what was promised (to Mexico). For instance, domestic industries were dismantled as multinationals imported parts from their own suppliers.
Local farmers were priced out of the market by food imported tariff-free. Many Mexican farmers simply abandoned their land and headed north.
Although one-quarter of Mexicans live in the countryside, they account for 44 percent of the migrants to the United States. The contradictions of Nafta are apparent in Guadalajara and the rich farmland around it.
After Nafta, the new factories imported parts from their global suppliers, wiping out local companies that had sold printed circuit boards or assembled computers under tariff protection, said Kevin P. Gallagher, a Boston University professor who has written about the Guadalajara information technology industry.
Things grew worse when the tech bubble burst, the American economy cooled and the companies moved to China, where they could pay even lower wages. Once China entered the World Trade Organization, Mexico lost much of the edge in exporting to the United States that Nafta had given it. Employment in Guadalajara’s I.T. factories dropped 37 percent in 2001 and continued to slide for two years.
“A new phenomenon has grown up under Nafta — high-productivity poverty,” said Harley Shaiken, chairman of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Low wages means low purchasing power. “It is not a successful strategy for globalization,” Mr. Shaiken said.
read more at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/24/business/worldbusiness/24peso.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
AIG sues US
From Global Trade Watch:
Panama FTA: AIG Sues U.S. for Back Taxes Dodged in Panama Tax Haven
Please write your members of Congress and urge them to reject the Panama FTA and all other "trade" agreements that empower corporate abuse.
The recent American International Group (AIG) scandal has outraged Americans from red and blue states alike. And now, we learn that AIG has the gall to sue the U.S. government, demanding more than $306 million in taxes it paid - twice the amount of the now infamous executive bonuses.
AIG is claiming that it overpaid taxes related to activities of an AIG-linked Panamanian corporation chartered in tax haven Panama. No surprise then, that none other than AIG - along with other bailed-out banks - supports a hangover Bush Free Trade Agreement with Panama.[1]
Write your members of Congress now to alert them about this AIG-Panama FTA outrage!
At issue is AIG-linked Starr International Company (SICO), which, it turns out, is AIG's largest shareholder. It is also the manager of a compensation fund for AIG employees, who are paid, you guessed it, in AIG shares. Oh, and SICO's chairman is former AIG chairman Maurice "Hank" Greenberg.
The Panama FTA, a hangover NAFTA expansion deal negotiated by the Bush administration, would grant SICO, and other Panama-registered corporations with offshore ties, expansive new rights to challenge U.S. public-interest regulations in foreign tribunals - to, um, demand taxpayer compensation for regulations that undermine their expected future profits.
Take action to make sure Congress knows about this AIG-Panama FTA outrage.
Why is SICO, which is so extensively connected to U.S. firms and individuals, based in Panama? Well, Panama applies low to no regulations and taxes on foreign firms registered there, of which there are 350,000 - second only to Hong Kong. And under the Panama FTA, SICO and many of these other 350,000 corporations could challenge U.S. policies that crack down tax cheating, money laundering and risky shady financial dealings. The FTA would allow these corporations to directly sue the U.S. government for taxpayer-dollar damages in an FTA-established foreign tribunal!
Whatever the eventual outcome of the U.S. court battles, this case, filed February 27, shows that AIG will exploit every available channel to escape U.S. taxes and regulations and to profit at the taxpayers' expense.[2]
The Panama FTA takes us in precisely the wrong direction at a time when all of our energies should be dedicated to fixing the mess made by corporations like AIG.
Send an email to your members of Congress today to tell them to reject the Panama FTA or any "trade" agreement that empowers more corporate abuse! Then, tell a friend!
Thank you for all you do,
James Ploeser, Senior Field OrganizerPublic Citizen's Global Trade Watch division
[1] See this Latin American Trade Coalition letter.[2] "A.I.G. Sues U.S. for Return of $306 Million in Tax Payments," New York Times, March 19, 2009.
Panama FTA: AIG Sues U.S. for Back Taxes Dodged in Panama Tax Haven
Please write your members of Congress and urge them to reject the Panama FTA and all other "trade" agreements that empower corporate abuse.
The recent American International Group (AIG) scandal has outraged Americans from red and blue states alike. And now, we learn that AIG has the gall to sue the U.S. government, demanding more than $306 million in taxes it paid - twice the amount of the now infamous executive bonuses.
AIG is claiming that it overpaid taxes related to activities of an AIG-linked Panamanian corporation chartered in tax haven Panama. No surprise then, that none other than AIG - along with other bailed-out banks - supports a hangover Bush Free Trade Agreement with Panama.[1]
Write your members of Congress now to alert them about this AIG-Panama FTA outrage!
At issue is AIG-linked Starr International Company (SICO), which, it turns out, is AIG's largest shareholder. It is also the manager of a compensation fund for AIG employees, who are paid, you guessed it, in AIG shares. Oh, and SICO's chairman is former AIG chairman Maurice "Hank" Greenberg.
The Panama FTA, a hangover NAFTA expansion deal negotiated by the Bush administration, would grant SICO, and other Panama-registered corporations with offshore ties, expansive new rights to challenge U.S. public-interest regulations in foreign tribunals - to, um, demand taxpayer compensation for regulations that undermine their expected future profits.
Take action to make sure Congress knows about this AIG-Panama FTA outrage.
Why is SICO, which is so extensively connected to U.S. firms and individuals, based in Panama? Well, Panama applies low to no regulations and taxes on foreign firms registered there, of which there are 350,000 - second only to Hong Kong. And under the Panama FTA, SICO and many of these other 350,000 corporations could challenge U.S. policies that crack down tax cheating, money laundering and risky shady financial dealings. The FTA would allow these corporations to directly sue the U.S. government for taxpayer-dollar damages in an FTA-established foreign tribunal!
Whatever the eventual outcome of the U.S. court battles, this case, filed February 27, shows that AIG will exploit every available channel to escape U.S. taxes and regulations and to profit at the taxpayers' expense.[2]
The Panama FTA takes us in precisely the wrong direction at a time when all of our energies should be dedicated to fixing the mess made by corporations like AIG.
Send an email to your members of Congress today to tell them to reject the Panama FTA or any "trade" agreement that empowers more corporate abuse! Then, tell a friend!
Thank you for all you do,
James Ploeser, Senior Field OrganizerPublic Citizen's Global Trade Watch division
[1] See this Latin American Trade Coalition letter.[2] "A.I.G. Sues U.S. for Return of $306 Million in Tax Payments," New York Times, March 19, 2009.
Obama's Popularity Collapsing...Why
Hi RC,
There seems to be some truth in this. What do you think.
Love Jess
You might remember Jess voted for Obama
LaRouche: Why President Obama's Popularity has Suddenly Collapsed
March 24, 2009 (LPAC)--Lyndon LaRouche today warned that President Barack Obama is being hoodwinked by some of his leading so-called economic advisers, and the consequences could be both the early destruction of his Presidency, and a global financial shock, that brings down the entire system. "This is why, over the past 48 hours, since the announcement of the latest bailout swindle, President Obama's approval rating with the American people has plummeted. It is the result of the President's apparent endorsement of this worst-yet bailout swindle," LaRouche explained.
"It is clear to me," LaRouche warned, "that the entire global financial system is hopelessly bankrupt, and that the behavior of some key American officials, including Larry Summers, Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank is tantamount to treason." LaRouche explained: "The President is clearly unprepared to deal with the horrendous financial and monetary collapse that he has inherited, and he is being hoodwinked into endorsing policies that will only assure that the entire system blows. Otherwise, President Obama would never have gone along with the swindle announced yesterday by his Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner. You cannot solve this worst financial and monetary crisis in modern history by turning over the keys to the banking system--at taxpayers expense--to a bunch of hedge fund thieves. Is the President prepared to squander another $6 trillion in taxpayers money over the period between now and April 15? That is what the plan announced yesterday by Secretary Geithner is going to mean.
"I know," LaRouche continued, "that Geithner is not the sole author of this swindle. He is the vehicle through which the scheme has been floated. I have no doubt that, ultimately, this plan was hatched in London, which stands to lose everything if the offshore hedge fund empire is shut down. So, we are not dealing with a well-meaning blunder. We are dealing with a policy that is intended to destroy the United States altogether. It is coming from a London-centered financial oligarchy that is out to wreck the United States, beyond repair. And people like Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank are fully complicit in this treasonous effort. For them, and for people like Larry Summers, their complicity in this action is tantamount to treason. If the plan, announced on Monday by Secretary Geithner is allowed to go forward, this can be the trigger that detonates the crash of the entire global financial system. This will not just bankrupt the United States. It will bankrupt the world."
LaRouche concluded, "President Obama is, no doubt, well meaning, but he has been taken in. If this continues any longer, the U.S.A. will be finished. I do not wish to see that happen. I do not wish to see worthless and semi-worthless paper on the books of the banks bought up by taxpayers' dollars at 80 or 90 cents on the dollar, and turned over as assets of the very offshore hedge funds that have played such a pivotal role in the unfolding of this crisis. I am speaking in blunt terms, because the stakes are so great, and nothing short of the whole truth is going to serve the President's needs at this time."
http://www.larouchepack.com/
update on Bill HR 1207
Video giving you update on "Audit the Federal Reserve" (39 congressional co-signers now and growing). The people are pressuring their representatives, and getting results.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Why and When was Federal Reserve Created
First Section from Government Website is as follows:
When was the Federal Reserve created?
The Federal Reserve was created on December 23, 1913, with the signing of the Federal Reserve Act by President Woodrow Wilson. The act had been drafted as House Resolution 7837 by Representative Carter Glass (D-VA), incoming chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee.
What are the Federal Reserve's responsibilities?
Today, the Federal Reserve's responsibilities fall into four general areas:
- conducting the nation's monetary policy by influencing money and credit conditions in the economy in pursuit of full employment and stable prices
- supervising and regulating banking institutions to ensure the safety and soundness of the nation's banking and financial system and to protect the credit rights of consumers (They did not do their job. No wounder the people are calling for an audit. In fact many are calling for an Audit of the Federal Reserve for this reason and evidence they have been bed fellows with the banking system that created the banking crises...fraud {see below})
- maintaining the stability of the financial system and containing systemic risk that may arise in financial markets
- providing certain financial services to the U.S. government, to the public, to financial institutions, and to foreign official institutions, including playing a major role in operating the nation's payments systems
Who owns the Federal Reserve?
The Federal Reserve System is not "owned" by anyone and is not a private, profit-making institution. Instead, it is an independent entity within the government, having both public purposes and private aspects.
As the nation's central bank, the Federal Reserve derives its authority from the U.S. Congress. It is considered an independent central bank because its decisions do not have to be ratified by the President or anyone else in the executive or legislative branch of government, it does not receive funding appropriated by Congress, and the terms of the members of the Board of Governors span multiple presidential and congressional terms. However, the Federal Reserve is subject to oversight by Congress, which periodically reviews its activities and can alter its responsibilities by statute. Also, the Federal Reserve must work within the framework of the overall objectives of economic and financial policy established by the government. Therefore, the Federal Reserve can be more accurately described as "independent within the government."
The twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks, which were established by Congress as the operating arms of the nation's central banking system, are organized much like private corporations--possibly leading to some confusion about "ownership." For example, the Reserve Banks issue shares of stock to member banks. However, owning Reserve Bank stock is quite different from owning stock in a private company. The Reserve Banks are not operated for profit, and ownership of a certain amount of stock is, by law, a condition of membership in the System. The stock may not be sold, traded, or pledged as security for a loan; dividends are, by law, 6 percent per year.
It is self-financed and therefore is not subject to the congressional budgetary process.
Note: This site also says they are audited, while others say: yes, but not a true audit that requires them to report all activities to congress. (see more explanation below). I personally wounder if there was full disclosure to congress that revealed corruption would they reward it as they have with Bailouts to banks. I am for a full audit that reports findings to the American people
http://www.federalreserve.gov/generalinfo/faq/faqfrs.htm#5
This second part was taken from various websites:
Though the Federal Reserve policy harms the average American, it benefits those in a position to take advantage of the cycles in monetary policy. The main beneficiaries are those who receive access to artificially inflated money and/or credit before the inflationary effects of the policy impact the entire economy. Federal Reserve policies also benefit big spending politicians who use the inflated currency created by the Fed to hide the true costs of the welfare-warfare state. It is time for Congress to put the interests of the American people ahead of the special interests and their own appetite for big government. (This article further explains why the creation of the Federal Reserve is unconstitutional) http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul53.html
Ron Paul speaking to the Congress http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4kxTkhwR_Q
Audits of the Federal Reserve are not Audits in the true sense of the word;The U.S. Federal Reserve has refused to publicize a list of AIG's derivative counterparties and what they have been paid since the bailout, riling the U.S. Senate Banking Committee.
Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Donald Kohn testified before that committee on Thursday that revealing names risked jeopardizing AIG's continuing business. Kohn said there were millions of counterparties around the globe, including pension funds and U.S. households.http://www.reuters.com/article/BANKSL/idUSN0725372820090307
“The Fed has so far resisted attempts to provide information on how it is spending the bailout money and currently dictates how accountable it will be to Congress. Since its creation in 1913, the Fed’s control of money and credit in this country has resulted in a 95% devaluation of our dollar and the piling up, just in the last year, of almost $10 trillion in bailouts and loans http://www.freedomworks.org/blog/joseph-onorati/ron-paul-bill-to-audit-the-fed
Two years ago would you have doubted the wide spread banking corruption now being revealed? Corrupt institutions often throw out a fall guy to take attention off of the real crime lord. It is time for complete transparency as President Obama has promised.
Bill HR 1207 to audit Federal Reserve http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h1207/show
Who to Contact:
To find your Senator, click here. To find your Representative, click here.
To contact Obama: http://www.whitehouse.gov/CONTACT/
To contact the financial services committee: http://www.house.gov/financialservices/contact.html
Monday, March 23, 2009
Treasury Dept. Doesn't know?
Obama's Treasury Department is not sure what the problem is. However they tell us not to worry because "if this doesn't work they will simply fine tweak it."
You will recall that when the politicians were telling us that "the economy was fundamentally strong" many of us were predicting this economic event, and even gave the reasons, and solutions. Click below to see what we said:
Treasury Dept. Doesn't know?
You will recall that when the politicians were telling us that "the economy was fundamentally strong" many of us were predicting this economic event, and even gave the reasons, and solutions. Click below to see what we said:
Treasury Dept. Doesn't know?
Congress Forced To Watch Training Video About Bipartisan Cooperation
WASHINGTON—In an effort to stimulate discussion, resolve party conflicts, and increase legislative productivity, members of the 111th Congress were once again required to watch an instructional video on bipartisan collaboration this week.
"Since both House and Senate seem unable or unwilling to compromise on several issues regarding tax money, earmarks, or even seating arrangement, we have decided to take drastic action," Vice President Joe Biden told a special joint session of Congress Monday. "Hopefully this will give you some tools you can use to lend a hand, and maybe an ear, across the aisle."
"And please, no talking on cell phones during the video," Biden added. "I'm looking at you, Senator Reid."
Article 1, section 8 of the Constitution specifies that the legislative branch must watch the instructional training film "A Vote For Understanding" once every six years. The 30-minute video was made in 1976 and stars former Sen. William Proxmire (D-WI), who guides viewers through a series of short lessons about the importance of listening to the opposition without interrupting, yelling, or filibustering.
After calling the mandatory session to order, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wheeled in a cart with a television and VCR and instructed Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell to dim the lights.
The film opens with a dramatization of two legislators tugging at opposite ends of the same bill, until Proxmire steps into frame and freezes the action by calling a "time out." While an up-tempo synthesizer track plays in the background, Proxmire teaches the bitterly divided congressmen to look at each other, open their minds, and work together instead of relying on threats and walkouts.
Another scene revolves around a heated appropriations dispute, and encourages lawmakers to always "S.H.I.N.E." by using the five steps of legislative cooperation: "Show respect, Hold back anger, Identify common ground, Nation first! and Emerge with compromise."
At another point, a split screen depicts two congressmen—a Democrat and Republican wearing blue and red hats, respectively—engaged in a shouting match over a bill's rider. The screen dissolves to reveal the two men facing away from each other, yelling in opposite directions. Proxmire then rotates the legislators' chairs around and switches their hats, teaching both a profound lesson in seeing government through the eyes of the opposition.
Despite the video's distinct message of compromise, cooperation, and not completely ignoring and then vilifying members of an opposing party, many lawmakers called it "unrealistic and outdated." Some claimed their time would have been better spent arguing over provisions of the upcoming health care reform bill.
"That's great: Here we are dealing with the worst recession since World War II and we have to watch a friggin' bipartisanship video," Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) said. "What a waste of time. I already saw that back in '97 when I first took office."
"This kind of Democratic grandstanding is exactly why I didn't read a single clause in the economic stimulus package before I voted against it," Enzi added.
Most lawmakers sat with members of their own party during the mandatory screening and spent the entirety of the afternoon slumped over in their chairs. While both sides mostly kept to themselves, there was one moment of bipartisanship during a scene in which Proxmire tells viewers to take a moment to cross the aisle and introduce themselves—to which someone loudly replied, "Yeah right," causing both parties to burst into laughter.
"I don't need some boring movie to teach me about partisanship," said Rep. Robert Andrews (D-NJ), adding that he could not believe the junior senator from Alaska was actually taking notes. "I'm one of the most partisan people around. Ask anyone."
Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID) was also dismissive of the instructional film, saying that if he ever actually went along with its "corny" message of tolerance, he would lose the respect of everyone in Washington.
Said Risch, "Ooh, I just can't wait to listen to Democrats! I'm totally going to consider their feelings and long-term initiatives before voting. Pff. As if."
A small group of legislators, however, said they appreciated the viewing experience.
"I think it was pretty good," said Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV), who appeared in the film with a thick head of brown hair. "I wouldn't mind watching it a second time."
There are a number of other videos Congress is bound by law to watch periodically. The most commonly shown films include "Commerce Regulation And You," "Budgets Made Easy," "So You've Been Re-Elected…," and "Drunk Driving: Dying Under The Influence."
Upon conclusion of the video, Democratic and Republican leaders went out onto the National Mall for a smoke break and, after some levelheaded discussion, determined everything was the executive branch's fault.
from www.theonion.com
"Since both House and Senate seem unable or unwilling to compromise on several issues regarding tax money, earmarks, or even seating arrangement, we have decided to take drastic action," Vice President Joe Biden told a special joint session of Congress Monday. "Hopefully this will give you some tools you can use to lend a hand, and maybe an ear, across the aisle."
"And please, no talking on cell phones during the video," Biden added. "I'm looking at you, Senator Reid."
Article 1, section 8 of the Constitution specifies that the legislative branch must watch the instructional training film "A Vote For Understanding" once every six years. The 30-minute video was made in 1976 and stars former Sen. William Proxmire (D-WI), who guides viewers through a series of short lessons about the importance of listening to the opposition without interrupting, yelling, or filibustering.
After calling the mandatory session to order, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wheeled in a cart with a television and VCR and instructed Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell to dim the lights.
The film opens with a dramatization of two legislators tugging at opposite ends of the same bill, until Proxmire steps into frame and freezes the action by calling a "time out." While an up-tempo synthesizer track plays in the background, Proxmire teaches the bitterly divided congressmen to look at each other, open their minds, and work together instead of relying on threats and walkouts.
Another scene revolves around a heated appropriations dispute, and encourages lawmakers to always "S.H.I.N.E." by using the five steps of legislative cooperation: "Show respect, Hold back anger, Identify common ground, Nation first! and Emerge with compromise."
At another point, a split screen depicts two congressmen—a Democrat and Republican wearing blue and red hats, respectively—engaged in a shouting match over a bill's rider. The screen dissolves to reveal the two men facing away from each other, yelling in opposite directions. Proxmire then rotates the legislators' chairs around and switches their hats, teaching both a profound lesson in seeing government through the eyes of the opposition.
Despite the video's distinct message of compromise, cooperation, and not completely ignoring and then vilifying members of an opposing party, many lawmakers called it "unrealistic and outdated." Some claimed their time would have been better spent arguing over provisions of the upcoming health care reform bill.
"That's great: Here we are dealing with the worst recession since World War II and we have to watch a friggin' bipartisanship video," Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) said. "What a waste of time. I already saw that back in '97 when I first took office."
"This kind of Democratic grandstanding is exactly why I didn't read a single clause in the economic stimulus package before I voted against it," Enzi added.
Most lawmakers sat with members of their own party during the mandatory screening and spent the entirety of the afternoon slumped over in their chairs. While both sides mostly kept to themselves, there was one moment of bipartisanship during a scene in which Proxmire tells viewers to take a moment to cross the aisle and introduce themselves—to which someone loudly replied, "Yeah right," causing both parties to burst into laughter.
"I don't need some boring movie to teach me about partisanship," said Rep. Robert Andrews (D-NJ), adding that he could not believe the junior senator from Alaska was actually taking notes. "I'm one of the most partisan people around. Ask anyone."
Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID) was also dismissive of the instructional film, saying that if he ever actually went along with its "corny" message of tolerance, he would lose the respect of everyone in Washington.
Said Risch, "Ooh, I just can't wait to listen to Democrats! I'm totally going to consider their feelings and long-term initiatives before voting. Pff. As if."
A small group of legislators, however, said they appreciated the viewing experience.
"I think it was pretty good," said Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV), who appeared in the film with a thick head of brown hair. "I wouldn't mind watching it a second time."
There are a number of other videos Congress is bound by law to watch periodically. The most commonly shown films include "Commerce Regulation And You," "Budgets Made Easy," "So You've Been Re-Elected…," and "Drunk Driving: Dying Under The Influence."
Upon conclusion of the video, Democratic and Republican leaders went out onto the National Mall for a smoke break and, after some levelheaded discussion, determined everything was the executive branch's fault.
from www.theonion.com
Latest Info. on Amnesty
Weekly NumbersUSA Summary
Pres. Obama Pulls Rug Out From Under Ex-Convict Pleading for a JobBy Roy Beck, Friday, March 19, 2009
Today's news reports on Pres. Obama's visit to California include a touching interaction with an ex-convict who has lost his job. But his comments about making sure that illegal aliens keep THEIR jobs illustrates the common occurrence of really smart people at the top of our government who just don't get it. They don't understand that there are a limited number of U.S. jobs and that when you fill those jobs with foreign workers (including illegal ones) American workers lose out. Look at what happened . . .
Americans' Protests Rising Against Pelosi's & Obama's Preference for Illegal Foreign WorkersBy Roy Beck, Wednesday, March 18, 2009
The White House switchboard is barely holding on. Fax machines there and in congressional offices are churning out Americans' protest in peak mode. Pres. Obama and House Speaker Pelosi have started a grassroots rebellion with their new statements of prioritizing illegal foreign workers over unemployed Americans. How angry are you? Let me count the ways . . .
NumbersUSA Petition Nearly 4 Times Bigger Than Pro-Amnesty Group'sBy Phillip Zanders, Tuesday, March 17, 2009
I've written often about studies conducted by Vivek Wadhwa with various coauthors. We agree on many issues and disagree on others. But his newest report discussed in a New York Times blog, finds that many Chinese and Indian tech workers in the U.S. plan to return home, which he believes will be a huge loss to the U.S. But Vivek's characterization of this exodus as "America's Loss" is quite baffling.
We Lost On a Tabling Motion, But Would We Have Won On a Straight E-Verify Vote?By Roy Beck, Sunday, March 15, 2009
Paul of Montana asks: "Is there any difference between the procedural vote on Leahy's tabling motion on Sessions' E-Verify amendment and a straight vote on the amendment (for a long-term re-authorization)? Would a straight vote have won for E-Verify?" My answer is . . .
Recent News...
E-Verify Growing in Washington State
Australia Slashing Immigration Intake
Tech Companies to Apply for H-1B Amidst Layoffs
Pelosi Video Goes Public
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Says Immigration Enforcement is "Un-American"
Ninth Circuit Upholds Arizona Illegal Hiring Law
Rep. Roscoe Bartlett -- Today's Champion for American Workers
Rep. Lamar Smith Criticizes Pelosi for calling Enforcement Officers "Un-American"
27 Arrests in Nebraska Search for Illegal Aliens who Disobeyed Deportation Orders
Rep. Pete Hoekstra -- Today's Champion for American Workers
NumbersUSA Members Respond in Big Way
Both Nancy Pelosi and Pres. Obama made big news this week, and since Wednesday, NumbersUSA members have sent more than 325,000 faxes!
Pelosi first made news when a video tape surfaced catching the House Speaker calling U.S. immigration enforcement efforts "un-American" and calling for a stop to the raids. She also called a group partly made up of illegal aliens "very, very patriotic." If you haven't done so already, send a fax to your three Congressmen urging them to reject Pelosi's statements. You can also read a new report released by the Center for Immigration Studies saying that work site enforcement raids increase wages.
On Wednesday, Pres. Obama met with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus to discuss immigration. During the meeting, Obama promised to pursue Comprehensive Immigration Reform and said he plans to travel to Mexico next month to meet with Mexican President Calderon to discuss Amnesty. Visit your Action Buffet and send a fax to Obama blasting his promise to pursue comprehensive immigration reform.
Thanks again for all your support and making your voice heard. And please remember, no voice can be louder than making a personal visit to your Reps district office and telling them that you want to protect American workers through lower immigration levels.
Thanks,
Chris Chmielenski Website Content Manager
Pres. Obama Pulls Rug Out From Under Ex-Convict Pleading for a JobBy Roy Beck, Friday, March 19, 2009
Today's news reports on Pres. Obama's visit to California include a touching interaction with an ex-convict who has lost his job. But his comments about making sure that illegal aliens keep THEIR jobs illustrates the common occurrence of really smart people at the top of our government who just don't get it. They don't understand that there are a limited number of U.S. jobs and that when you fill those jobs with foreign workers (including illegal ones) American workers lose out. Look at what happened . . .
Americans' Protests Rising Against Pelosi's & Obama's Preference for Illegal Foreign WorkersBy Roy Beck, Wednesday, March 18, 2009
The White House switchboard is barely holding on. Fax machines there and in congressional offices are churning out Americans' protest in peak mode. Pres. Obama and House Speaker Pelosi have started a grassroots rebellion with their new statements of prioritizing illegal foreign workers over unemployed Americans. How angry are you? Let me count the ways . . .
NumbersUSA Petition Nearly 4 Times Bigger Than Pro-Amnesty Group'sBy Phillip Zanders, Tuesday, March 17, 2009
I've written often about studies conducted by Vivek Wadhwa with various coauthors. We agree on many issues and disagree on others. But his newest report discussed in a New York Times blog, finds that many Chinese and Indian tech workers in the U.S. plan to return home, which he believes will be a huge loss to the U.S. But Vivek's characterization of this exodus as "America's Loss" is quite baffling.
We Lost On a Tabling Motion, But Would We Have Won On a Straight E-Verify Vote?By Roy Beck, Sunday, March 15, 2009
Paul of Montana asks: "Is there any difference between the procedural vote on Leahy's tabling motion on Sessions' E-Verify amendment and a straight vote on the amendment (for a long-term re-authorization)? Would a straight vote have won for E-Verify?" My answer is . . .
Recent News...
E-Verify Growing in Washington State
Australia Slashing Immigration Intake
Tech Companies to Apply for H-1B Amidst Layoffs
Pelosi Video Goes Public
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Says Immigration Enforcement is "Un-American"
Ninth Circuit Upholds Arizona Illegal Hiring Law
Rep. Roscoe Bartlett -- Today's Champion for American Workers
Rep. Lamar Smith Criticizes Pelosi for calling Enforcement Officers "Un-American"
27 Arrests in Nebraska Search for Illegal Aliens who Disobeyed Deportation Orders
Rep. Pete Hoekstra -- Today's Champion for American Workers
NumbersUSA Members Respond in Big Way
Both Nancy Pelosi and Pres. Obama made big news this week, and since Wednesday, NumbersUSA members have sent more than 325,000 faxes!
Pelosi first made news when a video tape surfaced catching the House Speaker calling U.S. immigration enforcement efforts "un-American" and calling for a stop to the raids. She also called a group partly made up of illegal aliens "very, very patriotic." If you haven't done so already, send a fax to your three Congressmen urging them to reject Pelosi's statements. You can also read a new report released by the Center for Immigration Studies saying that work site enforcement raids increase wages.
On Wednesday, Pres. Obama met with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus to discuss immigration. During the meeting, Obama promised to pursue Comprehensive Immigration Reform and said he plans to travel to Mexico next month to meet with Mexican President Calderon to discuss Amnesty. Visit your Action Buffet and send a fax to Obama blasting his promise to pursue comprehensive immigration reform.
Thanks again for all your support and making your voice heard. And please remember, no voice can be louder than making a personal visit to your Reps district office and telling them that you want to protect American workers through lower immigration levels.
Thanks,
Chris Chmielenski Website Content Manager
Sunday, March 22, 2009
St. Petersburg Times: Local history and the banking crisis
Moral hazard back in the day
By John Kennedy, Special to the St. Petersburg Times
Published Wednesday, March 18, 2009
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some of the best known names on Wall Street are hauled before a congressional committee and their testimony yields stunning accounts of a financial system out of control.
One of the wealthiest men in America paid no income tax for three straight years. Others manipulated stock sales with family members to avoid paying taxes.
Outraged committee members hear testimony about banks engaging in rampant stock speculation. Even credit markets were looted in pursuit of profit.
Sound familiar?
Such testimony didn't come from executives of Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley when they were recently hauled before a House committee plumbing the depths of the nation's financial crisis. Neither was it part of AIG's defense last week for paying millions of dollars in executive bonuses despite needing a $170 billion government bailout.
Instead, the Wall Street revelations date to the 1930s, when lawmakers similarly sought answers to an economic disaster — the 1929 stock market crash.
Chairing the investigation was a Floridian, Jacksonville Sen. Duncan Fletcher, whose name today is largely lost in history. But his probe of the freewheeling financial era that crashed with the Great Depression spanned two years, filled 11,000 pages of testimony and spawned many of the nation's banking regulations still in place.
The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 grew out of Fletcher's hearings, separating commercial banks from investment houses. Bank deposits became federally insured, protecting Americans' nest eggs, while the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 also tightened Wall Street regulation.
Glass-Steagall endured until Congress in 1999 bowed to pressure from the banking industry and repealed the measure. Many critics now blame the repeal for sparking the current global crisis, since risky investments and subprime lending flourished in the newly deregulated climate.
"Fletcher is one of most important figures to come out of Florida in the 20th century, but he's been mostly forgotten," said J. Wayne Flynt, a retired Auburn University historian and author of Duncan Upshaw Fletcher: Dixie's Reluctant Progressive, a 1971 book that chronicled Fletcher's almost three decades in the Senate before his death in 1936.
"If you look back, his work on the Senate's Banking and Currency Committee sounds like it could've drawn the same headlines you're seeing today," Flynt said.
Those called to testify before Fletcher's committee were a who's who of American finance.
J.P. Morgan, along with most of his partners, arrived in spectacular fashion. Like modern auto executives on their private jets, Morgan and four partners left New York for Washington in separate vehicles accompanied by 15 private bodyguards.
Once before the panel, testimony revealed that Morgan paid no incomes taxes in 1930, 1931 and 1932, while members of his firm paid less than $50,000 in 1930.
Just as near-daily revelations about bonuses and bailouts are bugging Americans today, Fletcher's committee touched a nerve almost 80 years ago in a nation staggered by the Depression.
Flynt, the biographer, recalled that the hearings led one businessman to write to Fletcher and deride the stock market as, "the greatest single source of misfortune and disaster in the history of the American people."
An Arizona man wrote the senator, saying he was mad enough to demand some cowboy justice had Fletcher not been "uncovering the truth" about bankers. His confidence in the Floridian "saved us from greasing up our Winchesters and coming down here to clean out this whole gang," the man wrote.
By the time Fletcher began his probe of the nation's troubled finances in 1933, the Depression-weary public had begun referring to bankers as "banksters," likening them to gangsters like Al Capone and Bugsy Siegel.
"The testimony he heard painted a picture of what was basically a free-for-all in the financial world, and it really steamed Fletcher," Flynt said. "He became deeply disillusioned. He had been an ally of the conservative banking industry back home in Jacksonville, and he felt deeply betrayed."
Fletcher, a conservative Democrat, had served as a Jacksonville city councilman, mayor and state representative before defeating Florida Gov. Napoleon Bonaparte Broward in the 1908 party primary for an open U.S. Senate seat.
Fletcher now may be remembered mostly by modest memorials.
In Tallahassee, the state's Fletcher Building houses the state's Office of Financial Regulation and Department of Financial Services. There's also a Neptune Beach high school and Jacksonville Beach middle school named after him.
But in his time Fletcher was a political giant killer. He not only knocked off the influential Broward, Fletcher also defeated another Florida governor, Sidney Catts, to retain his Senate seat in 1920.
Still, with his career built mostly on national issues in Washington, Fletcher's name has dimmed in his home state.
"He's mostly lost in history now," said Canter Brown, a historian at Georgia's Fort Valley State University, who has written extensively on Florida. "But in his time, Fletcher became the symbol of a new Florida, one of dynamic, growing cities like Jacksonville."
In Washington, Fletcher thrived as a progressive — supporting an eight-hour day for government workers, an income tax, and advocating social, political and economic reform. He also served on a Senate subcommittee investigating the sinking of the Titanic.
But when New Deal Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president in 1933, Fletcher's career found its zenith, with the pair joining in crafting legislation that reshaped the U.S. financial system.
"He really took on some big issues at a terrible time," said Alex Sanchez, president of the Florida Bankers Association.
Fletcher was low-key, historians recall. But he had bite when it came to dealing with a Wall Street run amok.
America's financial system "enabled corporation executives to run pools and to make enormous personal profits at the expense of their own stockholders," Fletcher told the New York Times in 1934. Such behavior, he added, subjected "the interests of the nation to the purposes and profits of stockbrokers."
Fletcher left most of the theatrics to his cigar-chomping committee counsel, Ferdinand Pecora, a former New York assistant district attorney and son of Italian immigrants, who led the probe that riveted the nation's press.
Fletcher's role, though, played well back home in a Florida hit hard by the Depression.
Just as the sputtering of Florida's housing market two years ago foreshadowed deeper problems worldwide, before Wall Street's 1929 collapse the state had been buffeted by bank failures, hurricanes and a citrus freeze that damaged the local economy.
"The Depression really came to Florida at least three years early," said Brown, the historian. "This state was hurting, and Fletcher was seen as a hero."
Fletcher's hometown Florida Times-Union hailed him in February 1934 for "having the time of his life calling all the big bugs up on the 'carpet' before his investigating committee."
In the Senate, Fletcher went on to push what was envisioned as one of the nation's biggest public works projects of its time: the Cross Florida Barge Canal. But the two-year Wall Street investigation had badly sapped Fletcher's health and he died of a heart attack on June 17, 1936.
Roosevelt in private correspondence remembered him as a "loyal and steadfast friend."
Fletcher's funeral in Jacksonville was carried on radio stations statewide and 5,000 people filed past his coffin at City Hall.
"There is almost no consciousness of Fletcher in Florida today," Flynt said. "But what he was dealing with was a financial meltdown that surpassed anything we have seen so far in this recession.
"He didn't like to be the center of attention. But he helped dig this country out of the middle of a real crisis."
John Kennedy is a former Tallahassee bureau chief for the Orlando Sentinel.
By John Kennedy, Special to the St. Petersburg Times
Published Wednesday, March 18, 2009
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some of the best known names on Wall Street are hauled before a congressional committee and their testimony yields stunning accounts of a financial system out of control.
One of the wealthiest men in America paid no income tax for three straight years. Others manipulated stock sales with family members to avoid paying taxes.
Outraged committee members hear testimony about banks engaging in rampant stock speculation. Even credit markets were looted in pursuit of profit.
Sound familiar?
Such testimony didn't come from executives of Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley when they were recently hauled before a House committee plumbing the depths of the nation's financial crisis. Neither was it part of AIG's defense last week for paying millions of dollars in executive bonuses despite needing a $170 billion government bailout.
Instead, the Wall Street revelations date to the 1930s, when lawmakers similarly sought answers to an economic disaster — the 1929 stock market crash.
Chairing the investigation was a Floridian, Jacksonville Sen. Duncan Fletcher, whose name today is largely lost in history. But his probe of the freewheeling financial era that crashed with the Great Depression spanned two years, filled 11,000 pages of testimony and spawned many of the nation's banking regulations still in place.
The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 grew out of Fletcher's hearings, separating commercial banks from investment houses. Bank deposits became federally insured, protecting Americans' nest eggs, while the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 also tightened Wall Street regulation.
Glass-Steagall endured until Congress in 1999 bowed to pressure from the banking industry and repealed the measure. Many critics now blame the repeal for sparking the current global crisis, since risky investments and subprime lending flourished in the newly deregulated climate.
"Fletcher is one of most important figures to come out of Florida in the 20th century, but he's been mostly forgotten," said J. Wayne Flynt, a retired Auburn University historian and author of Duncan Upshaw Fletcher: Dixie's Reluctant Progressive, a 1971 book that chronicled Fletcher's almost three decades in the Senate before his death in 1936.
"If you look back, his work on the Senate's Banking and Currency Committee sounds like it could've drawn the same headlines you're seeing today," Flynt said.
Those called to testify before Fletcher's committee were a who's who of American finance.
J.P. Morgan, along with most of his partners, arrived in spectacular fashion. Like modern auto executives on their private jets, Morgan and four partners left New York for Washington in separate vehicles accompanied by 15 private bodyguards.
Once before the panel, testimony revealed that Morgan paid no incomes taxes in 1930, 1931 and 1932, while members of his firm paid less than $50,000 in 1930.
Just as near-daily revelations about bonuses and bailouts are bugging Americans today, Fletcher's committee touched a nerve almost 80 years ago in a nation staggered by the Depression.
Flynt, the biographer, recalled that the hearings led one businessman to write to Fletcher and deride the stock market as, "the greatest single source of misfortune and disaster in the history of the American people."
An Arizona man wrote the senator, saying he was mad enough to demand some cowboy justice had Fletcher not been "uncovering the truth" about bankers. His confidence in the Floridian "saved us from greasing up our Winchesters and coming down here to clean out this whole gang," the man wrote.
By the time Fletcher began his probe of the nation's troubled finances in 1933, the Depression-weary public had begun referring to bankers as "banksters," likening them to gangsters like Al Capone and Bugsy Siegel.
"The testimony he heard painted a picture of what was basically a free-for-all in the financial world, and it really steamed Fletcher," Flynt said. "He became deeply disillusioned. He had been an ally of the conservative banking industry back home in Jacksonville, and he felt deeply betrayed."
Fletcher, a conservative Democrat, had served as a Jacksonville city councilman, mayor and state representative before defeating Florida Gov. Napoleon Bonaparte Broward in the 1908 party primary for an open U.S. Senate seat.
Fletcher now may be remembered mostly by modest memorials.
In Tallahassee, the state's Fletcher Building houses the state's Office of Financial Regulation and Department of Financial Services. There's also a Neptune Beach high school and Jacksonville Beach middle school named after him.
But in his time Fletcher was a political giant killer. He not only knocked off the influential Broward, Fletcher also defeated another Florida governor, Sidney Catts, to retain his Senate seat in 1920.
Still, with his career built mostly on national issues in Washington, Fletcher's name has dimmed in his home state.
"He's mostly lost in history now," said Canter Brown, a historian at Georgia's Fort Valley State University, who has written extensively on Florida. "But in his time, Fletcher became the symbol of a new Florida, one of dynamic, growing cities like Jacksonville."
In Washington, Fletcher thrived as a progressive — supporting an eight-hour day for government workers, an income tax, and advocating social, political and economic reform. He also served on a Senate subcommittee investigating the sinking of the Titanic.
But when New Deal Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president in 1933, Fletcher's career found its zenith, with the pair joining in crafting legislation that reshaped the U.S. financial system.
"He really took on some big issues at a terrible time," said Alex Sanchez, president of the Florida Bankers Association.
Fletcher was low-key, historians recall. But he had bite when it came to dealing with a Wall Street run amok.
America's financial system "enabled corporation executives to run pools and to make enormous personal profits at the expense of their own stockholders," Fletcher told the New York Times in 1934. Such behavior, he added, subjected "the interests of the nation to the purposes and profits of stockbrokers."
Fletcher left most of the theatrics to his cigar-chomping committee counsel, Ferdinand Pecora, a former New York assistant district attorney and son of Italian immigrants, who led the probe that riveted the nation's press.
Fletcher's role, though, played well back home in a Florida hit hard by the Depression.
Just as the sputtering of Florida's housing market two years ago foreshadowed deeper problems worldwide, before Wall Street's 1929 collapse the state had been buffeted by bank failures, hurricanes and a citrus freeze that damaged the local economy.
"The Depression really came to Florida at least three years early," said Brown, the historian. "This state was hurting, and Fletcher was seen as a hero."
Fletcher's hometown Florida Times-Union hailed him in February 1934 for "having the time of his life calling all the big bugs up on the 'carpet' before his investigating committee."
In the Senate, Fletcher went on to push what was envisioned as one of the nation's biggest public works projects of its time: the Cross Florida Barge Canal. But the two-year Wall Street investigation had badly sapped Fletcher's health and he died of a heart attack on June 17, 1936.
Roosevelt in private correspondence remembered him as a "loyal and steadfast friend."
Fletcher's funeral in Jacksonville was carried on radio stations statewide and 5,000 people filed past his coffin at City Hall.
"There is almost no consciousness of Fletcher in Florida today," Flynt said. "But what he was dealing with was a financial meltdown that surpassed anything we have seen so far in this recession.
"He didn't like to be the center of attention. But he helped dig this country out of the middle of a real crisis."
John Kennedy is a former Tallahassee bureau chief for the Orlando Sentinel.
A prayer from Lynn
This is a prayer from Lynn
Cleansing Prayer/Meditation for The Spring Equinox
This was sent to me by a fellow student. It is said to be a powerful prayer of transformation to be used only when truly ready to move forward. Feel free to change any of the wording so that it resonates best for you. Namaste.
"Today during the Spring Equinox "I am" clearing away all that no longer serves me for the Highest Good, I release the ego/mind that has held me prisoner, in bondage, in illusion and a fantasy world that is impossible of being True and Real and in limiting beliefs that have kept me away from the true source of Mother/Father GOD’S UNLIMITED LOVE. I begin again in clarity, in purpose, and allow myself to step into the Brilliance and Light of my True Being. I allow my inner child to be healed and transformed back into the innocence, purity and playfulness of my true essence. I release "seeing" out of eyes that peer to the outside for acceptance and TRUTH and instead replace it with the LOVE and TRUTH that comes from within myself, for all the answers of REAL TRUTH AND LOVE are contained within my inner being.
I ask Spirit today to utilize me as a vehicle for change and growth into the True Reality of Oneness and accept all the Unique gifts I was born into to assist in the "shift" of manifesting Heaven on Earth and for all to return to being One in UNITY. I allow my Heart to remain open at all moments and embrace the new understandings. "I am" choosing to release all the pain and suffering of illusion and to step into the Magnificence, Beauty, and Greatness I am destined to Be. From this day forth I release the darkness that society and the status quo have placed upon me and that I have chosen to participate in for the purposes of learning and choose My Heart, my Truth, and my Divine Birthright of Abundance and accept my Royal heritage.
Today I release the past and the future and am PRESENT in the MOMENT of NOW, where I am Eternal all ways. I am worthy and I deserve all the Grandness that Paradise on Earth is granting me and accept responsibility to embrace the love within and join the river of One consciousness and begin Co-Creating with Others, who too have also embraced and accepted their Divinity for it is a Team effort. I am closing the door on the old and embracing the new door that is opening into the Light and Truth and will also embrace the new information of Light and Love I am presented with. I am surrendering everything I have ever been told by the outside world and accepted as truth that does not serve the highest good and evolution and expansion of my soul and look inside my Heart for the Truth. For there really is only One Truth and that is Love and Love is everywhere present, when I am looking from within my Heart, the true brain of my being. Today is the day I am choosing to stand in my Light and Shine so I may be an example for others who may not yet have the Courage or Strength to stand Up for the Truth, Love and Light.
I release all fear, shame, guilt, abandonment and neglect that throughout this lifetime or others, I may have experienced and now understand it was all an illusion of an ego/mind who did not understand Love. I now release those back into Creation to be transformed back into Light to be Utilized for Higher Intentions for the HIGHEST Good of ALL.
I understand the moment has arrived where I have to stop being who I am not and express Who I Truly Am, a Light Being of Pure Love, Pure Joy, Pure Allowance, Pure Embracement, Pure Unconditional Love, Pure Compassion, and Pure Passion which transforms all pain and suffering.
Today as I release, I am in deep appreciation for all who assist me whether visible or invisible and take full responsibility for my own healing and transformation.
I reach out to others who are already in the Real and True for support and assistance.
Today and the next moments I chose to no longer feed into illusion, fantasy, and all the games the ego/mind plays to keep me from my True freedom of embracing Love, Light, and Truth. I support the Brilliance, Love, Light, and Truth in all who have also made and are making this choice as we connect our Hearts together as One, uniquely expressed to begin building and Co-Creating a Spiritual life of Unity, Harmony, and spreading the Universal Understanding of True Love, Oneness, Peace, and Abundance for all. I understand with Grander acceptance, and with my new found wisdom through this experience that I can also assist humanity in Upliftment into True Happiness and Heaven on Earth in all its Grandness. Within Greater understandings flows Grander responsibility to my Brothers and Sisters on Planet Earth on whatever level they currently are in. I release everything right now that is holding me in the past or future and am empowered by the Present moment, in the Present moment of NOW, I understand through the PRESENT MOMENT OF NOW we are always connected as One Heart Beating for this is full consciousness and full awareness.
With my new found consciousness I will utilize for the Highest good of all, through providing honest information to transform the old of Power over [ which the mind/ego created] and transform into POWER WITH and Power For, and will Do so with Courage, Grace, and INTEGRITY for my inner being and all that connect with me. Lastly, I will only serve ONE MASTER, my inner HEART being which is only Love, Truth, Brilliance, Grandness, Joy, Light and in serving my true inner being, I step into the River of ONE with all and build powerful unconditional love bridges in all my relationships. I am also serving in Unifying the Grid, the connection that will Light up the Earth into the Brilliance it is DESTINED to BE, Just Like the Sun.
Now, take a deep breathe in through the nose, deep into your being and then breathe out of your mouth, [ repeat this 3 times or until you feel your vibration level increase, you will know because you will feel tingly and Light]. Now again say out loud "I ask and give permission to be totally free and share my experiences with others for Higher understandings to build from. Today I cleanse and release the old for the allowance of the new to come in. Today I LET GO and surrender to pure Love and Light, in all ways!"
Cleansing Prayer/Meditation for The Spring Equinox
This was sent to me by a fellow student. It is said to be a powerful prayer of transformation to be used only when truly ready to move forward. Feel free to change any of the wording so that it resonates best for you. Namaste.
"Today during the Spring Equinox "I am" clearing away all that no longer serves me for the Highest Good, I release the ego/mind that has held me prisoner, in bondage, in illusion and a fantasy world that is impossible of being True and Real and in limiting beliefs that have kept me away from the true source of Mother/Father GOD’S UNLIMITED LOVE. I begin again in clarity, in purpose, and allow myself to step into the Brilliance and Light of my True Being. I allow my inner child to be healed and transformed back into the innocence, purity and playfulness of my true essence. I release "seeing" out of eyes that peer to the outside for acceptance and TRUTH and instead replace it with the LOVE and TRUTH that comes from within myself, for all the answers of REAL TRUTH AND LOVE are contained within my inner being.
I ask Spirit today to utilize me as a vehicle for change and growth into the True Reality of Oneness and accept all the Unique gifts I was born into to assist in the "shift" of manifesting Heaven on Earth and for all to return to being One in UNITY. I allow my Heart to remain open at all moments and embrace the new understandings. "I am" choosing to release all the pain and suffering of illusion and to step into the Magnificence, Beauty, and Greatness I am destined to Be. From this day forth I release the darkness that society and the status quo have placed upon me and that I have chosen to participate in for the purposes of learning and choose My Heart, my Truth, and my Divine Birthright of Abundance and accept my Royal heritage.
Today I release the past and the future and am PRESENT in the MOMENT of NOW, where I am Eternal all ways. I am worthy and I deserve all the Grandness that Paradise on Earth is granting me and accept responsibility to embrace the love within and join the river of One consciousness and begin Co-Creating with Others, who too have also embraced and accepted their Divinity for it is a Team effort. I am closing the door on the old and embracing the new door that is opening into the Light and Truth and will also embrace the new information of Light and Love I am presented with. I am surrendering everything I have ever been told by the outside world and accepted as truth that does not serve the highest good and evolution and expansion of my soul and look inside my Heart for the Truth. For there really is only One Truth and that is Love and Love is everywhere present, when I am looking from within my Heart, the true brain of my being. Today is the day I am choosing to stand in my Light and Shine so I may be an example for others who may not yet have the Courage or Strength to stand Up for the Truth, Love and Light.
I release all fear, shame, guilt, abandonment and neglect that throughout this lifetime or others, I may have experienced and now understand it was all an illusion of an ego/mind who did not understand Love. I now release those back into Creation to be transformed back into Light to be Utilized for Higher Intentions for the HIGHEST Good of ALL.
I understand the moment has arrived where I have to stop being who I am not and express Who I Truly Am, a Light Being of Pure Love, Pure Joy, Pure Allowance, Pure Embracement, Pure Unconditional Love, Pure Compassion, and Pure Passion which transforms all pain and suffering.
Today as I release, I am in deep appreciation for all who assist me whether visible or invisible and take full responsibility for my own healing and transformation.
I reach out to others who are already in the Real and True for support and assistance.
Today and the next moments I chose to no longer feed into illusion, fantasy, and all the games the ego/mind plays to keep me from my True freedom of embracing Love, Light, and Truth. I support the Brilliance, Love, Light, and Truth in all who have also made and are making this choice as we connect our Hearts together as One, uniquely expressed to begin building and Co-Creating a Spiritual life of Unity, Harmony, and spreading the Universal Understanding of True Love, Oneness, Peace, and Abundance for all. I understand with Grander acceptance, and with my new found wisdom through this experience that I can also assist humanity in Upliftment into True Happiness and Heaven on Earth in all its Grandness. Within Greater understandings flows Grander responsibility to my Brothers and Sisters on Planet Earth on whatever level they currently are in. I release everything right now that is holding me in the past or future and am empowered by the Present moment, in the Present moment of NOW, I understand through the PRESENT MOMENT OF NOW we are always connected as One Heart Beating for this is full consciousness and full awareness.
With my new found consciousness I will utilize for the Highest good of all, through providing honest information to transform the old of Power over [ which the mind/ego created] and transform into POWER WITH and Power For, and will Do so with Courage, Grace, and INTEGRITY for my inner being and all that connect with me. Lastly, I will only serve ONE MASTER, my inner HEART being which is only Love, Truth, Brilliance, Grandness, Joy, Light and in serving my true inner being, I step into the River of ONE with all and build powerful unconditional love bridges in all my relationships. I am also serving in Unifying the Grid, the connection that will Light up the Earth into the Brilliance it is DESTINED to BE, Just Like the Sun.
Now, take a deep breathe in through the nose, deep into your being and then breathe out of your mouth, [ repeat this 3 times or until you feel your vibration level increase, you will know because you will feel tingly and Light]. Now again say out loud "I ask and give permission to be totally free and share my experiences with others for Higher understandings to build from. Today I cleanse and release the old for the allowance of the new to come in. Today I LET GO and surrender to pure Love and Light, in all ways!"
Saturday, March 21, 2009
AlterNet: The secret war against American workers
The Secret War Against American Workers
By Robert S. Eshelman, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on March 21, 2009, Printed on March 21, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/132742/
Juanita Borden, 39 and jobless, patiently waits as her résumé methodically works its way, line by line, through a fax machine at a state-run job center in downtown Philadelphia. Lying open before her on a round conference table is a neatly organized folder. "This is my résumé and everywhere I've been faxing to. This is how I keep track of what day I've sent them on, so I can call and check back," she says, leafing through pages of fax cover sheets. "I usually give five business days before I inquire whether or not they've received it and whether or not they're interested."
Juanita was fired last October, when her employer found out that her driver's license -- a job requirement -- had expired. "It was only a matter of twenty-six dollars. I was under the impression that it expired in November of '08, but it was actually November of '07, and because I hadn't been driving I wasn't aware of it." The one occasion on which she was required to drive, though, she couldn't, and that was all her employer needed to fire her for failing to fulfill her employment responsibilities. She has since renewed her license and says with an air of futility, "I'd like to have my job back if they would give it to me."
She hasn't been asked back and, despite her persistent efforts, she hasn't received a single call from a prospective employer either. "The good thing," she says, remaining remarkably buoyant despite her misfortune, "is that usually when I interview I get the job. So... I'm hoping for an interview soon." Until then, her carefully managed folder serves as a small measure of control over an otherwise steady drift into poverty and homelessness.
Juanita isn't the only one at this job center on the precipice of acute need. And she isn't alone in relating a story about being fired for what would seem to many a frivolous reason. Chris Topher, 25 and making his first visit here, was axed in March of last year. The telecommunications company he had been working for sent him packing when, as he tells it, he installed cable equipment a customer hadn't ordered. It didn't matter that the mistake was on the work order Chris was given. "It was the best job I had since I graduated high school and I've had a few: Turnpike Commission, working in a Senator's office. I've had some nice jobs, but that one, I enjoyed it the most."
And there was good reason to enjoy it. Chris pulled down $1,200-1,300 every two weeks in addition to receiving a full benefits package. He thought of contesting his termination, but at the time it looked like a long, uphill battle that he wasn't eager to take on. It's a fight that, in hindsight, he thinks he could have won and that his employer probably knew he would win as well. "And that's why I believe I was approved by my employer for unemployment," he says.
Under unemployment eligibility requirements, an employer must certify whether an employee committed a "fault" on the job and was therefore terminated. If an employer indicates that no fault was committed and the employee meets several other requirements, including being physically able to work, states grant an unemployment claim. In other words, Chris's former employer granted him a small concession, while otherwise turning his life upside down amid the worst job market since 1983.
"Unemployment is the pits pretty much," says Chris, whose unemployment compensation is significantly less than half what he made as a cable installer. Still, he's better off than Juanita, who has applied for unemployment twice and been denied both times. She is now appealing, but her employer is conceding nothing. In a recent arbitration hearing, Juanita says, her former supervisor claimed that, if she had only told them about her expired license, they would have allowed her renewal time. If only.
Now, Juanita lives with her brother and his wife, but they, too, have financial problems. "My brother is working part time and it's driving him crazy, because it's causing money problems between him and his wife," she explains. "And with me being there," she hesitates, "...it's a little constrained."
Ratcheting Up the Fear
The mainstream media has generally sketched a picture of a labor market in which, under the pressure of an economic meltdown, workers succumb to two types of downsizing. In one, a fierce recession forces businesses, desperate to cut costs in terrible times, to lay off workers. They, in turn, face grim prospects for gainful employment elsewhere. In a kinder, gentler version of the same, employers, desperate to cut costs in terrible times, offer -- or sometimes force workers to take -- "furloughs," salary cuts, union give-backs, four-day work weeks, or un-paid holidays rather than axing large numbers of them.
In this case, tough as it may be, workers benefit, retaining at least some of their income, while businesses wait out the recession. In both cases, businesses are largely depicted as unenthusiastic dispensers of pink-slips. Managers and bosses are just facing up to an unpalatable reality and unavoidable pressures imposed on them by the worst economic moment in recent memory.
A visit to a job center is hardly a scientific survey. The experiences of Juanita and Chris, along with those of other unemployed people I spent time with while in Philadelphia, may be purely anecdotal evidence. But they do raise questions about a subject of no small importance, and it's not one you're likely to read about in your daily paper -- not yet anyway. If a deepening recession weighs down and threatens businesses, some of those businesses are undoubtedly also making convenient use of the times to do things they might have wanted to do, but were unable to do in better conditions.
In some cases, under the guise of "recession" pressure, they may be waging a secret war against their own workers, using even the most innocuous transgressions of work-place rules as the trigger for firings -- and so, of course, putting the fear of god into those who remain. In this way, company payrolls are not only being reduced by mass layoffs, but workers are being squeezed for ever greater productivity in return for lower wages, worse hours, and less benefits. The weapon of choice is the specter of unemployment, a kind of death by a thousand (or a million) cuts.
Companies stand to gain a lot these days from such small-scale but decisive actions. After all, they reap a double benefit. Not only do they pare down the size of their payroll, often without needing -- as in Juanita's case -- to consent to unemployment compensation, but they also contribute to a climate of intensifying fear. Workers who remain on the job are now not only on edge about lay-offs or scaled-back hours, but also know that a late return from a bathroom or lunch break might mean being shown the door, becoming another member of the legions of unemployed -- now at 12.5 million and rising fast.
This dynamic is, of course, hardly new. Countless critics of working conditions have written about it since the dawn of the industrial age. But at the moment, even as the latest unemployment figures make screaming headlines, this is a subject that seldom comes up. Consider, though, that in December, Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, settled 63 outstanding class-action lawsuits that alleged massive wage and hours violations. Fearing termination, Wal-Mart workers, according to their testimony in the lawsuits, labored through lunch breaks and past their scheduled hours for just above minimum wage pay, with little hope of getting enough hours to qualify for the company's health benefits.
As a condition of the settlement, Wal-Mart will pay out as much as $640 million to those workers. If corporations were able to exert such coercive power when the unemployment rate was around 5%, what can they do in a job market in which 14.8% of the population can't find adequate work?
In fact, the world's largest retailer is one of the few American corporations doing well in dark times. While retail sales slid almost everywhere, the company's same-store sales went up 5.1% in February (when compared with February 2008 sales). Yet, in that same month, it announced a move to "realign its corporate structure and reduce costs." It cut 700 to 800 jobs at its Wal-Mart and Sam's Club home offices, in effect acting no differently than any of the companies being battered by the deepening recession.
Free-Firing Zone
Rodney Green, a soft-spoken 52-year-old, comes to the job center three times a week to search on-line job listings. He describes his decades-long drift from full-time employee with benefits to marginalized temp-worker with no benefits and, finally, to the category of unemployed for an extended period.
From the late 1970s until the early 1990s, he worked for Bell Telecommunications, where he earned a good salary and full benefits. Since Bell laid him off, he's worked periodically as a forklift operator for various companies, getting temporary placements through an employment agency. Most recently, he earned $12 an hour working for a deli meat and artisanal cheese producer. No benefits were provided. A year's work, he explained, would mean a week's vacation, "but they don't keep you that long. They lay you off or rotate you into another job before then."
Today, as he's discovered, even such temp jobs are becoming scarce. "In the eighties, it wasn't as bad as it is now," he comments from the unemployment heartland of what, in 2009, is a deeply de-industrialized Philadelphia. "The city had jobs, but then the jobs moved to the suburbs. Now they're moving overseas. Back then, say, you applied for a job, maybe fifty others applied, too. Today, that same job, you're going to have hundreds -- I mean, a thousand for that one job. It's hard. It's depressing."
For the past year and a half, Rodney has been collecting unemployment periodically, and in that time, he hasn't landed a single interview. Recently, because the Bush administration finally acquiesced to grassroots and Congressional pressure to lengthen unemployment benefits, he received a thirteen-week extension, providing him a little cushion (unlike equally interview-less Juanita). "That helped me a lot. Times are hard right now. I hear there are over four million people collecting unemployment. That's kind of high."
If Juanita and Chris are casualties of the intensified war of attrition businesses are quietly waging on workers, Rodney represents a deeper unraveling of jobs and job security, thanks to a globalized economy in which the hard-pressed workers in this country are pitted against cheaper labor pools in Latin America, South Asia, China, and even the American South. In such a job environment, what is one to do?
Someone I interviewed prior to my job center visit described her reaction when she heard that her company had recently closed a plant in the Midwest: "The first thing I thought, and I felt bad for thinking it," she recalled, somewhat sheepishly, "was that means more work for us -- at least for the time being."
Her comment speaks volumes, as does her request not to be identified. Who needs union busters, patrolling shop-stewards, or legions of high-paid lawyers fighting wage and hours claims when a worker is so anxious about job security that she responds positively to the laying off of those she imagines as potential competitors? When employees police their own behavior for fear of the axe -- monitoring their time checking email or using the bathroom -- bad times distinctly have an upside for management.
In this job environment, it's easy to turn not just on others, but on yourself. Reflecting on what she will do without a job and unemployment benefits, Juanita wonders if the problem isn't the economy, but the choices she made in life. "I left home when I was sixteen and lived in my own places, had my children, and got married," she says nervously, continually folding and refolding a local newspaper. "I should have gone to school and did a lot more things to make myself more marketable earlier in life. Now I'm left having to start over again."
A look at corporate opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), whose passage in Congress is a central demand of organized labor, offers a glimpse of how persistently companies seek to disadvantage their workers. EFCA would allow workers to form a union when a majority of them sign union cards in a given workplace. "Card check," as it is frequently called, enables them to organize unions without the need for an election. In a November column surveying the business elite's response to the Act, Wall Street Journal op-ed columnist Thomas Frank wrote: "Card check is about power. Management has it, workers don't, and business doesn't want that to change."
In Frank's estimation, the current struggle over EFCA is the latest incarnation of a constantly evolving struggle between workers and employers. For the under- or unemployed crowding into this center in Philadelphia, the current recession isn't a time-out from the normal struggle, it's more like a new open season for corporate attacks on them.
Right now, for Juanita, Chris, and others at this center, there are actually two wars going on, and only one of them seems to have caught the attention of labor and business reporters. The headlines about the first read: Desperate Companies Forced to Cut Jobs. But many here seem to be experiencing a second war in which businesses are using bad times to act in ways they couldn't in the best of times.
Shouldn't reporters be heading out in search of this one-sided, covert struggle? Isn't it time for the second business war of our moment to make a few headlines of its own?
Robert S. Eshelman is an independent journalist and audio host at TomDispatch.com. His articles have appeared in the Nation, In These Times, and Abu Dhabi's the National. He can be emailed at robertseshelman@gmail.com.
© 2009 Tomdispatch.com All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/132742/
By Robert S. Eshelman, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on March 21, 2009, Printed on March 21, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/132742/
Juanita Borden, 39 and jobless, patiently waits as her résumé methodically works its way, line by line, through a fax machine at a state-run job center in downtown Philadelphia. Lying open before her on a round conference table is a neatly organized folder. "This is my résumé and everywhere I've been faxing to. This is how I keep track of what day I've sent them on, so I can call and check back," she says, leafing through pages of fax cover sheets. "I usually give five business days before I inquire whether or not they've received it and whether or not they're interested."
Juanita was fired last October, when her employer found out that her driver's license -- a job requirement -- had expired. "It was only a matter of twenty-six dollars. I was under the impression that it expired in November of '08, but it was actually November of '07, and because I hadn't been driving I wasn't aware of it." The one occasion on which she was required to drive, though, she couldn't, and that was all her employer needed to fire her for failing to fulfill her employment responsibilities. She has since renewed her license and says with an air of futility, "I'd like to have my job back if they would give it to me."
She hasn't been asked back and, despite her persistent efforts, she hasn't received a single call from a prospective employer either. "The good thing," she says, remaining remarkably buoyant despite her misfortune, "is that usually when I interview I get the job. So... I'm hoping for an interview soon." Until then, her carefully managed folder serves as a small measure of control over an otherwise steady drift into poverty and homelessness.
Juanita isn't the only one at this job center on the precipice of acute need. And she isn't alone in relating a story about being fired for what would seem to many a frivolous reason. Chris Topher, 25 and making his first visit here, was axed in March of last year. The telecommunications company he had been working for sent him packing when, as he tells it, he installed cable equipment a customer hadn't ordered. It didn't matter that the mistake was on the work order Chris was given. "It was the best job I had since I graduated high school and I've had a few: Turnpike Commission, working in a Senator's office. I've had some nice jobs, but that one, I enjoyed it the most."
And there was good reason to enjoy it. Chris pulled down $1,200-1,300 every two weeks in addition to receiving a full benefits package. He thought of contesting his termination, but at the time it looked like a long, uphill battle that he wasn't eager to take on. It's a fight that, in hindsight, he thinks he could have won and that his employer probably knew he would win as well. "And that's why I believe I was approved by my employer for unemployment," he says.
Under unemployment eligibility requirements, an employer must certify whether an employee committed a "fault" on the job and was therefore terminated. If an employer indicates that no fault was committed and the employee meets several other requirements, including being physically able to work, states grant an unemployment claim. In other words, Chris's former employer granted him a small concession, while otherwise turning his life upside down amid the worst job market since 1983.
"Unemployment is the pits pretty much," says Chris, whose unemployment compensation is significantly less than half what he made as a cable installer. Still, he's better off than Juanita, who has applied for unemployment twice and been denied both times. She is now appealing, but her employer is conceding nothing. In a recent arbitration hearing, Juanita says, her former supervisor claimed that, if she had only told them about her expired license, they would have allowed her renewal time. If only.
Now, Juanita lives with her brother and his wife, but they, too, have financial problems. "My brother is working part time and it's driving him crazy, because it's causing money problems between him and his wife," she explains. "And with me being there," she hesitates, "...it's a little constrained."
Ratcheting Up the Fear
The mainstream media has generally sketched a picture of a labor market in which, under the pressure of an economic meltdown, workers succumb to two types of downsizing. In one, a fierce recession forces businesses, desperate to cut costs in terrible times, to lay off workers. They, in turn, face grim prospects for gainful employment elsewhere. In a kinder, gentler version of the same, employers, desperate to cut costs in terrible times, offer -- or sometimes force workers to take -- "furloughs," salary cuts, union give-backs, four-day work weeks, or un-paid holidays rather than axing large numbers of them.
In this case, tough as it may be, workers benefit, retaining at least some of their income, while businesses wait out the recession. In both cases, businesses are largely depicted as unenthusiastic dispensers of pink-slips. Managers and bosses are just facing up to an unpalatable reality and unavoidable pressures imposed on them by the worst economic moment in recent memory.
A visit to a job center is hardly a scientific survey. The experiences of Juanita and Chris, along with those of other unemployed people I spent time with while in Philadelphia, may be purely anecdotal evidence. But they do raise questions about a subject of no small importance, and it's not one you're likely to read about in your daily paper -- not yet anyway. If a deepening recession weighs down and threatens businesses, some of those businesses are undoubtedly also making convenient use of the times to do things they might have wanted to do, but were unable to do in better conditions.
In some cases, under the guise of "recession" pressure, they may be waging a secret war against their own workers, using even the most innocuous transgressions of work-place rules as the trigger for firings -- and so, of course, putting the fear of god into those who remain. In this way, company payrolls are not only being reduced by mass layoffs, but workers are being squeezed for ever greater productivity in return for lower wages, worse hours, and less benefits. The weapon of choice is the specter of unemployment, a kind of death by a thousand (or a million) cuts.
Companies stand to gain a lot these days from such small-scale but decisive actions. After all, they reap a double benefit. Not only do they pare down the size of their payroll, often without needing -- as in Juanita's case -- to consent to unemployment compensation, but they also contribute to a climate of intensifying fear. Workers who remain on the job are now not only on edge about lay-offs or scaled-back hours, but also know that a late return from a bathroom or lunch break might mean being shown the door, becoming another member of the legions of unemployed -- now at 12.5 million and rising fast.
This dynamic is, of course, hardly new. Countless critics of working conditions have written about it since the dawn of the industrial age. But at the moment, even as the latest unemployment figures make screaming headlines, this is a subject that seldom comes up. Consider, though, that in December, Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, settled 63 outstanding class-action lawsuits that alleged massive wage and hours violations. Fearing termination, Wal-Mart workers, according to their testimony in the lawsuits, labored through lunch breaks and past their scheduled hours for just above minimum wage pay, with little hope of getting enough hours to qualify for the company's health benefits.
As a condition of the settlement, Wal-Mart will pay out as much as $640 million to those workers. If corporations were able to exert such coercive power when the unemployment rate was around 5%, what can they do in a job market in which 14.8% of the population can't find adequate work?
In fact, the world's largest retailer is one of the few American corporations doing well in dark times. While retail sales slid almost everywhere, the company's same-store sales went up 5.1% in February (when compared with February 2008 sales). Yet, in that same month, it announced a move to "realign its corporate structure and reduce costs." It cut 700 to 800 jobs at its Wal-Mart and Sam's Club home offices, in effect acting no differently than any of the companies being battered by the deepening recession.
Free-Firing Zone
Rodney Green, a soft-spoken 52-year-old, comes to the job center three times a week to search on-line job listings. He describes his decades-long drift from full-time employee with benefits to marginalized temp-worker with no benefits and, finally, to the category of unemployed for an extended period.
From the late 1970s until the early 1990s, he worked for Bell Telecommunications, where he earned a good salary and full benefits. Since Bell laid him off, he's worked periodically as a forklift operator for various companies, getting temporary placements through an employment agency. Most recently, he earned $12 an hour working for a deli meat and artisanal cheese producer. No benefits were provided. A year's work, he explained, would mean a week's vacation, "but they don't keep you that long. They lay you off or rotate you into another job before then."
Today, as he's discovered, even such temp jobs are becoming scarce. "In the eighties, it wasn't as bad as it is now," he comments from the unemployment heartland of what, in 2009, is a deeply de-industrialized Philadelphia. "The city had jobs, but then the jobs moved to the suburbs. Now they're moving overseas. Back then, say, you applied for a job, maybe fifty others applied, too. Today, that same job, you're going to have hundreds -- I mean, a thousand for that one job. It's hard. It's depressing."
For the past year and a half, Rodney has been collecting unemployment periodically, and in that time, he hasn't landed a single interview. Recently, because the Bush administration finally acquiesced to grassroots and Congressional pressure to lengthen unemployment benefits, he received a thirteen-week extension, providing him a little cushion (unlike equally interview-less Juanita). "That helped me a lot. Times are hard right now. I hear there are over four million people collecting unemployment. That's kind of high."
If Juanita and Chris are casualties of the intensified war of attrition businesses are quietly waging on workers, Rodney represents a deeper unraveling of jobs and job security, thanks to a globalized economy in which the hard-pressed workers in this country are pitted against cheaper labor pools in Latin America, South Asia, China, and even the American South. In such a job environment, what is one to do?
Someone I interviewed prior to my job center visit described her reaction when she heard that her company had recently closed a plant in the Midwest: "The first thing I thought, and I felt bad for thinking it," she recalled, somewhat sheepishly, "was that means more work for us -- at least for the time being."
Her comment speaks volumes, as does her request not to be identified. Who needs union busters, patrolling shop-stewards, or legions of high-paid lawyers fighting wage and hours claims when a worker is so anxious about job security that she responds positively to the laying off of those she imagines as potential competitors? When employees police their own behavior for fear of the axe -- monitoring their time checking email or using the bathroom -- bad times distinctly have an upside for management.
In this job environment, it's easy to turn not just on others, but on yourself. Reflecting on what she will do without a job and unemployment benefits, Juanita wonders if the problem isn't the economy, but the choices she made in life. "I left home when I was sixteen and lived in my own places, had my children, and got married," she says nervously, continually folding and refolding a local newspaper. "I should have gone to school and did a lot more things to make myself more marketable earlier in life. Now I'm left having to start over again."
A look at corporate opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), whose passage in Congress is a central demand of organized labor, offers a glimpse of how persistently companies seek to disadvantage their workers. EFCA would allow workers to form a union when a majority of them sign union cards in a given workplace. "Card check," as it is frequently called, enables them to organize unions without the need for an election. In a November column surveying the business elite's response to the Act, Wall Street Journal op-ed columnist Thomas Frank wrote: "Card check is about power. Management has it, workers don't, and business doesn't want that to change."
In Frank's estimation, the current struggle over EFCA is the latest incarnation of a constantly evolving struggle between workers and employers. For the under- or unemployed crowding into this center in Philadelphia, the current recession isn't a time-out from the normal struggle, it's more like a new open season for corporate attacks on them.
Right now, for Juanita, Chris, and others at this center, there are actually two wars going on, and only one of them seems to have caught the attention of labor and business reporters. The headlines about the first read: Desperate Companies Forced to Cut Jobs. But many here seem to be experiencing a second war in which businesses are using bad times to act in ways they couldn't in the best of times.
Shouldn't reporters be heading out in search of this one-sided, covert struggle? Isn't it time for the second business war of our moment to make a few headlines of its own?
Robert S. Eshelman is an independent journalist and audio host at TomDispatch.com. His articles have appeared in the Nation, In These Times, and Abu Dhabi's the National. He can be emailed at robertseshelman@gmail.com.
© 2009 Tomdispatch.com All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/132742/
Miami Herald editorial: For schools, the buck stops in Legislature
For schools, the buck stops in Legislature
OUR OPINION: State lawmakers can't shirk education funding responsibility
For too long the Florida Legislature has been reducing its general-revenue contribution to the state's public-education budget and making up the difference by raising a school-board tax called the Local Required Effort. Though school boards had no control over this, it looked as though they were responsible for increasing property taxes when it was really done by state lawmakers.
From the sentiments expressed during Wednesday's education rally in Tallahassee, the days of the Legislature getting by unnoticed for underfunding schools are over. Now perhaps legislators will take their education-funding responsibilities and obligations to Florida's school children more seriously. As in, if they don't do right by Florida schools they run the risk of voter backlash by angry parents and school employees, not to mention business leaders who know how important education funding is to the state economy.
Because of this year's $3 billion revenue shortfall, lawmakers are under extreme pressure to deliver on education funding -- from kindergarten through college. Florida's university presidents seek approval of a bill that would allow them to gradually increase tuition until it reaches the national average, $6,600. Tuition at state schools is $3,800 a year. With Sen. Ken Pruitt, R-Port St. Lucie, and Rep. Will Weatherford, R-Wesley Chapel, authoring the legislation, its chances of passing are good in the GOP-led Legislature. Gov. Crist also supports it. The presidents point to $285 million the colleges have lost in prior cuts and say that increasing tuition is their only option to offset the damage.
As to K-12 funding, legislative leaders have said they will consider everything put on the table. So far they have been lukewarm to: raising the tax on tobacco products; lifting any sales tax exemptions; imposing sales taxes on Internet purchases. There is more enthusiasm for taxing bottlers who take water from Florida's water supply, but that will bring in a few million dollars whereas the need is for billions.
Rep. Dwight Bullard, D-Miami, and Ronald Brisé, D-North Miami, coauthored a bill for a three-year, one-cent increase in the sales tax for education. Bad idea. The sales tax is regressive. It would hit hardest among the poor. This bill would exacerbate that effect. If Republicans have little taste for lifting sales-tax exemptions, they have even less for increasing the sales tax.
Which leaves, what exactly? Still deeper cuts for school districts? Unacceptable. Miami-Dade has cut $300 million so far this year. Broward has cut $150 million. Florida's schools are hemorrhaging, and the Legislature, like Nero, is fiddling away its funding options.
The Miami Herald, 3/20/09
OUR OPINION: State lawmakers can't shirk education funding responsibility
For too long the Florida Legislature has been reducing its general-revenue contribution to the state's public-education budget and making up the difference by raising a school-board tax called the Local Required Effort. Though school boards had no control over this, it looked as though they were responsible for increasing property taxes when it was really done by state lawmakers.
From the sentiments expressed during Wednesday's education rally in Tallahassee, the days of the Legislature getting by unnoticed for underfunding schools are over. Now perhaps legislators will take their education-funding responsibilities and obligations to Florida's school children more seriously. As in, if they don't do right by Florida schools they run the risk of voter backlash by angry parents and school employees, not to mention business leaders who know how important education funding is to the state economy.
Because of this year's $3 billion revenue shortfall, lawmakers are under extreme pressure to deliver on education funding -- from kindergarten through college. Florida's university presidents seek approval of a bill that would allow them to gradually increase tuition until it reaches the national average, $6,600. Tuition at state schools is $3,800 a year. With Sen. Ken Pruitt, R-Port St. Lucie, and Rep. Will Weatherford, R-Wesley Chapel, authoring the legislation, its chances of passing are good in the GOP-led Legislature. Gov. Crist also supports it. The presidents point to $285 million the colleges have lost in prior cuts and say that increasing tuition is their only option to offset the damage.
As to K-12 funding, legislative leaders have said they will consider everything put on the table. So far they have been lukewarm to: raising the tax on tobacco products; lifting any sales tax exemptions; imposing sales taxes on Internet purchases. There is more enthusiasm for taxing bottlers who take water from Florida's water supply, but that will bring in a few million dollars whereas the need is for billions.
Rep. Dwight Bullard, D-Miami, and Ronald Brisé, D-North Miami, coauthored a bill for a three-year, one-cent increase in the sales tax for education. Bad idea. The sales tax is regressive. It would hit hardest among the poor. This bill would exacerbate that effect. If Republicans have little taste for lifting sales-tax exemptions, they have even less for increasing the sales tax.
Which leaves, what exactly? Still deeper cuts for school districts? Unacceptable. Miami-Dade has cut $300 million so far this year. Broward has cut $150 million. Florida's schools are hemorrhaging, and the Legislature, like Nero, is fiddling away its funding options.
The Miami Herald, 3/20/09
The New York Times: Sugar is back on food labels, this time as a selling point
March 21, 2009
Sugar Is Back on Food Labels, This Time as a Selling Point
By KIM SEVERSON, The New York Times
Sugar, the nutritional pariah that dentists and dietitians have long reviled, is enjoying a second act, dressed up as a natural, healthful ingredient.
From the tomato sauce on a Pizza Hut pie called “The Natural,” to the just-released soda Pepsi Natural, some of the biggest players in the American food business have started, in the last few months, replacing high-fructose corn syrup with old-fashioned sugar.
ConAgra uses only sugar or honey in its new Healthy Choice All Natural frozen entrees. Kraft Foods recently removed the corn sweetener from its salad dressings, and is working on its Lunchables line of portable meals and snacks.
The turnaround comes after three decades during which high-fructose corn syrup had been gaining on sugar in the American diet. Consumption of the two finally drew even in 2003, according to the Department of Agriculture. Recently, though, the trend has reversed. Per capita, American adults ate about 44 pounds of sugar in 2007, compared with about 40 pounds of high-fructose corn syrup.
“Sugar was the old devil, and high-fructose corn syrup is the new devil,” said Marcia Mogelonsky, a senior analyst at Mintel International, a market-research company.
With sugar sales up, the Sugar Association last year ended its Sweet by Nature campaign, which pointed out that sugar is found in fruits and vegetables, said Andy Briscoe, president of the association. “Obviously, demand is moving in the right direction so we are taking a break,” Mr. Briscoe said.
Blamed for hyperactivity in children and studied as an addictive substance, sugar has had its share of image problems. But the widespread criticism of high-fructose corn syrup — the first lady, Michelle Obama, has said she will not give her children products made with it — has made sugar look good by comparison.
Most scientists do not share the perception. Though research is still under way, many nutrition and obesity experts say sugar and high-fructose corn syrup are equally bad in excess. But, as is often the case with competing food claims, the battle is as much about marketing as it is about science.
Some shoppers prefer cane or beet sugar because it is less processed. High-fructose corn syrup is produced by a complex series of chemical reactions that includes the use of three enzymes and caustic soda.
Others see the pervasiveness of the inexpensive sweetener as a symbol of the ill effects of government subsidies given to large agribusiness interests like corn growers.
But the most common argument has to do with the rapid rise of obesity in the United States, which began in the 1980s, not long after industrial-grade high-fructose corn syrup was invented. As the amount of the sweetener in the American diet has expanded, so have Americans.
Although the price differential has since dropped by about half, high-fructose corn syrup came on the market as much as 20 percent cheaper than sugar. And it was easier to transport. As a result, the sweetener soon turned up in all kinds of products, including soda, bread, yogurt, frozen foods and spaghetti sauce.
But with sugar newly ascendant, the makers of corn syrup are fighting back. Last fall, the Corn Refiners Association mounted a multimillion-dollar defense, making sure that an advertisement linking to the association’s Web site, sweetsurprise.com, pops up when someone types “sugar” or “high-fructose corn syrup” into some search engines.
In one television advertisement, a mother pours fruit punch into a cup while another scolds her because the punch contains high-fructose corn syrup. When pressed to explain why it is so bad, the complaining mother is portrayed as a speechless fool.
Audrae Erickson, president of the Corn Refiners Association, said consumers were being duped.
“When they discover they are being misled into thinking these new products are healthier, that’s the interesting angle,” Ms. Erickson said in an interview.
Although researchers are looking into the effects of fructose on liver function, insulin production and other possible contributors to excess weight gain, no major studies have made a definitive link between high-fructose corn syrup and poor health. The American Medical Association says that when it comes to obesity, there is no difference between the syrup and sugar.
And, Ms. Erickson added, the Food and Drug Administration considers both sweeteners natural.
Dr. Robert H. Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco Children’s Hospital, said: “The argument about which is better for you, sucrose or HFCS, is garbage. Both are equally bad for your health.”
Both sugar and high-fructose corn syrup are made from glucose and fructose. The level of fructose is about 5 percent higher in the corn sweetener.
Dr. Lustig studies the health effects of fructose, particularly on the liver, where it is metabolized. Part of his research shows that too much fructose — no matter the source — affects the liver in the same way too much alcohol does.
But all of that is irrelevant to some food manufacturers, who are switching to sugar as a result of extensive taste testing and consumer surveys.
“For consumers, their perception is reality,” said Jim Sieple, a senior vice president for Log Cabin syrup, a 120-year-old brand in the Pinnacle Foods Group that this month announced it had stopped using high-fructose corn syrup.
Sugar’s comeback is not entirely a backlash against the corn sweetener. Market researchers say that with the economy so unsettled, people want to control what they can. Choosing organic, less processed or so-called natural foods is a relatively inexpensive way to do that.
“Rightly or wrongly, that means consumers are more attracted to sugar,” said Kevin Higar, senior manager at Technomics, a market research company.
Chefs and connoisseurs have also driven sugar’s rehabilitation. Although even a sugar expert would be hard pressed to tell the difference between the taste of cane and beet sugar, some enthusiasts have elevated cane sugar to near cult status.
The Coke that is made from sugar for Jews who avoid corn during Passover has become so popular among cane-sugar fans that some stores have taken to rationing it.
At Jason’s, a chain of delis with 200 restaurants in 27 states, cane sugar has replaced high-fructose corn syrup in everything except a few carbonated beverages. “Part of this is a huge rebellion against HFCS,” said Daniel Helfman, a spokesman for the chain, “but part of it is taste.”
To researchers and nutritionists who study obesity and the effects of sugar on the body, the resurrection of sugar is maddening.
Pat Crawford of the Center for Weight and Health at the University of California, Berkeley, remembers when sugar was such a loaded word that cereal makers changed the name of products like Sugar Pops to Corn Pops.
Even though overall consumption of caloric sweeteners is starting to drop, Dr. Crawford says an empty calorie is still an empty calorie. And it does not matter whether people think sugar is somehow “retro,” a word used to promote new, sugar-based versions of Pepsi and Mountain Dew called Throwback.
“If people really want to go back to where we were, that means not putting sugar in everything,” she said. “It means keeping it to desserts.”
The New York Times (3/21/09)
Sugar Is Back on Food Labels, This Time as a Selling Point
By KIM SEVERSON, The New York Times
Sugar, the nutritional pariah that dentists and dietitians have long reviled, is enjoying a second act, dressed up as a natural, healthful ingredient.
From the tomato sauce on a Pizza Hut pie called “The Natural,” to the just-released soda Pepsi Natural, some of the biggest players in the American food business have started, in the last few months, replacing high-fructose corn syrup with old-fashioned sugar.
ConAgra uses only sugar or honey in its new Healthy Choice All Natural frozen entrees. Kraft Foods recently removed the corn sweetener from its salad dressings, and is working on its Lunchables line of portable meals and snacks.
The turnaround comes after three decades during which high-fructose corn syrup had been gaining on sugar in the American diet. Consumption of the two finally drew even in 2003, according to the Department of Agriculture. Recently, though, the trend has reversed. Per capita, American adults ate about 44 pounds of sugar in 2007, compared with about 40 pounds of high-fructose corn syrup.
“Sugar was the old devil, and high-fructose corn syrup is the new devil,” said Marcia Mogelonsky, a senior analyst at Mintel International, a market-research company.
With sugar sales up, the Sugar Association last year ended its Sweet by Nature campaign, which pointed out that sugar is found in fruits and vegetables, said Andy Briscoe, president of the association. “Obviously, demand is moving in the right direction so we are taking a break,” Mr. Briscoe said.
Blamed for hyperactivity in children and studied as an addictive substance, sugar has had its share of image problems. But the widespread criticism of high-fructose corn syrup — the first lady, Michelle Obama, has said she will not give her children products made with it — has made sugar look good by comparison.
Most scientists do not share the perception. Though research is still under way, many nutrition and obesity experts say sugar and high-fructose corn syrup are equally bad in excess. But, as is often the case with competing food claims, the battle is as much about marketing as it is about science.
Some shoppers prefer cane or beet sugar because it is less processed. High-fructose corn syrup is produced by a complex series of chemical reactions that includes the use of three enzymes and caustic soda.
Others see the pervasiveness of the inexpensive sweetener as a symbol of the ill effects of government subsidies given to large agribusiness interests like corn growers.
But the most common argument has to do with the rapid rise of obesity in the United States, which began in the 1980s, not long after industrial-grade high-fructose corn syrup was invented. As the amount of the sweetener in the American diet has expanded, so have Americans.
Although the price differential has since dropped by about half, high-fructose corn syrup came on the market as much as 20 percent cheaper than sugar. And it was easier to transport. As a result, the sweetener soon turned up in all kinds of products, including soda, bread, yogurt, frozen foods and spaghetti sauce.
But with sugar newly ascendant, the makers of corn syrup are fighting back. Last fall, the Corn Refiners Association mounted a multimillion-dollar defense, making sure that an advertisement linking to the association’s Web site, sweetsurprise.com, pops up when someone types “sugar” or “high-fructose corn syrup” into some search engines.
In one television advertisement, a mother pours fruit punch into a cup while another scolds her because the punch contains high-fructose corn syrup. When pressed to explain why it is so bad, the complaining mother is portrayed as a speechless fool.
Audrae Erickson, president of the Corn Refiners Association, said consumers were being duped.
“When they discover they are being misled into thinking these new products are healthier, that’s the interesting angle,” Ms. Erickson said in an interview.
Although researchers are looking into the effects of fructose on liver function, insulin production and other possible contributors to excess weight gain, no major studies have made a definitive link between high-fructose corn syrup and poor health. The American Medical Association says that when it comes to obesity, there is no difference between the syrup and sugar.
And, Ms. Erickson added, the Food and Drug Administration considers both sweeteners natural.
Dr. Robert H. Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco Children’s Hospital, said: “The argument about which is better for you, sucrose or HFCS, is garbage. Both are equally bad for your health.”
Both sugar and high-fructose corn syrup are made from glucose and fructose. The level of fructose is about 5 percent higher in the corn sweetener.
Dr. Lustig studies the health effects of fructose, particularly on the liver, where it is metabolized. Part of his research shows that too much fructose — no matter the source — affects the liver in the same way too much alcohol does.
But all of that is irrelevant to some food manufacturers, who are switching to sugar as a result of extensive taste testing and consumer surveys.
“For consumers, their perception is reality,” said Jim Sieple, a senior vice president for Log Cabin syrup, a 120-year-old brand in the Pinnacle Foods Group that this month announced it had stopped using high-fructose corn syrup.
Sugar’s comeback is not entirely a backlash against the corn sweetener. Market researchers say that with the economy so unsettled, people want to control what they can. Choosing organic, less processed or so-called natural foods is a relatively inexpensive way to do that.
“Rightly or wrongly, that means consumers are more attracted to sugar,” said Kevin Higar, senior manager at Technomics, a market research company.
Chefs and connoisseurs have also driven sugar’s rehabilitation. Although even a sugar expert would be hard pressed to tell the difference between the taste of cane and beet sugar, some enthusiasts have elevated cane sugar to near cult status.
The Coke that is made from sugar for Jews who avoid corn during Passover has become so popular among cane-sugar fans that some stores have taken to rationing it.
At Jason’s, a chain of delis with 200 restaurants in 27 states, cane sugar has replaced high-fructose corn syrup in everything except a few carbonated beverages. “Part of this is a huge rebellion against HFCS,” said Daniel Helfman, a spokesman for the chain, “but part of it is taste.”
To researchers and nutritionists who study obesity and the effects of sugar on the body, the resurrection of sugar is maddening.
Pat Crawford of the Center for Weight and Health at the University of California, Berkeley, remembers when sugar was such a loaded word that cereal makers changed the name of products like Sugar Pops to Corn Pops.
Even though overall consumption of caloric sweeteners is starting to drop, Dr. Crawford says an empty calorie is still an empty calorie. And it does not matter whether people think sugar is somehow “retro,” a word used to promote new, sugar-based versions of Pepsi and Mountain Dew called Throwback.
“If people really want to go back to where we were, that means not putting sugar in everything,” she said. “It means keeping it to desserts.”
The New York Times (3/21/09)
Huffington Post: 10 Steps to Bring New Life to Your Liver
Spring Cleaning: 10 Steps To Bring New Life To Your Liver
Patricia Fitzgerald, The Huffington Post
Spring is definitely in the air. Daylight Saving Time allows many of us to leave work to find the sun still shining. Here in Southern California, seeds are sprouting, birds are chirping, and flowers are blooming. People seem to have an extra swing in their step, and that "happy for no reason" feeling.
While winter can be a time for going inward and conserving energy (and probably eating too much over the holidays), spring often inspires regeneration, a renewal of spirit, and a fresh start.
In earlier times, giving special attention to liver health and detoxification was a springtime ritual in many cultures. Although it is, of course, important to take care of our liver (as well as our whole body) year-round, we can often draw inspiration from traditions that have been passed down from our ancestors. The thinking behind supporting the liver in this season is that spring brings new life, so it is time to shed what is no longer needed.
Traditional Chinese Medicine (also referred to as TCM) is a system of healing passed down through several thousand years. Treatments include herbs, acupuncture, nutritional therapy, massage, etc., and the care is based on the principles of living in harmony with nature and striving for balance. According to TCM, the liver is responsible for the smooth flow of qi (our vital energy) and blood.
When our qi is flowing well, we journey through life smoothly without a buildup of toxins, stress, and tension. This ideal scenario isn't always the case. In our 21st century fast-paced lifestyle, a pattern of liver disharmony observed in TCM called "liver qi stagnation" has become quite commonplace.
Some of the conditions traditionally associated with liver qi stagnation include fatigue, depression, mood swings, anger/irritability, feeling overwhelmed with stress, PMS and other hormonal imbalances, sluggish digestion/elimination, inflammation/pain in muscles and joints, headaches, allergies, bloating, gas, nausea, vomiting, constipation and/or diarrhea, a feeling of a lump in your throat, nausea, frequent colds and flu, and skin breakouts.
Some of the factors that can contribute to liver qi stagnation include environmental chemicals, coffee, alcohol, refined sugar, artificial sweeteners, food allergies, processed foods, emotional stress, lack of deep restful sleep, and excessive or inappropriate pharmaceutical drug and hormone use.
Our liver is an amazing organ with literally hundreds of functions, including detoxification, metabolic regulation, nutrient synthesis, hormone processing, and cholesterol and bile production. Liver qi stagnation would imply that some of the functions are not at optimal performance.
Here are 10 ways to increase your vitality and give your liver a little more TLC:
1. Drink plenty of water. Fereydoon Batmanghelidj, M.D. is one of the world's foremost experts on the therapeutic value of water. He suggests that half of your body's weight is the number of ounces of water to aim for each day. For example, if you weigh 120 pounds, 60 ounces of water is your goal. I have seen the beneficial effects of this formula in the clinic with many patients over the years. Also, drinking a glass of warm water with lemon first thing in the morning will support your liver's natural detoxification processes. By the way, dehydrating beverages such as coffee and alcohol don't count towards your total water intake.
2. Eat vegetables every day, especially greens. In TCM, the color green is associated with the liver. When choosing your salad fixings, go for the organic spring mix instead of the iceberg. Your liver will love a variety of greens such as kale, spinach, and collard greens. The color green in these vegetables comes from chlorophyll, a substance plants use to trap the energy of the sun. Go ahead--eat some sunshine!
3. Add sour-tasting foods to your diet. These include citrus fruits (sprinkle lemon in your water and on foods such as fish and vegetables), raw apple cider vinegar (good for balancing pH--try two tablespoons in a glass of water, or use with olive oil on your salad), and sauerkraut (which contains beneficial bacteria). With our over-sugared, over-salted palates, we often overlook sour-tasting foods. According to TCM, the sour flavor is associated with the liver, and it enhances bile flow.
4. Avoid toxic fats, eat beneficial ones. Decrease your consumption of trans fats and partially-hydrogenated oils. Toxic fats put an unnecessary burden on the liver, further stagnating qi flow. Emphasize organic, unprocessed oils (such as olive oil and flax oil) in your food preparation. Increase the use of fish that is low in mercury, avocados, nuts, and seeds in your diet. Consider supplementing your diet with an Omega-3 supplement to boost your essential fatty acid intake. Omega-3 supplementation has been shown to decrease cardiovascular disease risk, and it can reduce symptoms of arthritis, depression, cognitive decline, and a seemingly endless list of health challenges.
5. Reduce your sugar consumption. On average, Americans eat 137 pounds of sugar a year! It's the hidden sugars that often add up. Watch what you add to foods like cereal and coffee. Read food labels and avoid overly sugary choices. Know that "fat free" foods can be loaded with sugar, and actually increase triglycerides, a fat in your blood. Eat whole fruits rather than drinking fruit juice. If you find your cravings too strong to follow practical steps, you might find helpful hints in The Sugar Addict's Total Recovery Program by Kathleen Desmaisons.
6. Eat close to nature. Often simpler is better. Select the best of what comes from Mother Nature, and avoid artificial ingredients and toxic sweeteners by eating less packaged foods. Go organic as much as possible. The Environmental Working Group offers a free guide to pesticides found in common foods. You might be surprised that peaches, apples, and bell peppers top their list of the "dirty dozen"―foods recommended especially to be purchased in their organic version.
7. Incorporate more conscious breathing and exercise into your routine to boost circulation and enhance overall liver function. Choose a form of exercise that you enjoy, and remember to breathe. In traditional Chinese cultures, you can see people doing qi gong, which emphasizes breathing and movement specifically designed to promote the smooth flow of qi.
8. Choose to be joyful by cultivating a spirit of gratitude, and regularly forgive others as well as yourself. In TCM, the emotion that contributes to stagnant liver qi is anger, especially repressed anger. The virtues that free the liver qi are forgiveness and a release of judgment towards self and others. In China, when someone is angry, they are said to have a toxic liver. In fact, a morning greeting there translates to "How is your liver?"
9. Reduce or eliminate your use of alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine. These substances can become very addictive, masking a greater imbalance in our physical, emotional, and spiritual health. Taking these suggested steps to give our liver some TLC can be part of a comprehensive program to heal our reliance on potentially harmful chemicals.
10. Schedule time for self-care. Get a massage, take a yoga class, etc. I say schedule because I've noticed something in our 24/7 culture. This is that if we don't put taking care of ourselves on our own list, it often doesn't happen. Even Oprah, the woman who seems to have everything, admitted her health started to suffer as she didn't put self-care as a priority on her to-do list.
Hopefully this article gets you thinking about ways to be kind to your liver, during the spring and always. Because life is funny... You buy a car, you get a manual. You buy a toaster, you get a manual. You are born with a liver that you will have your entire life. No manual. Yet its care and maintenance is far more important than anything that you will every buy.
Detox is certainly a hot topic these days. People want to feel better, and it is natural to want a quick fix. Be wary of marketing claims that promise to detox your body with a "five-day cleanse." Extreme approaches do not cultivate a healthy lifestyle for the long term, and they promote the on-again, off-again "diet" mentality. Developing habits and choices that will reduce the toxic burden on your liver and your whole body is not going to change things overnight, in a week, or even a year. But you can start moving in the right direction by following the guidelines outlined above.
In the next article, we will explore the use of herbs and nutritional supplements that have been proven to be safe and effective to enhance the health of the liver, and consequently the whole body. We will also dispel some of the myths regarding detox.
Until next time, Happy Spring!
***
Patricia Fitzgerald is a licensed acupuncturist, certified clinical nutritionist and homeopath as well as the Medical Director of the Santa Monica Wellness Center. She is also the author of The Detox Solution: The Missing Link to Radiant Health, Abundant Energy, Ideal Weight, and Peace of Mind.
Patricia Fitzgerald, The Huffington Post
Spring is definitely in the air. Daylight Saving Time allows many of us to leave work to find the sun still shining. Here in Southern California, seeds are sprouting, birds are chirping, and flowers are blooming. People seem to have an extra swing in their step, and that "happy for no reason" feeling.
While winter can be a time for going inward and conserving energy (and probably eating too much over the holidays), spring often inspires regeneration, a renewal of spirit, and a fresh start.
In earlier times, giving special attention to liver health and detoxification was a springtime ritual in many cultures. Although it is, of course, important to take care of our liver (as well as our whole body) year-round, we can often draw inspiration from traditions that have been passed down from our ancestors. The thinking behind supporting the liver in this season is that spring brings new life, so it is time to shed what is no longer needed.
Traditional Chinese Medicine (also referred to as TCM) is a system of healing passed down through several thousand years. Treatments include herbs, acupuncture, nutritional therapy, massage, etc., and the care is based on the principles of living in harmony with nature and striving for balance. According to TCM, the liver is responsible for the smooth flow of qi (our vital energy) and blood.
When our qi is flowing well, we journey through life smoothly without a buildup of toxins, stress, and tension. This ideal scenario isn't always the case. In our 21st century fast-paced lifestyle, a pattern of liver disharmony observed in TCM called "liver qi stagnation" has become quite commonplace.
Some of the conditions traditionally associated with liver qi stagnation include fatigue, depression, mood swings, anger/irritability, feeling overwhelmed with stress, PMS and other hormonal imbalances, sluggish digestion/elimination, inflammation/pain in muscles and joints, headaches, allergies, bloating, gas, nausea, vomiting, constipation and/or diarrhea, a feeling of a lump in your throat, nausea, frequent colds and flu, and skin breakouts.
Some of the factors that can contribute to liver qi stagnation include environmental chemicals, coffee, alcohol, refined sugar, artificial sweeteners, food allergies, processed foods, emotional stress, lack of deep restful sleep, and excessive or inappropriate pharmaceutical drug and hormone use.
Our liver is an amazing organ with literally hundreds of functions, including detoxification, metabolic regulation, nutrient synthesis, hormone processing, and cholesterol and bile production. Liver qi stagnation would imply that some of the functions are not at optimal performance.
Here are 10 ways to increase your vitality and give your liver a little more TLC:
1. Drink plenty of water. Fereydoon Batmanghelidj, M.D. is one of the world's foremost experts on the therapeutic value of water. He suggests that half of your body's weight is the number of ounces of water to aim for each day. For example, if you weigh 120 pounds, 60 ounces of water is your goal. I have seen the beneficial effects of this formula in the clinic with many patients over the years. Also, drinking a glass of warm water with lemon first thing in the morning will support your liver's natural detoxification processes. By the way, dehydrating beverages such as coffee and alcohol don't count towards your total water intake.
2. Eat vegetables every day, especially greens. In TCM, the color green is associated with the liver. When choosing your salad fixings, go for the organic spring mix instead of the iceberg. Your liver will love a variety of greens such as kale, spinach, and collard greens. The color green in these vegetables comes from chlorophyll, a substance plants use to trap the energy of the sun. Go ahead--eat some sunshine!
3. Add sour-tasting foods to your diet. These include citrus fruits (sprinkle lemon in your water and on foods such as fish and vegetables), raw apple cider vinegar (good for balancing pH--try two tablespoons in a glass of water, or use with olive oil on your salad), and sauerkraut (which contains beneficial bacteria). With our over-sugared, over-salted palates, we often overlook sour-tasting foods. According to TCM, the sour flavor is associated with the liver, and it enhances bile flow.
4. Avoid toxic fats, eat beneficial ones. Decrease your consumption of trans fats and partially-hydrogenated oils. Toxic fats put an unnecessary burden on the liver, further stagnating qi flow. Emphasize organic, unprocessed oils (such as olive oil and flax oil) in your food preparation. Increase the use of fish that is low in mercury, avocados, nuts, and seeds in your diet. Consider supplementing your diet with an Omega-3 supplement to boost your essential fatty acid intake. Omega-3 supplementation has been shown to decrease cardiovascular disease risk, and it can reduce symptoms of arthritis, depression, cognitive decline, and a seemingly endless list of health challenges.
5. Reduce your sugar consumption. On average, Americans eat 137 pounds of sugar a year! It's the hidden sugars that often add up. Watch what you add to foods like cereal and coffee. Read food labels and avoid overly sugary choices. Know that "fat free" foods can be loaded with sugar, and actually increase triglycerides, a fat in your blood. Eat whole fruits rather than drinking fruit juice. If you find your cravings too strong to follow practical steps, you might find helpful hints in The Sugar Addict's Total Recovery Program by Kathleen Desmaisons.
6. Eat close to nature. Often simpler is better. Select the best of what comes from Mother Nature, and avoid artificial ingredients and toxic sweeteners by eating less packaged foods. Go organic as much as possible. The Environmental Working Group offers a free guide to pesticides found in common foods. You might be surprised that peaches, apples, and bell peppers top their list of the "dirty dozen"―foods recommended especially to be purchased in their organic version.
7. Incorporate more conscious breathing and exercise into your routine to boost circulation and enhance overall liver function. Choose a form of exercise that you enjoy, and remember to breathe. In traditional Chinese cultures, you can see people doing qi gong, which emphasizes breathing and movement specifically designed to promote the smooth flow of qi.
8. Choose to be joyful by cultivating a spirit of gratitude, and regularly forgive others as well as yourself. In TCM, the emotion that contributes to stagnant liver qi is anger, especially repressed anger. The virtues that free the liver qi are forgiveness and a release of judgment towards self and others. In China, when someone is angry, they are said to have a toxic liver. In fact, a morning greeting there translates to "How is your liver?"
9. Reduce or eliminate your use of alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine. These substances can become very addictive, masking a greater imbalance in our physical, emotional, and spiritual health. Taking these suggested steps to give our liver some TLC can be part of a comprehensive program to heal our reliance on potentially harmful chemicals.
10. Schedule time for self-care. Get a massage, take a yoga class, etc. I say schedule because I've noticed something in our 24/7 culture. This is that if we don't put taking care of ourselves on our own list, it often doesn't happen. Even Oprah, the woman who seems to have everything, admitted her health started to suffer as she didn't put self-care as a priority on her to-do list.
Hopefully this article gets you thinking about ways to be kind to your liver, during the spring and always. Because life is funny... You buy a car, you get a manual. You buy a toaster, you get a manual. You are born with a liver that you will have your entire life. No manual. Yet its care and maintenance is far more important than anything that you will every buy.
Detox is certainly a hot topic these days. People want to feel better, and it is natural to want a quick fix. Be wary of marketing claims that promise to detox your body with a "five-day cleanse." Extreme approaches do not cultivate a healthy lifestyle for the long term, and they promote the on-again, off-again "diet" mentality. Developing habits and choices that will reduce the toxic burden on your liver and your whole body is not going to change things overnight, in a week, or even a year. But you can start moving in the right direction by following the guidelines outlined above.
In the next article, we will explore the use of herbs and nutritional supplements that have been proven to be safe and effective to enhance the health of the liver, and consequently the whole body. We will also dispel some of the myths regarding detox.
Until next time, Happy Spring!
***
Patricia Fitzgerald is a licensed acupuncturist, certified clinical nutritionist and homeopath as well as the Medical Director of the Santa Monica Wellness Center. She is also the author of The Detox Solution: The Missing Link to Radiant Health, Abundant Energy, Ideal Weight, and Peace of Mind.
Times-Union: Stan Swart on the Employee Free Choice Act
LABOR UNIONS
Give workers a choice
Many thanks for publishing John Parker's excellent letter explaining the importance of the Employee Free Choice Act. It is time to level the playing field" for workers seeking to exercise their rights under the First Amendment to the Constitution.
This act will give workers - not management - the choice between a secret vote or a simple card check system.
As the situation now stands, many workers have actually lost their rights as citizens. In too many cases, we are seeing a return to the conditions made famous in a line from a song by Anne Feeney, The Union Maid: "Once unions were against the law, but slavery was fine."
It is time for the American people to fight back!
STANLEY L. SWART,
labor activist,
THE FLORIDA TIMES UNION (3/21/09)
Give workers a choice
Many thanks for publishing John Parker's excellent letter explaining the importance of the Employee Free Choice Act. It is time to level the playing field" for workers seeking to exercise their rights under the First Amendment to the Constitution.
This act will give workers - not management - the choice between a secret vote or a simple card check system.
As the situation now stands, many workers have actually lost their rights as citizens. In too many cases, we are seeing a return to the conditions made famous in a line from a song by Anne Feeney, The Union Maid: "Once unions were against the law, but slavery was fine."
It is time for the American people to fight back!
STANLEY L. SWART,
labor activist,
THE FLORIDA TIMES UNION (3/21/09)
Butter Verses Margerine
Roma: I checked snopes, and most of this article is true. Parts are not. Thanks for sharing it Winnie.
My grandparents were cattle ranchers who lived off the land in a wilderness area. They always taught us to avoid any water that did not have any life in it because that was a sign that something was wrong. From them I learned that we who have attended college have much to learn.
http://www.snopes.com/food/warnings/butter.asp
The book learned Naturalists lobbied for cows to be removed from federal land because they said they were not natural. The old ranchers pointed out that cattle were introduced for an important reason. The buffalo had been destroyed causing the grass to grow tall, and during dry seasons rampant forest fires plagued residents. The ranchers said if you remove the cattle, you need to reintroduce buffalo to prevent forest fires.
But alsa the Naturalists thought themselves too smart to listen to those uneducated ranchers., and removed the cattle from federal lands. Result...forest fires as the ranchers predicted. No one has all the answers, and the wise man listens.
From Winnie
> >> >> This is interesting . .. .>>
Margarine was originally manufactured to fatten turkeys. When it killed the turkeys, the people who had put all the money into the research wanted a payback so they put their heads together to figure out what to do with this product to get their money back. It was a white substance with no food appeal so they added the yellow> coloring and sold it to people to use in place of butter. How do you like it? They have come out with some clever new flavorings.
DO Y OU KNOW.. the difference between margarine and butter? Read on to the end...gets very interesting!
You can try this yourself: Purchase a tub of margarine and leave it in your garage or shaded area. Within a couple of days you will note a couple of things: * no flies, not even those pesky fruit flies will go near it (that should tell you something)
* it does not rot or smell differently because it has no nutritional value; nothing will grow on it. Even those teeny weeny microorganisms will not a find a home to grow. Why? Because it is nearly plastic. Would you melt your Tupperware and spread that on your toast?
Share This With Your Friends.. ....(If you want to 'butter them up')!
My grandparents were cattle ranchers who lived off the land in a wilderness area. They always taught us to avoid any water that did not have any life in it because that was a sign that something was wrong. From them I learned that we who have attended college have much to learn.
http://www.snopes.com/food/warnings/butter.asp
The book learned Naturalists lobbied for cows to be removed from federal land because they said they were not natural. The old ranchers pointed out that cattle were introduced for an important reason. The buffalo had been destroyed causing the grass to grow tall, and during dry seasons rampant forest fires plagued residents. The ranchers said if you remove the cattle, you need to reintroduce buffalo to prevent forest fires.
But alsa the Naturalists thought themselves too smart to listen to those uneducated ranchers., and removed the cattle from federal lands. Result...forest fires as the ranchers predicted. No one has all the answers, and the wise man listens.
From Winnie
> >> >> This is interesting . .. .>>
Margarine was originally manufactured to fatten turkeys. When it killed the turkeys, the people who had put all the money into the research wanted a payback so they put their heads together to figure out what to do with this product to get their money back. It was a white substance with no food appeal so they added the yellow> coloring and sold it to people to use in place of butter. How do you like it? They have come out with some clever new flavorings.
DO Y OU KNOW.. the difference between margarine and butter? Read on to the end...gets very interesting!
- Both have the same amount of calories.
- Butter is slightly higher in saturated fats at 8 grams compared to 5 grams.
- Eating margarine can increase heart disease in women by 53% over eating the same amount of butter, according to a recent Harvard Me dical Study..
- Eating butter increases the absorption of many other nutrients in other foods.
- Butter has many nutritional benefits where margarine has a few only because they are added!
- Butter tastes much better than margarine and it can enhance the flavors of other foods
- Butter has been around for centuries where margarine has been around for less than 100 years.
- Very high in trans fatty acids...
- Triple risk of coronary heart disease.
- Increases total cholesterol and LDL (this is the bad cholesterol) and lowers HDL cholesterol, (the good cholesterol)
- Increases the risk of cancers up to five fold.
- Lowers quality of breast milk.>> >>
- Decreases immune response.>> >>
- Decreases insulin response.>> >>
- Margarine is but ONE MOLECULE away from being PLASTIC..
You can try this yourself: Purchase a tub of margarine and leave it in your garage or shaded area. Within a couple of days you will note a couple of things: * no flies, not even those pesky fruit flies will go near it (that should tell you something)
* it does not rot or smell differently because it has no nutritional value; nothing will grow on it. Even those teeny weeny microorganisms will not a find a home to grow. Why? Because it is nearly plastic. Would you melt your Tupperware and spread that on your toast?
Share This With Your Friends.. ....(If you want to 'butter them up')!
Lessons of History for the U.S.
Melanie: Griffin hits the nail on the head about our economy.
http://www.thedailybell.com/bellPage.asp?nid=331
Roma: This article points out something more :
"When this sort of thing is talked about now, we are talking about a world system. As I said, in the beginning, where you have systems of administration, systems of law, culture, art and soul,which in various times, in various ways, are still continuing. And if Rome, itself, is no longer the capital of what's happening, we can never forget that Constantinople lives on until 1453."(Constantinople continued to flourish long after the so called fall of Rome. Constantinople became a Christian empire ruled by Constantine. But other areas of the old empire flourished as well. Some areas fell because they were too dependant on other areas to supply their needs (inner city areas in particular).
"That's what we now think is that rather than to talk about a fall of the Roman Empire, with a symbolical date of 476AD, there are the systems, the processes on the various levels of culture in the broad sense of the word --"
"MS. FENTRESS: Britain, for example, there's a moment when the Emperor Honorius says, look after yourselves people, because we can't help you anymore. "
MS. FENTRESS: You know, one thing that's interesting, if you take that another way, I mean this is something Jan touched on, but the economic, the actual production very quickly slips away from Italy, and starts with the sort of boom economies are in the provinces, in Gaul and North Africa and Spain. You get tremendous take-off of productivity, while Italian agriculture really very early on, in say the 1st Century AD, 2nd Century AD, is falling to bits. It's really collapsing. And while Rome continues to control these as part of the empire, the actual places that are producing are quite different. And the wealth is being made elsewhere. I mean, this is interesting in terms of the economic take-off, Pacific Rim, these kinds of areas. It's quite separate from the military hegemony.
http://www.pbs.org/thinktank/transcript501.html
http://www.thedailybell.com/bellPage.asp?nid=331
Roma: This article points out something more :
"When this sort of thing is talked about now, we are talking about a world system. As I said, in the beginning, where you have systems of administration, systems of law, culture, art and soul,which in various times, in various ways, are still continuing. And if Rome, itself, is no longer the capital of what's happening, we can never forget that Constantinople lives on until 1453."(Constantinople continued to flourish long after the so called fall of Rome. Constantinople became a Christian empire ruled by Constantine. But other areas of the old empire flourished as well. Some areas fell because they were too dependant on other areas to supply their needs (inner city areas in particular).
"That's what we now think is that rather than to talk about a fall of the Roman Empire, with a symbolical date of 476AD, there are the systems, the processes on the various levels of culture in the broad sense of the word --"
"MS. FENTRESS: Britain, for example, there's a moment when the Emperor Honorius says, look after yourselves people, because we can't help you anymore. "
MS. FENTRESS: You know, one thing that's interesting, if you take that another way, I mean this is something Jan touched on, but the economic, the actual production very quickly slips away from Italy, and starts with the sort of boom economies are in the provinces, in Gaul and North Africa and Spain. You get tremendous take-off of productivity, while Italian agriculture really very early on, in say the 1st Century AD, 2nd Century AD, is falling to bits. It's really collapsing. And while Rome continues to control these as part of the empire, the actual places that are producing are quite different. And the wealth is being made elsewhere. I mean, this is interesting in terms of the economic take-off, Pacific Rim, these kinds of areas. It's quite separate from the military hegemony.
http://www.pbs.org/thinktank/transcript501.html
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