The Party of No

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Published on Tuesday, July 6, 2010 by The Guardian/UK

Republicans: A Party of Unemployment

by Dean Baker

From now until 2 November, the Republican party will be the party of unemployment. The logic is straightforward: the more people who are unemployed on election day, the better the prospects for Republicans in the fall election. They expect, with good cause, that voters will hold the Democrats responsible for the state of the economy. Therefore, anything that the Republicans can do to make the economy worse between now and then will help their election prospects.
While it may be bad taste to accuse a major national political party of deliberately wanting to throw people out of jobs, there is no other plausible explanation for the Republicans' behaviour. They have balked at supporting nearly every bill that had any serious hope of creating or keeping jobs, most recently filibustering on bills that provided aid to state and local governments and extending unemployment benefits. The result of the Republicans' actions, unless they are reversed quickly, is that hundreds of thousands more workers will be thrown out of work by the mid-terms.
The story is straightforward. Nearly every state and local government across the country is looking at large budget shortfalls for their 2011 fiscal years, most of which begin on 1 July 2010. Since they are generally required by state constitutions or local charters to balance their budgets, they will have no choice except to raise taxes and/or make large cutbacks and lay off workers to bring spending and revenue into line.
State and local governments have cut their workforce by an average of 65,000 a month over the last three months. Without substantial aid from the federal government, this pace is likely to accelerate. The Republican agenda in blocking aid to the states may add another 300,000 people to the unemployment rolls by early November.
The blocking of extended unemployment benefits promises similar dividends. As Paul Krugman rightly notes this week, unemployment benefits are not just about providing income support to those who are out of work, they also provide a boost to the economy. Since unemployed workers generally have little other than their benefits to support themselves, this is money that will almost immediately be spent. The benefits paid to workers are income to food stores and other retail outlets.
Unemployment insurance provides the sort of boost to demand that the economy desperately needs. That is why neutral parties such as the congressional budget office or economist Mark Zandi, a top adviser to John McCain's presidential bid, always list unemployment benefits as one of the best forms of stimulus.
Republicans give two reasons for opposing benefits. First, they claim that benefits discourage people from working. Second, they object that the Democrats' proposal will add to the national debt.
On the first point there is a considerable amount of economic research. Most indicates that in periods when the economy is operating near its capacity, more generous benefits may modestly increase the unemployment rate. However, they are less likely to have that effect now. The reason is simple: the economy does not have enough jobs. The latest data from the labour department shows that there are five unemployed workers for every job opening.
In this context, unemployment benefits may give some workers the option to remain unemployed longer to find a job that better fits their skills, but they are unlikely to affect the total number of unemployed. In other words, a $300 weekly unemployment cheque may allow an experienced teacher the luxury of looking for another teaching job, rather than being forced to grab a job at Wal-Mart.
However, if the teacher took the job at Wal-Mart, then this would simply displace a recent high-school graduate who has no other job opportunities. That might be a great turn of events in Republican-econ land, but it does not reduce the overall unemployment rate, nor does it benefit the overall economy in any obvious way.
The other argument the Republicans give is that these bills would add to the national debt. For example, the latest extension of unemployment benefits would have added $22bn to the debt by the end of 2011. This means that the debt would be $9,807,000,000 instead of $9,785,000,000 at the end of fiscal 2011, an increase of the debt-to-GDP ratio from 65.3% to 65.4%.
It is possible that Congressional Republicans, who were willing to vote for hundreds of billions of dollars of war expenditures without paying for them, or trillions of dollars of tax cuts without paying for them, are actually concerned about this sort of increase in the national debt. It is possible that this is true, but not very plausible.
The more likely explanation is that the Republicans want to block anything that can boost the economy and create jobs. Throwing people out of work may not be pretty, but politics was never pretty, and it is getting less so by the day.

© 2010 Guardian News and Media Limited

Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer ( www.conservativenannystate.org) and the more recently published Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of The Bubble Economy. He also has a blog, "Beat the Press," where he discusses the media's coverage of economic issues. 

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Joint Dismissal in Conservation Commission Case

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The neighbors of the Mackin French King parcel and the defendants,
Greenfield Investors, have signed a joint dismissal today of the appeal
in the Conservation Commission case in Franklin County Superior Court.
This appeal was filed before the amended Order of Conditions.

The neighbors believe that they essentially won one of their major
battles--which was to force the landowner to clean up his polluted
wetland, and to force the developer to move its massive store off
Wetland 4. The issue of size was not addressed, but will be in the next
phase. We are releasing the following statement:

"When we began this process 3 years ago, the Conservation Commission was
claiming that wetland 4 was not even a wetland, and the developer
presented plans to put its store and parking lot over that
wetland--destroying it completely.

Now, as a result of our intervention, the wetland must be restored---not
replicated elsewhere---and in fact it will be expanded. The Conservation
Commission review was so flawed, that the state Department of
Environmental Protection had to file its own appeal of the Commission's
decision---and now we have a wetland resource that will be protected and
enhanced.

The neighbors remain concerned that to build a store this size the 100
foot buffer zone around this project had to be destroyed and paved over
in many areas---but we do not feel that court action would resolve this
problem. While the Conservation Commission ignored our concerns about
the incompatible size of this building--two and a half times larger than
Stop & Shop--we believe this issue will have more traction before the
Planning Board.

Now we move onto Phase II of this review, which is the special permit,
Major Development Review and site plan review of the store itself. The
homeowners in the Canada Hill neighborhood, and the whole eastern part
of town, will continue to assert that this proposal is incompatible with
a residential neighborhood, and that in its present state is
unacceptable---without safeguards and limitations to protect the
neighbors homes and property.

This project is located in the French King overlay district, whose
purpose is to create an attractive entryway into town, and to 'minimize
strip development and traffic congestion.' This overlay district was set
aside as a special overlay to 'protect scenic and naturaal features.'
Placing a big box store in this gateway to our town defies all rational
land use planning.

The neighbors also feel that an enormous superstore is incompatible with
existing uses, and will detract from the character and scale of
neighboring properties. The project as proposed has no screening, no
buffering, and no open spaces---it is a wall of concrete surrounded by a
sea of asphalt.

But the enormity of this project should concern all residents in
Greenfield and surrounding towns. We believe that a careful review of
this proposal will show that it will have a significant adverse fiscal
impact on the town, and surrounding towns, that it will adversely impact
adjacent properties, the neighborhood, and the environment, and that it
will result in unsafe vehicular circulation, reducing the service level
of traffic for the full length of High Street and surrounding
intersections. This project will also detract from the downtown as a
commercial center, and undermine the revitalization focus of current
efforts in our central commercial area.

We will be asking the Planning Board to dramatically scale back the size
of this project---which they have the right to do---and to limit the
time of operation and extent of facilities to protect the public health
and welfare.

This big box store three times the size of a football field is the wrong
size and in the wrong place for Greenfield and area towns. We hope that
these arguments will not be lost on the members of the Planning and
Zoning Board."

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Published on Wednesday, September 23, 2009 by Creators.com

'Local' Goes Loco

by Jim Hightower

In "Through the Looking Glass," Humpty Dumpty declared, "When I use a word, it means what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less."

Mr. Dumpty would have loved living in our era of corporate-speak, when even a plain word of obvious meaning can be dumped down the semantical rabbit hole to be swirled and twirled by marketing meisters.

Then — sproing! — out it pops, looking like the same word, but now burdened with a convoluted connotation that is the very opposite of what the word appears to mean.

This corporatization of language is presently being applied to the common term, "local" — as in: right here, in the immediate vicinity, this neck of the woods, hereabouts, our backyard, etc.

In the past few years, "local" has become an important commercial term, as small businesses have proudly attached it to their products, services and presence in the marketplace. The term differentiates them from the gigantism, plasticity, aloofness and frequent abusiveness of faraway, big-box, chain operations. The message conveyed by these local enterprises is that "we are your neighbors, you know us and we know you, we share a community bond beyond just taking your money."

"Local" is a growing movement in American commerce. Some 30,000 small businesses have organized themselves into "local business alliances" in more than 130 cities. The movement is phenomenally popular with consumers, who like the personality and uniqueness of homegrown enterprises and prefer to buy from people who keep consumer dollars moving through the local economy.

As a result of the movement's financial success, many more businesses are joining the local push. For example, such down-home outfits as Barnes & Noble, CVS, Frito Lay, HSBC, Starbucks, Unilever and Wal-Mart are trying to get in on the action.

Believe it or not, these giants are using TV ads and other promotional outlets to hawk their centralized, standardized and globalized brands as "local." Here are a few of the twists they've made in the straightforward definition of the term:

— HSBC, a sprawling, British-based financial conglomerate, has thousands of branch banks in localities across the globe (from Boston to Brazil), so it has labeled itself, "the world's local bank."

— Barnes & Noble, the biggest bookseller in the world, is trying to scale its image down to mom-and-pop level by proclaiming that "all book-selling is local."

— Hellmann's, a division of the Dutch-owned Unilever conglomerate, is claming that its mayonnaise is a local product because most of its ingredients come from somewhere in North America — a 9.5 million square mile stretch of "local."

— Starbucks, the ubiquitous 16,000-store caffeine purveyor, has been losing market share to cool, local shops that are the opposite of cookie-cutter chain stores, so the giant is opening a series of pretend-funky shops designed by corporate headquarters to present a "local vibe" — a consumer hoax that includes no display at all of the Starbucks name and logo.

These examples are closer to loco than they are to local!

Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance notes that the corporate pretenders are often boosted by economic development officials.

She recently reported on a "buy local" campaign in Fresno, Calif., in which county authorities sold out the true locals (as well as the English language) by proclaiming, "Just so you know, buying local means any store in your community: mom-and-pop stores, national chains, big-box stores — you name it."

This "ya'll come" perversion of reality is supported by PR consultants for giant marketers. As rationalized by Michelle Barry, an executive of the Hartman Group: "There is a belief that you can only be local if you are a small and authentic brand. This isn't necessarily true; big brands can use the notion of local to their advantage as well. ... It's a different way of thinking about local that is not quite as literal."

Wow, Humpty Dumpty would be proud of her! By that definition, "Made in China" could be local.

To connect with the "literal" world of local business, contact the Institute for Local Self-Reliance: www.ilsr.org.

© 2009 Creators Syndicate

National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow, Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be - consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks.