Category Archives: Unemployment

Wall Street Has SuperPACs, So Labor Should Have SuperPACs. AFL-CIO Takes A Step In That Direction.

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As Wall Street firms toss bonuses to their employees, so does the NFL in similar fashion award enormous signing bonuses and contracts to big talent players. Just the other day, the NFL announced they’d be giving Michael Vick a $100 million contract to stay on as Eagles QB.

A day before this was announced, there came a different sort of event: The AFL-CIO had just welcomed the NFL Players’ Association (NFLPA) into its loving embrace. The NFL players’ union has joined the AFL-CIO. Why now, one might well ask.

In what way do the interests of a group of seasonal workers — many of whom are multimillionaires — dovetail with the interests of the regular workers who make up the rest of the union? It’s a reasonable question.
We do understand that the players union includes not only the millionaire brats and the quarterback divas, it also includes those earning far, far less; and it is a large group of people for whom permanent disability is a significant risk.

But today the NFL just announced it has agreed to pay Michael Vick $100 million. Why does he need union representation — and why is he in one at all, when his employment situation is so many light years away from that of the rank-and-file worker?

Consider what it means. The largest union in America has just annexed a whole bunch of rich people. Those rich people, the star players, make their big money from labor negotiations. Some rich people actually will have to care about how labor gets treated!

Furthermore, Rachel Maddow made clear on her show a week or so ago how Labor and the Democratic Party rise together — when they rise, that is. Historically, the growth of Democratic power was because Labor supported it wholeheartedly; and Labor did well when the Democratic Party was able to carry out its platforms.

So now there’s some important movement occurring. Does this have something to do with superPACs? Are the football players going to help save labor? If so, this may be a really good deal for us. The position of the middle class working person is precarious in every way, and he needs the help of somebody strong. Not necessarily physically strong, but why not?

The strength of NFL players could be symbolic. Think about it.

If some big NFL players were to show up to support another workers’ group demonstration or strike, I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have the cameras see on our side. Picture it: Tired, striking health care workers (for example), standing in the rain with their picket signs, shuffling back and forth in front of the hospital entrance, … and suddenly a column of enormous athletes in jerseys marches up and they arrange themselves behind the strikers, and stand there with their enormous arms folded across their chests… just like in Revenge of the Nerds, when the older (and athletic, and black) Tri-Lambs show up to support their scrawny nerd brothers! What a day that would be!

When the 2012 presidential campaign begins in earnest, will our big strong brothers (Brothers in Labor!) be around to show support for the working man, giving a much-needed boost to the party trying to fight the Big Banks, the Wall Street firms, the Phil Gramms, the Koch brothers, and all the super-rich who hate ordinary people?

If so, that’s when I’d start idolizing football players.

Ed Rendell and New Deal Jobs. Spending is Happiness.

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Here in Pittsburgh, suddenly there are multiple bridge and road rebuilding projects going on at the same time, so driving from one end of town to another requires at least one major detour. I now realize the assigning of money to do the work must have been done before Governor Tom Corbett took office. I think, given his druthers, he would wait and wait, until he’d gotten some jails privatized or something before loosening up cash for repairs. He detests spending as much as he seems to detest prison inmates; at least, apparently, those in Dauphin County Prison, and wouldn’t mind if they suffered some more in order for the state to get money.

I had expected to be falling into one river or another, soon, from a collapsing bridge. We have so many.

But former Governor Ed Rendell, who tonight was on the Rachel Maddow Show, made my poor heart leap because he is indicating the road we can take to fix the entire economy: He suggested that we start immediately to fix the roads and bridges and stuff — sort of like Roosevelt did after the Depression. Jobs programs. In fact, he obviously set in motion some helpful money here before leaving office, because work is going on right now.

I can drive around town and see some beautiful examples of Works Program buildings from FDR’s legacy: for example, the Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh. It’s used for classes, for university offices, meetings, events, cultural activities, you name it. Things were built that were useful and lasting.

Such a route is precisely what people like Paul Krugman have been saying urgently was the answer. That yeah, we actually do have to spend our way out of the hole we’re in. When a powerhouse like Rendell says now that this is what we have to do — now that the artificial crisis of the debt ceiling is over, now that the presidential candidates are lining up like beauty contestants and being found very ugly — it carries possibility. It carries an air of reason. I guess timing is everything.

Wall Street’s Supposedly Vacant Houses and Fish; Ann Curry’s House and the Harafish.

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Some days on Wall Street, either you catch the fish or the harafish catches you.

Harafish is Egyptian and means the urban poor. It may be a slang term.

Bad things happen to vacant houses, when mortgage processors have gone rogue and the poor — that is, the homeless — have nowhere to go. NBC “Today” Show host Ann Curry just found out that a homeless man had been living in her empty $2.9 million townhouse on New York City’s Upper West side. The man was said to have been there for about a year. Curry and her husband have been renovating the house “for about eight years,” while living in Gramercy Park. It has been a magnet to other homeless persons too.

And why not? City shelters may have no space, and are sometimes dangerous. The homeless are chased out of public spaces like Central Park. Urban poor have been taking over rich people’s abandoned homes for centuries, just like in the novel The Harafish by Naguib Mahfouz; although the story’s set in Egypt it rings a bell here.

The other fish story I’d been thinking of happened late last year. Remember when Bank of America changed the locks and shut off utilities to a house they had nothing to do with? A doctor came home from vacation and found signs all over his house saying Bank of America was foreclosing on it. The doctor had no mortgage with them, no connection whatever. He breaks open his door and the whole place reeks of rotting halibut and salmon he’d stored in his freezer before leaving — 75 pounds of it. If someone had been home, maybe that wouldn’t have… yeah, if a homeless person had been inside, maybe he’d have found the fish and taken them out before they made the place smell so bad. Maybe.

Either way, the Wall Street banks, mortgage industry, and the financial companies who helped create the changed economy we are now enjoying — are clearly responsible for a long, long chain of adverse events.

Bonus Time at Wall Street’s Goldman Sachs. Needing Diversion. Thinking About Elves.

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Supersized Wall Street bonuses are planned by Goldman Sachs to be paid soon to their top executives and traders, bonuses exceeding last year’s and the year before. The moment I read about it, I

<I>Once again we may see stovepipe hats on Wall Street.</I>

Once again we may see stovepipe hats on Wall Street.

thought this decision was going to be undone by the provisions restricting TARP companies — since GS has not paid back the $10 billion it owes the U.S. But Goldman is NOT grouped among those handful of companies that received “extreme assistance”  on whom these restrictions lie. How handy!

 

No, they only received $10 billion, that’s all, and were laxly permitted to receive the complete value ($12.9 billion) of their credit default swaps from AIG — thus sending AIG into broke status — and special treatment at every step it has taken in recent years. GS is NOT being investigated for misrepresenting its financial status to its shareholders, although documents have emerged suggesting this very thing. Some would say those documents demonstrate it, not suggest it. 

So Goldman can go ahead and pay those bonuses, nothing much stopping them.

And now (according to Bloomberg.com) one of the biggest Wall Street trade groups, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), is going on the road with a niceness campaign to try to convince the public in some of the big cities that Wall Street doesn’t really suck.

They hired former assistants of Henry Paulson in this campaign. Are they really hoping, let alone expecting, to change the minds of the general public?

But …we know that the security industries suck. How can we blind ourselves to the fact that they suck? Because they actually suck.

A nice parade might work, for five minutes anyway. This level of distrust is difficult to sustain and it would be a nice break. After all, I already have to divert myself from grim reality with cartoons of honest sheriffs and other righteous inventions. For instance, I went to read Wigu.com to look at Sheriff Pony.

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(Cut to: Diversion from Bleak Financial Reality.)

Sheriff Pony looks like the offspring of Quickdraw McGraw and Smurfette, when maybe Quickdraw had to go to France during the war. The Smurfs are French, in case you didn’t know.

<I>Quickdraw McGraw's Baby Mama?</I>

Quickdraw McGraw's Baby Mama?

 

 

I bet all the major elves are related.

The tribe of Smurfs, I’d guess, are foreign cousins of the Keebler elves, who everyone knows are ardent capitalists — almost as bad as the Ferengi. Both the Smurfs and the Keeblers practice magic. You know the song: “And they’re baked in magic ovens and there’s no fac-tory. Hey!”

I know what you’re about to ask…. What’s their connection with the Rice Krispie elves? Well, they’re the first cousins of the head Keebler elf, who entertains a rather low opinion of them. The Rice Krispie brothers, Snap, Crackle, and Pop, were sort of drifter artists who at last found work in the cereal industry to keep themselves from starving in the gutter. The Keeblers, by contrast, are very bourgeousie and successful. They love their magic ovens. They’re so smug.

Yeah, they’ve got work and they do not need to rub it in. 

All of a sudden I’m feeling sympathetic towards the Rice Krispie guys. And all these people lately, who are out of jobs.