Warren's Native Heritage - why is it an issue?

So what's behind Brown's attack on Elizabeth Warren for claiming Native American ancestry? Why would it matter to anyone? My family story, like half the folks I know, includes some Native ancestry. I don't care very much if it's true. It's my family story. So what? Should we keep it a secret in case we might run for public office someday?

No, this is not about Warren's heritage. Brown is crudely playing on our anger at all those "other people" who've taken advantage of the system to jump ahead of us in line. Every time we check that box in an application form for "White" or "Caucasian" we've been conditioned to feel that somehow we're being deprived of an advantage. I know it's a crock, but I can't help feeling it too. Now Brown is telling us Warren is one of the line-jumpers who's robbing us of our due!

But our problem is not the few Black or Latino folks who may have jumped ahead of us on the line. Does any paleskin here really believe you'd have an easier life with a darker skin? Seriously?

The problem is that it's so darn hard for any of us to get and keep a really good job, to pay for college for our kids, to keep up with the mortgage and loan payments. It's so hard even if you or your kid manage to finish college, and then if you lose your grip on the ladder it's so hard and humiliating to get the help you need to survive and get back on your feet.

It's a rigged game, and it's only getting worse.

Some of us are too proud to ask for help. By the time we do, we've already made a mistake that disqualifies us. Then we're egged on to blame the ones who asked for help and got it!

Or just blame Elizabeth Warren! She's rich, she's famous, she's happy and successful, her father was a janitor, so she must have cheated or done something vile to get where we should be!

Is this the best Brown has to offer us? Is that what our choice of Senator should be about?

Or should it be about who will best help and support us in making the game fairer? 

Are they gaming the life expectancy data?

First came this:

From NY Times, Dec. 9, 2010:

Life Expectancy Drops Slightly, Bucking Established Trend [AP]

"Life expectancy in the United States has dropped slightly — by about a month ... " 

<nytimes.com/2010/12/10/us/10death.html >

Then this:

From the T&G, March 17, 2011:
"ATLANTA [AP} — U.S. life expectancy has hit another all-time high, rising above 78 years. 

 

"Previously, the CDC said a one-month dip occurred in 2008 to 77 years and 11 months. But in Wednesday’s report, the agency corrected that to 78 years, attributing the glitch to a computer programming error. 

"Belatedly, 'we realized there’s something wrong here' in the 2008 estimate, said Ken Kochanek, a CDC statistician. 

" 

<telegram.com/article/20110317/NEWS/103170763> 

In a New York Times article that same day, Kochanek told a reporter that after the initial estimate, in Dec. 2010, his boss had come to him saying - as I recall - This can't be right. There must be a mistake in your computer program. Go find it and fix it. And sure enough there was, and he did. 

I have searched diligently for that article.  I swear on my Mother's grave I saw it, no mistake about what was in it.  It seems to have disappeared from the Web.  Someone with access to an archive of paper copies of the Times (if anyone still keeps one, and I fear to have to say we really need to) will find it there, unless someone has gone around tearing pages out of those too!

Telegram, Sept. 23:

Life expectancy falls for less-educated Americans

Sabrina Tavernise THE NEW YORK TIMES

http://www.telegram.com/article/20120921/NEWS/120929930

For generations of Americans, it was a given that children would live longer than their parents. But there is mounting evidence that this trend has reversed itself for the country's least-educated whites, an increasingly troubled group whose life expectancy has fallen by four years since 1990.

The steepest declines were for white women without a high school diploma, who lost five years of life between 1990 and 2008

Among developed countries, American women sank from the middle of the pack in 1970 to last place in 2010, according to the Human Mortality Database.

Three other studies, by Ahmedin Jemal, a researcher at the American Cancer Society; Jennifer Karas Montez, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at Harvard; and Richard Miech, a professor at the University of Colorado Denver, found increases in mortality rates (the ratio of deaths to a population) for the least educated Americans.

Education No Silver Bullet for Fixing the Economy!

re: Is Education a Silver Bullet for Fixing the Economy?

By Richard Kirsch
Next New Deal
August 3, 2012

http://www.nextnewdeal.net/education-silver-bullet-fixing-economy

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Everyone, from the people who run jobs training through the upper ranks of education administrators, touts education as the solution for individuals and for the economy.  The owners and administrators of the private and charter schools, the boards and administration and senior faculty at the colleges and universities, even the NEA, all urge more education as the solution to joblessness, as the beacon of hope for our children and ourselves. The politicians, who have little else to offer, go on and on about it.   Millions of laid off workers have gone back to school on borrowed money to escape the trap of job insecurity and inadequate wages.

And much of what little money the government spends on jobs goes into eduction and worker retraining. 

This drive for more education isn't completely useless; for individuals it's necessary for just staying on the treadmill. For countries, it's necessary to remain competitive.  Plus, it provides jobs for a lot of teachers, who are not surprisingly easily persuaded that what they have to offer will save the world.   I should know, I was one of them.  

But education and training are apparently no solution to the problems that are pushing us all into poverty, wage and debt slavery, and are pushing our economy ever deeper into depression.  

One conclusion we can draw is the need to reject any jobs program that is mostly training and education.  Only actual government spending to create good jobs, actions to increase minimum pay and protect worker rights on the job, or government intervention to strengthen the bargaining power of workers will do.  Not that we should be against education and training, but we must not allow them to call it job creation.  It isn't. 

The Humphrey Hawkins Full Employment and Training Act is big and bold enough to mount a challenge and rally the public, which is no doubt why the corporate media have maintained a curtain of silence around it!  

That's a pretty tall order.  But life is putting the necessity for this in all of our faces.  The time for this is so long overdue that events could transform the situation very quickly.

Worcester Unemployment Rate - Sept. 20

We should have unemployment and jobs figures for Worcester, but we need a statistic better than the official "U3" unemployment rate.

The BLS issues a "U6" rate that includes many categories of unemployed and involuntary part time workers that don't get counted in the U3 rate. New grads and returning housewives who've never held a job, people taking one college course or putting in a few hours on a family business, job seekers with a small military pension, etc., plus "discouraged workers" who gave up looking less than a year before. This U6 rate is running about twice the official U3 rate nationally - 15 to 16% - but is not calculated and reported out by state, much less by metro region.

What we need is not a local version of the very-misleading official "unemployment rate" but a figure that takes the U6 rate and adds in the "long term discouraged workers" figure that the government stopped collecting in 1994. <shadowstats.com> publishes a "Shadow Government Statistics" (SGS) unemployment rate which adds to U6 their best guess at what the long term discouraged worker rate would be using the pre-1994 definitions. THe SGS rate has been going up even as the "official rate" goes down, and is now hovering around 23% unemployment nationally. What our local U6 or SGS rate would be is anyone's guess, but most regular people I talk to guess that the "real rate" in greater Worcester is something like 20%.

Most politicians, administrators, bureaucrats and professionals that I talk to don't have a clue, which is a problem. And they mostly talk to each other. The decision makers can't make good decisions because they don't understand that we have a real unemployment disaster on our hands! 6.3% sounds like almost back to normal, right? Some Republicans are speaking the truth about this, but will they keep it up if they win in November? Or will they go back to using the U3 rate to argue that things aren't so bad after all?

We need some honesty here folks! 

What do we do if Romney steals the election?

The next great wave of popular outrage may be over a stolen election. 

Whatever we may think about Obama, he remains extremely popular among people of color and much of Labor.  Romney's popular fortunes are declining, and by Nov. 5 it may be clear that Obama has won in the court of popular opinion.  It is a near certainty that election day will be chaos as millions discover they've been purged, millions confused by misinformation and millions unable to get into inadequate or non-functional polling places.  

One scenario is that while most people believe Obama should have won, Romney is declared the winner - and Obama fairly quickly concedes.  Without an organized response, the ghettos erupt, followed by a carefully prepared and murderous wave of mass repression. 

Another Scenario:  Obama wins.  We have reports from all over the country of plans by militias and even local Republican organizations for an armed revolt in that case.

How can we organize a response to any possible outcome of the election, when we don't know what will happen?  If we wait long enough to find out it may well be too late to get ahead of the curve.  

The Liberty Tree Foundation, in an email received on Tuesday, reported that they will "... again be putting out the call for nationwide Voter Assemblies on November 7th (the day after the election) - gatherings that will serve as instant organizing platforms if there is evidence that the fall election was stolen."  

Looks like a plan to me.  What do you think?

Letter to an anti-union union member - Sept. 3

"Thrifty", perhaps you should  think long and hard about your position.  You're in a union I take it, you get union scale, you talk like someone who feels entitled to a middle class lifestyle, but do you think you will keep it if the unions get crushed - like what's happened in Ohio and Wisconsin? 

We have gotten to see what a world without unions looks like as over the past 40 years "union density" has fallen lower and lower.  It's not just union pay scale that has fallen as unions lose clout, but everyone's.  

Companies used to pay close to union scale, give workers seniority, paid holidays, sick days, pension funds and grievance procedures, just to keep the unions out.  Now they don't worry much about keeping unions out, what with the NLRB stacked against the unions, really polished union-busting outfits available for hire, and so many unemployed people waiting to take the job if someone walks off the job or gets fired for union activity.  

The new normal is "all jobs are temporary", right?  Your next job is likely to pay less than the last one.  And now you pay (plenty) for your own health care, your pension if any is a small 401K plan if you're lucky, and your grievance procedure is the chance to appeal the denial of your unemployment benefits when they lay you off and say it was for cause.

More people are sliding closer and closer to a minimum wage, a wage that won't even support a poverty lifestyle, and that minimum wage becomes worth less every year.  Children come home after college to sleep on the couch, parents die in the attic because you can't afford a good nursing home, the food becomes more and more unhealthy unless you buy organic, and the price spread between good food and what we can afford grows ever wider.  

Is that really the future you want?  Or are you too angry to care?

Letter endorsing McGovern, Sept. 2

Jim McGovern is more in touch with the views and needs of the regular folk in his district than almost anyone in the Congress. On issues of job creation and rebuilding our infrastructure, tax fairness, Green Economy investments, saving Food Stamps and the Unemployment Insurance System, defending Social Security and Medicare, ending the waste of our money and lives on unnecessary and un-winable wars and guaranteeing access to quality health care for all, Jim McGovern has been second to none.

The Worcester Unemployment Action Group has met with McGovern and found his positions and record of leadership on job creation and help for the unemployed impressive and encouraging. His responses to our Candidate Questionnaire were thoughtful, detailed and constructive. He has earned our support.

William Feegbeh by contrast responded to our questionnaire by checking all the "Yes" boxes without comment. Unfortunately we have not succeeded in setting up a conversation with him.