Arnold's economic recovery flag is at half-staff

[Peter Farruggio <pfarr@uclink4.berkeley.edu>]

In the middle of this article, P Schrag inadvertently highlights the 
economic essence of what is destroying our public education system, the 
deliberate disinvestment in the education of most of our children as part 
of the New World Order.  This is not fuzzy thinking or forgetfulness by the 
leaders of the US political economy.  It is a key element of the current, 
post-Soviet stage of imperialism (now being called "globalization"): super 
exploitation of the "underdeveloped" (weaker) countries for their cheaper 
labor, including intellectual labor in Schrag's citation, and their captive 
markets.  This is not just a California story. Since the US rulers don't 
feel the need to compete with another super-power anymore, they could care 
less about educating the masses of our kids.  For them, the utility of 
schools in poor neighborhoods is strictly social control, brainwashing the 
future low wage workers into accepting their lot. That's what high stakes 
testing and creation of failure is about.  Big prison investment for those 
that don't accept their lot.  The steady erosion of  progressive taxation 
(tax cuts for the rich) accompanies the dismantling of the social contract 
forged by the labor struggles in the 1930s (New Deal, social safety net, 
etc), and this includes disinvestment in popular education. "Savage 
inequalities" is part of a deliberate policy.
It will take grass roots organizing to reverse this, not cogent arguments 
to convince the policy makers.

Tax the Rich!


Peter Schrag: Arnold's economic recovery flag is at half-staff
By Peter Schrag -- Bee Columnist
Published 2:15 a.m. PST Wednesday, February 4, 2004

http://www.sacbee.com/content/politics/columns/schrag/story/8211962p-9143011c.html

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger likes to say that if he could sell some of his 
movies, he can surely sell California. But even if he succeeds in getting 
the major workers' comp and regulatory reforms he wants, California's 
business climate and its overall job picture will need a lot more attention.

There are, first of all, the somewhat chilling new projections from 
California's Employment Development Department that show that job growth in 
the coming year will be a dismal 1 percent - about 142,000 jobs in all. 
That's barely more than half the 10-year average.
	
 Worse, a large share of the new jobs will be in low-wage occupations: 
retail sales, food preparation and service workers, waiters and waitresses, 
teacher assistants, cashiers and customer service representatives.

Those projections are consistent with those released last month by the 
Economic Policy Institute which show that since the recession officially 
ended in 2001, "\[American\] jobs in higher-paying industries have given 
way to jobs in lower-paying industries."

For California, according to EPI, the average wage in industries that 
contracted since 2001 - those shedding jobs - was $57,800. The average wage 
in growing industries is $34,742. That's a difference of 40 percent. An 
analysis by the California Budget Project, though not quite as bleak, 
showed a gap of 21 percent.

Add to that the likely impact of what a lot of people now call the 
"offshoring" of mid-level tech jobs and the picture becomes still grimmer.

Silicon Valley executives such as Hewlett-Packard's Carly Fiorina and 
Intel's Craig Barrett are telling Congress that if the United States is to 
compete in a global market, they need an extension of the federal research 
and development tax credit, more federal spending on research and more 
federal funds for science and math education.

But between the lines, the message was inevitability. China and India are 
producing tens of thousands of able engineers, programmers and other 
information techies and - guess what? - they'll work for a fraction of what 
their American counterparts get.

Given the Internet and the global nature of the business and the 
near-impossibility of imposing trade barriers against nations that are 
already major U.S. markets, they said, there's not much that can be done to 
prevent it.

"Companies can still form in Silicon Valley and be competitive around the 
world," Barrett told a group of editors and reporters at the San Jose 
Mercury News. "It's just that they are not necessarily going to create jobs 
in Silicon Valley." More chilling, Barrett says that half of Silicon 
Valley's venture capital now goes overseas.

None of that means that either Silicon Valley or the rest of America's 
entrepreneurial energy is now being drained by low-wage, high-skill nations 
in Asia. Steve Levy, the inveterate optimist who runs CCSCE, the Center for 
the Continuing Study of the California Economy, says jobs from mature 
industries will always wander offshore, as they did in basic manufacturing, 
to be replaced by new technologies and industries.

The data from the state and the EPI, though hardly encouraging, are not 
conclusive. But the globalization of jobs and markets leaves little doubt 
that, for California especially, the business climate in the broadest sense 
is absolutely crucial.

And that's where the governor seems to be missing the point. Among 
Barrett's unsurprising proposals is that wherever possible, government 
should get out of the way. But in supporting high-quality research and 
education at all levels, government support is absolutely essential.

And so, as Levy has often pointed out, are efficient transportation 
systems, the cultural amenities that attract executives and educated 
workers, and the schools to which they want to send their children. And 
when it comes to those issues, Schwarzenegger's flag of economic recovery 
hangs at half-mast.

Instead of protecting the state's universities, he's reducing access and 
raising fees. Instead of seeking funds to bolster the state's 
long-underfunded transportation system, he's snatched transportation money 
to help balance his budget.

To be sure, pressure of multibillion-dollar deficits now overrules those 
priorities. But there's a great deal in the governor's economic agenda that 
will prevent any significant attention to the state's public services 
priorities for years to come and almost nothing that fosters even planning 
for them.

The governor talks about making California the Golden State it was in 1968, 
when he first came to this country. What he doesn't mention is that 
California was then riding a boom of tax-funded infrastructure development 
- colleges and universities, roads, parks, water systems - like none the 
nation had ever seen. Has anyone told him?

Last week, when he was asked at the Sacramento Press Club what he'd done 
about the outsourcing of jobs to other countries, he said he'd been 
jawboning Virgin Air Lines about a California hub and making commercials to 
show what a great state California was to do business in.

That's wimpy. Schwarzenegger may be able to sell junk movies, but to sell 
the Golden State now, he really needs more than sunshine and beaches.