St. Louis CofCC Blog

I was watching the “Jaco Report” on Channel 2 this morning, and Charles Jaco headed a panel of important local business leaders and Mayor Slay, to talk about the economic downturn in the metro area, symbolized by what will probably be a successful takeover of A-B by InBev.

First off, Jaco himself said that one of the big problems in the region is the “black hole of the public education system” in certain parts of the metro area.  I suppose Jaco hasn’t yet read this story, but he will soon be getting a visit from the civil rights alphabet gang nonetheless, especially since he used “black hole” in an implied racial sense.

One of the panelists admitted that most people laid off from well-paid “working class” employment almost never find other work in the spirit of “re-training.”  He also admitted that employers are loath to hire such people, because they’re afraid that they’re going from a $50G job to a $20G job, and the severe reduction in pay will make them constantly frustrated and unable to do their new job.  Even if they are hired, the panel admitted, the pay isn’t as much, plus those that look for new work but give up after awhile drop out of the official unemployment stats.  Therefore, these kinds of mass layoffs at Chrysler or A-B don’t affect the unemployment stats very much, which conceals the extent of the near-depression that we’re in.

However, these panelists have not yet “gotten it.”  Jaco asked a question — To paraphrase, that Lou Dobbs and all his protectionist Indians are just over the fort wall, ready to storm into the protected palace of free trade and the global economy;  What do we do to con the masses into thinking free trade is good?  One of the panelists said that free trade means that they don’t have any restrictions in buying our goods.

What goods?  The only stuff they’re buying from us is raw materials to build up their manufacturing base, and food.  As such, the United States of America is becoming nothing more than a colony that one imperialist or another gets basic materials from.  The last time we were in this fix, Thomas Jefferson was working on his ninth draft of something that started with, “When in the course of human events…”

And to the notion that free trade is wonderful?  Mayor Slay agreed.  What a clueless schmuck.

The Federal government had its first $1 trillion budget in 1987, towards the end of the Reagan administration.  Through the whole of Bush 41’s and Clinton’s time in office, twelve years between them, the Federal budget still started with a 1.

Bush 43 has presided over the first $2 trillion budget (2002), and will apparently do so over the first $3 trillion one (2009).  Thankfully, this is final budget proposal — if he had a shot at one more, that would would probably be $4 trillion.

Remember, for three-quarters of the Bush 43 administration, he had a Republican House.

USA Today:

Employers want new way to judge graduates beyond tests, grades

Colleges have been scrambling over the past year to respond to recommendations from a national commission that they be clearer to the public about what students have learned by the time they graduate.

Sometime in the next several weeks, for example, a national online initiative will be launched that allows families to compare colleges on measures such as whether they improve a student’s critical-thinking skills.

(snip)

It builds on a survey last year in which business leaders said 63% of graduates are not prepared for the global economy.

(snip)

“We need to invent new forms of accountability that look at such issues as global knowledge and self-direction and intercultural competence, not just at critical thinking and communication skills,” she says.

Translated into English, the problem with American college graduates is that they really don’t have enough “critical thinking” skills — they’re not critical enough of the anachronistic mentality that people should have a high standard of living based on their wages and salaries.  And they’re certainly not “prepared for the global economy” — they’re not prepared for pay so low that they have to live twenty to a house.

President Bush wants to pump $150 billion of money the Federal government doesn’t have into an economy that’ll spend it all on China-made garbage at Big Box Mart anyway.

Economic stimulus.  Yeah, there’s a good laugh.

From PJB’s latest:

We are thus in the position of having to borrow from Europe to defend Europe, of having to borrow from China and Japan to defend Chinese and Japanese access to Gulf oil, and of having to borrow from Arab emirs, sultans and monarchs to make Iraq safe for democracy.

We borrow from the nations we defend so that we may continue to defend them. To question this is an unpardonable heresy called “isolationism.”

***

Some 8,000 people, including some recent college grads, attended a job fair where they applied for about 450 jobs that will pay between $8 and $10 an hour at a Wal-Mart Supercenter that will soon be opening near Atlanta.

Aside from the picture, and many clues in this Post-Dispatch article about the subprime bust, there is this short paragraph:

At most risk in St. Louis County, Duncan said, are neighborhoods filled with older, smaller homes — many of them in North County, where subprime loans are more prevalent.

It’s also where blacks are more prevalent.

Related:  Subprime Mortgages and race 

His tears are matched by those of Swiss bankers today.

AP:

ZURICH, Switzerland - Swiss banking giant UBS AG said Monday it will write off a further $10 billion on losses in the U.S. subprime lending market and will raise capital by selling substantial stakes to Singapore and an unnamed investor in the Middle East.

UBS will now record a loss for the fourth quarter and said “it is now possible that UBS will record a net loss attributable to shareholders for the full year 2007.”

UBS said that the government of Singapore Investment Corp., or GIC, is investing 11 billion francs ($9.75 billion), while an undisclosed strategic investor in the Middle East is contributing the other 2 billion francs ($1.77 billion).

(snip)

Western banks have lost billions of dollars from their exposure to U.S. subprime loans, and cash-rich sovereign wealth funds have been stepping in to help them boost their capital. Last month the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, the sovereign investment fund of the Gulf Arab state, acquired a 4.9 percent stake in Citigroup Inc., the nation’s largest bank, for $7.5 billion.

If UBS would have taken advice from the SVP, they wouldn’t be in this f-i-x.  And yes, the American “subprime mortgage crisis” is largely a racial issue.

Wall Street Journal:

Bush to Unveil Aid to Homeowners

WASHINGTON — President Bush is set to announce a plan to help struggling homeowners avoid losing their properties, including a temporary freeze on low, introductory mortgage-interest rates that would otherwise jump higher in the next few years.

The plan, expected to be announced today, seeks to combat a rising tide of foreclosures by making it easier for lenders to freeze the “starter” interest rate for certain borrowers for five years, according to a document being circulated by the Treasury Department.

As this medium has stated a number of times before, the subprime mortgage crunch is largely, but not entirely, a racial issue.  Mortgages with ridiculously low “introductory rates” on top of low ARM rates within the context of a low-rate climate is how many blacks and other non-whites were able to afford houses, and therefore this is the reason why President Bush was able to gloat about the “record home-ownership rate” among American blacks.  Never mind the fact that it was all built on gullible suckers that easily fall prey for snake oil without reading one word of the fine print, and built on those who have no idea that if 2.95% sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

And why only subprime borrowers?  Why not help those who lost their jobs who had sense enough to finance a mortgage with fixed rates?  And why only houses?  Many furniture stores have “no interest for a year” deals, but that means after you have made a year’s worth of payments, your next payment will include the interest — if you can’t afford the increased payments, and the repo truck stops by to take the furniture back, then tough cookies.  There’s no President Bush, HRC, Pelosi, et al. to help you.

Why only subprime borrowers?  The answer is in this post — it has to do with race.  Not only does President Bush want to maintain the “record minority home ownership” fiction, the NAACP and other “civil rights groups” would be screaming at the sky about “disparate impact” of foreclosures, and how the big bad evil white banks “tricked” blacks and other non-whites into agreeing to these snake oil mortgages, if no “relief” actions are taken.  (In fact, they already are).  Of course, if the banks and loan officers would have explained the situation, the NAACP et al. would have complained about “suppressing credit” and “denying credit to blacks.”

Remember, it wasn’t that long ago that many members of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, including our very own Francis Slay, was boasting about how urban property values were shooting way up.  Now we know that such legerdemain was merely a function of home buyers (especially non-whites), falling sucker for ridiculously low subprime interest rate mortgages.  And now who’s worried that the foreclosure crunch will disparately impact big cities the most?  Right.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Lottery payoff of schools falls short

For years, those states have heard complaints that not enough of their lottery revenue is used for education. Now, a New York Times examination finds that lotteries accounted for less than 1 percent to 5 percent of the total revenue for K-12 education last year in the states that use this money for schools.

In reality, most of the money raised by lotteries is used simply to sustain the games themselves, including marketing, prizes and vendor commissions. And as lotteries compete for a small number of core players and try to persuade occasional customers to play more, nearly every state has increased, or is considering increasing, the size of its prizes — further shrinking the percentage of each dollar going to education and other programs.

In some states, lottery dollars have merely replaced money for education. States eager for more players are introducing games that emphasize instant gratification and more potentially addictive forms of gambling.

In Missouri, because the state constitution mandates that at least 25% of state spending must be on education, this means that legally, only 25% of gross lottery revenues have to be spent on education. (Really, since education spending was higher than 25% of the state budget beforehand, much less had to go to education). What happened in reality was that all of the lottery revenue did go to education, but the state legislature took away 75% of that dollar amount of other state revenue sources toward education. For instance, if the lottery realized $100 million, it all went to education, but $75 million of state money from, e.g. state income taxes, that used to go to education, goes to something else now.

Wouldn’t you love to be able to raise your own credit limit from time to time?  Then again, you’re not the U.S. Senate.

Bloomberg:

Aug. 30 (Bloomberg) — At a union hall in Detroit packed with 800 members of the AFL-CIO and their families, Democratic presidential candidate and New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton promises to break the mold on trade.

“If we don’t have a strong manufacturing base in our economy, it won’t be long until we don’t have a strong economy,” Clinton tells the union members at the June meeting. So, she says, she will vote against the U.S.-South Korea free-trade agreement just negotiated by President George W. Bush. The crowd cheers.

Clinton’s statement contrasts with the position of the most recent Democratic president: her husband, Bill. Fourteen years ago, he defied labor union opposition and signed the North American Free Trade Agreement into law. Hillary Clinton, 59, promoted her husband’s trade agenda for years — until she began her own campaign for the highest U.S. office. She’s been reading polls that say more than 40 percent of Americans see free trade as the main reason the U.S. is losing highly paid manufacturing and white-collar jobs.

Clinton is now parroting the economic positions of candidates from the 1980s. And she’s not the only one. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney sounds like Ronald Reagan when he decries the deficit spending of President Bush. “I’m somebody who believes in reducing government spending,” Romney, 60, told Bloomberg Television on Aug. 28. “I propose that not only should we reduce spending but we should have a cap.”

Retronomics

Presidential elections are supposed to be about the future. Yet when it comes to economic policy, the 2008 contest is shaping up as a campaign in which the Republicans hark back to the economic nostrums of 25 years ago, while the Democrats wax nostalgic for the time when U.S. industry faced little foreign competition and every high school graduate could count on a lifelong job in a steel mill or an auto plant.

Call it retronomics. “They’re looking to the past for their policies,” says David Gergen, a professor of public service at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government who served as an adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Reagan and Clinton. “The Democrats’ center of gravity has moved further to protectionism since Clinton left office, and the Republicans clearly are not going to hold George Bush up as a model president.”

Yes, what a bunch of dinosaurs. Aren’t they with the new American economic zeitgeist? The wave of the future is that “Americans” (who are increasingly less “American”) have multiple slave wage jobs in their lifetimes, with no benefits and no unionization, and live thirty to a shack. If you’re a protected minority, then affirmative action will get you a little better job and a little higher standard of living, if you’re white, you’ll be lucky to have that.

Honestly, Hillary Clinton is no more a protectionist than Bill Clinton — it’s campaign season, and she needs to find suckers to vote for her. Also, I don’t understand this continuing Dutcholyatry among Republicans — Reagan’s rhetoric championed fiscal responsibility, but his budgets certainly didn’t. And in spite of occasional protectionist stop-gap measures from the Reagan White House prodded by advisors like Pat Buchanan, free trade was almost always the order of his days.

The British unemployment rate is six times higher than the official number, reports the Daily Mail. The reason there is that many people who have been out of work for a long time, or are not actively seeking work even though they want to or should, are counted as “economically inactive.”

Sound familiar?

At least the Brits try to count the “economically inactive.” In the American scheme of these things, they don’t even exist when computing a percentage rate.

I bet the fish sandwiches aren’t the only thing “hot” in this place

San Francisco Chronicle:

Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums and Rep. Barbara Lee of Oakland found themselves in the unwelcome spotlight this week over the letters of support they wrote on behalf of the notorious Your Black Muslim Bakery, but they aren’t the only politicos who have supported the group over the years.

At the height of its power back in 1996, the splinter Muslim group - whose members were implicated in last week’s slaying of newspaper editor Chauncey Bailey - got the city to approve an advance on a $1.2 million federal redevelopment loan to launch training program for health care jobs.

Within three months, the group had burned through $275,000 without turning out a single graduate.

They did, however, spend $650 a month to lease a Cadillac.

Another $44,000 supposedly went to consulting fees, $10,500 went for security and $7,500 for advertising on a local cable station, where then-leader Yusuf Bey had a weekly TV show.

(snip)

The school never opened.

And the loan - one of several the council made that year to help disadvantaged businesses - was never repaid.

This means that you paid for what turned out to be a grant for the members of “Your Black Muslim Bakery” to swill. This means that it’s truly “your” Black Muslim Bakery, whether you want it or not.

The Feds ultimately dumped $1.2 million on this bunch. St. Louisans might remember that, several years ago, the local chapter of BABAA (Blacks Assisting Blacks Against AIDS) paid a bunch of money to a relatively famous black man stripper for a supposed educational presentation by the group to high school students about the dangers of promiscuity, and some beancounters figured out that BABAA paid him with Federal anti-syphilis funds.. In reality, and not surprisingly, it turned out to be a strip act, and so the local media reported, some of the “education” involved black teenagers playing around with this guy’s organs with their hands.

In passing, the local media reported that the St. Louis BABAA received $1.5 million in Federal grants over a given period of time for health education missions.

So you figure, a million and change goes to waste on this black group in this city, a million and change goes to waste on that black group in that city — and they wonder why there’s no money to fix bridges. Verily, it’s the aggregate and accumulative effect of this kind of spending that is the reason why the infrastructure budget is squeezed.

Christian Science Monitor:

Washington - Tuition sticker shock – a fact of life for many families putting children through college – and recent scandals involving the student-loan industry are pushing Congress to address financial-aid programs after years of delay.

On Tuesday, the Senate voted 95-to-0 to boost the amount of federal aid that a low-income student can receive, create a simpler aid application, and eliminate some conflicts of interest for the student-loan industry. Four days earlier, it trimmed subsidies to the industry and used much of the money for grants to low-income and other college students.

Not long after the Democrats took control of both the House and the Senate, one of their first actions was to mandate a reduction in the interest rates on Federal student loans. That gave colleges and universities permission to raise tuition and fees, because students could afford to borrow a larger principal based on the lower interest rates. Now, some of the same politicians who helped create the “tuition sticker shock” are trying to cure it with increases in Federal grants.

Nothing is said about doing anything to question the higher education-industrial complex, or to do anything that would put the brakes on their forever-increasing tuition rates, because academia is the left’s playground.

(1) From the AP, and under the oh-so-enthusiastic glare of her home state’s Governor (above):

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. - Judicial independence is under attack from people who don’t understand that court rulings must be based on legality instead of popularity, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said Monday.

Judicial independence is under attack from judges who don’t understand that court rulings must be based on legality instead of ideology, this writer says today. The 1954 “Black Monday” Brown v Board decision wasn’t based on any good legal reasoning, it was based on the nine members of the U.S. Supreme Court doing whatever they felt like doing.

O’Connor urged the nation’s governors to push for improved civics instruction in public schools that would help citizens appreciate the separation of powers among the executive, legislative and judicial branches.

(snip)

Assaults on judicial authority have surfaced around the country, O’Connor said, including efforts to strip the courts of jurisdiction over certain types of cases and to impeach federal judges.

Congressional supervision over the jurisdiction of Federal courts and Congressional impeachment of Federal judges are both in the Constitution for the United States of America, and are representative of one branch of government (Congress) checking another (Judiciary). To say that Congress has no checks on the Judiciary is as stupid as saying that the Judiciary shouldn’t declare Congressional acts unconstitutional on occasion.

In addition, judicial races are getting mired in nasty election tactics previously limited to executive and legislative campaigns, said Tom Phillips, former chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court.

“Judges are making more contentious rulings on policy issues than ever before,” Phillips told the governors.

That is because courts have taken on so much power by themselves, essentially to enact new policy, that they have become politicians. They can’t miss the pain without missing the dance.

(2) Arizona’s Senior U.S. Treacherer, the one whose Presidential campaign is in the tank, is trying to get out of the tank by making Federal pork barrel spending an issue. John McCain states that, as President, he would veto budgets with pork barrel spending and excessive earmarks, (something which the Democrats claimed they wanted to stop if they won control of the House and Senate last year), and he wants the line-item veto.

The trouble is, (speaking of the judiciary, Miss O’Connor), the Supreme Court knocked down the line-item veto for very good reason: Because it upsets the separation of powers between Congress and the President. If any President had item veto power over certain items, and ergo over certain Congressmen and Senators, he would also have a lot of personal power over their votes, and it would eviscerate, to borrow Miss O’Connor’s phrase, Congressional independence.

What’s more noteworthy here is that McCain’s soft or hard amnesty for illegal aliens would create tens of trillions of dollars of new spending obligations for the Federal government over several decades.

AP:

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - President Bush sharply challenged critics of his stalled immigration-overhaul efforts on Thursday, suggesting that failure to pass a guest-worker program could trigger a labor shortage in the United States.

And this is bad because? Unless the laws of supply and demand have not changed recently, this will mean higher wages, salaries and compensation for labor. It’s certainly bad for those who have to pay the higher costs of labor, especially considering that the alternative isn’t that hard to implement. Those that say that President Bush more closely represents the interests of the wage-paying classes rather than the wage-earning classes might be justified by this.

At a town-hall style meeting, Bush also rebuffed a question about whether he would consider pardoning two Border Patrol agents in prison for the cover-up of the shooting of a drug trafficker in Texas.

“No, I won’t make you that promise,” Bush told a woman who asked about a possible pardon. Many Republicans in Congress have said the men should not have been convicted and have criticized the federal U.S. attorney for even prosecuting the agents.

There are several candidates for President in 2008 that have made that specific promise. It is likely that the only hope for real justice for Ramos and Compean, and many others like them, is for one of these candidates actually becoming President.

UPDATE 7/20:  Video of the town hall meeting where President Bush was asked the question about Ramos and Compean showed that Bush literally turned his back toward the woman who asked the question after she asked it.

AP:

Democratic presidential hopeful Chris Dodd is issuing a call for community service that aims to create the first generation in which everyone serves their country.

“Endowed as we are with so many gifts, is it too much to ask that we each give something back to this remarkable place?” the Connecticut senator said Saturday.

He proposes making community service mandatory for all high school students, doubling the size of the Peace Corps by 2011 and expanding the AmeriCorps national service program to 1 million participants by the end of his presidency.

Requiring community service will give high school students a chance to acquire new skills while meeting the needs of their communities, Dodd said.

Much of the time, mandatory community service accrues to the benefit of the domestic political left-wing. What also is a possibility is that the obsession of the political class over “volunteerism” is a way to condition young Americans to accept pittance wages and compensation for work as a fact of life, so they do not consider cheap-labor competition from recent immigrant arrivals as a problem.