Friday, July 24, 2015

The part time worker brouhaha. Most part timers choose to be part time

The part time worker brouhaha

A mini firestorm  between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush  about job creation and part time workers  got me digging  into the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) site to find  just how many part time workers wanted to work full time.  What I found  was  the number of part time workers in June, 2015  seeking full time jobs (two million)   is not a high percentage of either  part timers  or of the total 149 million labor force . While important to each individual affected,  only 10%  of  all part timers were actually seeking full time employment.   78 percent of part timers were part timers  by choice and the rest cited other economic reasons.  
Jeb  Bush, former governor of Florida and now vying for the GOP presidential nomination, started the war of words, when he said “that people need to work longer hours”, meaning that part timers need to become full timers and  there ought to be more full time jobs for those seeking them.  Hillary Clinton seized upon the phrase and in a major economic address said that “what workers wanted was a raise”.
Trend lines based on the BLS statistics also show that the number of those who choose to work part time has remained steady even through the ups and downs of the economy, but that those part timers seeking full time jobs increased especially during the Great Recession of 2008. As the economy has improved, their numbers are still  historically high, but  decreasing.
 An  more explosive political issue of concern to 65% of voters is the unfairness of the distribution of income. Uncontested is the fact that the middle class has “hollowed out”.     Neither party nor candidates can ignore this.  The Democrats will force the GOP to defend their plans to help the middle class  because Democrats  believe their own  proposals have  more potential  appeal to the key factor of “does he/she care about us”.  Expect Democrats to  propose stronger Wall Street reform,  minimum wage increases, expanding pay for overtime,   paid sick leave,  increased affordability of a college education, and  reform taxes so the secretary does not pay a higher percentage than the boss. Most  GOP candidates so far promise to help the middle class by relief to the wealthy and business. That  will be a harder sell to the middle class since recent experience has taught them prosperity does not  automatically trickle down to them.
 Bush claims more full time jobs  can be achieved  by raising growth to 4% per year, though he was vague about  how.  Bush and GOP candidates need to be pinned down on the specifics because the political devil is in those details. Will it be tax policy, welfare, trade and spending cuts?  If so, what gets cut and who benefits?  
Is 4% growth even possible?  Such sustained growth has not happened in most of American history. 5% growth did happen under President Reagan, but many  economists  owe that anomaly  to an expanding workforce  when women began working.  The non partisan Congressional Budget Office projected a 3% growth in 2015-2016 and dip in the long term to 2.2 percent due to baby boomers retiring and a shrinking workforce, a rate similar from 2009 to now.     

A version of this column appeared in the www.skyhidailynews.com  July 30, 2015     


      

Sunday, July 19, 2015

The GOP comes out swinging against the Iran deal and the Administration swings back harder

Also see a later posting: Heads up Spinners at work on the Iran deal 8/2/15 for comments on the anti Iran deal ad campaign.

 Nearly all  of the GOP members in Congress and their presidential contenders came out swinging against  the Iran nuclear arms control deal before they even  read the text, having  chosen to be deaf, blind, and intentionally dumb to the details of the provisions and the repercussions of killing the deal. Congress  will have sixty days  to become educated, though GOP’s pre-conceived notions seem already set in concrete.  Democrats swipe back harder and  turn to  keeping enough Senate Democrats in line to protect their president’s’ veto without GOP votes.

 Public rebuttals and counter rebuttals have begun. Key Administration arguments for the deal  are that the effectiveness of  verification measures make us safer than  a powerfully sobering result if the deal is killed. There would be no sanctions, no monitors by inspectors, a likely outbreak of war soon, a chance the US could be dragged into another Middle Eastern war to support our allies,  a nuclear arms race in the region, and knowing  Iran would be free to make  a bomb in a very short time.

If war now is considered better than the deal, the President pointed out, Iran’s  nuclear program would only be set back temporarily with conventional means. Bunker busters cannot wipe out their scientists’ knowhow.   The deal requires monitored mothballing  of 2/3 of their centrifuges and limits enriched uranium to 3.67% of stores for 15 years, making a bounce back difficult if impossible. 

Even Pres. Obama agrees there are  short term risks of beefed up hostilities from Iran’s surrogates due to Iran’s improving economic conditions and with the  conventional arms embargo lifted after five years, 8 years for missiles. Separate UN resolutions forbid Iran arming  surrogates.  Israel and our Gulf allies have already been offered more military aid to offset any  threat.

But are the provisions for verification good enough to block Iran’s path to nuclear weapons?
To answer GOP charges that Iran could develop weapons in ten years, their R&D continues, and the administration is naïve, the administration is pitting their experts against the GOP’s that the deal will block the path.  The administration’s  lead technical negotiator, a hardly naïve  Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, is one of the  world’s top nuclear expert scientists,  .

 Republicans criticized the 24 day notice for Iran to approve  inspectors to visit suspected cheat sites, noting approval could still be  delayed for months.  Scrubbing sites in a short period is impossible, per Moniz. Tell- tale nuclear residue lasts for years. Military installations are subject to inspections, but the GOP claims monitoring provisions are vague.  The deal includes  monitoring the entire supply chain of nuclear materials that will provide evidence of hidden cheating to be pursued by inspectors for the next twenty-five years.  

Some in the GOP want to double down on sanctions to change Iran’s  behavior instead. The administration countered that the  purpose of sanctions was to force Iran to negotiate. If Congress kills the deal,  the sanction’s purpose, leverage to force Iran to renegotiate, and  an effective  sanctions coalition evaporates.  US leadership becomes untrustworthy. If  the deal survives,   “snap back” provisions obligate the signers automatically to reinstate sanctions if Iran is caught cheating.

A version of this appeared in the Sky Hi Daily News  July 23-24 2015

http://www.rt.com/usa/310049-us-military-aid-israel/   ($1.6 billion in aid offered to Israel)
http://www.bloombergview.com/quicktake/irans-uranium-enrichment (destroys 2/3 centrifuges and limits all but 3.67% enriched uranium stores; limit refining metal to 5% over 15 years; after 10 years can build some centrifuges)



Sunday, July 12, 2015

Remembering Srebrenica, the worst genocide in Europe since World War II; over 8 thousand slaughtered

Imagine if every  male, man and boy, in Grand County were assembled, hands tied behind their backs, marched to a killing field, and shot dead for one reason: they were all of the same religion, an identified ethnic group, hated by a superior force.
  Something like  that took place twenty years ago in a city with a population a little larger than our county.  You say that must have happened in Africa, maybe Rwanda? It is difficult to believe that such a horrendous event  also took place in an industrialized European country, especially since the Western world had hopefully  learned its lesson from the Holocaust. 
The world is just now coming to grips with its failure to stop the worst genocide  in Europe since World War II. July 11 in   Bosnia, former President Bill Clinton and former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright,   prime ministers, presidents, a queen,  from Croatia, Slovenia, Kosovo, Turkey, Serbia, and Jordan ( Angela Merkel of Germany paid her respects earlier), marked the twentieth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, occurring  in a conflict which gave birth to  the term “ethnic cleansing”.
 On July 11, 1995, 8,372 men and boys were  marched to the countryside, shot to death, and  their executioners attempted to cover up the slaughter by moving the bodies, scattering body parts, and burying them so that no one would know.  A few of the victims played dead or hid under other bodies to escape and testify  to the world.    Thanks to DNA and forensic  recovery of the remains, all but 1000 have been identified, and another 136 coffins with parts of identified victims, were buried in the memorial ceremonies Saturday.
Oh, you say,  the Muslims did it?  (In Bosnia at that time, the largest ethnic group was Muslims).  Wrong.  The killers were Bosnian Serbs , Christian Orthodox, and the victims were killed for one reason. They were Muslim.
 It was a bloody incident in a bloody war as the former Yugoslavia broke apart in 1991 and the province of Bosnia struggled to gain its independence, with ethnic Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs, and Muslims engaged in a civil war to determine governance. Bosnia’s population was a little more than Colorado’s. Over 100,000, mostly Muslims, died   before Srebrenica and  in smaller incidents of ethnic cleansing. The United Nations had already intervened and had established Srebrenica as a safe haven, but some Dutch peacekeepers were held hostage and courts later ruled  the Netherlands liable for their failure to protect those in a safe haven.
News of the massacre resulted in the following month with  NATO retaliatory air strikes against Bosnian Serbs  The Dayton Accord three months later   ended the Bosnia conflict, thanks mostly to the belated leadership of the US.  Joined in a federation with a Croatian/Muslim entity, Bosnia Serbs gained autonomy.   War crimes trials of Bosnian Serbs accused of responsibility for Srebrenica are still taking place in The Hague.
 The US last week introduced a resolution in the UN to commemorate the Srebrenica genocide,  but Russia, to its shame, yet  historically allied with Serbia,   vetoed it.  Showing more grace, the prime minister of Serbia attended the commemoration ceremonies and endured rocks   thrown at him by impassioned activists.

Post note: The Bosnia Serb leader Radovan Karadzic was found guilty in the Hague in 2016  and sentenced to 40 years in prison.

Felicia Muftic is a columnist with the Sky Hi News, Grand County, Colorado
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 Highly recommended:http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/11/europe/bosnia-srebrenica-massacre-commemoration/ and listen to the audio version.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/09/world/europe/srebrenica-genocide-massacre.html?_r=1

Sunday, July 5, 2015

Trump is a demagogue by definition

The sudden rise of Donald Trump in the polls because of his remarks about undocumented immigrants (“ rapists”, “criminals” and “drug dealers” )  is more than disturbing.  He is by definition a demagogue because he appeals to a dark corner of American culture: prejudice and racism.  If we need a leader of our nation, we need one that appeals to our better nature, unifies the nation, and inspires us to promote  to the world  our national motto “e pluribus unum”, out of many, one.  Trump trumpets “e pluribus, pluribus”.
There are a variety of definitions of a demagogue, depending on which dictionary is searched. In ancient Greece it meant a leader of the people, but in current culture, it is defined as  “A politician who seeks to win and hold office by appeals to mass prejudice .Demagogues often use lies and distortion”  (American Heritage New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy) or “a political agitator who appeals with crude oratory to the prejudice and passions of the mob”  (Collins English Dictionary) .   By those definitions Trump fits the profile.
Compromises were made at our very founding of the United States to accommodate the Southern slave holders. It took a  bloody civil war to end slavery. But  the Charleston massacre of church goers by a white supremacist who used the Confederate rebel battle flag as an symbol of  his hate filled  identity began to gel Southern opinion  that it was time  to take down that flag. Its original meaning had been hijacked by those defying the civil rights movement. It is in the midst of that controversy Trump raised his prejudiced voice.
Trump has a history of riding the wave of prejudice.  In the last presidential campaign, which he sat out, he used his media celebrity bully pulpit to become the voice of birtherism,  that President Obama was a Kenyan and for that reason  he should be removed.   After the release of the Obama original birth certificate, still 14 to 16 percent of the GOP still echoes  the” lies and distortions”, a little more than Trump is polling now (12%).
Is Trump also racist? Racism is a subset of prejudice, according to psychologists and common definitions.  Dictionary.com defines racism as“ the doctrine that one's own racialgroup is superior or that a particular racial group is inferior to the others. Trump more than made the connection in his blanket characterization of Hispanic undocumented as rapists and criminals. However, Hispanics here for generations and with legal status  take offense of  such sentiments personally  and many have undocumented family members.
  Those sneering at the reaction criticizing Trump attribute it   to pressure to be “politically correct”. They  are missing important points. The GOP knows from their own analysis of why they lost the last election, that to win future ones, then must get around 40% of the Hispanic vote and hyping anti immigrant sentiment is bad politics.  The private sector also understands that for practical reasons they cannot alienate the Hispanic market (15% of the total; 22% of millennials).  It is not just a matter of PC. It is also bad for business. But “ from many,  one” is an American ideal and for that reason above all we should support those who support it.

 A version of this appeared in the Sky Hi Daily News July 10, 2015  www.skyhidailynews.com
Sen. Lindsey Graham called Trump a demagogue July 12, too, http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/lindsey-graham-trump-demogogue-gop/2015/07/12/id/654590/
Wall Street Journal also tagged Trump July 20 in an editorial as a demagogue, too:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-and-his-apologists-1437345060?tesla=y&cb=logged0.9893790108617395
and Rick Peryy said likewise on July 22 http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/rick-perry-trumps-candidacy-cancer-conservatism

And if you ever wonder if racism, birtherism and kindred spirits, and ani immigrants were not factors in some quarters, read http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/the-americans-are-coming-texans-fear-obama-led-us-military-invasion/2015/07/04/58047fee-2001-11e5-84d5-eb37ee8eaa61_story.html?hpid=z1on