^ what “job creation” really means : The Bangladesh-ization of America

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Not since the Plessy v. Ferguson, “separate but equal,’ 1896 decision has a Supreme Court decision done as much damage to the moral structure of our America as Citizens United. By opening the arena to flooding by billions of secret, mostly selfish, anarchic dollars, this decision has put democracy itself under attack. I am hardly the first editorial writer to say this; worse is that I’m surely not going to be the last. Almost every event since that decision was made shows huge disconect between what our people need and what governments are doing about it, because the vast billions given the green light have moved ruthlessly to capture as many governments as they can and to stymie the rest as much as possible.

Those billions could not have done their destruct without the votes of millions to get destruction elected. How did this happen ? How did the Koch Brothers become the effective demlons of our time ? Dedicated to deconstructing the Anerican economy as we know it, impoverishing the already poor, making vulnerable many millions more, and curbing the civil rights of all ? Can that many voters really be induced to vote against their own fundamental interests ?

Yes they can.

Similar happened in 1933-38 in Germany. The method used was to scapegoat “the other” — first the Jews and the Communosts, then the labor unions, then press and speech freedoms, churches, liberty itself. Always the word was “we are freeing Germany of influences alien to our Fatherland.”

No like madness yet portends here in America. Diversity is us, it is part of our national epic. We are all immigrants, and we celebrate “e pluribus unum” — one out of many. Democracy, too, seems as fundamental to our politics as food to our stomachs. All of us at least profess voting to be the single most basic civil right. And yet….

Consider that, in many states, all that stands between basic rights and the denial of them is Federal Courts. In those states — all of them under the power of “Republican” governments — a torrent of laws has been enacted that (1) impose religion agendas on education, women’s health, and personal lives (2) make it more difficult for low-income people to vote (3) burden lower income workers with sales taxes, lighten the taxes of high income earners (4) deny health insurance coverage to people Medicaid eligible (5) harrass undocumented immigrants (6) refuse to do basic infrastructure repair and (7) cut social services to families in need. Federal Courts have done heroic work overturning many such laws as unconstitutional, yet even so, the damage lasted for the long time it took to win a Court decision.

The only way such a government could be elected is by persuading a majority that those whom it views as a problem are a minority, a small minority, and that lie for the majorioty will be better once that minority is cast out.

I do mean “cast out.” The goal of such governments is, first, to get as much as possible of “the minority” to leave the state, just as Black Americans left the Jim Crow, lynch law South in huge millions of numbers 60 years ago and more. The second purpose, as uring Jim Crow, is to intimidate those who stay so they will work for pittance wages.

One thing only has changed : the methods. 100 years ago the means was terror — and lynching was as terrible as it gets. Today the means is to scapegoat a minority and then use the atx and safety net powers of statre government to impoverish that minority into political impotence. In a political system completely ruled by money, those who have none have no political power. Very simple.

The masters of the Southern — and Plains — states now ruled by secret “opportunity” billions will tell you that they want to make their states as tax friendly and wage-low as possible so as to draw in businesses seeking low-cost everything. They will tell you that such businesses are “job creators.” Myself, I see them as job destroyers. The good-paying jobs, they eliminate. as for the low-pay work, who wants work that pays almost nothing, in a state that won’t provide you any kind of public assistance to supplement your less than survival wages ?

Yet the economy policy under way in states like Louisiana, Kansas, North Carolina, and Alabama has a point : to make these states a kind of Bangladesh or Malaysia, where workers get paid next to nothing and live on nothing in slave-labor factories making goods for sale in high-income economies. This is what the “job creators” mean when they talk aboiut bringing back manufacturing jobs to America. Why NOT create a Bangladesh right here if you can do so ?

As our society splits between low earners and the very high income — as middle earning jobs disappear and, with them, the businesses that serve middle incomes — it kind of makes sense for a state hundreds of miles from America’s high-income coasts to become a Malaysia of coolies crowding into factories making high-end goods for export to New York, Massachusetts, California, Baltimore-Washington, and Seattle. And believe me, that is how it is going to be. The tycoons who run basic goods-making firms don’t really want to depend on factories thousands of miles away in countries whose govenments are corrupt and beyond the tycoons’ power. Why do that, when you can tycoon right here in states run by you and whose voters — those allowed to be such — are grateful to have even the nothing jobs you offer, because the state they live in won’t fund or make affordable the education you need to seek a better paying job ? After all, were they do do that, they might just do it : get that taxpayer-funded education and then leave the state for where the good jobs are.

There is a kind of perverse strength in being at the bottom. The bottom has economic advantages — which is why there Is a bottom at all. It perpetuates itself, almost impervious to raising up, because raising up would destroy it.

As for the technology jobs which pay so well, yes : you will find technology centers in some Bangladesh states. North carolina has a large technology corridor, as does Texas. In both states, however, technology districts gather around higher education institutions — the core of whatever effective political opposition exists therein. It can’t be helped. Even a Bangladesh state needs communication infrastructure competitive world-wide. An American Bangladesh state can tolerate this level of political opposition. It hasn’t anywhere near a majority of the votes, and its entrepreneurs are too attuned to the huge financial demands of maintaining their technological edge.

^ technology jobs ; for the intellectual mandarins needed even by Bangladesh States

Robert Reich, in his ongoing Facebook status editorials, sees the economic consequences of political stymie and the political consequences of economic inequality. So far, however, he does not seem to have recognized how the two forces are likely to evolve into an America divided between coolies and mandarins — Bangladesh versus Hong Kong, Malaysia against South Korea. (Or Shanghai, China, versus China’s hinterlands. Or Sao Paulo, Brazil versus the favelas of Rio.) Perhaps Reich just lacks an answer; if so, I share his lack. These are huge economic changes, historic, maybe the most important events going on in the world right now, changes which no nation or coalition of countries is likely to evade for much longer.

The middle class that made democracy possible and equality more than a pipe dream is losing all its gains these past 150 years — retreating to its origins, 1000 years back, in the professions : teaching, lawyering, medicine, government advisors. That was a powerful middle class, but a small one, vital to governance but politically at the mercy of kings, podestas, and Popes. That sort of middle class, devoid of well-paid manufacture and service, is what the future holds. Your grandkids’ America is very unlikley to be anything like yours.

—- Mike Freedberg / Here and Sphere

^ a meal and a weekend, but it doesn’t digest ; Kate Winslet, Gattlin Griffith, and Jason Brolin in “Labor Day”

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A good meal can solve a lot of things, and the leftovers too, mixed with canned goods from the pantry can sate as well, but not so much in Jason Reitman’s uneven romantic hash that’s chockfull of disparate parts, stock elements and daubs of cliche.
Reitman, who once served notice as a quirky indie director along the lines of Wes Anderson, with his acerbically big tobacco satire “Thank You for Smoking” (2005), held the line steadfast with “Juno” (2007) and “Up in the Air” (2009). Even “Young Adult” (2011) bore his droll punchy fingerprint, which is why “Labor Day” is such a puzzler, a change-up royale and by-the-numbers affair that lacks air, style or wit.

All of Reitman’s previous works were carefully hung on the framework of a situational dark comedy infused with varying degrees of romance. “Labor Day,” of all things, is a dark romance with a deep vein of crime drama to propel it. Perhaps Reitman saw the project as something new to challenge his skills, or maybe he simply couldn’t pass up the opportunity to work with Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin, two of film’s most complete and capable thespians of the moment.

Those two performers become the film’s saving grace. Brolin recently clocked a yeoman effort that gave legs to Spike Lee’s remake of Chan-wook Park’s “Old Boy.” He delivers this time as well, assuredly with simmer, compassion and just the right amount of intimidation as Frank, an escaped con who, at a thrift store in a deep New Hampshire enclave, takes a woman and her son captive. It’s the mid 80s, so Frank doesn’t have to contend with a texting adolescent to give him away or a viral internet trend to alert folks of his wanted status.

TV news flashes do provide a bit of an obstacle, but they’re also a means to inform viewers that Frank is serving eighteen years for murder–the details and complicated nuance of which are meted out sparsely by intermingled flashbacks that infuriate as much as they enlighten. Frank gains his freedom by jumping out a second story window of a hospital following an appendectomy. As a result he’s got a weeping wound in his side, while Adele (Winslet), the woman he takes captive, has a hole in her heart, lazing around her house, too inert to do anything. Her twelve-year-old son Henry (an effective Gattlin Griffith) pretty much sees after himself, but the sleepy old Victorian they share, as evidenced by the overgrown lawn and general state of disrepair, isn’t so lucky.

So there you have it, Frank’s physically damaged and Adele’s emotionally scarred (she had several miscarriages after Henry, became depressed and her marriage dissolved) and in that, the one can heal the other if the lurking police don’t intercede first. Following the carjacking, Frank ends up back at Adele’s house where holing up becomes hanging out. Besides fixing the front porch and dry wall, he proves pretty good in the kitchen, whipping up a tangy chili out of nothing, and pie? Boy can he bake a pie.

The film’s peach pie scene is one for the ages. Never before, not since “Ghost,” have hands on hands taken center stage with such inflamed hyperbole. In “Ghost,” it played to the texture of the film. Here, with such fine actors so debased, it feels soft-core cheesy and wrong. “Let’s put a roof on this house,” Frank growls as a trembling Adele fumbles with a pancake of thick dough. Reitman, who penned the script from Joyce Maynard’s novel, must have thought the scene smart and leaven with innuendo and metaphor, but as is, it has the sensory effect of chocolate mousse made from a package of stale Hersey Kisses.

Food becomes a reoccurring yet unbridled motif, and a point of bonding for Frank and Henry. Frank even teaches the boy to throw a baseball, and there’s a touching scene with the handicap kid from around the corner who’s allowed to play third base, but of course, the police loom and the film, as the title tells us, is limited to a long weekend.

The good news is that as the film sails into its final chapter, the pace, as well as Reitman’s directorial skills, pick up. Winslet too, who is so shell shocked and unkempt for so long, seizes the opportunity to blossom and fills the screen with her fully ripe, yet restrained sexuality. She and Brolin, like Frank in the kitchen, take what’s there, and with sweat, integrity and resolve, make the best of meager makings that have been dealt to them.

— Tom Meek / Meek at the Movies