Comment Cards October 29 - November 19

Q: What does downsizing do to high skilled jobs where there might not be another pool of able workers.

R: If managers or professionals are downsized, then it means the firm has been able to either out-source those positions or through consolidation (for example, now that K-Mart and Sears have merged) eliminate jobs that were duplicated in the bureaucracy of the combined firms.

Q: What does Folbre think about women in the workforce today, if the cause of less care is women not being home for their families?

R: She tells us that it would be better for men and women to share the child-raising and elderly care-giving responsibilities. It would be better if empathy were nurtured among both boys and girls. The altruistic gene that women are supposed to carry is a bit over-exaggerated she would argue.

Q: Can we watch a Michael Moore movie?

R: Maybe.

Q: Can communities set up contracts with factories, promising they will stick around?

R: They might but I don't know if it's enforceable. Moreover, the power shoe is usually on the other foot. Firms are being lured into towns by giveaways (tax breaks, free municipal water and sewer, interest-free loans etc.).

Q: What can government do to keep jobs here instead of going overseas?

R: First, they can remove the tax subsidies that allow them to move overseas. Many firms, via NAFTA, are able to move to Mexico and ship their products back into the U.S. without any tariffs, just as if they're operating on U.S. soil. So, where is the incentive to stay put? (In fact, the tax subsidy is depicted in Michael Moore's film The Big One).

Q: In Chapter 5 of Kuttner, under market inefficiencies what does he mean when he says "The most fundamental market inefficiency is the fact that some 40 million uninsured Americans get their medical care catch-as-catch-can, in the most inefficient manner possible?" (146)

R: Free clinics or emergency room visits. Most publicly subsidized hospitals must take emergency room patients, so people without health insurance often come there as a last resort, sometimes when their sickness or injury is advanced. This is not an efficient way of providing health care to our citizens.

Q: Galbraith wants a renewed public sector. But people can't get elected by campaigning for higher taxes. How can the public make a difference besides stopping the purchases of goods?

R: The general public (citizens as opposed to the public sector, which is government) does demand more programs while voting against higher taxes. It's a paradox and as long as government can get away with producing huge deficits, the pressure to add new programs can always be fended off. The public must demand a balanced budget and an increase in social programs that are most needed (education, health-care). We're not sending that message to politicians, instead they seem to believe that the public will always support more weapons, while opposing higher taxes.

Q: Kuttner believes in regulations but he didn't cover too much on care. How do Kuttner and Folbre over-lap each other?

R: They are both critics of unregulated capitalism. Kuttner is more concerned with how free-market forces create inequities, provide incentives to consolidate and concentrate business, encourage close cooperation between business and government and give too much opportunity to exploit workers and consumers. Folbre is closer to Galbraith's idea of ensuring that the public sector is not starved as well as favoring safeguards against capitalism undermining community,  family and a nurturing society.

Q: Folbre believed in care and with a free market care would be lost. Would care be lost or just what we care about be changed?

R: She means caring for children, the elderly and the sick and disabled. She believes that a capitalist market system is prone to pass off these responsibilities to non-paid citizen care-givers (women mostly -- prisoners of love, in her words) or to other countries (the nurturing of its most vulnerable citizens) when we hire non-citizen immigrants who can only seek care in their home countries -- we're not responsible for educating them, treating them when they're sick or injured or providing them with retirement benefits when they get old.

 Q: Do you fear that Folbre is right about care being totally lost? I feel humans will always care. It's in our nature to love.

R: She provides some devil's advocate examples -- like the mother who cheerily bids her kids goodbye as they go off to the Dominican Republic to be raised more inexpensively. She is simply making the case that true nurturing cannot be the subject of a market transaction without losing it's most important features.

Q: If immigrants didn't do the work that others didn't, who would? Don't we need immigrants to do jobs others don't want to do?

R: Maybe, but we are partly responsible for creating that situation. Our subsidized farm products can under-price those from developing countries, for example. Surplus dairy products are sold in Jamaica at prices that are lower than what the Jamaican dairy industry can produce them for. These U.S. dairy product exports are heavily subsidized. So the Jamaican dairy industry is driven into decline, workers lose their jobs and some of them come to the U.S. to work in our fields. Since this has been going on for almost 60 years, the wages for seasonal farm-workers in the U.S. reflects more the cost of living in Jamaica than that in the U.S. So, is it any wonder that Americans don't want to pick apples or vegetables? And is it any wonder that farmers here don't need to look to new technology to make harvesting of these crops more efficient -- they are provided with a steady supply (really an over-supply) of cheap foreign labor that we created.

Q: The market system could never be taken so far that there were no private jobs, just public jobs -- government runs everything.

R: I hardly think you'll see restaurants and service stations owned by the federal government. The government is not going to be hiring garment workers and selling at the GAP any time soon. But, guess what? More and more work is done by convict labor in the U.S. We have the highest rate of incarceration in the world  both in absolute numbers and  per capita.  So, we're letting private business contract with prisons to have prisoners produce things or supply a service for which they get far less than the minimum wage. The next time you get a call from a Verizon worker trying to get you to switch long-distance service, remember he may be serving 10 to 15, as well as working 9 to 5 (and, he knows where you live!).

Q: If more people are affected by layoffs than by crime, why do there seem to be more anti-crime groups than anti-layoff groups?

R: There are active efforts on the part of employers and members of Congress to prevent union organizing. Unions are/were the only serious organized effort to prevent layoffs. Remember as well, there is crime and then there is corporate crime. There are more organized efforts to prevent street crime than corporate crime because corporate criminals have their own lobby groups. The guy who holds up a liquor store or deals drugs isn't represented by a Washington law firm but Andrew Fastow of Enron, who arguably hurt more people, is.

Q: How can advertising be viewed as wasteful if it leads to profit? It seems to me that advertising can hardly be wasteful if all these companies are spending so much money on it.

R: Is any activity that produces profit beneficial by that fact alone? Advertising that provides useful information about a product is not wasteful. However, advertising that simply drives up consumption by luring ten year olds to pester their parents for a sugar-coated breakfast cereal or another trip to a fast-food restaurant is arguably a questionable use of society's scarce resources. The larger question is "does society need it" rather than does it provide profit for the producer. As Michael Moore asks, if that were true (profit is the only criterion of whether an activity is worthwhile) then "why doesn't GM sell crack cocaine?"

Q: Personally, although it may seem morally inadequate, I believe the idea of advertisement based on face value is a sound idea. We as a society wear the icons and logos that make up our culture. Companies like Nike, Abercrombie, etc. put their name all over clothes, and for some reason that makes them more desirable. So why not cash in on something inevitable like the feebleness of American culture?

R: In and of itself, whether a company makes a profit from selling merchandise with a swoosh on it, or their brand name, is of little significance. One might carp that the money Nike spends to make sure 80 percent of college football teams have swooshes (is the plural of swoosh, swish?) on their uniforms could have been spent for a better cause. But, perhaps that's just carping. So, making money from "the feebleness of American culture" (i.e., our insecurity about our own identity and the need to assume someone else's) may be just a mild critique of our society. But what if the company has exploited workers (small children etc.) in developing countries, paid off dictatorships to militarily put down strikes and destroy union organizing and taken advantage of the lack of environmental laws in these countries to destroy lakes, rivers and contaminate the soil and water? Wouldn't it be more appropriate if that were what was conjured up when we saw a swoosh, an A&F, McDonald's arches or Coca-Cola logo? The films McLibel and Cola Conquest and the book The Overspent American by Juliet Shor are important to view and read in order to address this issue. Recently, the U.S. Congress voted to eliminate the requirement that beef products display a label that indicates the country of origin. Of course American beef manufacturers were in favor of this, but importers of beef from other countries (like from Brazil where deforestation is destroying the rain forest to clear land for cattle-raising) were adamantly opposed to the rule. They got to congressional legislators with nice contributions and the legislators repealed the rule.

Q: a) Can you go into more depth about the Swedish program for re-introducing people back into the workforce?

For a long time, until center-right political parties began to gain power in the 1980s, Sweden had a system whereby workers were given generous unemployment benefits, a stipend for training and education, money for relocation costs and a job (needed community projects) with the government if s/he was unemployed beyond the benefit time limit. Sweden's system has moved towards a somewhat more free-market-oriented system as capital engaged in a pro-longed backlash against social democratic policies. Sweden still, however, has the lowest poverty rate in the world. 

     b) What were the lowest and highest unemployment rates in the U.S.?

In 1944, towards the end of World War II,  the unemployment rate was 1.2 percent. In 1933, the rate was about 25 percent of the labor force. We have experienced unemployment rates of near 10 percent in 1975 and 1985.

     c) Why was Reagan so against labor and unions?

Ronald Reagan was the first of the Republican free market ideologists to gain high office. Although he praised Franklin Roosevelt