class

So are the wealthy smarter, really?

Intelligence has nothing to do with wealth, according to a US study published Tuesday which found that people with below average smarts were just as wealthy as those with higher IQ scores.

"People don't become rich because they are smart," said Jay Zagorsky, research scientist at Ohio State University whose study appears in the Journal Intelligence.

You think?

Apparently being poor in America means going out to eat, living a comfortable life, but perhaps having to cope with an "old car" or a "black-and-white television" -- as opposed to back in the '50s, when people had to live "modest lives."

Apparently there's no "net" cost to globalization borne by America. On the whole, it's not like anybody is suffering, right? Right?

Apparently "centralization of power" -- of which O'Rourke claims to be suspicious -- does not include the multinational conglomerates that run our government and have quite a bit of power, thank you very much.

Apparently there is no real poverty in America. Apparently the disappearance of the middle class didn't happen because apparently there never was a middle class -- just people living "modest lives."

Apparently we're supposed to be happy because we're better off than Lebanon and Russia.

Apparently there is no economic basis for requiring trading partners to follow similar rules about the environment or child labor.

This from the white male living in his suburban house in the suburbs, enjoying what -- six-figure income? Seven? What does P.J. O'Rourke know about poverty in America?

Obviously not much.

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The Sunday before last, George Will on This Week made the oddball assertion that 25,000 people applying for 350 job openings at a new Wal-Mart is a good thing. (!)

I think of Russell Crowe in Cinderella Man, pressing at the iron gates, trying to be noticed, trying not to offend the foreman, the master of all destinies who decides who shall have a job and who shall not. That's just a movie, but it's based on the reality of the 1930s fall-out from Republican free-market adventurism -- the Great Depression, the result of The Crash of '29.

Apparently, those were the good ol' days. The Great Depression is George Will's example of a thriving economy at work.

Now Will has worked the Wal-Mart story up into another Liberals-Are-The-Force-Of-Evil kind of essay.

A large majority of the customers of the Wal-Mart that sits here, less than a block outside Chicago, are from the city, and more than 90 percent of the store's customers are African American.

One of whom, a woman pushing a shopping cart with a stoical 3-year-old along for the ride, has a chip on her shoulder about the size of this 141,000-square-foot Wal-Mart. She applied for a job when the store opened in January and was turned down because, she said, the person doing the hiring "had an attitude."

Message: Be meek and humble like Jim Braddock in Cinderella Man. If you don't get the 1-in-100 job, it's your fault. Uppity people should not apply. The poor should know their place, doncha know?

So why is the woman shopping here anyway? She looks at the questioner as though he is dimwitted and directs his attention to the low prices of the DVDs on the rack next to her.

Sensibly, she compartmentalizes her moods and her money.

Message: Despite being poor, she is a sensible person. Surprise!

It really is almost funny how George Will tries to explain the motivations and experiences of people from the opposite end of the economic spectrum. I wonder how many times Will has been forced to limit his grocery shopping options. I wonder if Will even does the grocery shopping. (Does he even cook? I have no idea.)

Yet George Will puts himself up as some sort of Authority on American Life. This apparently is due to the wise insight gained from being a highly paid television personality for decades.

Now, having dipped his toe into the working poor's perspective, though, he quickly trots across the deck to the stock-investor's jacuzzi:

Wal-Mart, the most prodigious job-creator in the history of the private sector in this galaxy, has almost as many employees (1.3 million) as the U.S. military has uniformed personnel.

These jobs are working poor jobs. You work full-time, and you're still below the poverty line. Think of how Braddock was working full-time -- every day -- working with a broken hand even, and still he could not pay to keep his family. This is the American Dream, George?

How ironic that Will equates working for Wal-Mart and working for America's security. Fighting the threat of encroachment of the poor into middle-class life is right up there with going after al-Qaeda, it seems.

A McKinsey company study concluded that Wal-Mart accounted for 13 percent of the nation's productivity gains in the second half of the 1990s, which probably made Wal-Mart about as important as the Federal Reserve in holding down inflation.

Let's translate: Productivity goes up when you get more work for less money. In other words, by holding up productivity as an abstract measure to praise, without any human context, you are hailing the reduction of working wages as a measure of success.

It sounds like Will is completely with the dock bosses and not the desperate workers on the other side of that iron fence.

By lowering consumer prices, Wal-Mart costs about 50 retail jobs among competitors for every 100 jobs Wal-Mart creates.

Do the math: 100 jobs = 50 jobs ==> hourly wages are half. Now, some might point to economies of scale and opportunities for better deals on the part of management, so maybe the wages aren't quite down to half. On the other hand, remember, productivity has gone up, so more product is going out per dollar. No matter where it falls, suffice to say those wages are pretty damned poor.

Wal-Mart and its effects save shoppers more than $200 billion a year, dwarfing such government programs as food stamps ($28.6 billion) and the earned-income tax credit ($34.6 billion).

Ah, but Will is leaving something out: Wal-Mart employees are on food stamps. It's documented:

We estimate that Wal-Mart workers in California earn on average 31 percent less than workers employed in large retail as a whole, receiving an average wage of $9.70 per hour compared to the $14.01 average hourly earnings for employees in large retail (firms with 1,000 or more employees). In addition, 23 percent fewer Wal-Mart workers are covered by employer-sponsored health insurance than large retail workers as a whole. The differences are even greater when Wal-Mart workers are compared to unionized grocery workers. In the San Francisco Bay Area, non-managerial Wal-Mart employees earn on average $9.40 an hour, compared to $15.31 for unionized grocery workers—39 percent less—and are half as likely to have health benefits.

At these low-wages, many Wal-Mart workers rely on public safety net programs— such as food stamps, Medicare, and subsidized housing—to make ends meet. [Emphasis added.]

In fact, it's part of Wal-Mart's business plan:

California Assemblywoman Sally Lieber, who represents the 22nd Assembly District and is a former mayor of Mountain View, was outraged when she learned about the sex discrimination charges in Dukes v. Wal-Mart, and she smelled blood when, tipped off by dissatisfied workers, her office discovered that Wal-Mart was encouraging its workers to apply for public assistance, "in the middle of the worst state budget crisis in history!" California had a $38 billion deficit at the time, and Lieber was enraged that taxpayers would be subsidizing Wal-Mart's low wages, bringing new meaning to the term "corporate welfare."

Lieber was angry, too, that Wal-Mart's welfare dependence made it nearly impossible for responsible employers to compete with the retail giant. It was as if taxpayers were unknowingly funding a massive plunge to the bottom in wages and benefits - quite possibly their own. She held a press conference in July 2003, to expose Wal-Mart's welfare scam. The Wal-Mart documents - instructions explaining how to apply for food stamps, Medi-Cal (the state's healthcare assistance program) and other forms of welfare - were blown up on posterboard and displayed. The morning of the press conference, a Wal-Mart worker who wouldn't give her name for fear of being fired snuck into Lieber's office. "I just wanted to say, right on!" she told the assemblywoman.

The Christian Science Monitor, on MSN Money, asks, "Is shopping at Wal-Mart immoral?"

Some recent research suggests the low prices and job opportunities offered at a new Wal-Mart store don't alleviate a community's struggles with poverty over the long term. Wal-Mart workers in California, for example, annually seek $86 million worth of public assistance, according to a 2004 study by the Labor Center at the University of California at Berkeley. If other big retailers in the state follow suit, the study projected, California taxpayers would have to foot another $410 million in healthcare services, food stamps and other public costs.

This "race to the bottom" in labor costs also seems to rub off on a surrounding area, according to research from economists Stephan Goetz and Hema Swaminathan at the Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development at Penn State University. While the national poverty rate dropped 2.4% between 1990 and 2000, the rate fell by just 0.2% on average in counties that added a Wal-Mart. One theory: Although Wal-Mart creates jobs, the company also eliminates jobs by putting others out of business.

The sad part about it is that Wal-Mart employees can't afford to shop there. (I'd like to see George Will make ends meet on $1000 a month.)

Ah, but the good news is that Wal-Mart employees can use their food stamps when they shop at Wal-Mart -- or at least some Wal-Marts. (Not all Wal-Marts accept food stamps. Sorry. Now get back to work!)

Will then reveals his truth:

Liberals think their campaign against Wal-Mart is a way of introducing the subject of class into America's political argument, and they are more correct than they understand. Their campaign is liberalism as condescension. It is a philosophic repugnance toward markets, because consumer sovereignty results in the masses making messes. Liberals, aghast, see the choices Americans make with their dollars and their ballots and announce -- yes, announce -- that Americans are sorely in need of more supervision by . . . liberals.

Will seems outraged that his religion -- his god, The Market -- might be questioned. He is so divorced from reality that economic abstractions mean more to him than the human condition.

Economics is a well-developed means of trying to understand, evaluate and quantify in aggregate the diverse, individual choices each person makes.

By holding up The Market as some sort of omniscient entity, some holy truth that shall not be questioned -- in other words, a god -- Will is making a religious argument.

But economics is purportedly a science, not a religion. It's based on reason -- and, in most cases, assumes rational acts on the part of all parties -- and thus must stand up to reason. Economics is a tool. Economics is a means to understand the reality. Economic abstractions are not the reality.

"The Market" is an ideal thing used in economics. The Market is merely an abstraction. It is not the holy truth, and measuring The Market does not measure people's lives.

Will claims that liberals believe "Americans are sorely in need of more supervision by . . . liberals," but what he really fears is that The Market may be impacted by Keynesian economic policies that work to improve the lot of millions of poor. Why? Because such measures might affect investor portfolios -- and that's part of an economic reality George Will knows. He's just talking out his backside by arguing from the perspective of the poor, and defending his point of view by a religious argument deifying The Market.

What is this focus of evil in the modern world?

--Will asks. Apparently the answer is "liberals," for blaspheming his god. And maybe threatening his pocketbook portfolio.

If you missed This Week this week, you missed George Will making one of the strangest assertions I've heard (video):

That the fact that 25,000 people applied for 350 low-wage jobs at a new Wal-Mart is a sign of a strong economy.

Excuse me?

25 thousand people desperate to work at a job that will still leave their families below the poverty line. This is supposed to be a good thing?

24,650 people bummed because they can't work for minimum wage? This is supposed to be the sign of a healthy economy?

Of course, this is coming from the guy who sees contracted and earned corporate pensions as "entitlements" (and thus somehow undeserved). I suppose it's not news that George Will needs to come down from his ivory tower.

Life's a little harder if you're not pulling down six or seven figures from ABC News.

While our troops enjoy the support of the vast majoriy of Americans, whether for or against the fiasco that has US military mired in Iraq, it seems that our troops are supporting usury on the part of America's banks.

Ezra Klein writes about this report in USA Today:

These payday loan stores are increasingly becoming a problem near military bases, too, where soldiers seeking an advance on their (paltry) paychecks or a loan to fix their car are being charged exorbitant rates. The issue grew so acute that Congress commissioned a study on the rates. The researchers found that soldiers are being charged $15-$25 for a two week, $100 loan(!), and annual rates of up to — ready for this? — 780 percent(!!). The average borrower pays backs a total of $834 (!!!) on a $339 loan, and the debt problems can grow so urgent that they lose their security clearances (assumedly under the rationale that debt renders one susceptible to bribery).

So we have two forces at play here: The first is that we pay our service members so little they’re forced to enter into debt if they want a chance at middle class lifestyles. The second is that we sequester them on remote bases, where the available financial options fleece them. This must be really demoralizing for our troops.

Oh, and let's remember the Bankruptcy Only for the Wealthy bill passed by the Republican Congress last year. Long after our soldiers and Marines have served the country, they'll still be servicing their debt to the banks who are preying upon them. In other words, their Duty and Honor will be privatized and subject to collections.

This:

A bill that expands President Bush's ability to wiretap American phones and conduct other forms of domestic surveillance will likely appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee next Thursday, RAW STORY has learned.

The bill, which was written by judiciary chairman Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA), and which has been widely and publicly excoriated by Democratic members of the committee, contains provisions—such as the institution of program-wide warrants, and warrants that do not expire for a year—that would weaken the strict limits that currently govern the FISA courts.

and...

But a Senate aide who works closely with Specter tells RAW STORY that, “The White House said they would veto any bill that includes a provision for judicial review.”

“I can’t say that the bills work hand in hand,” an aide told RAW STORY adding that, though Specter’s bill does not make judicial review mandatory, “it makes it optional.”

You just gotta love an administration that doesn't trust America's own judges, even though they've been cleared for top-secret intelligence and have their own top secret court.

Apparently Bush and Cheney just cannot be bothered. Maybe in King George's case, he's had his head turned by his blue blood heritage. What's dead-eye Dick's excuse?

There's so much to say about Katrina, King George's posing, DHS & FEMA, politically-flavored pork-barrel post-Katrina contracts, the incompetent government run by a bunch of folks who don't believe in government (unless it controls us peasants, you know)....

...but I think that during this week of remembrance, this quote of Barbara Bush seems to capture the essence of the cold heart of the right-wing. (Less Christian, more Roman in sentiment, wouldn't you say? I find it rather easy to imagine Barbara's words coming from Pontius Pilate. Traditional values indeed.)

Who's "elite"? The Hollywood actor who gets in a rowboat and tries to help people when FEMA, the New Orleans police, and the rest of the "homeland security" crowd are nowhere to be found? Or the silver-spoon crowd who claim privilege to dismiss the suffering of others?

I've laid off this one for a few days now, but it persists in the headlines. Here's the logic:

While researchers have long shown that tall people earn more than their shorter counterparts, it's not only social discrimination that accounts for this inequality -- tall people are just smarter than their height-challenged peers, a new study finds.

"As early as age three -- before schooling has had a chance to play a role -- and throughout childhood, taller children perform significantly better on cognitive tests," wrote Anne Case and Christina Paxson of Princeton University in a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Here's what's missing: That taller children's confidence will enable them -- yes, empower them -- to take on more challenging tasks.

Other studies have pointed to low self-esteem, better health that accompanies greater height, and social discrimination as culprits for lower pay for shorter people.

But researchers Case and Paxson believe the height advantage in the job world is more than just a question of image.

"As adults, taller individuals are more likely to select into higher paying occupations that require more advanced verbal and numerical skills and greater intelligence, for which they earn handsome returns," they wrote.

It's not just image, but self-perception, which translates quite easily into self-confidence. The assumption that it must be biology or nutrition alone is simply specious. You cannot simply eliminate cultural influences simply because you see a strong correlation with physical attributes. After all, physical attributes affect cultural responses. Just ask any racial minority. Or obese person. Or woman.

And how tall are the researchers?

They are both about 5 feet 8 inches tall, well above the average height of 5 feet 4 inches for American women.

Okay okay, full disclosure. I'm a half-inch taller than the researchers. I guess that makes me smarter, so consider that as you re-read this post.

More: God is for Suckers and Culture Kitchen

The FDA has shocked me. After stonewalling their own doctors and scientists, the politicians in the agency have decided to act rationally, perhaps as a ploy to help the Republicans you've seen frothing at the mouth over the past two years whenever they talk about sex to seem more reasonable.

It's a partial victory:

Girls 17 and younger still will need a doctor's note to buy the pills, called Plan B, the
Food and Drug Administration told manufacturer Barr Pharmaceuticals Inc.

The compromise decision is a partial victory for women's advocacy and medical groups that say eliminating sales restrictions could cut in half the nation's 3 million annual unplanned pregnancies.

The pills are a concentrated dose of the same drug found in many regular birth-control pills. When a woman takes the pills within 72 hours of unprotected sex, they can lower the risk of pregnancy by up to 89 percent. If she already is pregnant, the pills have no effect.

I hope the nutters out there will note that last sentence. The fact is that Plan B prevents conception. With this "morning after" pill, there is no abortion at all. It's not even an issue.

What's at issue for Plan B opponents is whether the man's sperm can claim dibs on a woman's body, even if they're just wiggling around in there without fertilizing an egg (conception), without even an egg's being there to be fertilized. It's one of the most absurd arguments for patriarchal privilege out there.

Of course, we can expect the nutters to continue to distort and lie about Plan B. Anything that gives women power over their own bodies is bad, according to them. Just wait. You'll see them all over cable news today (if you can stomach watching that crap).

The fear and unreason is already out there:

Bravo folks! let's give our kids one more reason to have sex like rabbits!

"Yeah, it's much better to have pregnancy as punishment! And kids will have sex because the girl will then get to take a pill!"

Don't worry, though. It seems that most people see the positive side. This could reduce the number of aborted pregnancies significantly. That should be good news for everybody.

Congress is debating whether or not to raise the minimum wage.

Why not set a maximum wage, instead? What about a maximum wage of $1,000/hr ... that's 2.08 million a year based on 40 hours a week. Pretty cushy for anyone if you ask me for working 9 to 5.

Those who have read books on economics or who have taken the subject in school know the argument that "the minimum wage 'costs' jobs." The argument goes that if wages are raised, employers will hiring "up the food chain." For example. The $5.15 per hour worker, now waking $7.63 hour won't look as attractive as the worker already earning $7.63. In fact, employers will bid-up the wages of the person already making $7.63 (say to $9.45 before the bidding is over) and all that happens is inflation.

Listening to the folks on the New Hour (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/jan-june06/minwage_0...) we hear about low productivity employees who are not worthy of more.

But no man is an island. It's like a pyramid with a bunch of low wage earners at the bottom supporting layers (of ever fewer) workers who make more ... all the way on up.

What about a maximum wage? An idea whose time has come?