NYT headline says it all: ‘U.S. Companies Thrive as Workers Fall Behind’

The American economy remains mired in what likely is a massive transformation that is fast leaving workers behind. As Floyd Norris writes today in his Off the Charts column,

AMERICAN companies are more profitable than ever — and more profitable than we thought they were before the government revised the national income accounts last week. Wage earners are making less than we thought, in part because the government now thinks it was overestimating the amount of income not reported by taxpayers.

The rest of the column explains some changes in the way income and gross domestic product are calculated, but the point is pretty clear. We are not in the midst of a magical economic rebound.

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When not to endorse a candidate

Recent endorsement editorials in The Record and The New York Times reinforce a decision I made when I was writing editorials for The Princeton Packet: Never endorse in a primary.

Why? Because you either will have to jump through hoops to make the endorsement — as The Record did yesterday — or you will have to contradict your endorsement later on when you endorse in the general election.

Consider what The Record has to say about Steve Lonegan in its endorsement of him to be the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate. Lonegan “clearly is the stronger Republican candidate” and “an anti-government social conservative to the core.”

His priorities include repealing “Obamacare,” reducing entitlement programs and opposing putting “left-wing radicals” on the federal bench. Lonegan opposes abortion, marriage equality and spending money to combat global warming, which he repeatedly questions. He says he would have opposed the emergency aid package for Sandy relief.All of this puts Lonegan at odds with The Record’s more liberal approach to governing.

Lonegan, however, “can display a reasonableness that sets him apart from some of his soulmates on the Republican right,” The Record writes.

He opposes spending huge sums to construct a fence along the nation’s border with Mexico, calling that yesterday’s technology. He also supports raising the number of immigrants who can be legally admitted to the country. Nor would Lonegan spare the nation’s military from his budget ax.

Good things, of course, but I think it is a stretch to use these positions as evidence of his reasonableness.

The Record then does something that undercuts its argument, essentially setting itself up for what is likely to be a November endorsement of Lonegan’s opponent — most likely Newark Mayor Cory Booker:

We are less pleased with the overall philosophy Lonegan would bring to the Senate. Rather than seek common ground with Democrats, who are a majority in the Senate, Lonegan says a more important priority for him would be staying true to his principles. That’s noble, but at a time when political gridlock in Washington is pervasive, the public is better served by politicians who compromise to get things done.

Basically, they argue, he is the wrong choice for the Senate, but the best of a bad Republican lot. While this may be accurate (and incredibly sad), it also did not have to be written. There is no reason for newspapers to weigh in on intra-party primary fights — except in those cases where there is no functioning opposition party (say, New Brunswick), and the primary is the de facto general election.

The party faithful understand this — does anyone thing that hardcore Republicans, the ones who vote in primaries, are going to listen to what The Record has to say in this case?

In the end, the paper looks wishy-washy (at best) or duplicitous (at worst). It puts itself in the position of backing a candidate for whom it has little use, and it would be like me, a non-observant Jew, telling a Catholic the best way to observe Ash Wednesday.

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See this film, when you can

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Let’s start with some basic facts: There are about 650,000 homeless men, women and children in the United States, as of the last official count, a figure that some say is only a fraction of the actual number.

There are about 11,000 in New Jersey alone, a number that has declined a bit since the beginning of the recession, but not by much.

And we, as a society, have done very little to address the problem.

Enter Jack Ballo and his film, Destiny’s Bridge, which had its premiere at the Two River Theater Company in Red Bank on Wednesday. Ballo’s film tells the story of the Tent City homeless camp by following the fates of about a dozen of its residents — Minister Steve Brigham, the camp’s founder and de facto leader, Charlie, Angelo and the couples Jack and Deborah, Sheridann and Nahrida, Wil and Mo, Elwood and Cynthia and Michael and Marilyn — as they struggle to get by. It also follows the very beginnings of “Destiny’s Bridge,” an effort by Brigham and some others to create a new kind of shelter for the homeless.


Here I need to offer full disclosure: I have been working with Jack and the photographer Sherry Rubel on what we call The Tent City Project since last year. The film is Jack’s piece of the puzzle. Sherry has shot dozens of amazing still images and I have finished the manuscript for a book-length poem (for which I am seeking a publisher and an excerpt of which appears on the back of the film-premiere program) that centers on Tent City.

The story of the camp has grown familiar over the last year to New Jersey residents (partly due to my own journalistic efforts, I am proud to say): Brigham essentially founded the camp about seven years ago as a way of helping a man who came to him for help. The camp has grown to nearly 100 residents since then, creating tensions with the township of Lakewood, where it is located, and resulting in lawsuits. A consent decree signed by the homeless and the township is designed to close the camp, but only after housing is found for its residents. A second lawsuit against Ocean County, which still lacks any formal homeless shelter, continues.

But most of the journalism, whether in print or on video, has been of the hit-and-run variety — a story here, a story there, generally when something spectacular and horrible has happened at the camp.

Ballo’s film does something very different. It commits to telling the stories of the camp’s residents in a holistic manner, to offering the good (a surprise birthday party) and the bad (the arrest of Minister Steve) within the larger context of the camp’s day-to-day existence.

Ballo’s approach is different than most documentary filmmakers and very effective. Unlike Michael Moore, he stays out of things. He  doesn’t appear on camera, doesn’t offer voice over or commentary. His goal, as he said during a question-and-answer session following the premiere, is to tell the truth and let the audience decide.

That approach cedes a lot of authority to Minister Steve, who is rightly critical of local officials who have taken a highly combative position — at least until recently. Steve also is critical of a shelter system that warehouses the homeless (thankfully, this is changing) and he views elements of the tent encampment as a possible model. In this, the film posits a solution that is housing based — construct small houses on small lots that can be affordable to low-income people.

My own analysis is more systemic — while I agree that there is a need for more available low-cost housing, I also think there is a need for broader change in how capitalism functions. American corporate capitalism is designed to maximize profit by minimizing costs. This design creates what can best be described as waste product that corporations then push onto to the larger society and expect us to deal with. I use the metaphor of a chemical reaction, which always needs to be in balance. This often leaves a remainder product, an excess compound or element that is discarded.

For American capitalism, that discarded excess is not just air and water pollution, but also the sub-population of people we view as unnecessary to the functioning of our economy. That is why full employment does not mean full employment (4 percent unemployment is considered acceptable) and why we have been more likely to aggressively prosecute the homeless for quality-of-life crimes than to find them housing, address their mental and physical health needs or to make sure that they have enough money to function and do more than just barely survive.

But I digress. Ballo’s film is necessarily simpler and more focused (and in that way different and better than the film I might have made). It does not attempt to take on all of capitalism, but a particularly inhumane aspect of it by reminding us that the people who live in homeless camps like Tent City in Lakewood — which is just one of hundreds around the country — are really not a whole lot different than our neighbors or ourselves.

None of the characters in the film — characters is probably not the right word here; these are real people and treated as real people throughout — want to be living in the woods. They want something better, but that something better has been pushed out of reach for a time. They are struggling with the fallout of their own bad decisions and the decisions made by the big banks, the government and business, which cost us millions of jobs. They are struggling against a bureaucracy that has been designed to deny them help with one hand even as that help has been offered with the other.

In the end, it is clear to the viewer that something is very wrong, that our willingness to allow nearly 100 people to live in a camp in the woods is a failing that needs to be addressed. To Ballo’s credit, he leaves it to the viewer to formulate how to move forward.

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Investment questions

There are a lot of things to not like about the report in The New York Times today on Cory Booker, but the biggest is something the Newark mayor says deep into the story:

Mr. Booker said it was not hard to raise $1.75 million in seed capital “because of the power of the idea.”

“Power of the idea” or, perhaps, some other kind of power?

The story goes like this: Booker, with the help of Silicone Valley’s biggest players, starts his own tech company called Waywire. The company, according to the Times, was set up in 2012 with financing from Eric Schmidt of Google among others. Its goal is to make it simple to “’collect, curate and share’ videos from across the Web.”

Booker, apparently, does not have day-to-day responsibilities at Waywire, though he

received the largest stake because of his social media profile, his name recognition and his connections to investors, and he was not expected to run the company, Mr. Richardson said, though Mr. Booker has attended every board meeting, according to another investor. “Cory is the inspiration architect,” Ms. Ross said. “He really is the thought-leader soul part of the business.”

He’s also running for Senate and expected to win, meaning he could have something to say about how Silicone Valley is regulated — which the investors in his internet start-up no doubt have an interest.

That’s why the ease with which he was able to raise start-up cash sends up so many red flags. There is nothing illegal going on here, but these kinds of investments raise questions as to whether the mayor is cashing in on his political celebrity and, perhaps more troubling, whether the investors view their investment as being about more than the company. Do they see themselves as investing in the career of Cory Booker with an expectation of something in return?

These are just questions, but they are questions to which the voters deserve an answer.

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