Category Archives: Economy

‘Let’s meet the moment. Let’s get to work.’

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Here’s the thing: Nobody hires in August.

I know this fact quite intimately. I had begun my job search in the summer of 2008, before my job was ‘eliminated’ at the end of 2008. I was working in the real estate world then, and contrary to popular narratives, signs of distress were everywhere in 2007. In August 2008, a colleague enlightened me to this universal corporate meme.

So when the new numbers were released from the department of labor that showed zero job growth for the month of August and the unemployment rate held at 9.4, I didn’t flinch.

My expectations were already low.

I’m no politician, just an average, slightly over educated black woman who worked in the very industry that seems to be the lynchpin of the Obama’s job plan and well, a fake psychic.

Here’s me in February 2009:

So this brings me to my current thinking about infrastructure. Infrastructure is more than the physical universe of roads, bridges, schools, power grids, levees, dams, reservoirs, trains, subways. Think of them as veins and vessels within the body. The body cannot live without the mind. Teachers, firefighters, police officers, servicemen and women flow through that universe. So do you and I. And all of us need to be a bit more educated about how we all are connected in this life. How do we individually complement the stimulus package that was just signed? Infrastructure, beyond the jobs and economic stability it can create, includes you, me and a dose of intellectual curiosity.

America is a young nation with old systems in play. All that American ingenuity we’ve been taught about has laid fallow for too long.

Here’s Obama in 2011:

The purpose of the American Jobs Act is simple: to put more people back to work and more money in the pockets of those who are working. It will create more jobs for construction workers, more jobs for teachers, more jobs for veterans, and more jobs for long-term unemployed. (Applause.) It will provide — it will provide a tax break for companies who hire new workers, and it will cut payroll taxes in half for every working American and every small business. (Applause.) It will provide a jolt to an economy that has stalled, and give companies confidence that if they invest and if they hire, there will be customers for their products and services. You should pass this jobs plan right away. (Applause.)

Indeed. This thought process is rooted in simple economics: cash begets demand, demand begets supply, begets higher GDP. This is stimulus for main street. Create an environment so that consumers spend and employers hire. Investment in infrastructure is known by most policy wonks as the speediest metric to mark job growth. It is not unlike the recession of 2000/2001, when everyone looked toward investment in construction starts for housing, to compensate for the epic failure and job losses from internet companies folding. And that housing boom (and inevitable bust) carried the country out of recession of the early aughts. I suppose the logic remains the same here for the American Jobs Act; incentivize the private market (small businesses) to hire more 14 million Americans out of work, put cash in the pockets of those underemployed and overworked Americans so that we spend more and grow the economy.

Construction jobs are like cells dividing, besides the trades that get hired, folks who do work with their hands, it also creates a bureaucracy, a host of support staff to manage the endeavor. It’s not a bad idea…

Which is really to say that while this is effective method to stimulate job growth, it is a terribly old idea. If we’re to presume that everyone in the job market is looking to specialize in masonry, electrical, engineering trades, then he’s definitely on to something. It certainly would require a re-education or refining of capabilities. The ‘jobs’ that this bill will likely create would require a highly specialized labor force, one that seeks transform an erstwhile trader/bookseller that’s been serving up your latte at your local coffee shop for the past six months to rewire a school to support a 4G network.

When we talk of job creation what exactly are we talking about? Continue reading →

however do you want me. however do you need me.

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So I took the summer off from blogging and have been on my reinvention grind. This economy has been various degrees of unkind and kind to black girls (and yes, everyone). As of late I’m choosing to embrace a more positive dream (more on that later). Yet, these hands were not idle. There’s the summer issue of the litmag I edit with an awesome team of folks and a new issue to drop later this month. As well as confronting my oddball disdain for Herman Melville (my sole summer read), which has really revealed a misdirected love for his whole opus. That reads cryptic, I know. I’ll unpack that later gators.

scattered thoughts on moderation and restoring sanity.

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I had every intention of going to DC for the Rally to Restore Sanity. The spectacle and clarion call, the gathering of moderates was seductive. However, in typical moderate fashion, I didn’t figure out a plan to get there. By the time I realized I should have booked a bus ticket on MegaBus or Bolt, they were already sold out.

So instead, I spent my Saturday restoring sanity on the home front. I cleaned my bedroom. I cleaned the bathroom. I vacuumed. I groomed my cat. I folded laundry. I organized the stack of ungraded papers for my review. I took a walk around the neighborhood. I bought a latte. I did most of this in relative silence. I refrained from checking my twitterfeed for updates of value and snark regarding the day’s events. I peaked once. Kid Rock performed? (Dude, like seriously?)

There were shows I’m missing. A happy hour I would’ve liked to have gone to. At the very least, I would’ve loved to rub elbows with the young progressives and shared in their sideways glance, witty banter and commentary about a comedian who’s righteous indignation against the tide of batshit crazy in our political discourse has manifested itself in a not so cleverly disguised get out the vote rally on the Washington Mall. Instead, I’m here in Brooklyn. Unable to check into foursquare to unlock uber swarm badges to acknowledge that I exist among the crowd of young(ish) moderate voices in American politics. I’m fine with this. Continue reading →

Quote of the…

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Day? Maybe of the week. A friend passed along a recent interview with The Wire creator, David Simon.

It’s one thing to recognize capitalism for the powerful economic tool it is and to acknowledge that, for better or for worse, we’re stuck with it and, hey, thank God we have it. There’s not a lot else that can produce mass wealth with the dexterity that capitalism can. But to mistake it for a social framework is an incredible intellectual corruption and it’s one that the West has accepted as a given since 1980—since Reagan. Human beings—in this country in particular—are worth less and less. When capitalism triumphs unequivocally, labor is diminished. It’s a zero-sum game. People paid a much higher tax rate when Eisenhower was president, a much higher tax rate for the benefit of society, and all of us had more of a sense that we were included….I guess what I’m saying is that the overall theme was: We’ve given ourselves over to the Olympian god that is capitalism and now we’re reaping the whirlwind. This is the America that unencumbered capitalism has built. It’s the America that we deserve because we let it happen. We don’t deserve anything better. The Wire was trying to take the scales from people’s eyes and say, “This is what you’ve built. Take a look at it.” It’s an accurate portrayal of the problems inherent in American cities. Continue reading →

Bartleby.

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I read Bartleby, the Scrivener in the eleventh grade. It was required reading for IB English I at my high school.

For the uninitiated, Bartleby was a scrivener, a writer, if you will, who worked for a real estate lawyer. Our modern tongues would define his position as ‘administrative assistant’, or ‘paralegal.’ And while the narrator of the story itself suggests that Bartleby offered no indication of any emotion to his circumstance, I’d submit that underneath the veil of ambivalence, Bartleby hated his job. Bartleby was bored out of his mind. Bartleby only offers a very controlled and passive response to all the directives issued by the boss, ‘I prefer not to.’ We watch this détente between boss and employee unfold over a period of time, and the slow degeneration of Bartleby, the office relocates and Bartleby, the everyman working in the offices of a boom economy, condemned to banal tasks of recording mortgages, deeds for would-be moguls, all the while passively resisting any work that demanded more of his mental mind.  The story concludes with the discovery that Bartleby lived in the old offices and died bereft.

Yeah. Continue reading →

Zombie

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I can’t seem to get away from them either.

The Daily Beast recently unpacked what appears to be a trending topic in our cultural lexicon.

So what is it about zombies? Arguably, they are the perfect interchangeable metaphor for everything from Nazis, to consumerism, to the loss of individuality, to the collapse of civilization, to the impending doom of swine flu, and most recently representing mindless bankers, stumbling around and feeding on whatever fetid bad debt they can, however unsavory it later turns out to be.

Unlike other more glamorous monsters that always come across as a little too cool and a little too chiselled, the zombie is the reassuringly accessible underdog—often vulnerable, powerless and alone, but also blissfully unaware. Theirs is a condition that is far closer to that of the human being than we would like to admit, and it is perhaps for this reason that zombies will always have resonance in times of social and economic upheaval: We start losing our jobs and homes, and before long we’re all completely lost, left to shamble around mindlessly until someone takes pity on us and shoots us in the head.

So this isn’t just coincidence. Insolvent banks are commonly known as zombie banks. And with good reason; practically every Friday, a new bank failure failures. One of them was a beast. I’ve come to expect announcements of bank failures around 4:30 PM -7:00 PM every Friday with a bit of disaffection. I don’t know if that’s good or not. But with the threat of something so familiar in ‘normal’ life as a un-dead flesh eating beast, there isn’t any room for nostalgia. Continue reading →

green the cities, create the jobs, save the planet…

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Or something like that. I think about sustainability a lot. In a previous life, I worked on the development of new construction residential buildings, and very slowly, applied green building practices and materials to those buildings.

I’ve also been thinking about the intersection of green job creation and sustainability in cities. Very quietly, I follow stories about urban gardening/agriculture movements. In 2007, President Clinton was the keynote speaker for an awards dinner at ACORN (yeah, I know… whatever) that I attended and flagged two major issues that we’ve now seen come to pass: job crisis and credit burden. To a crowd of affordable housing professionals, the 42nd President of the United States teased out practical solutions to these problems.  In 2007, 38% of US greenhouse gas emissions come from buildings. As some of us who were awares that the housing bubble would inevitably pop and create a crisis in jobs, Clinton talked to this small crowd about the link between green jobs and affordable housing, specifically pointing to jobs modernizing the existing housing stock with by making them more energy efficient beasts (high-efficiency boilers, energy efficient lighting and appliances, smart building technologies, green roof replacement, etc.) Even then, you could tell that some of these ideas came from folks like Van Jones and Majora Carter, because they’ve already witnessed how these incremental changes created benefits to individual and community.

I could geek out even further on this; water waste in multi family buildings has a solution too. For every flush, 5 gallons of potable water is wasted. The first luxury rental building in NYC to get a gold LEED certification, uses a gray water reclamation system, a very expensive system in its upfront costs. However, if it is an idea we mandate, then we’d be able to eliminate millions of gallons potable water waste.

I might be a little OCD in my interest in sustainability. But it’s nice to know I have noble company.

From GOOD:

“I made this trip,” explained Matt Victoriano, a Marine who served in Iraq, “because it became painfully aware to me that our current energy policy is a direct threat to our national security and the troops.” Marine General Anthony Zinni, former head of U.S. Central Command, takes it a step further: “We will pay to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, or we will pay the price later in military terms. And that will involve human lives. There will be a human toll.” In other words, to best support our troops, support a clean energy future.”

And this post from TAPPED:

Often these are people returning from prison, people who have lived in generational poverty, or returning combat veterans – some fit all three of these demographics. Each group commonly suffers from, among other things, a deep sense of social isolation that inhibits their participation in the marketplace, increases their social services footprint, and negatively affects the health and educational outcomes of both themselves and the people around them. Typically, these places are the environmental sacrifice zones that make our dirty-energy economy possible.

They have been creating expensive and ever-widening cost vectors for decades – if one looks at how many people are coming out of our prisons, going into poverty, and coming back from multiple deployments for wars with no end in sight. We need to turn those cost vectors around as soon as possible using the tools we can control on regional and community levels.

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Horticultural infrastructure work is highly therapeutic for certain psychological barriers to full participation in society. It’s more cost-effective than pharmaceutical methods too, so this can contribute to public heath savings.

Projects like these, on a massive scale throughout our cities, shorelines, and over-stressed water management systems, can turn some of our most expensive citizens into some of our most productive in three important ways.

Do you see that?  The connection in building a sustainable future could also mean jobs for veterans and under/unemployed in communities of color.

And then there’s my favorite word again: infrastructure.

once in a lifetime…

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I’m posting this as yet another ‘stub’.

Indulge me a little bit here. Talking Head’s dance interlude aside, the sentiment and lyrics of this track strikes hyperreal nerves. This track is twenty years old and still struggles with all of our middle class, bourgeois aspirations. Compounded with my Mad Men obsession and simultaneous crash course in Feminist history (I’m currently reading Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique) and the uber-timely post on Huffington Post about modern woman’s happiness (or lack thereof) there seems to be an issue worth looking at closely.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been deeply engaged in conversations with friends, or just people of my generation about the pursuit of happiness. We’re still parsing out our answers. However, the key question for my generation at present, prior to our economic woes, has been, is this it? All the hard work, staying in school, brand name education, mountains of student loan debt, inevitable marriages and mortgages, the job… and we still find that we still trying to find our bliss. I’ve had too many conversations these past two years where people from my generation still feel that something is missing once we achieved some measure of success in our careers, or in owning a home or condo, or marriage or baby. There is this lingering longing that kinda hangs in the ether, some gnawing sensation that says that the individual desires something more that brings them closer to wholeness.

Friedan referred to it in the context of mid 20th century housewives as ‘the problem with no name.’ I’d even posit that ‘the problem with no name’ in early 21st century America cuts across gender, class and ethnicity. I think the problem with no name lives is present in the lives Generation X and the millenials as we try to determine our economic and cultural future going forward.

Same as it ever was? More later.

Public Option Now

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It should be restated again. We need health care reform now.

For one, like MSM, I got distracted by the Gates-gate episode. Following this very complex conversation or rather deconstruction about race, class, authority, law, free speech, and frankly, a story of two ‘reasonable’ men clashed which escalated about who’s member is bigger than the other, was riveting.

It’s already been said by many more wiser writers and minds than me; that Obama’s presser last week that the real message of the urgency of the need for reform was buried in the MSM coverage of a seemingly gaffe by POTUS.

I’ve been trying to synthesize my thoughts about the bubbling race in America today question for weeks now. I had a rather random post that was only to function as a primer for me to redress late. I felt something was coming. I just wasn’t expecting it to come in the form of segregated pools, excessive force/abuse of power cases, and the death of a pop icon.

Again, I digress.

I also started to draft a post about my recent trip to DC to lobby for reform. Particularly, I wanted highlight the people I met and why they were willing to bake in the late June heat, to push for reform and a public option. A few real life things happened that got in the way of that for me. And then my uncle died. I don’t meant to make him out to be some sort of martyr, but the significance of his passing and the health care debate cross hairs for me. He was diagnosed with stage four cancer in March. He didn’t have health insurance. It wasn’t provided to him through his job. I can’t help but wonder if there were a public option, would he have been able to seek medical attention months, years ago for a stomach problem that he could have easily dismissed as indigestion. He stopped treatment in June. Apparently he lived an expectantly longer life than any doctor would have conceived. He had a pre-existing condition that complicated his treatment with chemo. As my mother explained to me this past weekend, he had a childhood disease that should have been terminal. And it’s apparently genetic. The irony, if you want to call it that, is that my uncle may have saved the life of his children with the discovery of this disease that was responsible for the complicating treatment that would’ve prolonged his life. I’m still trying to wrap my head around that.

The other story that seems to get lost is the face of the uninsured. It’s an issue beyond black, white and class. 43 million Americans do not have health insurance. I’ve heard reported (trying to verify) that the number of uninsured Americans under the age of 30 constitute the large part of that number. A detail that I don’t find too surprising. The low skilled worker, or the recent college graduate who have entry level jobs often are, for lack of a better word, shafted. Ask any bright, young thing who’s employed by a publishing house, magazine, or advertising company to someone who’s working as a janitor, security guard, or retail clerk. Do they have adequate health coverage, if any? Would a public option help small businesses who factor fringe benefits in employee compensation? Would small businesses be able to expand and hire more workers? Would that aid in our economic recovery?

I think Obama failed to explain these facts in a way that can incite urgency among everyone. MSM failed in deconstructing the argument in digestible bits that would push the conversation beyond what polls supposedly say about what Americans want: deficit reduction.

I’m biased of course. I’m part of a Venn Diagram of constituencies that’s affected by this. I want a public option. I’m a bright, young, African American, thirtysomething that would love the independence of not relying on an employer to provide health care coverage. I’d also love a system that would make it affordable so that people like my uncle can seek and receive care in instances where their employer can’t afford to provide them coverage. I’d also like for the forces that claim to read tea leaves through polls realize that my biggest care in the world is not the growth of the American deficit. I do care about it. But I’m a member of the generation that will carry the burden of many debts. I’m still researching the data, but my impression is that the national debt will increase with reform and without reform. I’d like to hear a sound debate about the rate of that growth if we don’t reform our entitlement programs now.

It’s food for thought.