TWO FROM KRUGMAN

Last week I complained about how the New York Times had put its columnists behind a subscription only firewall which meant that I hadn't been reading my favorite left-leaning Princeton economist lately. Then it occurred to me to try taking the seven sentence stubs that the Times uses as a tease on a Google search. Presto, Krugman's columns came up, syndicated elsewhere. Granted, they're at least a week old, but that's okay; his insight is always pretty poignant.

Consequently, I offer these two Paul Krugman essays.

From the New York Times via Wake-Up Wal-Mart:

Big Box Balderdash

But instead of resting its case on these honest or at least defensible answers to criticism, Wal-Mart has decided to insult our intelligence by claiming to be, of all things, an engine of job creation. Judging from its press release in response to the religious values campaign, the assertion that Wal-Mart "creates 100,000 jobs a year" is now the core of the company's public relations strategy.

It's true, of course, that the company is getting bigger every year. But adding 100,000 people to Wal-Mart's work force doesn't mean adding 100,000 jobs to the economy. On the contrary, there's every reason to believe that as Wal-Mart expands, it destroys at least as many jobs as it creates, and drives down workers' wages in the process.

Think about what happens when Wal-Mart opens a store in a previously untouched city or county. The new store takes sales away from stores that are already in the area; these stores lay off workers or even go out of business. Because Wal-Mart's big-box stores employ fewer workers per dollar of sales than the smaller stores they replace, overall retail employment surely goes down, not up, when Wal-Mart comes to town. And if the jobs lost come from employers who pay more generously than Wal-Mart does, overall wages will fall when Wal-Mart moves in.

Click here for the rest.

And from the New York Times via truthout:

Age of Anxiety

American workers at big companies used to think they had made a deal. They would be loyal to their employers, and the companies in turn would be loyal to them, guaranteeing job security, health care and a dignified retirement.

Such deals were, in a real sense, the basis of America's postwar social order. We like to think of ourselves as rugged individualists, not like those coddled Europeans with their oversized welfare states. But as Jacob Hacker of Yale points out in his book "The Divided Welfare State," if you add in corporate spending on health care and pensions - spending that is both regulated by the government and subsidized by tax breaks - we actually have a welfare state that's about as large relative to our economy as those of other advanced countries.

The resulting system is imperfect: those who don't work for companies with good benefits are, in effect, second-class citizens. Still, the system more or less worked for several decades after World War II.

Now, however, deals are being broken and the system is failing. Remember, Delphi was once part of General Motors, and its workers thought they were totally secure.

Click here for the rest.

The bottom line for me, for both of these essays, is that the myths used by corporations and the wealthy elite to justify the economic brutality imposed on average ordinary American citizens simply don't work in the real world. "Rugged individualism" is fine and all as a principle as long as it recognizes that such rugged individuals exist within a social, political, and economic context over which they have very little control. That is, I'm all for "individual responsibility" up to a certain point, which starts where corporations, using the political influence they've bought, rig the game in their own favor.

Wal-Mart says that they create jobs, which is true, but they're crap jobs, with no or few benefits, not really paying enough to support a family. "Jobs, jobs, jobs" can no longer be a justification for whatever the corporations want. The situation is much more complicated than that. So, too, with retirement and health care benefits. It is becoming increasingly clear that corporations have the ability to simply walk away from their commitments to workers, to take away that for which they've worked for years. It's not like a rugged individual, at the age of 65, can just go find another retirement nest egg. If the government is going to allow companies to break such agreements with workers, then the government must clean up the mess, either by imposing severe legal sanctions on these deadbeat businesses or by establishing a European style welfare state.

Again, I'm all for pulling oneself up by the bootstraps and all, but when private wealth ties one's hands behind one's back, that's impossible.

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