Vagabond Journalist

There are lies, damn lies, and statistics enough to bury us in misinformation on nearly any given subject, but this particular set of data is pretty difficult to twist, although as David Johnston suggests in today's New York Times, the real picture is likely even more grim for the vast majority of Americans:



As Johnston notes, the cuts in education and health care benefits mostly enjoyed by the "90 percent" also factor in, as do the massive under-reporting in capital gains and business income. Since corporate earnings are approaching 15% of total GDP, one-and-a-half times their usual share of national income, we can see how the cuts in capital gains, corporate and banking taxes on the state and federal level (and yes, that was the "liberal Democrat" Davis administration in California as much as Wilson) have aggravated this imbalance. If the current rate of income growth for the super-rich and stagnation for the rest of us continues for just two more years, the United States will break its own record and leave 90% of the country with less than half the income. In terms of aggregated wealth, the picture looks nearly as stark, with the top 1% owning 38% of all net assets, and over half if you don't count primary residences.

So why does this matter and how does this apply to Humboldt County? Economics professor Edward Wolff put it this way:

Typically when countries are more equal, educational achievement and benefits are more equally distributed in the country. In a country like the United States, there are still huge disparities in resources going to education, so quality of schooling and schooling performance are unequal. If you have a society with large concentrations of poor families, average school achievement is usually a lot lower than where you have a much more homogeneous middle class population, as you find in most Western European countries. So schooling suffers in this country, and, as a result, you get a labor force that is less well educated on average than in a country like the Netherlands, Germany or even France. So the high level of inequality results in less human capital being developed in this country, which ultimately affects economic performance.

We don't need no stinking pie charts, but merely a glance out the window to see the concentration of poor families in Humboldt County, the ones who are considered "undereducated, lazy, whacked-out, shiftless pack of scoundrels" in the typically pithy, pro-bourgeois manner of a North Coast Journal which is, after all, published by a Fieldbrook winery operator. Evidently there aren't enough local boys and girls willing to live in migrant worker shantytowns out at Sun Valley Floral Farms to enjoy those deep breaths of methyl bromide, a toxic pesticide which the Journal's friend Congressman Thompson is responsible for the continued use of in this state.

Well golly, if we should all be quitting our dream jobs to go make beds in Benbow for near-minimum wage, why isn't the Journal among those businesses suffering from a labor shortage? Heidi Walters begins to hint at some more reality-based analysis when noting the dire lack of affordable and available housing in Southern Humboldt, before falling back on that old reliable bigotry of how all those damned hippie liberal kids are "lazy," "don't want to work," "lazy," "don't want to work," usually stoned and laughing at ceilings, oh and of course "lazy" again. While looking down their noses at their peers seems to be what most of these pro-Establishment writers excel at, it was a real shame for the Journal not to exercise that biting wit in a more constructive direction and connect the lack of housing, the dearth of educational opportunities for families trapped in truly grinding poverty, and that 25 percent decline in the key 30-39 age group.

Instead of digging into this cycle of poverty and maleducation well-matched by often-brutal law enforcement agencies and always callous criminal justice systems, Walters laments the plight of the bosses and can only ask the workers whether they are "good enough" for their betters. Class consciousness, anyone? These same journalists wonder why the public considers the media to be so completely unworthy of respect, worse than even politicians, cops and lawyers. Reporters, as Ronnie Dugger once told me on his last visit to Humboldt County, used to be cut from the same cloth as the Average Joe they were targeting with their words. Now that gritty apprenticeships have been replaced by sterile academic hoop-jumping, the craft has become a profession and self-respecting members of the Forth Estate enjoy hobnobbing with the very creatures of power they supposedly hold accountable. It's just so incredible to think an everyday Humboldter would consider the exploitation of foreign migrant workers as necessary or even beneficial.

The old codger-type banter about those darned brats wanting to "create their own hours?" These self-professed cutting edge types at the Journal might want to take their own advice and look around at the market. As Ryan Blitstein reports in the San Jose Mercury News in a jot on the corporate culture over at Netflix, "Flexible schedules are now available to 28 percent of full-time U.S. workers, almost twice the number in 1991, according to the non-profit advocacy group Corporate Voices for Working Families... Employees [at Netflix] schedule time off within the rhythm of their jobs." Anyone willing to be the one dumb enough to suggest how lazy those Netflix people are when their business stands to break $1 billion in sales this year?

I can't claim with any credulity to have the one true and holy answer to meet the needs and ends of local labor, but whatever that answer is, it won't be discovered with crotchety finger-pointing at 'those damned kids.' Though I can't buy Shawn Warford's cabal theory of all local media as Arkley's puppets, the Journal's inane blamecasting towards the poor, as if they should be ashamed of their own poverty and subsequent lack of marketable skills (key word there being 'market') is surely worthy of Robin Arkley Sr. Nine years on and I still remember walking out of an exciting convention at the Arcata Vet's Hall and reading clearly his hand-made signs warning of "Communism" should ideals of environmental and social justice finally take root in Humboldt County. The local landed gentry grip tightly to these fears if Hodgson's latest cover story is any indication, and their hired guns are all to happy to ignore half the pertinent facts in order to spread their view of Humboldt County's poor and unemployed as untermenchen to be swept aside.

Labels: arkley, economy, inequality, media, mike thompson, north coast journal