Letter to South Carolina State Legislators

Dear Sirs,

I am writing to request that you work at getting the South Carolina legislature to accept the 2.4 billion dollar loan the Federal Government is willing to extend to the state. I understand the loan will possibly result in future state tax increases; but at this point we can’t afford not to take it.

The Federal government has and is about to spend what might as well be gazillions of dollars to bail out the crooks in Wall Street that put us in this position in the first place; we’ll be paying taxes on that forever, and the least we can do is get a little relief here and now. Please try to override Governor Sanford’s ultra-ideological stance on the issue. His standing on his principles might do his heart some good (assuming he has one), but it’s not helping those of us with our feet in the trenches.

Sincerely,
Katya Cohen (educator)

Sure Sign of Bad Times

Got my Art Forum today. Removed the protective plastic and had an unusual haptic experience; one I don’t usually associate with the handling of this age old art world "institution": I could lift the thing with one hand! I could roll it, I could wave it, I could play with it, I could easily open it to read. I knew something was seriously weird because, for the first time in years, it looked like a magazine and not a cube!

In the summer of ’07 I got an Art Forum I could barely carry from the mailbox to my house; it was the fattest Art Forum I had ever seen. And the haptic experience I had then has led me to want to dissect the damn thing and get to know it intimately by reproducing it by hand like an illustrated manuscript (not quite, but sorta). That issue, at the height of our lend and spend spree, had grown to the whopping size of 541 pages, with 3/4 of them being devoted to advertising. This latest issue has a mere 240 pages! The magazine has not been this thin since 2004! I have not done a head count of advertising pages versus “content” yet, but my guess is that advertising is down my a good 30-40 %, mirroring the plunge in the Stock Market; after all, auction house sales are down by that much.

Although I am delighted to have a magazine I can actually carry around with me, this is a bad thing; just one more concrete sign of the troubles around and ahead of us (translate into: job losses for thousands). The economic downturn in the '70's led to conceptual art and art of the Other, and the one in the 80's gave us Uber-macho post-modern art; now that this latest bubble has burst, it remains to be seen what kind of art will be produced in this market.

An Honest to Goodness Rave

The Ranting Economist sweetly characterizes my blogs as “civil”; I fear I will be unable to maintain that veneer on this one. Plus The Ranting Economist will probably tear me to shreds on my economic thinking; so be it, I enter the new year full of piss and vinegar.

December 31st: Woke up this morning... 8.4% unemployment rate in the State of South Carolina: one of the highest in the nation. Why? you might ask; we’ll come to that....

...So, 77,000 people are unemployed while the Employment Security Commission is about to run out of money at the end of December 31st while pleading with that asshole (told ya) of a governor of ours, Mark Sanford, to accept a $146,000,000 loan from the Federal Government (to whom we all do pay taxes after all) to cover unemployment benefits until March. The Asshole refuses to do it until the ESC allows for a state audit of its numbers. The ESC is willing to undergo a federal audit but refuses to deal with Sanford. Meanwhile, 77,000 people, that is biological entities that are about to go hungry without their unemployment benefits, are hanging in the balance waiting for the resolution of this state of affairs; though most of them, probably being somewhat uninformed (’cause how else would that asshole get elected to be governor twice), might be unaware of the shenanigans going on in Columbia.

The Little Fucker is one of those ideologue Republicans that believes in his stone heart of hearts that “the market will take care of everything”: education, infrastructure, the insane, inter-galactic travel, you name it. Given that our current financial crisis, the worse since the great depression, has occurred under the most “laissez-faire-let-the-market-decide” administration ever, we can see how good that has been for nation building. Well, it’s just as good a plan for State building.

Sanford is such an ideologue about his view of reality that even though our state is completely broke (like others), he claims that he will refuse any federal bail-out money (unlike others). Again, I want to stress that I do pay federal taxes; taxes, that by the looks of it, will go to bail out states like California while, here, Little Fucker sticks to his principles! I could go on about the rest of the legislative body of this state (all male and mostly Republican in the Senate, whose sole purpose in life seems to cut taxes for their rich cronies); but I’ll refrain, since even they seem a little miffed at the current state of affairs.

And how, pray tell, have we been weathering this financial storm? Oh well, we have cut our services of course. And what is one of the few services (other than prisons and roads and facilities for the mentally disabled- oh no, I forgot, those they just closed down) this state deigns to provide? Why, that would be education. The state has furloughed and fired people all over the education landscape to save money.

...And this brings me back to “Why oh why is our unemployment rate so high?” It is so because we have very low human capital in this state. We have a severely under-educated population whose best use is in manufacturing, an industry that the powers that be in Columbia love to bring into the state by handing out nice tax incentive packages; thus once again cutting down the tax base that could possibly be used to finance things such as, oh I don’t know, education... That is, assuming we could attract firms by other means of course... Oh hey, with an educated populace, firms might seek out this state without even needing tax incentives: what a novel idea, and hey, it even sounds like, dare I say it, the free market!

Last I checked, due to global pressures and free trade and the fact that as a nation we decided that we are "too smart" to work “with our hands”, simple manufacturing has mostly moved out of this country. The little that there is we’ve imported to states like South Carolina, where labor is cheap precisely because it is under-educated. In good times, manufacturing firms needing unskilled labor settle in the area; in bad times, large numbers of this unskilled labor gets to be unemployed labor. One might want to ask, what is the one thing that could mitigate this and make it so that we wouldn't have the largest unemployment rate in the nation during bad times? Well, that would be education --> the real thing, not just lip service to it. But hell, that seems to be exactly what this state finds reasonable to cut.

An Update: By the end of December 31st, Mark Sanford did accept the federal loan that will make it possible to deliver benefits to our unemployed. He is however still pressuring the ESC to open itself to a state audit (the litigation will keep lawyers employed). I imagine Sanford accepted the loan because he could not afford to have 77,000 people pissed at him; after all, he might want to run for president one day....

Picture this: a Sanford/Palin ticket! A Republican wet dream! The Ranting Economist optimistically thinks it would be the death knell of the Republican Party; but to quote that paragon of present-day Republicanism, President Bush himself, never “mis-underestimate” the American public.

Happy New Year!