­by Javier Aguirre

It would be optimistic to say that the economy is on the brink of disaster. That would be taking the Pollyanna approach. In actual fact, the economy has gone over the edge.

Although this cataclysmic event has been showing its ugly head for some time, the failure of our legislators to acknowledge it and informing the general population is as deplorable as the event is cataclysmic.

Then again, the failure of the general population is almost as deplorable. The questions we didn’t respond to then have returned to bite us on the proverbial gluteus maximus.

Are sub-prime loans good for the market, or simply good for commissions? Is the practice of selling homes No Money Down a feasible approach, or simply a legally constructed practice for flipping homes? Are gluttonous salaries and perks for corporate CEO’s really justified?

This is point in time when practically any state in the nation can approach its sports teams and borrow enough money from a single player to pay off the state budget’s deficits. Yet the federal government is considering using tax dollars to bail out corporations that have failed to regulate themselves in a fiscally sound manner.

The public should not forget that the government is considering doing this from a deficit position.

Who benefits? Certainly not the middle class, who have already lost their homes and are living in a ten  city somewhere.

Certainly not the chronic unemployed, who will continue to be unemployed.

Certainly not those whose credit is already shot and won’t get any benefit from the bail-out unless they get offered another sub-prime loan, which won’t happen under federal regulation.

Public assistance agencies maintain that if welfare recipients were to receive $10,000 to get back on their feet, it won’t happen; they will blow it. It is presumed that they are not fiscally responsible. Yet, if we apply this same analogy to the corporations and the federal bail-out, there will be no shortage of “reasonable” explanations and excuses why it’s not the same. Seven hundred billion dollars.

Let’s do this . . . Divide it up among the states. That will provide each state with approximately 13 billion, 461 million, 538 thousand, 461 dollars and 50 cents. That should cover quite a few state deficit budgets and help bring them back in line.

Regulation, you say? Earmark the money for attacking poverty and all of its ancillary problems such as school failure, legislative incompetence, homelessness, governmental ignorance and unemployment.

Offer that money as a high-interest loan to the states with high-performance standards tied into the loan. The interest is forgiven as performance standards are met. Get it down to the lowest levels of society by using CBOs who are also required to meet the highest performance standards possible.

Couple this action with quarterly formative evaluations conducted by third-party evaluators, not governmental employees.

Programs not performing quarterly will lose their funding. No exceptions. For example, for most employment and training programs “train and place” is the standard of measure. Consequently, even if the client leaves after only several days of work, the placement counts toward performance. Long-term retention should be the measure of success, not placement. Long-term retention is defined as enough employment to result in the building of personal equity such as unemployment insurance.

The traditional model for resolving problems impacting upon the poverty and middle-class populations has been from the top down. Most recently, the savings-and-loan fiasco proved that this model is ineffective.

In this 21st century, the model is obsolete. The bail-out never reaches the street level, where it is most necessary. The only viable solution is to impact upon the chronic, low-income unemployed who have problems with job retention. There is an old adage that says that it “rolls downhill.” This is true. It’s time to flip the pyramid.

(Javier Aguirre is a former migrant farmworker with extensive ties to the laboring community. He currently holds a bachelor’s degree in public administration from Heritage College in Washington and a master’s degree from American Intercontinental University in Illinois. He is a doctoral candidate at the University of Phoenix. A past contributor of Hispanic Link, community organizer and educator, he is employed as operations manager for Fresno West Coalition for Economic Development of Fresno, Calif. Fresno is known as the Appalachia of the West, with one of the highest concentrations of poverty among urban communities. He is author of Expanding Horizons: A journey to Becoming a Skilled Language Interpreter.) ©2008

por José de la Isla

José de la Isla

HOUSTON – Right after Hurricane Ike struck Galveston, Texas, a TV news reporter was out near Surfside describing the devastation. She gave an account of how in one part of the community, the storm lifted a beach house, sending it airborne, and slamming into another beach house. In a voice with rising decibels, the reporter said, “It was like, like a piñata.”

The imagery was perfect: A flying house, like a missile, clobbering a stationery one, with the debris scattered everywhere, harem-sacrum.

Some situations, like this one, require us to have a broad imagination, a wider-than-usual understanding which goes beyond the commonplace to reach reality.

That’s what came to mind reading the current issue of Literal magazine, a bilingual English-Spanish publication that brings a Latin American and transnational perspective to the arts and modern living.

In it José Blanco writes an essay that wants to level with us. It reads like a challenge about whether we are ready to level with ourselves in the upcoming presidential campaign. Would we ask the candidates the hard questions, with the hyperbole and distracting exaggerations put aside?

Blanco simply recognizes that the United States is passing from the scene as the world’s only heavyweight economy, that our military has been used like a bouncer in the world community. According to Blanco, a world leader is needed, not another heavy. And when we don’t act responsibly, our country is weaker abroad.

We were the world leader in habeas corpus — guaranteeing the civil rights of individuals to avoid arbitrary arrest and detention, he reminds us. The rest of the world has now witnessed how quickly we compromised human rights principles through extraordinary renditions, Abu Graib, Guantanamo and the Torture Talks inside the White House. How the next leader will restore rights, post-Patriot Act, will say a lot about redeeming ourselves, or whether ours is now a seriously compromised and hypocritical country.

Is the United States one that can lead the world into finding a new monetary system with financial security for all? Can we resolve problems that might seem national but are really global in scope, impacting far more than our neighborhoods and towns? These include treating migration as a worldwide phenomenon, eradicating hunger in the next 50 years, transferring technology, and facilitating education.

Even as our own education reform might be slow, the lack of more education abroad will increasingly become our problem as people seek a way out of their dire straights.

Education reform everywhere, as futurist Juan Enríquez has point out, is now a choice between development and underdevelopment.

Blanco raises many questions, each one with a major issue to resolve. He poses them as a citizen of the world who has an interest in what U.S. voters will decide.

Clearly this election is already trivialized into one about “hockey moms” or the revenge of “Hillary’s people,” about race, the old and the young, or selecting somebody you would like to drink a beer with. But the stakes are simply too high. And our judgment is in question.

Whose jaw doesn’t drop when José Blanco points out the Iraq war costs $341.4 million per day? The cumulative total is about $530 billion. Meanwhile, Iraq’s gross national product is $18.8 million. The United States has thrown into that enterprise 28 times everything that Iraq can possibly produce. With that amount, the whole of sub-Saharan Africa could have been redeveloped.

The question runs deeper than how we got into that war. It is as well about what “victory” means and the real costs of that maniacal pursuit. There’s a Spanish word for that. It is called a capricho.

If we don’t watch out, someday unusual incidents will be called “flying piñatas” and lack of human rights and policy irrationality will be called “capricho americano.” And if we don’t do the right thing now, we will likely lose our friends, we won’t be able to influence people, and we’ll all have empty pockets.

[José de la Isla, author of “The Rise of Hispanic Political Power” (Archer Books, 2003) writes a weekly commentary for Hispanic Link News Service. E-mail joseisla3@yahoo.com]. ©2008