That a woman was made homeless for not having enough electricity reveals America’s modern-day sumptuary laws

If you see a woman drowning the decent thing to do is toss her a life buoy, or at least leave her the hell alone; sitting on her head to push her deeper under water is wholly unacceptable behaviour. Unless you live in America and work for some local-level housing authority, in which case it’s part of your job.

Being poor sucks in any country but especially in the US, which is so proud of being the Richest Nation on Earth that it makes sure everyone lives up to that whether they can afford to or not. Consider the case of Avondale, Arizona resident Christine Stevens, who has been in deep water (financially speaking) since losing her bank job in January 2009. She decided to discontinue her electricity service and make do with solar panels – Arizona has no shortage of sunshine, after all – and using an ice box in lieu of a refrigerator.

But such frugality defies Avondale city codes, which require a refrigerator, heating and cooling system, and electricity enough for all. So Stevens’ house was condemned, and Stevens kicked out. “We explained to her that the panels weren’t enough to sustain a quality of life there,” Avondale’s code enforcement manager said. Stevens is back in her home now, after spending 11 nights sleeping in her car, but could still lose the property.

When you’re worried about someone’s quality of life, adding them to the ranks of the homeless might not be the best way to improve it, but it’s close enough for government work. Sometimes more drastic measures are needed, like the ones taken by city officials in Mountain View, California: they kicked an old lady named Loretta Pangrac out of her house, demolished it, and billed her almost $20,000 for their troubles.

Pangrac’s roof was in bad shape and she couldn’t afford to repair it, so the whole house was condemned as a dangerous “public nuisance” – even though Pangrac was the only member of the public actually endangered by it. To recoup their self-imposed costs, city officials placed a lien against the property. Even without the lien, it’s doubtful Pangrac could sell the vacant lot for enough to buy another house. She suggested living in a trailer on her land, but of course that would violate city ordinances. Laws against trailers are commonplace, since citizens living in trailers because they can afford no better tarnish the reputation of the Richest Nation on Earth and the municipalities therein.

When I was a kid, sitting through history classes and learning how lucky I was to live in a free country rather than some uptight dictatorship or constipated nanny state, I remember being especially offended by the monarchies of yore with their snobbish “sumptuary laws“. What kind of government would tell me I can’t wear purple because my ancestors were peasants rather than aristocrats? But old-time sumptuary laws forbidding poor people from living like their “betters” are still preferable to America’s modern version, requiring people to live like their “betters” whether they can afford to or not.

Housing codes were passed with good intentions – of course we don’t want people living in substandard housing – but what the enforcers don’t understand (or refuse to admit) is that for some people, the choice isn’t between “good housing” and “bad housing” but “bad housing” or “no housing at all”. Living in a house without a refrigerator is better than living in a refrigerator box, but America’s modern-day sumptuary laws won’t let poor people like Christine Stevens make that choice for themselves.

No fridge is better than no house | Jennifer Abel is a post from: Bad Credit Loans

News that wages are rising in China is greeted with dread by those who share Greenspan’s unwarranted fear of rising inflation

Alan Greenspan had a dream, or rather a nightmare. Greenspan seems to have woken up in a cold sweat one morning in fear that the period of “disinflationary pressures” that had kept inflation low since the 1990s was about to end. This was 2007, when he published his autobiographical economic treatise, The Age of Turbulence. Despite his well-known love for economic data, and poring over the latest reports from every statistical agency, he did not realise that he was sitting on a housing bubble of epic proportions. Not seeing the bubble (he also missed the prior stock market bubble that accumulated and burst on his watch, causing the 2001 downturn), he could not know that it would soon collapse and cause a very ugly recession, in which inflation would be irrelevant.

This by itself should be enough to question the wisdom of central bankers, since the evidence for both of these world-historic asset bubbles was blindingly obvious once they had reached a certain size. But Greenspan’s nightmare is scary for other reasons, some of which will become increasingly relevant as the world economy recovers.

As Greenspan details in his book, the reason for his nightmare is that the world was depleting its stock of hundreds of millions of unemployed people, including those of the former Soviet Union and also in rural China. In other words, “too many” of them had become employed, and this was allowing for wages of factory workers in China to rise. So long as China had a huge mass of unemployed, wages were held in check, and – according to Greenspan – competition from low-wage production there held down wages in the rest of the world, including even rich countries like the United States. All good! Until the nightmare started.

Is there something wrong with this picture, that one of the world’s most powerful economic decision makers (at the time), dreads the decline of mass unemployment and rising wages among people making 80 cents an hour? What, then, is the purpose of economic development, if not to raise living standards for poor people? Some may dismiss Greenspan’s values as unrepresentative – he was, after all, a devotee of the extreme libertarian writer Ayn Rand. And his autobiographical narrative is rather unusual: although we learn about his love of baseball, music (he attended the Julliard School), and how he became interested in economics, there is something missing. Most public figures of his stature, and even most economists, would have offered at least a perfunctory paragraph about how his economic thinking was aimed at helping those at the bottom of the social ladder – whether true or not. Greenspan didn’t bother.

But unfortunately Greenspan is not an outlier but a moderate among central bankers. What is worse, their perverse world view has a hugely disproportionate influence on reporting and discussion of economic issues. As the press has recently reported, wages in China are again rising, due to the additive effect of the global economic recovery and the world’s most effective economic stimulus programme, which enabled China to plough right through the world recession with 8.7% growth in 2009. The reports are somewhat less negative than they were a few years ago, but Greenspan’s nightmare is everywhere: a dreaded “labour shortage” is forcing Chinese wages up and this will add to inflation. It is not clear what is wrong with a “labour shortage” being resolved in the way that markets resolve other shortages: ie the price of labour goes up until quantity supplied matches quantity demanded.

“China has drained its once vast reserves of unemployed workers in rural areas and is running out of fresh labourers for its factories,” reports the New York Times. “Personnel managers here say they are also abandoning the informal tradition of not hiring anyone over 35 – they say they are now hiring workers up to 40 years old, and sometimes older, despite concerns about whether they can keep up week after week with the rapid pace of Chinese assembly lines.”

“Managers can no longer simply provide eight-to-a-room dorms and expect labourers to toil 12 hours a day, seven days a week,” says Business Week.

There is more, but we wouldn’t want to give Alan Greenspan a heart attack.

To its credit, the Times recognises the positive aspect of rising wages for Chinese workers and also notes that the Obama administration, which has complained about the Chinese yuan being undervalued, should welcome this development. An increase in Chinese wages, to the extent that it raises the price of the country’s exports, has the same impact as an appreciation of the yuan.

But the reality is that the Obama administration, as well as Congressional leaders, are not really serious about a more competitive dollar. If they were, they could push down the value of the dollar worldwide, rather than trying to blame the Chinese for our overvalued currency. But they don’t do that because the Greenspan/Wall Street view prevails: anything that lowers inflation is good, whether it’s an overvalued dollar, cheap imports from repressed overseas labour, or US workers’ wages stagnating, as they have, for decades.

All this despite the fact that the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office projects inflation over the next 10 years averaging less than 1.7% annually – lower than any decade for more than half a century. Imaginary threats of inflation could turn out to be one of the more real threats to the United States’ economic recovery.

Inside Alan Greenspan’s nightmare | Mark Weisbrot is a post from: Bad Credit Loans

Find out which countries are propping up the US economy

China has defended its investment in US Treasury bonds, amid concern that its position as the biggest investor in US debt may become political as well as economic.

Treasury bonds are how the US – and all governments for that matter – borrow money: they issue government securities, which other countries and institutions buy. So, the US national debt is owned predominantly by Asian economies. The US Treasury releases the figures on this – here they are in a more useable form.

Last year, China expressed concern over the security of its vast United States treasury holdings and premier Wen Jiabao has urged Washington to safeguard their value.

Take a look, download the spreadsheet and let us know what you can do with the data.

DATA: Foreign owners of US treasury securities

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US federal deficit: who owns America’s debt? is a post from: Bad Credit Loans

It’s simple: China is soon going to revalue its currency against the US dollar. Or it isn’t. It just depends who you ask

Both these articles were published on Saturday. Which is right? Take your pick:

New York Times, 6 March 2010
China’s central bank governor indicated Saturday that the government was unlikely to detach the value of China’s currency from that of the dollar anytime soon, echoing Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s statement on Friday that exchange rates would remain “basically stable” for now.

Financial Times, 6 March 2010
Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of the People’s Bank of China, gave the strongest hint yet from a senior official that China would abandon the unofficial dollar peg, in place since mid-2008. He said it was a “special” policy to weather the financial crisis.

One thing certain: one of these articles will be right. Of course, to really understand how international financial markets work one should refer to the Currency Cat.

China to do something. Or not | Richard Adams is a post from: Bad Credit Loans

Buyers are being tempted by a glut of bank-owned foreclosed property available at dirt cheap prices, a monthly index shows

Despite unremitting gloom in America’s worst hit corners, the nationwide US property market is showing fragile, flickering signs of life as buyers are tempted by a glut of bank-owned foreclosed property available at dirt cheap prices.

A monthly index published today by property valuations firm Clear Capital found a 5% year-on-year rise in US-wide prices for February, although after an uptick last year, progress has been slow – the quarter-on-quarter increase was zero.

“Although many markets have seen a slow down in price gains, I’m encouraged that prices have remained positive through the first two months of the year,” said Alex Villacorta, senior statistician at Clear Capital.

Positive performers included relatively economically robust cities such as Houston and the Silicon Valley enclave of San Jose. And there were signs, too, that prices are off the bottom in one of America’s poorest cities, Detroit, where Clear Capital found a 21.8% year-on-year rise in prices, albeit from a staggeringly low base with repossessed homes changing hands for as little as $10,000.

Still, the overall picture remains depressed. Banks filed repossession notices on 2.8m American homes during 2009. The worst affected areas were formerly booming areas such as Nevada, southern California and Florida, together with “rust belt” cities in Ohio and Michigan which lost thousands of jobs in manufacturing industries.

The average US family home cost $164,700 in January, according to the National Association of Realtors, which said 38% of homes changing hands were “distressed” transactions sold by banks or owners in danger of foreclosure. Home prices are back to their levels of summer 2003, the closely watched Case-Shiller index revealed last month.

US property market shows signs of life is a post from: Bad Credit Loans

Florida’s once-booming housing market is at the heart of America’s financial crisis. In 2006, an average family home was $248,000; by 2009, that had fallen to $142,000

A short hop from Disneyworld in the heart of Florida, there’s a little slice of Britain on offer at Harry Ramsbottom’s pub. Cornish pasties, beans on toast or the house speciality, fish and chips, are on the menu. A policeman’s helmet jostles for space behind the bar with Scottish banknotes and a pennant depicting a Welsh dragon.

But times are hard in the sub-tropical sunshine. On a recent weekday afternoon, the bar was deserted, with a Premier League football match flickering forlornly on television. Harry Ramsbottom’s is the only operational business in an all-but-abandoned shopping centre – the rest of the strip mall, along a main highway west of Orlando, has been repossessed by the banks.

“We’re having a wretchedly hard time,” says Rodney Forton, who moved from Leeds to Florida in 1994 and runs the pub with his wife, Pamela. “We’ve got fewer bums on seats, and the bums we’ve got left don’t have as much money on them.”

Forton, whose pub is up for sale, reckons the number of British tourists visiting the area is down by as much as 40%. His regular customers – second homeowners – have been hammered by a devastating property collapse, with the value of their holiday homes plummeting by as much as two-thirds.

Florida’s once-booming housing market is at the heart of the US financial crisis. In 2006, the average price of a family home in the state was $248,300 (£164,000). By 2009, that had fallen 43% to $142,600 according to the Florida Association of Realtors. And the worst-hit region of the state is the area surrounding Orlando, a haven of theme parks, lakes and golf courses that act like a honeypot for sun-loving expatriate Brits.

The British consulate in Orlando estimates that 400,000 British expats live in Florida and 1.5 million tourists visit the state each year, ranking Britain second only to Canada among the origin for overseas visitors. Many property owners spend a few months a year in the state and rent out their houses for the rest of the time. Almost all have been badly burned.

Antony and Katrina Heard, a couple from Cornwall, spent $475,000 in 2004 on a four-bedroom corner house in a development called Regal Oaks, just across the road from an amusement park, Old Town in Kissimmee. The estate was never completed, the developer went bust and a similar neighbouring property recently sold for a paltry $100,000.

“It isn’t worth a fraction of what we paid for it. We probably got sucked into the hype and the figures,” says Heard. “I suppose, with hindsight, we should have waited and bought now.”

The Heards, unusually, were cash buyers. Most British homebuyers in Florida used mortgages, often from Lloyds TSB or Bank of America, which used to offer promising terms for international buyers. Buyers are now deep in the mire of negative equity.

Faced with mortgages far higher than the value of their property, some British owners have simply abandoned their properties. Patricia Kawaja, founder of the Florida Association of British Businesses, says: “We’ve had cases of Brits just leaving their homes and going back to the UK owing money. There’s no extradition treaty for people unable to pay their mortgages.”

Dean Churm, the British consul general in Orlando, backs this up. “I’ve certainly heard of it happening. The Orlando area has been particularly badly affected by the property bubble that burst,” he says.

Central Florida has scores of British estate agents who made a good living, at the peak, helping buyers find their dream homes in the sun. Life is less easy now. Richard Veale, a broker at Profiles Realty, moved from Essex to Florida five years ago. He says demand for second homes has dried up: he sold 13 properties to British holidaymakers in 2008 but just two last year, although business buyers keep him busy.

“Buying a property is easier here than in Britain – you sign a contract and you can complete in just two or three weeks. There’s never a chain,” says Veale.

As distressed homeowners from Detroit to Las Vegas can attest, banks in the US foreclose on property far more quickly than their British counterparts. Tens of thousands of bank-owned homes are now on the market, often selling at mass auctions – Veale is fresh from showing off a three-bedroom townhouse priced at $120,000.

Sean Snaith, director of the University of Central Florida’s institute for economic competitiveness, says prices have fallen below the bricks and mortar replacement cost of properties in many parts of the state. “Prices can’t stay down there forever,” he says. “There’s no incentive to build and replace inventory.”

He believes Florida is at, or close to, the bottom in terms of the slump, although with so many vacant homes to sell, it could be a long haul to recovery.

“There have been some severe downturns historically in Florida,” says Snaith. “But the severity of this housing recession, together with the financial crisis and the pronounced credit crunch, has certainly made this one for the ages.”

Banks are being browbeaten by the Obama administration to lend once more, yet many are still risk-averse and are under pressure from regulators to raise their capital ratios.

Florida’s highways are littered with so-called “bandit signs” stuck into grass verges with offers of homes for sale. Dave Robertson, a Glaswegian expat who works for Orlando-based Dolby Properties, has a sanguine view of those who lost out: “There are countless numbers of people who paid way too much for properties. Greed got the better of them at the end of the day. They saw the market rocketing and tried to jump on.”

There are hopes, though, that a new Harry Potter theme park, set to open this spring, will reinvigorate the British visitor trade. The venue, based on JK Rowling’s young magician, joins a crowded clump of big-budget attractions around Orlando including Universal Studios, SeaWorld, Gatorland and even the Bible-themed Holy Land Experience.

Robertson, who has a five-bedroom house on his books for $118,000, insists the Brits will be back, lured by a potent combination of sunshine, relaxation and rollercoasters.

“It’s not all doom and gloom. In my lifetime, we’re never like to see another opportunity like this,” he says. “If I had a pocket full of change, I’d have bought a dozen properties by now.”

Hard times for British expats in the Florida sun is a post from: Bad Credit Loans

With global co-operation fading away, there are disturbing gaps in the approach to financial reform in Europe and the US

Consensus on financial reform seems further away than ever. In January, Barack Obama finally got on board with the “Volcker rule” to get tough with US banks, after months of dithering. The rule, long advocated by Obama’s leading economic wise man Paul Volcker, is intended to separate off the Main Street banking sector, backed by government guarantees if they go bankrupt, from Wall Street hedge funds and investment banks that would be allowed to collapse.

Congress, on the other hand, is pushing for a financial stability oversight council, that would be more discretionary in its approach, curbing banks’ risk-taking through close scrutiny by supervisors.

These are hard to square with European reforms. Europeans are planning to impose a higher price for risk to reform the banks, rather than trying to break them up. They are moving towards a system of clear rules designating capital and liquidity surcharges for dangerously big banks, overseen by independent central banks and regulators.

National politics is back, after some desperate global co-operation to fight the financial crisis. The political dynamics driving reforms are local. Obama announced his support for Volcker’s rule after the Democrats lost Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat to a Republican populist. European banks are fearful that the US will insist on higher capital rules to be imposed this year at the Basel committee that decides global rules – US banks are looking healthier – and European governments have receptive ears: they are keen not to have to pump in more capital or cope with another banking downturn. The US is being driven by the urgent need to respond – and be seen to respond – to taxpayer anger at the bailouts. Europe, with its still undercapitalised banking system, and spectre of Greek, Portuguese and Italian sovereign default, wants some breathing space before a tightening of rules. The promise made at successive G20 summits, to “promote good practices and consistent approaches at the international level“, is ringing a little hollow – and Europe is lagging behind.

Here at CentreForum, we have looked through the draft financial reform legislation (pdf) being passed on both sides of the Atlantic, and have found some disturbing gaps. Securitisation reform – where the EU is planning a 5% retention rule, the US 10% – is one example.

Another is derivatives: the Obama administration is calling for as many derivatives as possible to be routed through independent central counterparties, which act like exchanges and pay up if one party to the trade goes bankrupt halfway through. The Derivatives Act passed by the house of representatives in December 2009 would limit banks or brokers to 20% ownership of a central counterparty. European legislators are considering more relaxed rules, allowing clearing to be conducted by market participants themselves via “multilateral trading facilities”. This may be less effective at limiting counterparty risk – banks and dealers which run their own centralised clearing may try to push clients to take more complex “over-the-counter” derivatives, which would have higher returns.

International co-operation is always difficult, except in times of severe crisis. Now we are over the worst, it is unsurprising that financial reform is being driven by national interests. But, of course, finance is global, and apparently small differences in securitisation, derivatives, capital and trading rules are big opportunities for arbitrage. Capital will shift into countries where the returns are greatest.

Here’s a practical reform that might make a big difference: the Financial Stability Board is not currently overseeing the legislation that governments are planning in most countries to bear down on systemic risk. At present, governments are represented on the FSB through their treasuries, but it would be sensible for legislators to be represented too – the European parliament and the US Congress could certainly benefit from more formal co-operation. The FSB should offer appraisals of the systemic risk legislation that is going to pass in 2010 and 2011 before the bills are passed. National legislatures may find this unwelcome, but they should recognise that it is in all of their interests to find common solutions to the problem of global financial instability. In time, the FSB should be given the financial and human resources it would need to audit the international dimensions of national regulation, so that international rules keep pace with the shifting sands of international capital.

Reform takes on a national agenda | John Springford is a post from: Bad Credit Loans

Women now make up half the US workforce, yet dated attitudes to family-friendly working hold many back. Mary O’Hara meets leading campaigners looking to the UK for inspiration

Toward the end of 2009 when it was announced that for the first time, women constituted half of the US workforce, a report by liberal thinktank the Center for American Progress (CAP) declared: “Quite simply, women as half of all workers changes everything.”

Such a claim could have been met with accusations of hyperbole but the milestone has instead reinvigorated the debate around work-life balance in the US, where traditional attitudes to issues such as working hours and time off have long prevailed. What’s more, many Americans pressing for change see the UK as a model for the direction in which they would like to go.

The report called for a radical re-evaluation of “out of touch” policies still shaped by social and working conditions that are no longer the norm in modern-day America; namely the male breadwinner and female homemaker. Too little was being done by policymakers and employers, it said, to adapt to the “new reality” for US workers.

That reality includes long, often unsociable working hours, more households dependent on multiple incomes, large numbers of single parents, increased demands on carers due to an ageing population, and growing numbers of female breadwinners. The US also lags behind with regard to maternity leave – there is no statutory paid entitlement and just 12 weeks’ unpaid allowance.

Many components of the CAP’s “new reality” are common in western Europe, including Britain, where all political parties are keen to bolster their flexibility friendly credentials ahead of the imminent election. But in America the work-life balance debate has, up to now, largely been marginalised as a “women’s issue”.

In January, official US labour force payroll figures for the month revealed that female employees actually outnumbered men at just over 50%. The January data may have been raw and there were, among other factors, seasonal adjustments to take into account, but coupled with mounting concerns about how the recession has impacted on women and men, it becomes clearer why calls are growing for a reappraisal of work-related policies and practices.

In the CAP report, Maria Shriver – wife of the California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger – notes in the introduction: “Men have lost three out of four jobs so far since the recession began in December 2007, leaving millions of wives to bring home the bacon while their husbands search for work. Women working outside the home, however, is not a short-term blip … This is a long-term trend that shows no signs of reversing.”

According to Ann O’Leary, executive director of the Berkeley Centre for Health, Economic & Family Security at the University of California, it is this fact that should wake policymakers up. “That women are more than half the workforce is extremely significant but what has been even more transformative – and I think what has shocked most people – is the fact that women are increasingly the primary breadwinner,” O’Leary says. “In four out of 10 American families, women are now the primary breadwinner.”

While discussions concerning women at work can get segmented into areas such as boardroom representation or pay inequality, O’Leary thinks what is needed is a more expansive approach that encompasses women, men, community groups, campaigners, employers and government.

“Up until now, government policymakers focused on supporting women’s entry into a male-oriented workforce on par with men – a workplace where policies on hours, pay, benefits, and leave time were designed around male breadwinners,” she says.

“But allowing women to play by the same rules as the male single breadwinner of yore is not enough. Too many workers – especially women and low-wage workers – simply cannot work in the way the breadwinner once worked with a steady job and lifelong marriage with a wife at home.”

Shifting trends

Just one in five American families with children are of the traditional male breadwinner, female homemaker variety compared with almost half in 1975. The problem, according to O’Leary, is that while change has been far-reaching, there has been no corresponding shift in either the law or the ways the average worker is expected to work.

“This really cuts across class,” she says. “Among low income families two thirds have women as the primary breadwinner.” Such trends matter not just for social policy she says, but crucially, for broader economic policy. “The US has not done what is necessary and has not realised that this is not just about women. It’s about what we are going to do to compete in the 24/7 global economy.”

John Podesta, a former Clinton-era White House chief of staff and current chief executive of CAP, has argued that the “outdated model of the American family” relied upon by policymakers and employers needs to be directly challenged. “Despite the existence of innovative practices in corporate America, most employers fail to acknowledge or accommodate the daily juggling act their workers perform,” he says.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett, an economist and founding president of the Centre for Work-Life Policy, has written extensively on the issue of women in the workplace. Her latest book, Top Talent: Keeping Performance up when Business is Down, is a guide for how employers need to act to motivate staff in a recession, but she says how women fare in difficult times needs to viewed through a wider lens.

Hewlett says multiple factors are responsible for the dramatic alterations to women’s roles in the home and their representation in the American workplace including progressive laws such as the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act, ongoing campaigning for reform, and even some employers unilaterally reforming working practices to retain “precious female talent”.

However, the danger with placing so much emphasis on women crossing the 50% threshold, according to Hewlett, is that it could easily be interpreted as women making more progress than they actually are.

“Women may now be more than 50% of the workforce but obviously that disguises ongoing inequalities. For example, many women are in part-time employment and many are low paid. There are a few stand-out corporations taking great initiative [to be flexible employers],” she adds, “but not enough.

“We need to think in terms of a ‘new normal’ where it is recognised that the old ways of working no longer fit. We don’t live in a nine-to-five society and women are not going to stop wanting to work.”

Hewlett argues that it “still matters” that women are not on a level playing field. “Our research has shown that a major hurdle for women’s progress is still the ‘old boys’ network’. It is not a meritocracy, more like a quickly narrowing pyramid. We need to see a lot more women in the senior ranks [of companies] to really turn things around.”

Signs of women’s progress are unmistakable in the US from the proportion of women versus men gaining college degrees (currently approximately 57% of bachelor’s degrees and 60% of master’s degrees are awarded to women) to the expanding ranks of women in middle management.

For Hewlett and many others, however, this can conveniently obscure their absence further up the corporate food chain. Women in America – as elsewhere – remain notably under-represented at board level. Just over a 10th of all board members in the US are female. In addition, while a woman may have made a serious run for the vice-presidency, they remain markedly under-represented in the upper echelons of politics – 17% of the members of both houses of congress combined are women.

Flexible working practices will only work, says Hewlett, if there are more women at the very top and if opportunities to sign up to alternative working patterns such as home working are fostered at all levels within organisations, including government.

Once again drawing on the British experience of altering policy, O’Leary suggests what would really benefit the US is doing what was done in the UK and “framing the issue as one not just about women”. She cites the British government’s efforts over the past decade to promote flexibility for all workers, not just mothers, as “much more advanced” than the US. The fact that reforms such as giving all workers a legal right to request flexible working have made it on to the statute book are “inspirational” for Americans hoping to achieve similar goals, she adds.

For O’Leary it is not so much believing Britain has found the answers to work-life balance issues – she accepts that, as recent studies by the Fawcett Society have reaffirmed, women continue to lag behind men in many aspects of working life including the type of jobs they do, pay and status. What she and others like her hope is that America can learn from how momentum was built in Britain toward changing the political discourse around work, flexibility and equality.

“There is never a good time to talk about these issues,” O’Leary says. “They are complicated and recession doesn’t make it any easier. But we need to change the way we talk about this new reality and to do that we need political leadership.”

Could boardroom quotas hold the key?

Before we get too carried away with the UK’s family-friendly working practices, it’s worth remembering that in our boardrooms, there is still some work to do. In Britain, high-flying UK businesswomen such as Karren Brady (pictured) are the exception rather than the norm – in fact, research by the Fawcett Society in 2008 shows a paltry 11% of UK company directors are women – a lower percentage than many of our European neighbours and the US.

Norway leads the way in redressing this imbalance. In 2002 it became the first country to insist that women should fill 40% of its boardrooms. When the law was introduced women accounted for only 6% of Norwegian boardroom representatives, now 44% of company directors are female.

Several other western European countries have taken inspiration from the Norwegian model. France has just announced laws to achieve 40% female boardroom representation within six years, while Spain passed similar legislation in 2007. Germany has also introduced “soft” quotas in the form of a voluntary charter to gender equality and the Netherlands looks poised to follow suit.

Could such a move work in Britain? Dianah Worman, diversity adviser with the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, says that while increasing the numbers of women in boardrooms is a start, it should not be seen as the answer.

“It’s about changing behaviours,” she says. “The ambition should be to have more diversity in our boardrooms, rather than just upping the numbers.

“We need different kinds of perspectives on business, life and the world we’re living in, and not just expect women at board level to act and think like men would. If we can achieve that at the top, it’s far more likely to have an effect on the way businesses function generally.” Graham Snowdon

In pursuit of flexible working is a post from: Bad Credit Loans

Anti-tax revolts have led to a huge gap between well-resourced schools for the wealthy and starved-for-cash schools for the poor

Over the next two weeks, more than 5,000 Los Angeles school employees – teachers and other personnel – will receive lay-off notices informing them that they might not have jobs come the start of the next academic year. Not all of them will ultimately lose their salaries, but many likely will. The reason? In addition to the hundreds of millions of dollars the city budget is short by, the school district, which has separate revenue streams, is also in the red by a staggering $640m.

The layoffs aren’t just impacting Los Angeles. Around California, the education system is in crisis. Schools in the San Diego area face the loss of hundreds of teachers. In northern towns like Elk Grove, hit particularly hard by the housing bust, about one-sixth of school employees will receive lay-off notices. Even a university town like Davis, which prides itself on having one of the best public school systems in the state, is feeling the pain. Davis, a small town of fewer than 70,000 residents, recently announced that more than 100 teachers would lose their jobs.

With property tax revenues shrinking and state contributions to plug funding gaps on the decline, California’s schools are haemorrhaging teachers and non-academic staff, cutting back on virtually every non-mandatory aspect of education – music, arts, science and so on – cleaning facilities less often, reducing special education programmes, and more. Many districts are all-but eliminating the presence of school nurses, counsellors, and psychologists. Teachers are being hit with pay cuts. The length of the school year is being trimmed. I’ll stop there, but you can be sure that the list goes on.

What’s insane about this is that everyone knows California’s heading in the wrong direction here, yet the financial crisis is so vast, and the options for raising taxes so limited at this point because of the toxic politics around the issue, that nobody can see light at the end of this particular tunnel.

By most measures, California already performs poorly when it comes to educating its 6 million-plus public school students. It spends far less per kid than the national average – thus largely negating the arguments of conservatives who say that California’s schooling crisis is all to do with overpaid, over-benefited teachers – it has higher student-teacher ratios, it has below-average test scores for maths and reading, and it has higher than average high school drop-out rates.

In fact, over the past several decades anti-tax revolts have turned a once-vaunted public school model into one characterised by cascading crises and growing gaps between well-resourced schools in affluent neighbourhoods and starved-for-cash schools in poor communities. Mediocre numbers from a decade ago, regarding spending per student, have been replaced by truly awful numbers as the financial crisis has worsened.

Ironically, barely a week before LA announced the likelihood of mass layoffs, students from three low-performing schools in low-income neighborhoods sued the school board because of earlier rounds of layoffs which removed thousands of teachers and school personnel statewide in 2008 and 2009. The class-action lawsuit alleges that the cuts resulted in such chaotic learning environments that quality education became well-nigh impossible.

And that gets at the nub of what is happening here: the education setting for increasing numbers of poor Californians is becoming little more than a charade.

Since California continues to have plenty of wealthy citizens and plenty of families willing to spend a fortune to ensure their children’s educational needs are met, the end result of all of this will be not a complete societal collapse but an increasing privatisation of education, as of so many other core parts of life. Similar to trends that developed in Thatcher’s England, or in boom-time New York, so in California the middle classes will, increasingly, opt out of a damaged, inadequate public school system. And that will be a great tragedy.

Historically, American public schools have been seen as a great equalising force, as institutions worth investing in and sustaining precisely because virtually every family had a stake in their continued success. Take away that universal appeal and they increasingly become educational settings of last resort, a sort of charity handout for those too poor to be able to access the private market. And that, in turn, will still further undermine the willingness of taxpayers to properly fund the system.

Recessions come and go, but if California – and many other states – can’t work out a way to better protect quality schooling during this time of austerity then the events of the past few years will leave lasting scars on America’s societal fabric.

California’s education charade | Sasha Abramsky is a post from: Bad Credit Loans

Barack Obama passes a new law to encourage foreign tourists to visit – by charging them for the privilege

The US yesterday passed a new law designed to boost dwindling numbers of foreign tourists – it will start charging them for the privilege of entering the country.

The bizarre move has prompted controversy on both sides of the Atlantic and warnings that it could backfire. Under the Travel Promotion Act signed into law by Barack Obama yesterday, a new national marketing body will be set up to promote US holidays abroad, a job that until now has only been done piecemeal by individual states. However the money to pay for the “multi-channel marketing campaign” is to be raised in part from visiting tourists, by charging them $10 for permission to enter. The rest of the funding will be raised in private sector contributions.

Currently visitors from Britain and the EU do not need a visa to visit the US on holiday, but must complete an ESTA (Electronic Scheme for Travel Authorisation) application online, giving detailed personal information. Filling in the form has been free, but it will now cost of $10 per person. The date for the introduction of the fee has not yet been announced, but officials estimate it will take between five months and a year to set up a system to collect the money.

Many within the tourism industry, in both the US and the UK, welcomed the move, saying it would help reverse the decline in visitors as a result of the global recession and increasing public concerns about the treatment of tourists by US immigration officials.

“President Obama has acted to support the power of travel to serve as an economic stimulant, job generator and diplomatic tool,” said Roger Dow, president of the US Travel Association, an umbrella body for the US travel industry.

Richard Wimms, managing director of British-based holiday company The Vacations Group, said the move was “great news”. “Up until now the US hasn’t had a central fund to promote travel there, but it has been much needed and is long overdue,” he said. “As far as the $10 fee is concerned, I think it’s a relatively small sum compared with the cost of the whole holiday, and is certainly far less than the airport tax charged for leaving the UK.”

But others have warned the US levy might prompt tit-for-tat charges from more countries.

“We generally oppose tourism taxes, which this is – we’re concerned about retaliatory action by other countries,” said Steve Lott, a North America spokesman for the International Air Transport Association, which represents 230 airlines worldwide. “We don’t want foreigners to have to jump through so many hoops that they just give up and don’t bother coming ot the US. “

According to the US Travel Association, foreign visitor numbers have dropped every year since 2001, with 2.4 million fewer overseas visitors last year than in 2000.

US to charge tourists for entering country is a post from: Bad Credit Loans