Help me help Kamala and sign up

 

— This is a request for donations to fund my upcoming trip, as well as links where you can sign up to volunteer and/or donate directly to the campaign. Dear Friends, In a few weeks I’ll be off to volunteer in and around Green Bay during the final stretch of the campaign. I will be canvassing door to door and training others to do the same in our efforts to Get Out The Vote (GOTV) for Kamala Harris, as well as for (D) Senator Tammy Baldwin’s re-election bid and to help flip Wisconsin’s 8th Congressional district from Red to Blue for the first time in over a decade! I’m not as young as was I was sixteen years ago when I spent the last six weeks of the 2008 campaign doing the same for Obama in Columbus, Ohio. But I am confident I can still have an impact. I will be spending the later half of everyday, every evening and weekends doing nothing else while I’m in Green Bay. I am asking my community to help me cover the expense of travel, rental car, gas and lodging through the link to my GoFundMe page below. Please contribute what you can, if you can. If you would like to volunteer in a swing state yourself, there are many opportunities in the three Blue Wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, as well as in the four other swing states now in play- Nevada, Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia -all of which need volunteers! Check the links at the bottom of this message*, or contact me and I’ll set you up with a regional organizer. Also, there is special work if you are a lawyer**. If you want to get paid to canvas in a swing state there are several options for that as well including the ones mentioned in this article , or you can apply to work as a paid staffer for the Harris campaign here. If you prefer, to donate directly to the campaign in Wisconsin to help pay their staff go to Wisdems.org For everyone else who is staying home, there is SO much you can do from where you are, including sending postcards: here, here or here (arguably the most effective of the remote options), or if you prefer texting and/or email  here  and of course phone calls. Pretty much everything other than the actual door knocking can be done remotely.  In appreciation of your support,  Richard Salzman 1751 Charles Ave Arcata CA 95521 707.822.5500  WARNING!   I was not aware of GoFundMe's sneaky new tactic to add "tips" to your contribution when I set this up.  Just zero out the tip BEFORE you click donate as they do fine off the perfectly reasonable 3% processing fee and need no additional tips: GoFundMe Please note, Any funds in surplus of my costs will be used on behalf of other volunteers (e.g. gas, food, lodging) or on expenses at the local headquarters from which I’ll be working. ----- How to talk about Project 2025 Options to travel within California to win swing House seats: CA-3, CA-13, CA-22 ** SWING STATE SIGN UP LINKS: Michigan: https://michigandems.com/volunteer/ Pennsylvania: https://www.padems.org/swing-state/  and: https://www.indivisiblephiladelphia.com/what-we-do  Wisconsin: https://wisdems.org/get-involved/ Arizona: https://azdem.org/take-action/ Nevada: https://actionnetwork.org/forms/nv-dems-volunteer-signu North Carolina: https://www.ncdp.org/action/ Georgia  https://georgiademocrat.org/take-action/  and: Stacy Abrams’ Fair Fight: https://www.fairfight.com/lfgv -------- ***  PRO BONO OPPORTUNITIES FOR LAWYERS: Campaign Legal Center: https://campaignlegal.org/information-lawyer-volunteers Defend election officials: https://eoldn.org/  We the Action: https://wetheaction.org/projects/2435-join-we-the-action-s-voter-vanguard Vote Riders - Voter ID education and assistance efforts: https://www.voteriders.org/volunteer/ Stacy Abrams’ Fair Fight: https://www.fairfight.com/lfgv Lawyer’s Committee Voting Rights Project: https://www.lawyerscommittee.org/project/voting-rights-project/ The ABA’s Perfecting Democracy Initiative:https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/projects-and-initiatives/perfecting-democracy/ ----- Why the Blue Wall Looms So Large Once again, the presidential election will likely come down to how Democrats perform in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. By Ronald Brownstein for The Atlantic  -August 22, 2024 American politics over the past generation has experienced the equivalent of continental drift. The tectonic plates of our political life have shifted and scraped, toppling old allegiances and forging new demographic and geographic patterns of support. The turmoil has shattered and remade each party’s agenda, message, and electoral coalition. And yet, no matter what else changes, the most direct path to the White House always seems to run through a handful of blue-collar states in the nation’s old industrial heartland. This year is no exception. Strategists in both parties consider Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin the pivotal states that are most likely to decide the winner in 2024—just as they did in 2020 and 2016. Although taking this trio of Rust Belt battlegrounds is not the only way for Vice President Kamala Harris to reach the necessary 270 Electoral College votes, “if you look at the history of those states … then you have to believe they are the fastest way to get there,” says the longtime Democratic operative Tad Devine, who managed the Electoral College strategy for the Democratic presidential nominees in 1988, 2000, and 2004. Republicans consider those three states equally indispensable for Donald Trump. If Harris can sweep Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which offer a combined 44 Electoral College votes, and hold every state that President Joe Biden won by three percentage points or more in 2020, and win the congressional district centered on Omaha in Nebraska (one of two states that award some of their electors by congressional district), she would reach exactly the magic 270 votes. In turn, even if Trump sweeps all four of the major Sun Belt battlegrounds—North Carolina and Georgia in the Southeast, and Arizona and Nevada in the Southwest—he cannot reach 270 without carrying at least one of the big three Rust Belt states (unless he achieves a major upset in one of the states that Biden won last time by at least three percentage points). The priority on Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin is evident in both the time and the money that each campaign is expending there. Both sides are bombarding these states with personal appearances and television advertising: Pennsylvania ranks first, Michigan second, and Wisconsin fourth (behind Georgia) in the ad-spend total, at more than $200 million so far for the three states, according to figures from AdImpact. And for the Democrats gathered in Chicago, Harris’s prospects in the three Rust Belt states is a perpetual topic of discussion, excitement, and anxiety. “Let me just say, in conclusion,” former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told the Michigan delegation at the convention yesterday morning. “No pressure: The future of the nation is riding on you.” Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin were a significant part of what I termed in 2009 the “Blue Wall”—the 18 states that ultimately voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in all six elections from 1992 through 2012. That was the largest bloc of states consistently won by the Democrats over that many elections since the formation of the modern party system in 1828. The 2016 election broke that pattern: Trump won the presidency by dislodging the big three of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin from the Blue Wall by a combined margin of about 80,000 votes. In 2020, Biden reclaimed all three—and with them, the White House—by a combined margin of nearly 260,000 votes. Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette Law School Poll, has calculated that in both 2016 and 2020, Wisconsin was the tipping-point state that provided the 270th Electoral College vote (first for Trump and then for Biden). Priorities USA, a leading Democratic super PAC, projects that Pennsylvania is the most likely such fulcrum this year. Perhaps because of this tipping-point effect, my term Blue Wall has morphed into a shorthand for these crucial states—even though they were simply the three bricks that fell out of the rest of the wall in 2016. At a breakfast meeting of the Pennsylvania delegation that kicked off convention week in Chicago on Monday, speakers talked about defending the Blue Wall across Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin against Trump as urgently as characters in Game of Thrones would discuss fortifying the Wall in the north against the White Walkers. “It is no secret; we are the keystone state of the Blue Wall,” Sharif Street, the Pennsylvania party chair, said. “As goes Pennsylvania, so will go America.” A little later, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Harris’s vice-presidential nominee, popped into the meeting with a similar message. “I just came from the Wisconsin breakfast, and the Blue Wall is solid, people,” he told the large crowd in a hotel ballroom. Another special guest, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, dwelled on the topic. “Can we all agree we are going to be the Blue Wall again in 2024?” she asked. “Thank you for helping to save the world with us a few years ago. Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin: This race once again is going to come down to our big states.” Before these states became the three-headed decider in presidential elections, campaigns usually considered Ohio—a demographically and economically similar neighbor—to be the tipping-point state. Early in the 1988 presidential race, I interviewed Lee Atwater, the legendary GOP strategist who was running George H. W. Bush’s campaign, and he told me that the campaign’s entire Electoral College strategy was to lock down so many states that Democrat Michael Dukakis could not reach 270 without winning Ohio, and then to defend Ohio with what Atwater called a “gubernatorial” level of campaign spending. Sixteen years later, Karl Rove, the chief strategist for George W. Bush’s reelection campaign against the Democrat John Kerry, likewise considered Ohio “the key state,” he told me this week. Bush eventually won a second term (by the second-narrowest Electoral College majority for a reelected president ever) when he outstripped Kerry in Ohio by about 120,000 votes. The state remained vital for Barack Obama, who carried it in both his 2008 and 2012 victories. But since then, Ohio has moved solidly toward the Republican Party, which has established overwhelming advantages in the state’s small towns and rural areas. Ohio no longer functions as a fulcrum in the presidential race; it is no longer even a state that Democrats contest at that level. As Ohio has faded, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin have together filled its former pivotal role in presidential contests. An earlier generation of political analysts and operatives viewed Ohio as decisive partly because it seemed to capture America in miniature, due to its racial, educational, and economic mix and rural/urban makeup. Yet that microcosm thesis doesn’t explain the prominence of the new big three. Demographically, the states are not all that representative of an America that is inexorably growing more diverse: All three are whiter and older than the national average, with a lower proportion of college graduates and immigrants, according to census figures. The national trends regarding educational attainment and ethnic diversity that have unfolded in many other states, especially across the Sun Belt, have evolved much more slowly in the big three Rust Belt states. In particular, white voters without a college degree,who fell below 40 percent as a proportion of the national vote for the first time in 2020, according to census data, still cast about half the vote in Michigan and Pennsylvania that year and nearly three-fifths of it in Wisconsin, according to calculations by William Frey, a demographer at Brookings Metro, a center-left think tank. Voters of color, who in 2020 cast about three of every 10 votes nationally, constituted only about one in five voters in Michigan, one in six in Pennsylvania, and one in 10 in Wisconsin. If these Rust Belt battlegrounds still wield great influence in presidential races without being representative of the country overall, what explains that continued prominence? Experts I spoke with offered three persuasive explanations. One is that a critical mass of voters in these states are conscious of their fulcrum role and therefore devote more attention to presidential contests than most voters do elsewhere. Rove likens the role that Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin now play in the general election to the part that Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina have typically played as the early states on the primary calendar. “There may be something to be said for them taking their roles seriously,” Rove told me. “Like, ‘We are going to pay a little bit more attention to this, and our politics are going to be slightly more robust.’” Another explanation for these states’ central role is that they have remained highly competitive in presidential elections when so many other states “have made a very rapid transition,” as Rove put it, into the camp of one party or the other. Mark Graul, a GOP operative who ran George W. Bush’s Wisconsin campaigns, told me that the Rust Belt battlegrounds have remained so close because, within them, all of the big political changes over the past generation have largely offset one another. For example, although Democrats are benefiting from better performance in the growing white-collar suburbs around such cities as Philadelphia, Detroit, and Milwaukee, those gains have largely been matched by increasing GOP margins among the substantial small-town and rural portions of these states. In the long run, Graul told me, Republicans won’t be able to sustain that trade-off, because their strongholds are either stagnant or losing population. For the near term, though, these states “have been able to weather the demographic and geographic voting shifts and still remain incredibly closely divided,” he said. The third explanation—identifying perhaps the most important dynamic at work—centers on these states’ powerful tendency to move together in elections. The big three have voted for the same party in every presidential election since 1980, with the sole exception of 1988 (when Wisconsin went with Dukakis, while Michigan and Pennsylvania backed Bush). Even more remarkably, in this century the same party has controlled the governorship in all three states simultaneously, except for one four-year period when Democrats held Pennsylvania while the other two elected Republicans. Devine told me that because of the demographic and economic similarities and their proclivity for moving in tandem, the three states should be “considered a single entity,” which he calls “Mi-Pa-Wi.” With its 44 combined Electoral College votes, Devine said, Mi-Pa-Wi is in effect the last true swing state of that size, given that the states of comparable magnitude—California, New York, Florida, and Texas—all tilt solidly blue or red. “These three states are really one big state that is going to decide the election,” he said. On paper, that should be an ominous prospect for Democrats in the Trump era. The foundation of Trump’s electoral coalition is non-college-educated white voters—and they constitute a significantly larger share of the vote in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin than they do nationally. Yet, at their national convention this week, Democrats from these states clearly feel more optimistic about their prospects now than they did when Biden was the presumptive nominee. “I think this race has been reset,” Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, told me after the delegation breakfast on Monday. A recent survey from the New York Times/Siena College poll showed Harris with a four-percentage-point lead over Trump in all three states. Other surveys have shown the two candidates more closely matched, but almost all polls show Harris gaining. Her revival builds on the larger trend across the region. After Trump’s upset victories in 2016, Democrats have regained the initiative in all three states. In 2018, each of them elected a Democratic governor; then each backed Biden in 2020; and in 2022, all three elected Democratic governors again—in every instance by a larger margin than in 2018. Democrats now also hold five of their six U.S. Senate seats. The winning formula for Democrats in all three states has been similar. Although the party has rarely captured a majority of working-class white voters, its winning candidates—such as Whitmer, Shapiro, Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers, and Biden in 2020—have routinely performed a few points better with those voters than the party does elsewhere. Democrats have also posted huge advantages among young people, especially in such college towns as Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Madison, Wisconsin. And in all three states, Democrats are benefiting from expanding margins among college-educated voters in the suburbs of major cities—an advantage that widened after Dobbs, the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion. (Later that year, Whitmer, Shapiro, and Evers each won about three-fifths of college-educated white voters: a crushing margin that improved on Biden’s performance, according to exit polls.) These formidable gains with white-collar voters have enabled the party to withstand disappointing turnout and somewhat shrinking margins among Black voters in Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, and other midsize cities. Democrats hope that Harris can reverse that electoral erosion in Black communities, while expanding the party’s advantages in well-educated suburbs, especially among women, and recapturing young people who had soured on Biden. Her biggest challenge in the region will be holding as much as possible of Biden’s support among older and blue-collar white voters, who are probably the most receptive audience for the coming Republican attack ads claiming that Harris is a “woke” liberal extremist who is soft on crime and immigration. Dan Kildee, a Democrat who is retiring after this session as the House representative of a district that includes Flint, Michigan, told me that this sort of hard-edged message will find an audience among some working-class white voters, but he believes Harris can keep those losses to a manageable level. “There’s a whole segment of that cohort of the electorate that now has evidence of what a Donald Trump presidency looks like,” Kildee said, “and will weigh that against the more hopeful and optimistic message that Vice President Harris brings.” The margin is very tight: Even if Harris does everything right, an optimal outcome for her in these states might be winning them by one or two percentage points. Shapiro could have been speaking about all three states when he told reporters on Monday: “You can get to a race that’s sort of basically statistically tied, and getting that last point or two in Pennsylvania is really, really tough.” But unlike what happened in 2016, when Hillary Clinton famously, fatally, took her eye off Michigan and Wisconsin to focus on campaigning elsewhere, Democrats are singularly focused on cementing Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin back into the Blue Wall. At the Pennsylvania breakfast, Whitmer told the delegates: “Josh [Shapiro] and I and Tony [Evers] are talking about a Blue Wall strategy. The three of us together, in all three of our states, turning out the voters, getting people pumped up, educating people.” If they can celebrate victory after that effort, she said, it will mean they can “say ‘Madam President’ for the first time in the history of this country.” — Also: Ronald Brownstein: How the Rustbelt paved Trump’s road to victory --- ------

GoFundMe

Vote Ben McLaughlin, Superior Court Judge, June 7, 2022

Dear Editor,

Right now the historic confirmation hearings of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson are underway--historical as she is the first Black woman ever nominated to sit on The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS).

What strikes me is that there is currently an African American, Justice Clarence Thomas, and there is the female Justice, Amy Coney Barrett, seated on the highest court in the land. Yet I don’t find that either of those attributes have engendered any sense of comfort that either of those two will look out for my rights, or those of many of my fellow Americans.

I celebrate Ms. Jackson being the first Black woman on The SCOTUS and, I stand with Cory Booker and second his sentiments on this matter (see 10 minute video at: tinyurl.com). However, what I find even more intriguing in regards to social justice, is that Ketanji Brown Jackson is also the first nominee in the history of The SCOTUS to have once served as a public defender!

That brings me to Ben McLaughlin, candidate for Superior Court Judge here in Humboldt County

Most Judges are former prosecutors, as is Ben. He served seven years as a Deputy District Attorney and during that time he had a 90% conviction rate. Impressive numbers, and one reason why he has earned the endorsement of so many in law enforcement, including Del Norte County District Attorney Katherine Micks, the retired police chief of Arcata Tom Chapman, and the retired chief of police of Eureka Steve Watson, Fortuna City Councilman and former Fortuna police officer, Humboldt County Deputy Sheriff and District Attorney Investigator Mike Losey, as well as the endorsement of former District Attorney Paul Gallegos. But, Ben has also been endorsed by the current Humboldt County Public Defender Luke Brownfield. 

You see, Ben McLaughlin has also served five years as a Public Defender.  This is a significant distinction from his opponent in this race. As I reference when speaking of the current Supreme Court nominee, we want judges who understand both side of the courtroom. We want judges who understand the court room not just from the perspective of the most privileged, but also from the least empowered in our society. This experience has added to Ben's respect for all parties involved in the legal process. Including his time in private practice, Ben McLaughlin has 23 years of experience in the court room.

To me, this makes Ben McLaughlin the more qualified candidate for judge. 

Ben has the proven experience that creates respect for the process and for all parties. This is why we should elect Ben Mclaughlin Superior Court Judge on June 7th. 

You can visit his website: Ben4Judge.com to learn more, and he seems to respond to all email directly, which I think is pretty cool!

Richard Salzman

Arcata CA

LAST CHANCE By Richard Salzman for The Northcoast Journal ( Highway safety should be top priority)

Back in November a dear friend and I took our annual trip to Ashland, Oregon, to enjoy the fall leaves in Lithia Park. I love most of the drive, first up the coast along U.S. Highway 101 and then following the Smith River Valley on U.S. Route 199.

But that short distance when you're on Interstate 5 in the Medford area is a shocking wake-up call. This tranquil drive suddenly becomes jarringly unpleasant as giant trucks and tractor trailers are right alongside you at 65 miles an hour. I drive a full-size sedan but no one in an automobile could survive a collision with these monster trucks. Now imagine these same giant trucks, but when you're on the steepest windy parts of 101 in Southern Humboldt or 199 in the Smith River Canyon. Now imagine it's at night, in a pouring rain. 

Why? Why? Why would you put your citizens in such danger? With the completion of Buckhorn Summit on State Route 299, STAA trucks can now access Humboldt County, benefitting those few businesses whose profit margins will increase with access to STAA trucks. We do not need to be putting more large trucks on 199 perched above the Smith River, nor on Highway 101 between southern Mendocino and northern Humboldt County, where 101 has long stretches with curves that strain the suspension of most vehicles driving at 65 mph, never mind if a deer or a loose tire suddenly crosses your path. In such a situation, the one thing you do not want, is to be alongside of, or head-on with, an oversized truck. 

Maybe you think I'm being a bit hysterical and just frighten easily. Well if you doubt me, please take a moment to visit www.trucksafety.org or read these statements from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety: One in 10 highway deaths occurs in a crash involving a large truck. Most deaths in large truck crashes are passenger vehicle occupants. Truck braking capability is often a factor in truck crashes. Loaded tractor-trailers take 20 to 40 percent farther than cars to stop, and the discrepancy is greater on wet and slippery roads.(Rain much on the North Coast?)

Bigger, longer, heavier trucks are deadlier. But then nothing could be more obvious. Yet there are forces that want to subject us to exactly that: bigger, longer, heavier trucks on our windy roads, traveling at high speeds, more and more with drivers who are chronically fatigued. Once you let the STAA truck through, drivers may well have traveled thousands of miles before they end up next to you on a dark and rainy night. Tell me again, why do we want to make our lives so much more dangerous? 

Now back to my trip to Ashland. In both directions we had the now routine one-way controlled traffic as we passed the chronically failing road at Last Chance Grade south of Crescent City on 101. You may have read recently that a final determination has been made that, in spite of the more than $35 million CalTrans has spent over the last three decades to try to shore up that section of road, physics and geology make it impossible. The road will have to be moved. It is no longer an option, it is now a necessity. The Last Chance Grade Economic Study concluded that a project cost of as much as $1.6 billion was justified based upon the local economic impacts when the current road fails, and fail it will. Oh and don't forget, the post office is still intent on moving our distribution center from Eureka to Medford, so when the road is out, the mail will take even longer to arrive. 

Depending on which alternative route around Last Chance Grade is selected (the most likely of which will include tunnels), the preliminary geotechnical recommendations alone will take up to four years, with the final recommendations likely to be 12 years away. Point being: We can not afford to waste time with other unnecessary local highway projects.

So, here we have a billion-dollar project that will take years to complete, but is required if we wish to keep the coast highway, our sole artery to Del Norte County, open. Yet for some reason someone has CalTrans convinced that we should spend millions more of our tax dollars to widen 101 through Richardson Grove State Park and 199 through the Smith River Canyon so that longer, bigger, heavier trucks can be put onto more of our local highways. The number of people who died in large truck crashes was 16 percent higher in 2014 than in 2009. Why?  Simple. Because more bigger trucks are on our roads. 

But if saving lives doesn't compel you alone, you might also consider the significant increase in wear and tear to our own roads. Also, why are we considering widening a highway through a state park?  In October, 101 was closed for an entire day when a diesel tanker crashed spilling 5,000 gallons of petroleum product near Dora Creek —  a local swimming hole on the South Fork of the Eel River. Richardson Grove and the Smith River Canyon help protect the North Coast from crashes like these that can have tragic consequences. Let's not destroy that.

There is a local group that has been rationally addressing these issues with science and common sense. You can find out more and support their efforts at transportationpriorities.org.

Richard Salzman is an agent representing illustrators and visual artists. He lives in Arcata.

Support Rent Stabilization for Humboldt County Mobil Home Parks

Evict 'em 

Editor:

Hilary Mosher explained in her views piece "Disquiet on the Mobile Home Front" (Aug. 13) that the board of supervisors won't even put the issue of rent stabilization at mobile home parks on the agenda and expressed that Ryan Sundberg, Virginia Bass and Rex Bohn are subverting the public process.

I hope that neither Ms. Mosher nor anyone else who's been paying attention is surprised that the these three supervisors are more concerned with the profit margins of the owners of the mobile home parks than with the plight of Humboldt County's seniors and other low-income citizens.

All one need do is look at the public records of the donations to their campaigns to see that Sundberg, Bass and Bohn are funded and backed by the largest landowners and the related development industry business owners. The reason these well-heeled folks back these three supervisors is that they know they can count on them to always vote for industry's interests over those of the average citizen. And you have to give all three of them credit for being unabashed in their public display of contempt for the rest of us.

As to the McKinleyville Advisory Committee (MAC), Hilary is wrong to refer to them as in any way representing the citizens of McKinleyville. The MAC is a sham, created by the board of supervisors, which appoints all its members, as a way of further subverting the will of the voters and to provide cover for Sundberg's actions on behalf of the land developers' cabal.

It is long past time to vote these supervisors out of office.

Richard Salzman

Arcata

http://www.northcoastjournal.com/humboldt/evict-em/Content?oid=3217007

Building a better economy for Humboldt County

http://www.times-standard.com/opinion/20150907/lets-take-county-into-the-future-not-the-past

Let’s take county into the future, not the past

09/07/15,

Dave Spreen’s “My Word” (“Building on our rural creative class economy a better bet,” Times-Standard, Aug. 29, Page A4) was the most intelligent commentary yet on the folly of CalTrans priorities on the Northcoast. Those arguing for this mid-20th Century infrastructure expansion will leave us with a obsolete economic structure while eroding our quality of life as well endangering our citizens. Let’s build for the future not for the past. The fact is that Humboldt’s potential is far greater then extraction industries or bulk shipping. There’s a reason we were recently voted the second most livable city, and widening roads for oversized truck traffic is the antithesis of what gives us the quality of life that’s capable of attracting the best and brightest from artisans to 21st Century entrepreneurs. I know this sustainable business development model has not materialized as fast as we’d all like, but if you think we should instead rebuild the whaling station in Trinidad, or a port for deep draft container ships, or large scale gravel mining, or continue to invest in the pipe dream of rebuilding a freight rail line, then I bet you could get hired as an advisor at CalTrans!

Richard Salzman, Arcata

PROFIT MOTIVE

Raising The Minimum Wage

Chris Rock said it best with this comment that if you’re being paid minimum wage: “your employer is basically saying HEY, if I could pay you less, I would, …but the law won’t let me!”

The point is that businesses pay low wages in order to maintain higher profits.   

As the founding father of free market economics Adam Smith explained  back in the eighteenth century, the ‘Butcher, the Brewer, and the Baker’  set up shop not out of some benevolent desire to put food on our table  [or to create jobs], but in order to make a profit.  

So the short-term impact of raising the minimum wage (for companies with over 25 employees) will be a slight reduction in the profit margin of business owners and corporate shareholders.

As to the myth that this modest raise in the wages of our lowest paid workers will lead to a significant loss of jobs, it’s simply not true: A review of 64 studies on minimum wage increases found no discernible effect on employment. Additionally, more than 600 economists,  seven of them Nobel Prize winners in economics, have signed onto a letter in support of raising the minimum wage.

As to the myth that it will lead to a significant increase in the cost of goods or services to the consumer, I would remind you what most of  us were taught in the elementary school, that prices are based on supply and demand, the most fundamental concept of economics and the backbone of our market economy.  If business owners could charge more, they’d be doing it now.

In Eureka, the largest number of employees earning minimum wage work for multi-national corporations including McDonald’s, Walmart and Target. The prices at these large chain stores are generally set at corporate headquarters and not store to store and their profits are considerable and they can in fact afford to raise their wages without raising prices or laying off workers.  

McD’s for examples makes over $5 billion in profit from revenue of over $27 billion per year and their CEO was paid $13 million dollars (that works out to over $9,000 an hour) last year.

And before you help these liars dry any more of their crocodile tears over their threatened “cost” to us the consumer of raising the minimum wage, you might want to consider the cost to us, the taxpayer, of NOT raising the minimum wage.

You see us taxpayers subsidize these corporations in the form of public assistance.In fact McDonald’s used to run what they called “The McResource phone line” where they advised their employees on how to apply for food stamps.  Workers with increased earnings would pay more in taxes and receive less in government benefits, that you and I pay for, so we would no longer be subsidizing their employers.

And as the City of Eureka relies on sales tax and not income tax for the bulk of its revenue, when you raise the pay of low income workers, 100% of that money gets spent, versus when you give it to shareholders and well-off business owners, who even if they live in town are not likely to increase their spending. 

As an example, last year McDonald’s spent the equivalent of $14,286 per restaurant worker employed by the company on “share repurchases” and dividends. That was $6 billion in one year spent to profit shareholders, while employees are paid minimum wage, which at its current level has a purchasing power of 20 percent less than it did in 1968!

Look, whenever profits are threatened, business always scream “JOBS.” If you’re old enough, you may remember that requiring seat belts in cars were going to cost us jobs!  Any increase in the cost of doing business is always fought with the myth that it will cost jobs, but myths are just that, and the truth is employers will hire as many workers as they need to meet the demand of the marketplace. No more and no fewer.

Then of course there is the moral argument, that if a man or woman does an honest day’s work, they deserve an honest day’s pay, and that would be a wage one could live on.

Sunny Brae Park clean up June 28th 11:am - 6:pm

 Please come out to Virginia Way between Beverly Dr and Charles Ave to pitch in!

June 28th  11:am to 6:pm  BBQ at 4:pm

Contact Susan Ornelas for more info or to RSVP: sornelas@cityofarcata.org