Reading the Beacon Journal Today...
Several important conflicts covered in our local paper today.  As usual, the Beacon stands out as a valuable community resource, introducing readers to important stories.  There is always more to say.

Wages of US Workers Continue to Decline

When I search the Beacon online for the article at the link below from today’s paper using the author’s name, no hits.  Then I go to the business section and it is right there, as expected.  How hard is it to set up a search engine for your own publication?

Wages across the entire US economy fell more than one percent in the past twelve months, the fourth time this has happened since 2009.  Wages have tripled in China over the past decade.  The average worker in China earns $8,700 a year and the average worker in the US earns $47,000.  US labor productivity has continued to increase, growing at rates close to our historical average from 2000-2007 and at a lower, but still positive, rate from 2007-2012. 

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics  http://www.bls.gov/lpc/prodybar.htm

Adjusted for inflation the average hourly wage for US workers remains well below its peak in 1972.  Since 1972 the average hourly wage dropped consistently until 1993 and has increased since then, though still not back to 1972 levels and only slightly higher than 1964 levels.

It is finally a bit more clear why Beacon columnist Bob Dyer keeps winning journalism awards, despite the fact that he is an embarrassing cliché with a megaphone.  Today’s Beacon reports annual press club awards and it seems just about everyone at every paper in the region gets a trophy.  Precious.  Too bad those doing the heavy lifting, like Michael Douglas and others, have to share the limelight with Bob, making their recognition suspect when it should be unambiguous.

Concentrated Disadvantage Reprise

We know that living in an inner city area brings with it a whole host of undesirable disadvantages, and that doing so with dark skin simply adds additional layers of disadvantage.  In today’s Beacon Doug Livingston reports on another layer.  Students walking to school in inner city neighborhoods are 3.3 times more likely to be hit by a car on their way to or from school.  Livingston, quite rightly, directs our attention to the transportation policy decisions at the root of this unequal distribution of disadvantage.

Santa Monica Shooting Spree on Page A3

Four were killed when a 24 year old man with 1,300 rounds of ammunition went from a home to a campus library on a murderous rampage.  This have become so common it is no longer front page news.

Elite Law Breaking Ignored

A poor kid without a stable home and in a crumbling school sells pot and becomes a felon for life; our best and brightest, growing up with every advantage, continue to ignore the law (and these are the law makers) by not fixing our school funding system that has been four times ruled unconstitutional since 1997 and we just wait patiently for them to comply with the law. 

Two Powerful Presidents Meet in Rancho Mirage

Arguably the two most powerful individuals in the world met for eight hours of one-on-one informal but important conversation over two days.

Cybersecurity, an interest shared by both nations, emerged as the center of the conversation, to no one’s surprise.  The US framed this conflict as the ‘key to future’ of Sino-US relations more broadly.  Xi Jinping framed it as a shared interest that should not block good relations, without accepting any responsibility for hacking and, instead, emphasizing that China has also been victimized by hackers.  Both leaders emphasized hacking without specifying blame.

“‘Cybersecurity should not become the root cause of mutual suspicion and frictions between our two countries. Rather, it should be a new bright spot in our cooperation,’ said Yang Jiechi, Xi’s senior foreign policy adviser.”

In the ChinaDaily, the summit was reported as a positive exchange between the leaders of the world’s two most powerful economies toward establishing a new relationship of mutual respect, emphasizing the Pacific Rim large enough for both superpowers and that doing so peacefully will advance the ‘Chinese Dream,’ which has been a recurring theme in Xi’s domestic political campaigns.

China Daily, which covered Xi’s trip to Trinidad, Tobago, Costa Rico, Mexico and the US as a global journey demonstrating the influence of China in the Americas, has a picture of the two presidents with Xi appearing to be the senior leader as Obama listens, in contrast to all the pictures in the US media.

 

The two presidents agreed on the importance of a denuclearized Korean Peninsula, again as expected.  And they agreed to work together to reduce hydrofluorocarbons, one of the most potent greenhouse gases associated with industrialization.

Noticeably absent from reports (there was no formal press conference at the end, punctuating their shared emphasis on the informality of these extended conversations) was discussion of the following, though BBC reports that the presidents did discuss US-China rivalry in the Pacific.

·        Chinese or US human rights violations;

·        Political prisoners in China (including Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo);

·        Chinese currency valuation;

·        Expanding Chinese influence in the Americas;

·        Expanding American influence in the Pacific;

·        Treatment of Chinese businesses in the US;

·        Tibet and the Dalai Lama;

·        US weapons sales to Taiwan;

·        Chinese naval developments;

·        Diaoyu Islands and the South China Sea.

There were the usual US platitudes about encouraging China to shoulder its responsibility as a global power by ‘playing by the rules.’  President Obama struggled to make clear his distinction between the problem of cybersecurity in hacking and intellectual property theft and the problem as manifest in US government surveillance of US citizens. 

The shared script describes a Sino-US fresh start, but it is not clear that both sides understand the new relationship the same way. 

According to the Daily Beast, we should read Xi’s focus on a fresh start through the lens of his domestic political campaigns for a ‘Chinese dream,’ where he appears to be

‘thinking that the “new model” of relationship meant that Washington would recognize Chinese prerogatives and keep quiet about its concerns. That’s the subtext for another one of Xi’s recent phrases, the “new China dream,” a vision of the Communist Party leading a strong and revitalized country. As Zhang Lifan, a Communist Party historian, said about the Chinese leader, “He is falling back on nationalism, talking about making China the No. 1 superpower of the world.”’

Will this meeting lay groundwork for their next meeting at the International Economic Summit in Russia in September?  Xi invited President Obama to visit China for informal conversations round two and committing to continuing the conversation on the phone and in writing between visits.  In-depth conversations, and a fresh start to a new relationship, are needed.  So that is the good news.  But the nature of the conversations and relationship remain unclear at best so do not bet the house on progress just yet.