It’s not about us and them, it’s about sharing — just ask Mark Zuckerberg

By Hoover Wind, Kathleen Kenna and Hadi Dadashian

It’s not about us and them.

As much as we honor the peaceful intentions of the Occupy movement, it’s not just a simple formula of 1% versus 99%.

It’s about all Americans, as Sarah Palin reminded us at the CPAC convention this weekend.

Let’s look at Mark Zuckerberg, sometimes reviled, sometimes beloved founder of Facebook.

It sounds outrageous that the social networking giant could raise $5 billion in its public stock offering.

We want all American companies to raise that kind of cash in their IPOs.

We want all American companies, all Americans — from the wealthiest to the lowest-income  — to share.

Zuckerberg, hopefully, is about to show us how this is possible.

Say Facebook raises $5 billion.

This means as much as $1 billion for the rest of California.

How? That five-letter word in the current election campaign: T-A-X-E-S.

The non-partisan legislative analyst’s office in California estimates this single IPO — the largest ever for an Internet-based firm — could bring California millions, and perhaps even $1 billion, in taxes.

This has so excited California’s governor, the sometimes reviled, sometimes beloved Jerry Brown, that his staff has offered to mow Zuckerberg’s lawn in exchange.

“If it is as big as it is being billed, then on behalf of a grateful state, I will go to Mark Zuckerberg’s house and either wash his windows or mow his lawn,” says H.D. Palmer, Brown’s finance spokesman.

This is the great part:  The non-partisan legislative analyst’s office and the Democrat governor’s office have both put one of California’s richest entrepreneurs on notice.

Pundits are crowing that Zuckerberg will pay the most taxes of any American in history.  This is good news, no matter where you stand on tax reform, tax breaks for the rich, or tax hikes.

California is broke.  With a deficit of more than $9 billion, its schools are falling apart, and its streets and highways are filling with garbage.  Social services — for veterans, elders, people with disabilities, children and low-income families — have been squeezed and squeezed and squeezed.

Slashbacks across all levels of government have hit all public services, from policing to economic development, like a tsunami.

To international visitors, it appears that California’s homeless population is growing, in major cities and small towns.

Politicians will fall all over themselves with a windfall like this. Watch for national politicians to argue about how Zuckerberg’s tax contributions should be spent — more prisons/less prisons; more affordable housing/more campaign contributions.

We’ll be watching Zuckerberg and his Facebook workers, many of whom are counting on becoming millionaires as a result of this IPO.

Will they park their new profits outside the country to avoid taxes?

Or will they share, by paying full taxes — however that is defined — to help California’s most vulnerable?

Will they, as Republican minority leaders in California insist, use this newfound tax wealth to “protect our public school students … and pay down the state’s debt service.”

You know — the debt that everyone shared in accumulating during the so-called “good years”?

Open letter from a jobless job counselor to Michigan Governor Rick Snyder

Dear Governor Snyder:

Let’s cut the niceties and be straight:  Cutting unemployment insurance (UI) won’t create jobs.

It will create more misery.  It will lead to more poverty, more hunger, homelessness, and worse.

I understand your state is suffering, with official unemployment at 10.6%, compared to the national rate of 8.6%.

You and I both know those numbers are inaccurate:  The jobless rate in Michigan, like the national rate, is likely double that, since “official” numbers only tally those collecting UI.  They don’t include so-called “discouraged” workers, and the long-term unemployed.

On the other side of the country, I can’t pretend to know how to convince Michigan employers to create jobs when they’ve already had tax cuts, and you’re about to slash billions more from their taxes.

But crushing the vulnerable isn’t the answer, governor;  it’s never the answer.

Tax cuts for U.S. employers and the wealthy in the past decade haven’t helped the country much.  If they did, where are the jobs?

Governor, I worked as a job counselor for five years in two states — including two years in a city with the highest unemployment in the U.S. — so I know a little about this misery.

Americans are begging for work.  Offer many job seekers $10-an-hour jobs, and they’ll take them, with gratitude, no matter how much abuse they must endure to keep it.  (And from what I saw, the lower the wage, the more abuse.)

You intend to force almost a half-million job seekers off UI and into $10-an-hour jobs.

Really?

Does the $50,000-a-year social worker benefit society by taking a job away from a lower-wage worker?

Where do those workers go if employers decide they’re easily replaced by jobless workers with degrees?

Did you consider the single-parent nurse who won’t have time to seek work in her career or afford child care at $10-an-hour if she’s forced to work outside her helping profession?  Who does that help?  Who gets hurt?

Governor, when you announced these cuts last March, you said, “Let’s start the job creation process.”

What have you and Michigan’s politicians, employers and big thinkers been doing since then?

You said, then: “I wanted to make sure we could do whatever to help these people to continue on a path until they can find a job.”

Sounded more like you were blaming the jobless for being out of work:  “Let’s focus on bringing our unemployment rate down so we don’t have people on unemployment that’s going on for 20 to 26 weeks or 99 weeks.”

The U.S. Labor Dept. reports that average unemployment for U.S. workers collecting UI is more than 40 weeks.  It’s getting worse, despite tax cuts and bailouts and other aid to employers and financial institutions — that’s why Washington grudgingly agreed to those 99-week extensions.  Income disparity in this country grows wider too, amid more calls for more tax cuts and record profits in Corporate America.

Oh, and average unemployment for U.S. workers not collecting UI?  Estimates vary, but it’s edging up to two years.

You said this week that Michigan’s UI slashbacks (to a max of 20 weeks) are designed to “encourage people to work.  It’s not to have them go backward.”

That’s encouraging.  You must be certain there are plenty of $10/hr jobs, available now, for every jobless person in Michigan.  You sound certain that employers will use their tax breaks to create so many new jobs that Michigan will no longer have one of the highest unemployment rates in the U.S.

Please post that jobs list asap.

“It’s easiest to find a job when you’ve gotten a job,” you said this week.

Again, really?

Spend some real time with job seekers, trainers, counselors and others at Michigan’s job offices.  Spend some real time with long-term unemployed workers.  Listen to them with the same time and attention span you gave the state’s big employers.

There are other solutions, Gov. Snyder.  It’s going to take some hard work and big thinking to get there — not little jobs and big tax cuts.

And please, let the rest of us know how that goes.

Respectfully, Kathleen Kenna

Related story:  Snyder among least popular governors in U.S.