GUEST COMMENTARY BY VICTOR KAMBER Bush’s Labor Day message to workers
By Daily Press staff
Santa Monica College’s business school completed another summer session working with teens.
A Venice area student, Garrett Okita-Abe, 15, a sophomore at Venice High School, was selected to be valedictorian of the SMC site for the Summer Business Institute (SBI) of the Academy of Business Leadership (ABL). Okita-Abe, a survivor of two heart surgeries at 11, was recognized at SBI’s cap-and-gown commencement ceremony honoring 214 graduates at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles this past weekend.
Okita-Abe was among 23 SBI students at the SMC site this summer. SBI’s students, ages 10 to 18, are Southern California high school and middle school students. Many of them are overlooked but have high potential.
They have completed a rigorous, seven-week program that teaches leadership, values and the principles of business and finance, in classrooms at five Southern California college and university campuses. The students hail from 92 middle and high schools across Southern California, 52 of which are in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
The core of SBI is learning about values, business and finance through lectures and competitive, hands-on exercises that include managing a fictitious stock portfolio of $100,000, and assembling and presenting business plans for firms that the students invented.
The SBI program is credited by many business executives with giving the students a 10-to 20-year head start in business. Exposure to academic campuses, corporate offices and SBI’s challenging curriculum are designed so students, especially those facing socio-economic and educational obstacles, can reach goals that otherwise seem impossible, SBI officials said.
“By what we show them and by posing hard, but doable challenges where they achieve immediate success, we help them realize that their dreams can become goals,” said Anna Ouroumian, the president of ABL. “We show them how it is done and how they can do it, then we put them on the path to dreams they once thought were unattainable.”
Ouroumian designed ABL’s approach and curriculum on the assumption that all the students are leaders and up to the challenge.
“If you treat them as leaders up front, and you set high expectations, in a loving and nurturing environment, miracles happen,” Ouroumian said.
The graduation ceremony included several guest speakers, including Maria Contreras-Sweet, cofounder of Promerica Bank and Fortius holdings, former Secretary of California’s Business, Transportation and Housing Agency; John Hope Bryant of Operation Hope; and Keith Ferazzi, author of the best-selling self-improvement book “Never Eat Alone.”
SBI classes were held on the campuses of the University of Southern California, SMC and the California State University at Los Angeles, Dominguez Hills and Fullerton. The program also included frequent field trips to companies that included State Street, Southern California Edison,Merrill Lynch,the Capital Group Companies,First Pacific Advisors and American Honda, as well as in-class appearances by seasoned business owners, corporate executives and community leaders.
The SBI has graduated 1,800 students and has reached more than 46,000 through workshops and presentations at hundreds of middle and high schools. Better than 99 percent of ABL students graduate from high school, and 87 percent attend colleges and universities nationwide. Researcher takes top honor President Bush is famous for putting his foot in his mouth. In the midst of the Hurricane Katrina debacle he turned to the incompetent FEMA director and said: “You’re doing a heckuva job, Brownie.” I didn’t think he could ever top that. But he did, just this week. With Labor Day on the horizon, he beamed at the television cameras and said: “Things are good for American workers.”
In my memory, I cannot think of a time when things were worse. And yet, when it comes to who this president has hurt the most, labor has to get in line — a long line.
By misleading our country into a disastrous war, ignoring global warming, ordering illegal wiretaps and quadrupling the national debt, President Bush has laid claim to the trophy labeled “Worst President Ever.” He has gone out of his way to punish the poor and the elderly with his attacks on Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security while rewarding the rich with tax breaks. Young people fare no better as college tuitions become unaffordable and they begin careers nearly bankrupted by their student loans. He would tear down the Constitutional wall separating church and state, simply to curry favor with the only people on this planet who don’t care about his failings — just that he is “born again.”
But despite the long line of beleaguered citizens who have suffered at the elitist policy whims of this administration, I still believe a good case can be made for putting labor unions at the very front of the line. No one has suffered more and their suffering harms the entire nation.
Here is where labor is this Labor Day: We have a Labor Secretary who hates labor, that’s for starters. Elaine Chao is a favorite of President Bush and employers all across the nation. For the first time in our history, corporate bigwigs have run of the building while AFL- CIO President John Sweeney can’t even get a green card. When a business-funded con artist opened an anti-union Web site called “Union Facts,” Chao’s Labor Department advertised it on their Web site.
The National Labor Relations Board was created in 1935 to help workers organize unions. The current NLRB with Bush appointees now functions as a training center to create new obstacles for workers wanting to join unions — a far cry from what FDR had in mind.
What does it mean when workers can’t form unions? Wages fall. Working conditions become Dickensian, millions more have no health coverage. Labor unions made this a middle-class nation and the envy of the free world. That has always been our strength, with each generation of workers more productive and with the clout in bargaining to share in the prosperity they help create. In the process, they also built a stronger America.
That was then. This is now. Just before adjourning for its August vacation, the GOP-controlled Congress sandbagged the first increase in the minimum wage in a decade — and laughed about it. Meanwhile, an administration that is close friends of the rich and powerful does nothing to contain soaring gas prices or health care costs that have working families struggling to survive on stagnant wages.
And all our president can say this Labor Day is: “Things are good for American workers.”
Almost as good as “let ‘em eat cake.” (Victor Kamber is a consultant to several labor unions and president of Carmen Group Communications, a Washington, D.C.-based communications firm. His political views are expressed regularly in his blog: Kamber’s Comments, accessible at www.victorkamber.com.)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on August 31, 2006. Read the original PDF.