Reader question:

Please explain “status quo” in this headline: Obama’s best jobs plan might be status quo (AP, September 7, 2011).

My comments:

That means, in a nutshell, there’s nothing new to Obama’s new jobs plan. Or, to put it more sympathetically, there’s only so much an American President can do to help its workers.

Well, without attempting to put too fine a point upon it, we can make a few sweeping generalizations about Barack Obama’s politics and American politics in general. And let’s make a few generalizations pertaining to, er, the status quo in the American jobs market.

The status quo, you see, is Latin for the way it is. Literally “the state in which” everything is, the status quo means the way things are, good or bad.

Being originally Latin, its “first known use” as accepted English is pretty late, 1807 (Merriam-Webster.com). But anyways, in English political jargon, the status quo is the current state of affairs as a whole, political, social and otherwise.

In the above example, the status quo refers to the American jobs market as a whole, good and bad. Obviously there’s something bad about it – there are too few jobs. Hence, the Obama Administration plans to change it.

And it is a job that’s difficult of accomplishment. Anyone who attempts to change the status quo involving society at large knows it is difficult of accomplishment. There’s always resistance because a lot of people who benefit from the status quo want to preserve it. Fewer jobs, for instance, are not exactly something the extreme rich capitalists mind very much. For one thing, fewer jobs means greater competition for them, which means a lot of people will agree to work for less, which, in the long run, means greater profit for the corporation.

So long as things don’t go to extremes, that is, such as is the case at Foxconn, where the pay is so low, work so hard and the hours so long that many workers have opted to commit suicide in order to end their troubles at the firm.

In short, fewer jobs, to a degree, are a healthy thing for the bottom line, if you are an owner of a corporation. Hence it’s one of the reasons why it is always difficult to make drastic changes to the status quo. It’s a zero sum game between the employer and the employee. Owners don’t want to give back so much that it eats greatly into profit making.

Hence the advice to Obama, that perhaps it’s best to let it be – leave things as they are.

It makes sense also in that it’s probably what Obama wanted to do in the first place, so long as he could get away with it. You see, politicians are often like that. They say one thing and then go out and do something different. Obama says he cares about American workers and wants to create jobs, and he appears sincere in rhetoric, but in action he really prefers to do nothing if possible. After all he’s a politician who wants to win elections – and, this year, re-election – and all politicians, as their capitalist backers are very certain, are good people that money can buy. At the end of the day, Obama represents the rich and powerful people of America more than he represents the average working folk.

And the rich and powerful people of America, mind you, are the ones to want to preserve the status quo, not upset it.

Ah, well, so much for American politics. Again, without putting too fine a point upon it, I hope our generalizations are not, by and large, too wide of the mark.

Here are media examples of the status quo and people to want to change it:

1. Barack Obama, ambitious plate-spinner, has added another platter to the presidential act: immigration reform.

White House aides have let it be known he intends to push for comprehensive immigration reform this year - on top of health care reform, a big energy agenda and rescuing the American financial system.

Great good luck to him.

America’s immigration system was in desperate need of an overhaul when President Bush turned to the task in 2007, only to be swamped by a grass-roots “amnesty” revolt. Give credit to Obama for understanding that the status quo still stinks.

Every day, employers grow more frustrated at their inability to confirm workers’ immigration status.

Every day, drugs and people pour in over the borders while guns flow the other way.

Every day, countless would-be legal immigrants, including skilled workers, beat their heads against the walls of a bureaucratic maze.

And every day, 12 million people toil in the shadows, unable to climb the rungs toward citizenship.

Yes, they’re in the country illegally. But, no, there is no practical way to boot them all. Nor should we try, given that most are productive residents in jobs that citizens have spurned.

- Barack’s border battle: President Obama must win immigration reform, NYDailyNews.com, April 10, 2009.

2. There was no way to tell what Muhammad Ali would become when Walter Beach first met him at the Fifth Street Gym in Miami over four decades ago. Beach was playing for the Cleveland Browns and they happened to be in Miami. He stopped by the gym to see Ali work out.

“He was training for a fight against Sonny Liston. He was calling Liston “The Bear” and he was wearing this denim jacket that had the words “Bear Hunting” on the back,” Beach said.

There was no way to tell that the boastful young man, who changed his name from Cassius Clay shortly after that fight with Liston, would become a revolutionary figure, a lightning rod who empowered and awakened the consciousness of an entire generation of African-American athletes.

By the time Beach saw Ali three years later he knew exactly what Ali had become. Beach was a member of a group of black athletes who gathered in Cleveland in the summer of 1967 to support Ali, who had been banned from boxing because of his refusal as a conscientious objector to be drafted into the Army to fight in the Vietnam War.

“I think more than anything else he is defined by courage,” Beach said. “He had the courage to resist abandoning his principles and not succumbing to the pressure of other aspects of society and culture. He had a strong determination on how he was going to live as a moral individual with integrity and honor.”

To Beach that is Ali’s lasting legacy to all the other African-American athletes who have followed him.

Ali will be honored at a star-studded gala and fund-raiser for the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health and the Muhammad Ali Center at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas on Saturday.

The 70-year-old former heavyweight champion once glided around the ring with the fluidity and grace of a ballet dancer. He no longer floats like a butterfly. His gait is a slow shuffle. Once a loquacious raconteur, Ali is trapped in a cocoon of silence. The ravages of Parkinson’s Syndrome have taken a devastating toll.

Whatever his physical form, Ali remains an enduring symbol of courage, honor and integrity for millions around the world. But for African-American athletes he has special meaning. He was the first black athlete since Jack Johnson at the turn of the 20th Century to upset the status quo. Like Johnson, Ali challenged political, social and cultural boundaries at great personal cost. But because Ali did it during a politically and socially convulsive period in American history, his sacrifices have greater resonance.

- Jim Brown and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar say Muhammad Ali's social consciousness is lost on today's athletes, NYDailyNews.com, February 11, 2012.

3. Kerry Kennedy, daughter of Robert F. Kennedy, saw what the country saw when it was official that Barack Obama had been elected President, saw the remarkable joyful pictures from Chicago.

It was the city her father never made it to in 1968, the year he began the campaign that finally ended for Obama on the night of Nov 4.

“My father said this would happen,” she said. “You can look up the exact quote, but he said that in 40 years an African-American would be President.”

The exact quote is from May 27, 1968, a week before Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles after winning the California primary, the night he closed his speech at the Ambassador Hotel by saying, “Now it’s on to Chicago [for the Democratic National Convention] and let’s win there.”

A few days before our Triborough Bridge is renamed in her father's honor, these are the prophetic words to which Kerry Kennedy referred: “Things are moving so fast in race relations. A Negro could be President in 40 years. There is no question about it. In the next 40 years, a Negro can achieve the same position that my brother has.

“Prejudice exists and probably will continue to ... but we have tried to make progress and we are making progress. We are not going to accept the status quo.”

- Bobby Kennedy’s dream of a black president comes true after four decades, NYDailyNews.com, November 16, 2008.

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About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

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