Film ideas for a quiet Valentine’s Day on the couch

Bill Knight column for Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, Feb. 12, 13 or 14           

Valentine’s Day is part feast day for the Roman martyr who died in 269 AD and a holiday honoring Juno, the Roman goddess of women and marriage. So “roman” is part of romance, right?

This week, besides candy and flowers, consider sharing a romance movie wth your sweetheart. There’s a lot there, from last year’s “Shape of Water” and “Beauty and the Beast” to 1997’s “Titanic” and “The Notebook” (2004), “Splash” (1984) and “Wuthering Heights” (1939). How to choose?

“Romance means not merely a love story,” the late critic Roger Ebert wrote, “but a love story told against the backdrop of exciting events, in the midst of which – as Bogie said – ‘The problems of a couple of little people like you and me don’t amount to a hill of beans.’ But they do.”

Here are ideas for movies to rent or stream:

“The African Queen” (1952). Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn are a crusty riverboat captain and a prim sister of a murdered missionary during World War I, brought together by circumstances. As the micmatched pair copes with Nature (“I hate leechies”) and threats from a German gunboat, they unexpectedly find love in the jungle.

“As Good As It Gets” (1997). Women may identify with single-mom Helen Hunt (waiting on tables, helping her sick kid, coping with her live-in mother). Men may identify with romance writer Jack Nicholson (his cynicism, if not his obsessiveness). Each won an Oscar in director James L. Brooks’ serio-comedy, co-starring Greg Kinnear in a tale of three people in need who help each other, feel their hearts thaw, and find more than friendship.

“Casablanca” (1942). Blending romance, intrigue and an exotic, timely backdrop (North Africa, early in World War II), the yarn about a tough saloonkeeper with a broken heart still works wonders. Add an able director (Michael Curtiz) and a superb cast (Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet and Paul Henreid), and timeless magic results.

“City Lights” (1931). Filmmaker and star Charlie Chaplin could have made a movie with sound, but he chose to make this his last silent picture, his best film. Again playing the Little Tramp, Chaplin falls in love with a blind flower girl and helps her in many ways, but he’s limited in what he can do. So he befriends a millionaire in order to get money to pay for an operation that may restore her sight. Echoing tender moments from O. Henry and the best part of just being alive, “City Lights” is endearing and innocent, and has one of the movie industry’s most memorable endings. (It co-stars Virginia Cherrill, a native of west-central Illinois.)

“The Goodbye Girl” (1977). It’s 41 years old, but this Neil Simon comedy has a fresh charm and enduring quality that contrasts with dated efforts such as other pretentious efforts. Richard Dreyfuss and Marsha Mason star as incompatible New Yorkers forced to share an apartment.

“It Happened One Night” (1934). The first film awarded all the major Oscars, Frank Capra’s screwball comedy stars Clark Cable and Claudette Colbert in a fast-paced battle of the sexes – and classes. A hardboiled reporter and a runaway heiress on a bus trip from Miami to New York discover new points of view, and love.

“Moonstruck” (1987). Cher is excellent in this Oscar-winning, ethnic-flavored delight co-starring Nicholas Cage. Cher won the Academy Award as a stubborn, confused woman torn between fiancé Danny Aiello and his brother (Cage). Featured are Olympia Dukakis and John Mahoney, who attended college in west-central Illinois and recently died at age 77.

“On Golden Pond” (1981). Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn were old when they made this film, which soars above melodrama. Their ages lift their performances and the film’s impact. It’s engaging, humorous, touching and loving, in both a family sense and a sense of the ageless passion and commitment an elderly couple can have.

“Roxanne” (1987). Steve Martin wrote and stars in this modern retelling of “Cyrano de Bergerac,” with Daryl Hannah in the title role and Martin as the big-nosed, big-hearted “suitor.” Amusing misadventures, frank realizations and comforting resolutions make this light love story a keeper.

“Sleepless In Seattle” (1993). Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan somehow created a chemistry, although they share few scenes in this tale of a widower with a cute son who literally broadcasts his father’s loneliness, which comes to the attention of a fetching Eastern reporter. Writer/director Nora Ephron’s cast also includes Bill Pullman, Rosie O’Donnell and Rob Reiner.

In U.S. economy, the devil’s in the details

Bill Knight column for Thurs., Fri., or Sat., Feb. 8, 9 or 10, 2018

Avoiding the fire-and-brimstone tone of his typical tweets, President Trump in his first State of the Union address Jan. 30 said, “After years and years of wage stagnation, we are finally seeing rising wages,” but the Associated Press noted that wages “are not rising any faster than they have before.”

Within days, Trump claimed credit for a booming stock market, the Labor Department said the economy added 200,000 jobs, wages went up 2.9 percent compared to a year ago, and then Wall Street’s “Trump Bump” had a “Trump Slump.”

The Dow Jones Industrial Average on Monday lost 4.6 percent, its biggest decline in more than six years. (The S&P lost 4.1 percent, and the Nasdaq dropped 3.8 percent.) The stock market tripled in value from 2008 to 2017, and investors’ wealth increased dramatically. But that’s had little effect on most people.

The Dow’s 1,175.21-point drop Monday followed a 665.75 loss last Friday, indicating the roller-coaster nature of the stock market. But some Americans can’t even get on the ride. (And though Trump takes credit for positives, he blames others for negatives.)

Meanwhile, there are other areas of concern:

* Workers who get tips may lose them. Trump’s Labor Department is proposing that business owners can collect and keep customers’ tips to workers under a plan to rescind a 2011 rule stating that workers’ tips are workers’ property. The 3.2 million Americans who get tips for their jobs together get about $36 billion a year in tips. Most need that income. Supposedly, “de-regulating” tips will let employers take tip money and share it with fellow workers who don’t get tips as long as they’re paid at least the minimum wage. But it’s not required.

* One in five Americans are in the world’s bottom 10 percent of wealth ownership, according to the 2017 Global Wealth Databook. These 50 million people have less savings than debt, and their wages have been virtually flat for 40 years.

* More American children live in poverty. The National Center for Children in Poverty shows that the number of kids living in households below the poverty threshold ($24,036 a year for a couple with two kids) increased by 18 percent since 2008.

* The U.S. has the worst rate of maternal deaths in the developed world, according to a six-month investigation by ProPublica and National Public Radio. At childbirth, American moms in some regions face risks almost as bad as Third World countries.

* The government has all but abandoned the mentally ill – which affects about 20 percent of the U.S population. “The state hospital-bed population had dropped more than 96 percent, to 37,679 beds – or 11.7 beds per 100,000 people,” reports the Treatment Advocacy Center.

* There’s a housing crunch. “In major U.S. cities – the only source of jobs for many low-income workers – high-priced luxury homes and apartments are pricing most people out of the housing market,” writes Paul Buchheit, author of “Disposable Americans.”

Meanwhile, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) sees some strength in the economy, but he puts data into context.

“The official unemployment rate today is 4.1 percent,” Sanders conceded, “but what President Trump failed to mention is that his first year in office marked the lowest level of job creation since 2010.”

Indeed, looking at a longer view, 2017 showed 2.05 million jobs created – worse than the last six years: 2.24 million jobs were created in 2016, 2.74 million in 2015, 3.11 million in 2014, 2.33 million in 2013, and 2.19 million in 2012.

The statistic for rising pay translated to 4 cents an hour, Sanders said.

“Over the last year, after adjusting for inflation, the average worker in America saw a wage increase of 4 cents an hour, or 0.17 percent. To put it in a different way, that worker received a raise of a little more than $1.60 a week. And, as is often the case, that tiny wage increase disappeared as a result of soaring health-care costs.”

Also, Sanders pointed out, Trump in his State of the Union speech neglected six other issues important to Americans’ pocketbooks – and futures: climate change, unregulated campaign finance permitted after the “Citizens United” Supreme Court ruling, voter suppression, inadequate resources at the Social Security Administration delaying benefits to disabled Americans, and others.

“Over half of older workers have no retirement savings,” Sanders continued, and “hundreds of thousands of bright young people are unable to afford to go to college, while millions of others have come out of school deeply in debt.”

The devil’s in the details.

Gov’t, business continue to target pensions

Bill Knight column for Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, Feb. 5, 6 or 7

Traditional company pensions – the system where employers withhold part of workers’ pay packages to reserve for emloyees’ retirement – are traced to 1875, when American Express (then a delivery service) established pensions for its employees. In the history of labor relations, however, it took decades of organizing for pensions to become relatively common.

Now they’re getting rare.

Today, among working families on the verge of retirement, about a third have no retirement savings of any kind, and another third have total savings that are less than their annual income, according to Nari Rhee of the National Institute on Retirement Security. That means the country faces a “retirement crisis,” according to U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

“There have been warning signs for years about what is happening to our middle class,” she said. “The dream of a secure retirement is slowly slipping away. A generation ago, middle-class families retired with strong pensions from their employers. And where pensions, savings and investments fell short, they could rely on Social Security to make up the difference.”         

However, employers, especially corporations, changed. Now it’s typical that short-term profits and maximizing stock prices take precedence over long-term value and good relations with workers, vendors, customers and communities. Plus, organized labor has weathered sustained attacks but is weaker, and Americans’ life expectancies rose – meaning that pension benefits last longer.

Two decades ago, 35 percent of all private-sector workers had traditional, defined-benefit pensions – which guaranteed a certain monthly payment retirees could depend on. Today, that number’s been cut in half – 18 percent of private sector workers have defined benefit pensions, according to Monique Morrissey of the Economic Policy Institute.

“And just as they need to rely more than ever on pensions, employers are withdrawing from their traditional role in helping provide a secure retirement,” Warren said. “Employers have replaced guaranteed retirement income with savings plans, like 401(k) plans, that leave the retiree at the mercy of a market that rises and falls, and, sometimes, at the mercy of dangerous investment products. These plans often fall short of what retirees need, and nearly half of all American workers don’t even have access to those limited plans. This leaves more than 44 million workers without any retirement assistance from their employer.”

The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office in October issued a report that said, “The U.S. retirement system, and the workers and retirees it was designed to help, face major challenges. Traditional pensions have become much less common, and individuals are increasingly responsible for planning and managing their own retirement savings accounts.

“Many households are ill-equipped for this task and have little or no retirement savings,” added the GAO, which recommended Congress create an independent commission to study the U.S. retirement system.

“If no action is taken, a retirement crisis could be looming,” the GAO said.

Meanwhile, Illinois’ Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner – after losing court battles as to the constitutionality of proposed pension reforms – now wants the U.S. Congress to intervene by releasing states from such mandates if they can show that fulfilling the promises would impede other public services. Rauner’s scheme is akin to bankruptcy proceedings, where a financial “reorganization” could be authorized by a court to, for example, change how benefits are calculated or reduce promised benefits.

Illinois’ state constitution says that benefits cannot be “diminished or impaired” once they’re granted to workers, and the courts have upheld that directive. Because a series of governors and legislatures, Democrat and Republican, refused to raise taxes to meet the spending they authorized, and then reneged on making required contributions to pension funds, Illinois’ pension debt is more than $120 billion.

So Rauner wants control of the constitutionally protected state pension system and the promises it’s made for generations of state employees, who worked for government with the understanding that pensions were part of the package. (As Warren has said, “A pension is nothing more than deferred compensation.”)

“We’re unreasonably hamstrung,” Rauner’s argued. “And the federal government can say, ‘No, federal restructuring law supersedes the state restrictions, Congress is freeing up states to restructure their pensions as they need to, as they see fit’.”

Warren said,  “Add all of this up – the dramatic decline in individual savings and the dramatic decline of guaranteed retirement benefits and employer support in return for a lifetime of work – and we’re left with a retirement crisis – a crisis that is as real and as frightening as any policy problem facing the United States.”