Tweet
tropical tricolour cake by chotda
In spite of Obama’s assurances that a recovery is underway and that he can see the light at the end of the tunnel the outlook for working people is bleak. What he really sees a political locomotive called the radicalization coming at him at full steam.
Six million have been out of work for over six months, 14 million are totally unemployed and another 10 million plus are underemployed. Because of union busting, austerity measures, and high, permanent, deliberately maintained unemployment wages are down across the board and profits are up. For youth and people of color this is the worst job market on record, surpassing the figures of the earlier depression. Unemployment continues to rise, jobs are being cut and wages reduced and now Obama and his Republican and Democrat cousins are going to slash Social Security and Medicare.
The WH and Congress are out of touch. Everything they do makes matters worse.
After 30 years of bipartisan attacks on unions, beginning with Carter and continuing under every president including Obama the living standards of the vast majority of working people have been severely reduced. The new jobs are mostly McJobs – 23 percent of the jobs lost in 2008 paid $9-$13 an hour while 49 percent of new jobs added are McJobs. 40 percent of the jobs lost paid ($19-$31 an hour and of the new jobs only 14 percent pay decent wages according to the National Employment Law Project. http://www.nelp.org/page/-/Justice/2011/UnbalancedGrowthFeb2011.pdf?nocdn=1
With the help of political prostitutes like Obama and the Congress ( with the probable exception of Bernie Sanders), the looters and banksters are using the new Depression to get richer. At a recent fundraiser for Obama in New York, where well to do Obots shelled out $35,800 per plate to have the ear of the man who’s given them trillions in bailouts and handouts, John Emerson, an Obama backer who’s president of Capital Guardian Trust Company, said “the president’s support for the Troubled Assets Relief Program and the measures that tightened financial regulations has bolstered his position with Wall Street… Candidly, the financial services industry hasn’t done too badly in the last year and half.”
Bloomberg Business Week reports “In the boardroom, it’s as if the Great Recession (sic) never happened…The typical pay package for the head of a company in the Standard & Poor’s 500 was $9 million in 2010…That was 24 percent higher than a year earlier.”
What to do, What to do?
The recovery, such as it is, is limited to the profitability of the banksters and big industry. Continuing a trend begun by Carter and continued by Reagan, the Bushes and Clinton, Obama is busting unions, exporting jobs, ignoring unemployment and poverty and giving handouts to the rich. Perhaps that explains that more than half of people in the U.S. consistently tell pollsters that the economy is in either a recession or depression. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/28/us-usa-economy-gallup-idUSTRE73R3WW20110428
There is no recovery for working people and the BS from the WH claiming there is one has the effect of making the depression that much worse. They continue to impose austerity, refuse to grapple with unemployment and keep their eyes on their main prize – giving trillions to the rich and getting rich themselves in the process. The behavior or both Democrats and Republicans and the looters and banksters they serve is criminal. Obama’s rape of the UAW and his attack on federal workers combined with attacks by Cuomo, Brown, Walker and others on state public workers is driving the economy further and further towards further economic disaster.
The deficit obsession in Washington is an excuse to ramp up attacks on working people as Democrats and Republicans become increasingly blind to the reality on the ground – massive unemployment, poverty, homelessness, anger and unease over military escalation. In DC the password is “let them eat cake”.
The password for socialists and revolutionists is “Pour les vaincre, messieurs, il nous faut de l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace…!” The massive radicalization now underway is a bell that tolls for Democrats and Republicans alike. On Tuesday, November 6th, 2012 vote socialist, vote left or just sit it out. Instead of worrying about which right wing candidate wins concentrate on building mass movements to win our agenda.
21 Comments
Bien dit mon ami. La verite se fera jour.
rec’d.
What we are witnessing, will not be resolved by touching screens on electronic voting machines.
Exactly.
Laissez-les manger la nourriture pour chat
there were probably still voting machines that voted for bush in the obama/mcain election.
Thank you, I am still laughing now as I hit submit.
Elections in this country are as much a farce as any elections held in a Banana Republic. And with Obama it’s not ‘let them eat cake’, it’s ‘let them eat peas’, so Marie Antoinette had a better attitude toward her people. I’m still recovering from my high blood pressure attack after watching his most recent speech, telling us we have to learn to ‘eat our peas’, that is accept austerity measures that are not even necessary. And he also means eat the humble pie that we deserve as his subjects, who he views as peons just as he views democracy as a terrible inconvenience.
I especially liked the “Obots” reference.
They can’t do a damned thing about unemployment as long as they rely on the private sector, and that’s something NOBODY in Washington has the guts to manage. The plain fact is, the economy isn’t big enough to provide a decent job for more than about 70% of everyone who wants a job. Job creation through the Clinton years, as well as the period of full employment during the Bush years was created by a pair of bubble markets: the dot-bomb in the Clinton years and the housing bubble which began deflating in 2005.
The only thing in the free market that’ll put people to work quickly is another bubble, and that ain’t happening.
What do we do about it? I don’t have that answer, except to say that whatever measures anyone can think of will probably go into the mix of things we need to do. Certainly, we should begin by thinking hard about the harmful effects free markets inflict on all of us who aren’t 10 percenters. We should recognize the harmful effects of major corporations and the barriers to entry they represent for anyone looking to use his or her talents and capacities to start a new business – and we need to recognize that these same dynamics we see here in the US mirror or foreshadow what’s to come in developing nations, where in many cases already local businesses are crushed by multinationals coming to town.
So I ask again: what do we do about it?
For the record, I fully recognize that Obama has swallowed the globalization myth of convergence, and that this is the agenda he’s running on us, so I won’t support him, and lacking any decent candidate, I plan to sit 2012 out.
Using your number, if each of us worked 70% as much as we do now, there’d be jobs for all. I’m willing to do my share.
Actually, the Germans right now are actually reducing the hours worked so there are more jobs for the unemployed.
Dean Baker: Job Sharing Could Ease Unemployment
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/13/dean-baker-job-sharing-co_n_357200.html
Right. The powers to be have control of the counting and as Stalin once said, its not important who votes or for whom, its whose counting the votes that is key.( or something along those lines) Our democracy for the most part is dead. We saw that 1st hand in 2000 in Fla. and the SCOTUS. The fascists will over turn elections as they see fit.
There is no way I will vote for Obama again.
I am making use of my time bugging my Senators and Rep. on how opposed I am to the current policy push and that I will not vote for them and work against their re-election. I call, e-mail, fax, and use traditional mail. All of this may be futile and I accept that. We may be getting the shaft without end but, as long as I have breath I will use my voice.
Sitting out the election seems only to reward the oligarchy. I am choosing to use Write-In choice on the voting forms for all partisan elections. Even if I am voting for an individual listed on the ballot.
In theory, one could use the write-in to vote for Obama to prevent the GOP from officially gaining the White House and have the vote be registered as a protest. If five percent of the voters chose to write in Obama for president the elections would not be decided the night of the elections and may be initially declared for the GOP but if the percent of write-ins were enough to put Obama over then it would give the media something to take notice of.
Do you have any idea what the %% of public to private jobs nationwide is? I’m just curious.
Mind you, that number is based on a rough estimate of real unemployed, including those who’ve given up searching, plus a measure for those ostensibly employed, but who aren’t called into work. A dozen or so at the store I work at are kept on the books this way but aren’t actually scheduled any hours. The same thing where my sister works.
Given future increases in productivity, it may well turn out that all the world’s goods can be produced by a minority of working people. That being the case, what are the rest of us supposed to do? The same question asked in the 50′s and 60′s when the topic was automation. However for the last 30 years, a large part of the growth in productivity was due to wage depression and off-shoring manufacturing. Which never gets reported.
My understanding is that something like one in six jobs in the US is a government job. That’s a soft number, which doesn’t include private sector employees working on government contracts, nor the 1.5 million serving in uniform, but which I assume includes the 750,000 direct civilian employed by the Pentagon.
I’ve already lost one shift, so my hours worked are just under 80% of what they were last year. I could pick up some shifts, but as I say in my other reply, there are many I work with still not scheduled any shifts at all, and as far as i’m concerned, those hours belong to them.
There’s easily another 25 million people who have worked sporadically over the last 3-4 years and have virtually been living on their retirement savings, any equity in their homes, and other savings they may have had. It’s complete ground zero for these people, and God forbid they should have any serious medical issues.
I think you’re misunderstanding and exaggerating the problem. Right now, we all should work, but work 30-35 hours a week.
In the future, who knows? The point you’re making whether you realize it or not is that the world will be a very wealthy and prosperous place in the future, since you see a world in which everyone’s needs are met. In that context, what we likely should do, emphasis on the collective democratic ‘we’, is distribute wealth fairly evenly, supporting lots of ‘non-essential’ enjoyable creative ‘jobs’ and ‘work’ to mix in with the ‘essential’ boring stuff.
Corporations are more profitable than ever, so why not share the work at 30-35 hours a week for full-time wages? It’s exactly the same argument as was made for the 40-hour work week.
I hope for good luck for them but, truly, we’re on the edge of becoming an uncaring, impoverished, ‘third world’ country, where people die on the street for lack of any safety net.
Wealthy city centers (and exurban ‘estates’) surrounded by poverty and deteriorating formerly middle-class neighborhoods is the path we’ve been on for more than 30 years.
Actually, I don’t believe everyone’s needs will be met, based on the world’s current trajectory, nor do I believe that a 30-35 hour workweek will provide a living wage. This is even given a world in which investor looting is completely eliminated. I should have made that clearer.
The way things are now, prices will be set to target the upper half (just a gut estimate – could be high or lower and will certainly fluctuate) because they’re going to be the only ones who have any spending money. While the bottom 60% lives on subsistence. My feeling is that “convergence” will only mean that the income profile of nations will become more alike. We all know about income inequality in the US, so we know this is already taking place: in 2002, Joseph Nye cites this as a problem in the US, and David Cay Johnston pointed out a year later that the income profile in the US was already similar to that of Brazil, Mexico and Russia.
Unsustainable. Not only in the US, but as we’ve seen throughout MENA, a large population of trained but unemployed youth (or just high unemployment in urban areas – or both) is a prescription for political trouble as well. Stability through a healthy middle class, or stability through draconian repression, you can have one or the other, but you can’t have both.
The other thing I expect, though I’ve yet to find any supporting data, is that global economy will ossify. This is implied in Krugman’s research on consumer choice diminishing as large corporations employ economies of scale, labor and regulatory arbitrage as well as greater political control to lock in market share. I may be wrong, but I expect the barriers to entry cause by these three conditions to bring the pace of innovation to a crawl. Already, the barrier to entry of new chips is so great that not even industry giants like IBM, Intel, Micron, Samsung, Toshiba, et al, can’t go it alone in developing new products. Years ago, they pooled their resources to create a research consortium (Sematech) to develop new chip improvements. I could go on in this vein, and plan to one way or the other in future.