After All, It’s Only Numbers

[Daveparts still]

After All, It’s Only Numbers
By David Glenn Cox


What a callous and unfeeling nation we have become. More war because we have to, health care if we can afford it, COLAs for the retired, sorry, but it’s been a bad year. It is as if our nation has become some Stanford Experiment and we just wear our smocks and call each other by our numbers and have forgotten our own humanity.

“Dec. 2 (Bloomberg) -- Companies in the U.S. cut an estimated 169,000 jobs in November, according to a private report based on payroll data.”

We hear figures like this and we let them fly over our heads. These are 169,000 Americans whose kids are going to have a lousy Christmas; kids whose parents will worry about losing their homes. These are 169,000 Americans with very few options and very few ways out. That number of 169,000 is twice the number of attendees at the Rose Bowl game on New Years Day, but it is less than half of the number whose unemployment benefits ran out in September.

“The report signals the job market is still deteriorating and unemployment will probably climb further even as the economy is emerging from the worst recession since the 1930s. After overestimating payroll losses by 103,000 on average in the five months to September, ADP’s initial estimate for October was in line with the government’s payroll figures.”

The report is a god damned, sugar coated lie! There was no recession in the 1930s; there was a full blown depression, the so-called Great Depression. So, if the job loss numbers rival those of the 1930s, then it’s pretty obvious what type of situation we are in now. Yet for some reason these numbers are accepted as just bad news, like rain all weekend that can’t be helped. These are our people, these are our neighbors. They are not some third world peasants living on the edge of the Serengeti having ten children and just not knowing any better.

They are refugees from a shit storm they didn’t cause. They didn’t go to their employers and suggest moving the plant to China. They weren’t in the market for credit default swaps or bundled mortgages, but they are the ones now paying the price. This is no different than Hurricane Katrina, because the government didn’t maintain the financial levees to keep this from happening. Now, as they are swamped and sitting stranded, they are ignored, minimized and vaporized.

“'We’re going to see job losses extend well into 2010,' said Ryan Sweet, a senior economist at Moody’s Economy.com in West Chester, Pennsylvania, who forecast a loss of 178,000 jobs. 'The labor market is crawling towards stabilization. We need the labor market to improve to generate the wage income necessary to support spending.'”

Is this Orwellian non-speak? “The labor market is crawling towards stabilization.” The other team scored ten runs last inning but only nine runs this inning, so we’re catching up? Or is it Freudian, “The labor market” meaning working people are crawling.

When will the time come when we as a nation come to terms with what is going on here? Bailing out banks helps the banks not the people, but bailing out the people helps the people and the banks. Bailing out GM so they can pay us back by opening more factories overseas is a failure to communicate. GM closing two domestic divisions is not a signal of the failure of GM but the loss of prosperity for America’s working people. GM must compete with automakers that pay their workers $5.00 an hour, and it just can’t be done.

We are talking about millions of Americans who have lost their jobs, spent their 401Ks, lost their retirement and who are looking at a bleak future, and the response from their government has been little more than lip service and an extension of unemployment benefits. That’s not a helicopter lifting you off the rooftop; it's a kapok lifejacket thrown down to you. It’s not a rescue, and it’s not even a bailout. It’s subsistence until things get better. What’s the plan to make things better? Trust in the free market, son! Trust in the free market!

The plan is to wait and see, fourteen million Americans expected to just wait and see where the wheel stops. Maybe she'll get better, maybe not; that’s the way it goes, first your money, then your clothes. Then there are those nine million others underemployed, working at the Family Dollar Store, or any one of a thousand other locations, grateful for the opportunities that a college education afforded them.

I’m sorry, but that’s just not good enough. We can’t afford hundred million dollar jet fighters if our people are struggling to keep a roof over their heads. We cannot be the leader of the free world if we lead the free world in poverty. We are suffering the levels of unemployment that we are now suffering because of our trade policy. As soon as you say trade policy someone calls you a protectionist. But is Germany protectionist? The have a vibrant auto industry paying good wages. Are they protectionist? Japan and Italy have strong automotive industries. Are they protectionist?

“What we must do is this: revise our tariff on the basis of a reciprocal exchange of goods, allowing other Nations to buy and to pay for our goods by sending us such of their goods as will not seriously throw any of our industries out of balance, and incidentally making impossible in this country the continuance of pure monopolies which cause us to pay excessive prices for many of the necessities of life.” Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Allowing other Nations to buy and to pay for our goods by sending us such of their goods as will not seriously throw any of our industries out of balance; we have done the opposite. We have emaciated our domestic industry with the lure of tax breaks and cheap labor overseas. We are all ordered to bow at the shrine of Free Trade because it is good for us. It is the only way, and the whole world is doing it; any who say otherwise should be burned as heretics!

“But while they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving. We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.” Franklin Delano Roosevelt

But they are not made by the human beings that suffer through them and swim in them and drown in them. Children without a Christmas, marriages that break apart and mortgages that don’t get paid. So, while a bank may struggle, it is human beings that suffer, children that suffer, Americans that suffer and through no fault of their own other than trusting in the system. When the system fails them, all that’s left is the government, and when the government fails them, it is a truly dark and ugly place.

FDR First 100 Days
March 9 Emergency Banking Act
March 20 Government Economy Act
March 22 Beer-Wine Revenue Act
March 31 Creation of Civilian Conservation Corps
April 19 Abandonment of Gold Standard
May 12 Federal Emergency Relief Act
May 12 Agricultural Adjustment Act
May 12 Emergency Farm Mortgage Act
May 18 Tennessee Valley Authority Act
May 27 Securities Act
June 5 Abrogation of Gold Payment Clause
June 13 Home Owners Loan Act
June 16 Glass-Steagall Banking Act
June 16 National Industrial Recovery Act
June 16 Emergency Railroad Transportation Act
June 16 Farm Credit Act

“Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live.

Restoration calls, however, not for changes in ethics alone. This Nation asks for action, and action now.”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt

[niyad]

1. k and r

[Daveparts still]

2. I see

The negative Nellies are hard at work.
They must be in favor of unemployment and inaction.
Lets have a jobs summit, but lets promise first not to spend any money