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January 1, 2010 –
The truth is simple, and people on both sides - and,
of course, we who are in the middle - are aware of it.
The economy is in collapse - there is no recovery.
We also know why there is no recovery: A) Free
trade/outsourcing has sent our jobs overseas; B) the "Big
Boxing" of America has put most industries in the hands of a handful
of oversized players who suck all of the money up to the few at the
top, leaving the rest of the nation without the ability to earn
actual livings.
Yes, there is the talk - is this recovery? You
hear the insanity coming from the Obama administration - jobs will
be here by Spring. (see
Reuters article)
It was understandable back in 2004, when the Bush
administration and the media trumpeted 'recovery,' though mentioning
no jobs were coming. The Moderate Independent ran articles
back then telling that there was obviously no truth to that - in an
economy that is 2/3 consumer spending, how can you have recovery if
consumers aren't earning money to spend? Jobs are recovery.
The concept of a 'recovery' occurring because some corporate numbers
are looking up is a fiction created by the nonsensical preachings of
the conservatives who have looted and collapsed America.
'Supply side' economics - the idea that if you have corporations do
well, that leads to jobs and a strong economy - was accurately
labeled the 'voodoo economic' ponzi scheme it is right from the
beginning by none other than George W. Bush's father, George H. W.
Bush, when he ran against Ronald Reagan in 1980. At that time,
the nation understood, people had to earn money to have money to
spend; that strong labor laws were important; that competing with
cheap overseas labor without equalizing agreements would be
insanity. At that point, Rush Limbaugh didn't exist, Fox News
didn't exist - in fact, overtly dishonest propaganda media didn't
exist. Something resembling the truth dominated.
Flash forward to 1994. Here is what I am
referring to when I say the media claimed recovery in 2004 when it
was obvious there was none. Read
this article - isn't it eerie. Now you maybe see what I
saw back then - which is the same exact insanity we are seeing now.
People were saying we were in 'recovery.' Yet then they'd
mention jobs and wages hadn't actually come back. Then they go
into some fictional blurb about how it's always that way, jobs lag,
it will be... yes, just as you are hearing now... a year, maybe two,
before the jobs show up.
Um, this article was written in 2004. The jobs
never came back. They are not going to come back unless you
fix free trade, outsourcing, Big Boxing, etc.
No one really understood what I was getting at back
then, nor when I said it a couple years ago as this collapse fully
began, but reading this article now, I think you can finally
understand what is happening with the economy, why it is not the
mortgages (remember they were blaming those,) and why there is 0.0%
chance recovery has begun. Let's start with this excerpt:
"Take the case of Tony Strickland. At age 38, Strickland, who has
worked as a graphic designer for UPS for five years, is feeling worn
down. Though he's happy to have held onto his job during the
downturn, he hasn't had a single raise, save for a tiny
cost-of-living adjustment. And over the past few months, he's
attended several employee seminars about the rising cost of
benefits. While he hasn't yet been able to figure out how much that
will shrink his take-home pay, he knows he's not likely to land a
raise anytime soon. UPS, meanwhile, recently announced record
quarterly profits."
The article tries to somehow say 'the rising cost of benefits' is
why wages haven't gone up. Um, look a couple sentences later:
"UPS, meanwhile, recently announced record quarterly profits."
In the conservative fictional scheme of thing, this is recovery -
strong corporate profits, this will lead to jobs; that is the entire
crux of their pitch. But here we see that simply has no basis
in reality.
The next paragraph of this article says a mouthful. Remember,
it was written in 2004, long before the mortgage collapse.
In 2008 people were saying the mortgages were the problem. I wrote,
no, those were the symptom. (see
It's Not Just the ARM's - Deflation
Across the Board is Due) Why was I saying it wasn't the
mortgages, but that they were just a symptom? Well, now
reading this article from 2004, you can see what I saw back then:
"Strickland has company: In March hourly
wages grew at an annual rate of 1.8%, their slowest pace since the
1980s. And that means that after adjusting for inflation, average
wages were flat. (No wonder mortgage refinancing was so popular
during the downturn.) Meanwhile, during the past three years the
share of national income going to companies in the form of profits
has been steadily rising and now stands at an all-time record.
"Who's winning the age-old war between employers and workers? Right
now employers are winning hands down," says Mark Zandi, chief
economist of Economy.com. "And there's no reason to suspect that
will change anytime soon."
As I said, there is a mouthful in this paragraph - a mouthful that
no one noticed before, but now I think pops out to all. "...the
share of the national income going to companies in the form of
profits has been steadily rising and now stands at an all-time
record." "...wages were flat." The conservative lie that
if you do what is good for companies - tax cuts, free trade - it
trickles down obviously has no bearing on reality. And of
course, now that we've been through the mortgage crash, this line -
back then just a parenthetical thought - really jumps out, doesn't
it: "No wonder mortgage refinancing was so popular during the
downturn." Now I think you can see what I meant by the
mortgages were the symptom, not the problem. The borrowing
that was taking place was not wild speculation and growth, it was
desperate Americans trying to just somehow afford getting by with
wages that wouldn't allow it.
Just stop now and let this settle for a second. Reading just
these two paragraphs knowing what you know now, it's pretty obvious
that there never was recovery, that the collapse we are in started
long ago, that this is just a continuation and deepening of it, and,
of course, that there is no chance things will turn around since
nothing has as of yet been changed: free trade still has our
jobs in China, outsourcing has our jobs in India, and whatever money
is spent here at home all goes up to corporate profits and bonuses
and never 'trickles down' as wages.
And why does this last part occur? What has happened that
makes it so that now companies can do that when they used to have to
eventually share some of the wealth? Read this paragraph from
that article, then I'll answer:
"...Typically companies see an economic recovery and begin to invest
and hire. As demand for employees soaks up those out of work,
headhunters start calling. Employees sit tight for a time but jump
to new jobs when wages rise past a certain point. And after losing a
few employees to better pay elsewhere, firms get the message and
start handing out raises..."
That's what's supposed to happen; that's what used to
happen. But this article, as basically all economic articles
over the past few decades have, first avoids the obvious truth, and then
instead covers with a standard conservative scheme lie. The
obvious truth that we all know is that due to free trade and
outsourcing, the American worker no longer has leverage. The
jobs have gone overseas, and so the "demand for employees" never
actually "soaks up those out of work." The leverage stays with
the companies.
This article goes on to follow a standard
conservative 'blame them for the problem we created' scheme by not
only ignoring the obvious I just stated, but putting forth something
easily seen as untrue:
Perversely, one of the factors keeping a
lid on wages is the benefits workers have fought so hard to win.
Consider health insurance. Over the past five years the average
increase in premiums was 32%, according to the Kaiser Family
Foundation. And rising medical costs automatically translate into
lower wages. Either firms make their employees pay a bigger share of
higher health-care costs, lowering take-home pay, or firms offset
the increased cost by holding wages down. (Rising benefit costs are
a big reason offshoring has become so attractive for many
companies.)
If you had any question as to what has happened to the economy, you
can see it right here. First, the bit about high benefit costs
somehow relating to why firms don't increase wages is an obvious
fiction. Just a couple paragraphs before, the article spoke of
how UPS had just recorded a record profit. Obviously, the
company could afford to share some of that as wages. The bit
about wages is just a right-wing smear to blame workers for their
own lack of pay - pretty nasty, eh - when the real culprit spills
out just a couple sentences later, again, as with the bit about
refinancing, with the true big point only put in as a parenthetical:
"Rising benefit costs are a big reason offshoring has become
attractive to so many companies."
There you see it. Why did the author ramble on about benefit
costs? The writer doesn't even pretend that those costs are so
excessive the company can't afford to pay for benefits and increase
wages. It is just a twisting and bending psychosis that
diverts from the obvious fact, which is in fact implied by the
author: wages are not rising because companies are offshoring.
Why didn't the author just say, "Wages aren't rising because
companies are offshoring?" The answer to that answers why the
economy has collapsed and has done nothing that can lead to
recovery.
The reason the author doesn't simply say what they end up in effect
saying anyway, that offshoring is stagnating wages and stopping the
economy from recovering, is that all of the American economic
conversation has been completely hijacked and replaced with a
conservative fiction that allows a handful of people at the top to
completely loot the nation while blaming the very workers they
betray for the problem. It's very sick. It's actually a
typical setup of abusive households. Someone beats their wife
and blames her for provoking it. In this case, the poor
companies are only offshoring because those damn liberal-led workers
demanded too much in benefits. Um, the company had record
profits - the benefits are not the problem.
But don't miss the biggest point: it is not just that this is
what some Fox News liar or AM radio loon said in this article.
It's not even that this was a CNN article, a news source that is
considered more reliable and mainstream. It is that the above
is essentially what we are hearing from the Obama administration at
this moment. Look back at the article about jobs supposedly
being on the verge of returning that was linked at the beginning of
this article. The Obama administration says jobs will be back
starting this Spring.
The jobs aren't coming back. And the wages for the jobs we
have aren't coming back. And it's not that they can't, or that
they wouldn't if we fixed things.
The reality is that we have not even begun to fix the conversation,
never mind the policies. As long as outsourcing is allowed, as
long as free trade exists, companies will send jobs overseas.
This is what every American knew would happen. This is what
has happened. China has gotten rich, we are collapsing.
And the entire country/world/media is pretending that the central
point is not real: that free trade is not something that has
existed as jobs have come and go; that free trade was something new
we only began in the mid-1990's; that immediately after we began
free trade, the jobs began to flee; that within four or five years,
we began a massive downturn due to this loss of jobs (the 2001
recession, as they call it); that the jobs never came back after
that downturn (they began using the absurd 'jobless recovery'
phrase); that the downturn never ended but continued, so that by
2004 we had what we just read above; that the jobs never came back
from 2004, as the article said they would, but instead Americans
desperately found more and more ways to borrow to get by; that, to
put it simply, from the moment we started free trade in the mid
'90's, the jobs began leaving America and the economy began to
collapse, that it has never reversed and slowed and never will;
that, to sum up, free trade never worked, is a disaster, and simply
did what everyone said it would - sent all of our jobs overseas.
As we were fed the lie about benefits being the cause of stagnant
wages above, we were fed one lie that held together the 'free trade
is good for us' fiction: the jobs we will lose are jobs
Americans don't want anyway; that magically better jobs will appear
- go ahead, say it, it instantly comes to your brain - 'service
sector' jobs. We were universally conditioned to automatically
echo that fiction. Service jobs. We'll only lose jobs we
don't want anyway. Um, just because they said it - just
because it was what was universally trumpeted without questioning by
the media - doesn't mean it has any basis in reality. Someone
should have at least asked, "What service job are you talking
about?" There was no answer to that. There are no
magical service jobs. And yes, we might not prefer to spend
our time in factories, but we did actually want those jobs so we can
put food on our table.
Free trade was the scam of the century. It allowed
corporations to simply use any dirt cheap labor they want, and
completely took away any leverage the American worker had to bargain
for wages, benefits, or anything else. It was a coup on the
part of management on a scale never before seen. It is what
has collapsed our economy. And until it is reversed, jobs will
not come back, and, beyond anything we've even yet to see, America
will fall in an all out economic collapse. Yes, this is just
the beginning. Obama's lack of focus on free trade - which he
promised to deal with during the election - as well as his failure
to enunciate what I just have, that it is the conservative economic ponzi scheme that has caused our problems, that until we reverse its
policies there can be no recovery - his failure to say this has set
things up not only so that things cannot improve, but that the
conservatives who caused this collapse can now work to blame him for
the collapse they caused. He said jobs will come by Spring.
They won't. When they don't, they can say, 'See, he failed,
you need us.'
Can you imagine a conservative coming into office and not undoing
liberal policies and placing the blame on liberals if their policies
were collapsing the nation? But somehow, Obama has left America entirely in the grip of a conservative ponzi scheme that nobody in
power seems to have a problem with. They all have drunken the
Kool-Aid.
So, there you have it. Now you likely see it. Now you
are where I have been since the 1990's, when I began this crusade to
save America from a conservatism-caused collapse.
The good news about Obama is that he is not really a leader, he is a
follower. He will do whatever pressure on him says he should
do. He is the sort of leader that leads from behind, that
hears the most dominant voice/message and simply is the best at
parroting that back. Which makes our task very clear: we
must make free trade - loudly and constantly - public enemy number
one. It is up to us to save our nation. No one will do
it if we don't make them. And I don't know about you, but I
love this nation too damned much to allow a handful of greedy
conservatives to feed us to the Chinese. Before these
conservatives have a chance to get back to doing the only two things
they are skilled at - blaming and lying; before they start saying we
need them because of how powerful the Chinese are (power given to
China by them); before they get back into office and finish off
American democracy as they attempted during their last time in
charge; it is upon us to stand and fight like angels in defense of
Heaven. We must unite: real conservatives, liberals, and,
of course, we moderate independents, to defend our nation against
the wholesale looting known as free trade and conservative
economics.
And just a last note: conservatives know this isn't
conservatism. Selling American workers and the nation out to
the Chinese? No, the correct word for what we are up against
is corporatism. A handful of corporatists claiming to be
'Christian conservatives' have hijacked and looted the nation.
We will not be putting food on our tables if we don't take our
stand.
The time for talk is done. The time for reading on the 'net or
writing on it is done. It is time to stand against free trade.
Spread the word. And let's defend our nation together.
What can you do? You may not expect there to be an answer, but
there is:
1) Call your Congressperson (call, don't e-mail, it's far more
effective.) Just Google their name and you'll have their
number.
2) Call your Senator.
While petitioning the government to get them on track is vital, we
hold a lot of the power to fix things in our hands on a daily basis
- two-thirds of it as luck would have it. If two-thirds of the
economy is consumer spending, then what we choose to buy controls
two-thirds of it. And so:
1) Stop shopping at Big Box stores. Not just Walmart.
Home Depot. Applebees. Blockbuster. Support
private, local businesses. Why? Because each of those
support individual families, keeps the money local instead of having
it all sent off to one corporate headquarters, and because smaller
merchants pay fairer prices to distributors, who can pay fairer
prices to manufacturers, who can pay fairer prices to suppliers, all
of whom can then pay fairer wages to their employees. Big Box
stores squeeze all of these to get your discount. One purchase
at Target, and you have destroyed dozens of jobs and put under
dozens of local businesses. A Home Depot, for example,
eliminates paint stores, hardware stores, lighting stores, appliance
stores, nurseries, lumber yards, and a whole host of businesses for
several towns - as well as damages all of those who supply such
stores.
Also, local merchants can choose to do what we all must do:
2) Buy local. As in stop buying, "Made in China."
We have felt powerless maybe since we don't have say over what is on
the shelves, but we do if we go to local merchants. Wal-Mart
will tell you to f-yourself and your nation. A local merchant
can order as the customers want. And honestly, there is choice
if you put in some time.
We have become incredibly selfish, each of us just caring about
saving a few bucks and some time, and we have sold each other out. We must stand together united, as one nation.
There is a label solution that will really help fix things further.
But to start, you see that there is a lot you can do. Each
time you spend a dollar you cast a vote. Every time you go to
the self-check line at the supermarket, you cost someone their job.
When you use an ATM instead of a teller. Which leads to:
3) Pay with cash or check - not credit or ATM card. Why?
If you pay with credit card, the merchant pays a fee to the bank - a
percentage usually of the purchase, up to 3% often. By paying
with cash, you are directly increasing profit for the local merchant
you shop at, instead of just handing it to the big banks that just
looted us and that hand their CEO's multi-million dollar bonuses.
1-3% may not seem like a lot, but do the math. Say you go to a
local suit store instead of the Big Box Men's Wearhouse.
Instead of saving a few dollars but undermining dozens of suit
makers', small store owners', and fabric suppliers' ability to make
a living, you buy a suit from the little local guy. The suit
is $200. 3% of that is $6. That might not seem like
much, but that is pure extra profit. Instead of giving the
bank $6 for no good reason, this local owner keeps an extra $6 per
purchase. Guess what? Suddenly paying his clerks an
extra dollar an hour becomes possible, and the owner has more money
to spend locally - rather than, if you shopped at Men's Wearhouse,
the clerk not making enough to live on, and the only owner making a
living is the one guy you see on TV - who hands the cash that
hundreds of local store owners would have been living on to TV
stations, so they then can give it to sports teams and film studios
so actors and athletes can make $20 million a year while we don't
have any money to pay our bills.
See how this all works?
Shop small and local, buy locally made products, and pay with cash.
You won't have to take my word for the fact you are making a
difference. You will instantly know it. You can do the
math each time you pay cash. You will experience the
difference each time you buy locally. If we call our
Congresspeople and Senators and change our shopping habits - and
spread the word for others to do the same - we will, at last, begin
to sew the first seeds of actual recovery.
If we don't, the collapse will be complete and the conservatives who
caused it will blame liberal spending and step back into power and
finish off our democracy once and for all.
This is no joke. This is our lives and livelihoods on the
line. Let's stand together and get our nation back on track.
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