Demand demand

We demand more demand!

And an economic policy that goes with it.

P.S.  It's the opposite of 'supplyside' baloney, and it's based on the crazy idea that when workers make money, we spend it; when our wealthy overlords make money, they hoard it or play the stock market with it.  Duh!

Occupy Everywhere!

Well, it's happening on Wall Street, so why not Main Street?

Jobs AND Justice

Hitting the nail on the head as usual, Jobs with Justice and allies are demanding -- whaaat? -- jobs?? publicly funded? in the middle of a recession? a "Great Recession"?!?

But aren't we all lucky hold on to what we have without some Big Brother World Government Belgian Queen Elizabeth-Osama bin Laden Jr. Great Satan stepping in and taking away all our tea and freedoms, especially our filthy rich brothers and sisters, who are sitting on a mountain of cash and won't give us a job at the moment, but if we just give them a few more tax breaks they might?

In other words, you my innocent friend may ask, don't taxes take money out of the economy?

The only rational response when you hear this (all over the fracking place) is: WRONG!
(Actually it should be "Wrong, YOU DIPSTICK!") In fact what is taking money out of the economy is giving it to the rich! They aren't investing it. They're hoarding it! (See above.)

OK, carefully, now, carefully: Taxes on the rich, especially on money they are stashing away or blowing on the markets, and using that money to create jobs for working class folks who will certainly spend it, probably locally, is ... what? Taking money out of the economy? Or putting it back in? Hmmm... tough one, eh?

Every indicator

More bad news: foreclosures, unemployment, you name it.

It's starting to stack up on us. Earlier layers include the big news - recession since 2008 - and the barely made the news - real income spiral-down over the last few decades.

Back to that recession thing, and Rasmus, he points out: this recession is impressively worse by every economic indicator than every preceding recession this century - but not at depression -- yet.

Until now, recession meant GDP declined 2-4 percent for a couple quarters. This time it's 5-15%. Depressions have been much worse, but we could get there.

Until now, recession meant 10 percent unemployment or less. This time we hit 17%, including a million job losses per month from Nov. 08 to May 09. It's complicated by the fact that the government keeps changing how it calculates unemployment, but controlling for that, it seems clear that we are looking at much worse unemployment now than previous recessions. Depressions have been over 20%. And as public employers continue slashing deep, we could move that way.

Industrial production, exports, and stock markets, all worse than previous recessions. But not hitting levels we had in depressions -- yet. If you want a jolt, read this book.

Jobs bill not enough

Is the jobs bill the Dems are so proud of (well, not the Blue Dogs) truly a good, albeit insufficient, start? Es posible. Certainly it makes more sense than the POP (Party of Palin) ever-twisting nonsense: so it's too hard for struggling small business owners/managers to figure out some "fancy" tax credit, eh?

Happy New Year

Good bye, 2009, don't let the door knob hit you in the ass on your way out.

Over 20 million of us Amerischmucks got unemployment in '09, which of course doesn't count millions more who didn't qualify for various reasons, were forced to work only part-time, or dropped off the U-3 rolls when their clocks ran out.

We didn't get out of Iraq, dug in deeper in 'AfPak', didn't let those poor slobs go home from Gitmo - held for years without charge ("land of the free," ya know!), didn't get national health care, single-payer insurance, OR a good solid public option. AND we didn't get a right to unionize. But, hey, at least there was a "jobs summit," right?

I don't know. Looks like in 2010 we might have to raise a little hell.

GM, the new Conrail

Here's a shock: the media are reporting this story all wrong. "GM files for bankruptcy protection," "...a low point in the carmaker's 100-year history...," "... a powerful reminder of how far GM has fallen ...," blah, blah, blah.

The closest they come to the real story is generally on the jump page: "To achieve the lower break-even point, GM will have to shed thousands of employees, several car brands, hundreds of dealerships, health care and pension benefits, and a mountain of debt."

Whoa, rewind there: " ... GM will have to shed thousands of employees, ... health care and pension obligations ..."

Lemme get this straight. The US Government now has controlling interest in GM. The same US Government that has been telling us we have to pump millions of our dollars into GM, et al., because if por exemplo the Big Three go down we could lose jobs big time. The same US Government has also been talking about creating jobs, public works, etc., etc. Now they own GM (mostly), and the jobs go down the toilet anyway? On their watch? On their orders?

Admittedly we're now talking 40,000 jobs instead of 2 million, but the game ain't over yet. We still have more bankruptcy tickets.

This is the wrong kind of restructuring, folks! This is the (now discredited?) IMF all over again, just the opposite of what we need, what we need being what we might call a Social Monetary Fund - that would fund job creation, not "job shedding"; expanded health care that would cover more people, not fewer; likewise pensions.

Instead we seem to be getting, as Greg Palast puts it, "Grand Theft Auto:" nevermind ERISA, nevermind the fact that the pension money isn't theirs to take, and how DO you walk into to the doctor's office and pay with a bankrupt car company's stock?

That's clearly what we should be pissed about. But I'd like to add one more little observation, while we're on the subject (or I am). A little history, just a sort of after dinner mint to tip us right over the edge. It concerns Conrail, pretty well named in retrospect.

You see, this has all happened before. Before 1975 there were a number of old private, for-profit railroad lines running in the Northeastern US. Only they went bankrupt. So the Government bought them, and restructured them, downsized them, "shed" some of their operations and the attendant workers, etc. At the same time, with the same Act, the Government began a program of "regulatory reform" - i.e. deregulation. Several such "reforms" followed, but that's another story.

The long and the short is, by 1980 Conrail turned a profit (NB: as a government run enterprise it became profitable). So the Government took the next logical step - claro. It re-privatized the company, the largest sale of public stock in US history!

Get it? Private enterprise not working - government/taxpayers assume debt, invest billions to rebuild and repair - then hand it back to the profiteers, this time with far fewer regulations, like, for example, secret contracts, etc., etc.

They call this 'socialism'? The smart guys have a better way to describe it: "Socialized risk, privatized profit." What it means is, socialism for the rich, while the rest of us get to take our chances with wild west capitalism.

Recovery, who gets it

Here's a useful piece of work.

I like that it's balanced, rational. Points out opportunities for grassroots pressure as well as problems (e.g. the money is dispersed, not overseen by - say - a Social Monetary Fund.)

Diversify or die

In today’s news there’s another stark reminder of the need for a Social Monetary Fund, which would push the economy in general and bailout recipients in particular toward a new, social kind of diversification. The worse the economy gets, the more people hold onto their old cars, and the more people hold onto their old cars, the more we need to convert some of that capital that’s frozen up now in making cars that people aren’t buying into some more useful purpose (more useful to us chickens, that is).

I heard someone on the radio the other day mention Zipcars, and the speaker raised the following I think very timely question: Will the business of Ford, Toyota, whoever, be selling more cars to people [whether they need them or not – ed.] or will it be providing the means for people to get from one place to another?

But the stimulus money being released now, though it may have been necessary to get the ball rolling in the very shortest of runs, is not what we’re looking for. Building more roads and bridges, willy-nilly, is ultimately self-defeating. It’s not “sustainable” (as we say these days), laying more pavement and concrete we can’t afford to maintain for cars people are driving less and less to jobs they are losing more and more.

How much money do we have to spend to create every 60 jobs? That’s a drop in the unemployment bucket – especially since the workers who need these jobs the most aren’t getting them.

Clearly there are some profound needs that are being addressed by the stimulus discussion. But there are also colossal needs being missed, some that have been metastasizing for more than a generation, screwing up the federal poverty numbers, etc. The point is, there is a much better way.