Thanks For The Awesome Job Market, Cons

Any Con worth their salt will tell you that the “free-market” will fix everything!  Their zeal to cram their fake religion down everybody’s throats led to the collapse of the U.S. economy in this first decade of the 21st century.  But there is a huge disconnect.  Thanks to both Cons and Democrats looking out for their Wall St. benefactors, most Americans haven’t and won’t feel anything close to a recovery for a long, long time.  While Wall St. has posted stunning gains since their lows earlier this year, millions more Americans have continued to lose their jobs and their livlihoods.

How bad have things gotten for the real average American?  How about a look at a paper published last month by Advance Realty and Rutgers: America’s New Post-Recession Employment Arithmetic.  Here are some choice figures for you to chew on [emphasis mine]:

• The combination of a weak economic expansion sandwiched between two recessions (2001, and 2007–2009) produced what will be a lost employment decade. As of August 2009, the nation had 1.3 million (1,256,000) fewer private sector jobs than in December 1999. This is the first time since the Great Depression of the 1930s that America will have an absolute loss of jobs over the course of a decade.

• To put this new millennium experience into perspective, during the final two decades of the twentieth century, the nation gained a total of 35.5 million private-sector jobs. During the current decade, America appears destined to lose more than 1.7 million private-sector jobs.

• This 1.3 million annual increase in the labor force means that in terms of private-sector payroll employment, the nation has to create an estimated 920,000 jobs per year.  Adding this to the actual private-sector job losses accumulated during the 20 months (to date) of recession equates to an August 2009 employment deficit of 8.6 million jobs. Given conservative estimates of further employment declines (even if the recession ends in the third quarter of 2009) and the continued increase in the labor force, the nation’s employment deficit could approach 9.4 million private-sector jobs by December 2009.

• Erasing this deficit will require substantial and sustained employment growth. Even if the nation could add 2.15 million private-sector jobs per year starting in January 2010, it would need to maintain this pace for more than 7 straight years (7.63 years), or until August 2017, to eliminate the jobs deficit! This is approximately 50 percent greater than the length of the average post–World War II expansion (58 months).

The “free-market” cannot and never will fix this.  It’s going to take the concentrated effort of the federal government working with the private sector to pull us out of this disaster.  Thanks again, Cons!

[h/t MB]

Misc. News 9/27/09

Occasionally, a number of things catch my eye on the same day.  With so much, I can’t go into detail about all of it.  Instead, I try to sample them with much shorter opinions.  Here’s today’s:

“Democrats Are Jarred By Drop In Fundraising“.  Really?  Democrats are really jarred by this?  A big reason might be it’s nearly October2009 and all the Democratic-led government has done is given away trillions of dollars to rich people and corporations while working feverishly to explain to America that they just can’t put together real health care reform.  It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Americans are unlikely to continue forking over their hard-earned cash to such insipid waffling.

“Petitions target state spending” sounds innocuous, until you realize that the right-wing rag Denver Post decided on the lede.  Three ballot initiative petitions are circulating in CO that would take an additional $1 billion per year away from the government to do things like fix roads and bridges, maintain telecommunications infrastructure and give a big middle finger to local school districts who voted to opt out of spending limits.  It seems the Cons talking point about keeping control local doesn’t apply when people don’t agree with their insane economic policies.  The petitions will gather signatures, there’s no doubt about that.  But asking Coloradans to further weigh the state government down when everything is already being defunded thanks to similar efforts in the past?  I doubt that will resonate.  Who knows, though – Coloradans could again prove how senseless they are.

“Rural counties taking a beating” tries to perpetuate the story that urbanites are likely to overlook rural concerns as the economy tries to recover.  It ignores one simple, basic fact though.  Those “common-sensical” rural folks?  Yeah, they voted for the economic policies that caused the Great Recession for over 30 years.  It seems to me their “concerns” carried too much weight in the past – and it’s brought all of us down.  They want to lead a different kind of life than those of us in the cities?  That’s fine, it’s their right after all.  But it sounds stupid when they complain about conditions they created.  How about the concerns of the majority of Coloradans, who happen to live in cities?

Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman wrote a short piece on the potential greening of the economy.  He relates a very important concept about the energy and climate legislation Congress has stalled on: it’s cheaper to do something about climate change than not.  Point in fact, it’s probably cheaper than even he relates in the column.

News Pieces 1/30/09: Cassini, GDP, Exxon and Winter Storms

NASA’s Cassini mission managers want to extend the mission another 7 years.  Doing so would allow them to investigate the Saturnian system for 1/2 of a Saturn year.  I hope they get the go-ahead.

The economy shrank at a 3.8% annual rate in the last quarter.  That’s a preliminary reading – one which is expected to get worse as the numbers are looked at in more depth.  That number won’t get better any time soon.  Millions are losing their jobs and their houses.  Millions more have lost access to credit, which was the economy’s driving force for the past twenty years.  Americans are going to realize they aren’t being paid enough when their credit lines are shut down as the recession deepens and lasts longer than most people are estimating right now.  All these things are the direct results of Con-servative policies being implemented (exactly as Cons wanted them to be, by the way) in the U.S.  It’s happened to every other country in the world where America tried to export “capitalistic democracy”.  The Cons finally got their chance to implement their policies to their fullest extenet here in America.  We’re living with the consequences now.  What are Cons doing in Congress? Pushing the same failed policies that got us here.  Thankfully, voters made better choices in this last election.

Did you hear that even poor ol’ Exxon Mobil is huring – just like the rest of us – in the recent economic downturn?  Okay, maybe not just like the rest of us.  After all, their 2008 profits were only $45,200,000,000.  Only $45.2 Billion.  Does anybody remember $4.50 gas last summer?  Guess where it went.  Autocratic regimes in the Middle East and mega-corporations like Exxon Mobil.  That’s correct – that disgusting number is only the profits of one corporation.  Keep those numbers in mind when you see their advertising claiming they’re doing all  kinds of critical research, developing better things for tomorrow.  In the face of the worst economic downturn since the last Republican Great Depression, in the face of record energy prices, the mega-fossil fuel corporations are making billions in profits and distributing millions more to executive bonuses.  When will their new technologies and “cleaner” fuels be available?  Eh, just keep buying gas for a few more decades.  Maybe after another $500 Billion or so in profits, they’ll actually come up with something.  Or Americans can continue to play the sucker in the relationship and continue buying their fossil fuels and never expect more out of them.

I heard about this last night on the radio.  Plenty of people in the eastern half of the U.S. are without power from … an average January winter storm.  The excellent questions raised were the following.  How many billions of dollars is the Dept. of “Homeland Security” sucking down every year?  The purpose of DHS is to protect the “homeland”, correct?  What kind of target do you think terrorists would like to strike?  Maybe power plants or power infrastructure more generically?  Our economy would certainly suffer even more if extensive power outages occurred.  Do you think DHS is doing its job protecting the homeland if a common, well-forecasted winter storm puts millions of people into the dark and cold?  I certainly don’t.  Given these circumstances, I have no faith in DHS to protect any American from a terrorist attack.  There are plenty of problems with our current infrastructure.  This kind of problem should receive some attention in the recovery package making its way through Congress now.

Bush and Banks Robbing the American Taxpayer

I’ve written about this a little since Sep 15th, when everything in the financial markets went to hell.  I didn’t trust the Bush “administration” to handle the financial crisis with any degree of honesty or integrity.  I take no pleasure in reading news reports that my worst fears continue to come true.  Bush and Sec. Treasury Paulson are taking American taxpayers for a ride; a ride that they will never be held accountable.  How bad is it already?  As detailed by Jerome a Paris, here are the up-to-date details:

• the original $700 billion bailout;
• an additional $140 billion in tax breaks for banks (quietly non-announced by the Bushies);
• $150 billion for AIG, on much sweeter terms than they were paying for the earlier $85 billion bailout (with a whoopping 5% drop in the interest rate they have to pay, for instance);
• lest we forget, the $29 billion guarantee to JPMorgan for Bear Stearns assets (but that’s almost small change now);
• and $1,200 billion new liabilities on the Fed’s (ie ultimately the taxpayers’) balance sheet, backed by mostly junk paper;

That’s $2.3 Trillion in just under two months’ time.  From a party that will whine for the next four years that Democrats are being fiscally conservative.  Is it responsible or moral to give away more taxpayer money to banks that ran around unregulated for years?  Is it responsible or moral to renegotiate the AIG deal with a lower interest rate when they blew through their original giveaway in a few weeks’ time?  Is it moral or responsible for the Federal Reserve to refuse to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral?

This is the kind of immoral and irresponsible behavior that cost the Cons the 2008 elections.  Yet, the lesson they’ve learned so far from the elections is they didn’t attack Democrats enough; they weren’t loud enough about their failed ideas and policies.  Believe me, the American voter heard more than enough disgusting Con attacks.  Voters have suffered under the Cons’ failed policies.  The problem is Con policies are too extreme for America.  If Cons want to come back toward the center-left the nation actually occupies, they’ll win plenty of elections.

3 Super Banks

There was a large public outcry against sending $700 billion to corporate banks a couple of months ago.  It wasn’t hard to figure out why.  Those banks and their Con-servative government gamed the system against Americans for years. People wanted the $700 billion to go to people and projects that would actually benefit the economy.  Remember, the Bush administration redacted portions of the contracts with the banks that would allow Americans to see where their tax money went.  Instead of opening up credit markets, the banks were allowed to buy each other out.  Now, there are 3 Superbanks left.

In a sad demonstration of just how little analysts actually understand the banking-government relationship and a disgusting demonstration of how the corporate media has allowed that relationship to become a cancer in our economic system, the article has the following:

Moreover, many analysts worry about how federal and state authorities, who were unable to prevent the current financial industry meltdown, will be able to monitor the new giant banks that combine a wide range of operations from investment banking to consumer lending.

Those authories were able to prevent the current financial industry meltdown, they just chose not to.  There are laws on the books regulating banking activity – they just need to be enforced.  That is exactly what the corrupt Bush administration chose not to do.  They argued against regulation of the industry.  So instead of changing the law (transparency), they decided not to enforce it.  We have a Department of Justice for a reason.  But it requires people in government who want to govern, hence the govern in government.  Bush and his cronies achieved power with the intention of using the U.S. government as their personal piggy-bank.  By the time the American people could respond, they would have sucked everything dry.  And it’s worked spectacularly.  This country has over $10 Trillion in debt, half of which was racked up in the past 7 years.  The other half took decades to accumulate, most of which happened under Con-servative presidencies.

Here is what I said when the financial crisis struck: If the corporation is too big to fail (if its failure would harm the economy), it’s too big to exist.  Sen. Bernie Sanders from Vermont has quite succintly put that concept together and I’m happy to borrow it.  Here is what it means: in the wake of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, Con-servatives allowed the already too-large financial corporations to grow even bigger.  Consumers now have fewer choices.  This situation is a violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.  The federal government has the responsibility to enforce that Act and break up these Mega-Banks to more manageable size.  In fact, the new Big 3 control 1/3 of this country’s banking industry.  The rich got much, much richer with Cons in the White House.  The American people got screwed.  In fact, when Americans have to keep paying higher ATM taxes and higher account taxes and higher taxes associated with everything they do through their bank, I hope they think about how good bank consolidation is for them.

In fact, existing federal banking laws say that no bank can have more than 10 percent of the domestic deposit market — a threshold recently surpassed by all three superbanks.

When asked whether the government would take any action, a Justice Department official was noncommittal.

The worst financial crisis in 70 years, and the DoJ official is noncommittal.  I hope no one seriously wonders why John McCain lost so badly on Tuesday.  He offered nothing different in his approach.  At least with Democrats, there is a chance of a difference.  It will require Americans pushing them to do the morally correct thing, because those MegaBanks will wave loads of taxpayer cash under elected officials’ noses to keep looking the other way while they run amok.

In the current environment, such rapid consolidation is a “no brainer,” says Gregory F. Udell, Chase Chair of Banking and Finance at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business.

The risk of creating monopolies, he says, “is a lot less than the risk of having a lot of zombie institutions out there.”

He also points out that consolidation in the banking sector, though recently at a fever pitch, is nothing new.

Indeed, the number of commercial banks and savings & loans in the United States has fallen in the past 20 years to 8,451 as of June, compared to 16,574 in 1988, according to FDIC data.

In the wake of the S&L crisis (another Con-caused disaster for average Americans), Cons allowed banks to eat each other up, reducing competition and transparency in the industry.  In the wake of this latest crisis, the process has simply accelerated.  As far as Udell’s sentiment goes: it’s another arrow shot into the free-market religious zealots.  As long as taxpayers are tapped to socialize corporations’ losses, there is no free-market.

I can’t wait until the Cons in charge of our government are sent back to the holes where they came from.  I can’t wait until responsible adults are running this country again.  The banks need to be broken up into manageable pieces.  The American people need officials who advocate for their interests.