Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Friday, June 04, 2010

The "Recovery" Is Jobless, the Deficit Hawks Are Clueless (And Also Evil)



The dotted line tells us the story of current employment numbers with and without temporary census workers treated as part of the picture. The census jobs are real, of course, and somewhat stimulative, but also temporary and likely not indications of structural jobs recovery after all.

There are a lot of deficit hawks who want to ensure their fortunes are insulated from inflation and who don't give two shits about the human catastrophe represented by these unemployment numbers.

Many of these deficit hawks are also warmongering chicken hawks who don't seem to care how much of our sprawling deficit is attributable to our bombs and bullets and bases. This is not an oversight or a bit of fuzzy thinking on their part. Defense spending -- especially when it represents such a high proportion of GDP -- is a lever that enables folks who like loudly to declare their ideological devotion to "spontaneous order" and "free market meritocracy" to plan and control the economy to their parochial benefit. It is also true that no small amount of Defense spending amounts to welfare for the rich programs from which they directly endlessly benefit. And all that is not to mention that bombs and bullets and bases come in handy when you want to defend your fortune from starving hopeless hordes of people few of whom are sufficiently attractive to have a place in your household as photogenic slaves -- especially once Greenhouse storms turn the southeastern neo-Confederacy into gunk-saturated swamps and the mid-west is tornado torn beyond recognition and western forests go up in uncontrollable flames.

If Democrats maintain their Congressional majorities (which I expect) and make a better than expected showing in the mid-terms (which I hope), we need to get another huge stimulus out of them, and employ people in schools, in clinics, in the repair, maintenance, and building of shovel-ready infrastructure projects (including sexy interstate bullet trains and urban streetcars and windmill farms and solar rooftops and so on, of course, but also just filling potholes and shoring up sewer pipes and bridge girders for heaven's sake, Terrance gives you plenty to chew on here if you want to know what to direct your attention to). This will require serious organizing and participation, marches, demonstrations, phone calls to representatives, and so on -- especially since the many people who talk sense in the Democratic Party in these matters do not seem to have the President's ear at present. That means we will have to provide the megaphone that reaches his ear. It will require efforts that are not blunted by demoralization, and are not stymied by serial failures and disappointing compromises.

It doesn't matter that the Tea Party will shriek, and they will. They have shown they shriek no matter how one tries to accommodate them. They're all just racist sexist pigs anyway. It doesn't matter that the corporate CEOs and lobbyists will organize a ferocious resistance, and they will. They have shown they will resist no matter how one tries to reason with them -- they have the money and the power and the shills to muck up the works and water down our efforts but we have to do our best against them anyway. They're all just greedy narcissistic assholes anyway.

The bigot mob and the corporate-militarist elite represent an unholy alliance that is the kernel of an authoritarian order that would commandeer the organizational forces of the Republican Party and exploit the psychic distress of economic catastrophe to earth-shattering ends. I do not think they would finally succeed in their aims because I think the scale and diversity of our nation provide resources for resistance and hope that are proof against industrial/mass-mediated totalitarian control formations.

But I don't want to live through the violence and destruction and death they could easily manage along the road to their ultimate defeat this time around. They came closest to their prize in the first two years of the second term of the Bush/Cheney Administration, and I hope that the secular multicultural democratically-minded majorities of Americans will deploy the organizational and informational resources of the Democratic party step by slow step to re-regulate corporate-militarist institutions and shame the bigots and Know Nothings into disorganized marginality, all the while nudging the imperfect instrument of the Democratic Party itself step by slow step in a more progressive direction responsive to real needs and real possibilities.

The imperfection and hence obviously apparent inadequacy of that instrument here and now is less important than is the fact that it is the only instrument we have on hand and that it is an instrument that can be improved, even if more slowly than the urgency of our problems demand.

1 comment:

Lorraine said...

The graphic is most instructive. The current employment recession certainly blows the doors off the others in terms of area under the curve, or would that be over the curve? The overall contour of the curve looks like it could well find its way back to "peak employment month," much less so of course if you subtract the census jobs.

I remember the early 80's recession (which I call the Reagan Recession) as more structural than cyclical for labor. Those were my coming-of-age years, and it was made clear to my generation that jobs-with-bennies are henceforth to be several rungs up the career ladder. One of the fundamental flaws in official economic statistics is of course the refusal to recognize the difference between gainful and contingent employment.

I expect this recession, like the Reagan Recession, usher in a permanent ratcheting-down of worker expectations. The RR ratcheted down expectations primarily in the areas of job security and bennies. This time I suspect the new normal will be a tacit understanding that sales is part of everyone's job description; an increasingly large part.