BartBlog

Author’s note: I have a better solution than the author who suggested emigrating. How about REALLY taking our country back…from the corporations that own it? How about, tar, feathers and a modern day version of the guillotine?

Excerpt:
On Friday the grim reality of more job losses for Americans was plastered across headlines. What makes this even more distressing is that this is occurring during what is supposed to be an economic recovery.

Approximately 131,000 jobs were lost in July and the unemployment rate remained stuck at 9.5 percent. Private sector hiring was at a modest 71,000, unable to offset the layoff of thousands of temporary census workers, other government employees and those who lost their jobs in the private sector last month.

Of course, the big story was that the jobs report affected stocks and the Dow Jones industrial index, not the millions of Americans that are out of work, even though stocks rebounded by the end of the day. After all, who in the corporate media really cares about middle class workers? It is becoming clear that the so-called economic recovery applies to Wall Street, not “Main Street.”

According to Newsweek, Main Street may not be adding jobs, but Wall Street went on a hiring binge. A recent study by the White House executive-compensation board reported that banks paid $1.58 billion in bonuses at the end of 2008, just days after receiving federal bailout money and dangerously close to the nexus of the financial collapse. These same banks do not want to lend to the shrinking middle class that bailed them out when they can make more money speculating on Wall Street.

Economists are still spinning fairy tales so they can celebrate bank bailouts. Unmentioned are the 40 million Americans that are still broke and out of work. The reality is that things have gotten progressively worse as foreclosures are still near their peak, bankruptcies are rising, wages are stuck or reversing backwards, and benefits that have been cut by companies may never be returned to their workers.

Why is that? I do not have any answers, but this piece written by Michael Lind, director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation, may provide some insight. I normally would excerpt this and provide commentary, but this one may be best to read in its entirety:

Are the American People Obsolete?

Have the American people outlived their usefulness to the rich minority in the United States? A number of trends suggest that the answer may be yes.

In every industrial democracy since the end of World War II, there has been a social contract between the few and the many. In return for receiving a disproportionate amount of the gains from economic growth in a capitalist economy, the rich paid a disproportionate percentage of the taxes needed for public goods and a safety net for the majority.

In North America and Europe, the economic elite agreed to this bargain because they needed ordinary people as consumers and soldiers. Without mass consumption, the factories in which the rich invested would grind to a halt. Without universal conscription in the world wars, and selective conscription during the Cold War, the U.S. and its allies might have failed to defeat totalitarian empires that would have created a world order hostile to a market economy.

Globalization has eliminated the first reason for the rich to continue supporting this bargain at the nation-state level, while the privatization of the military threatens the other rationale.

The offshoring of industrial production means that many American investors and corporate managers no longer need an American workforce in order to prosper. They can enjoy their stream of profits from factories in China while shutting down factories in the U.S. And if Chinese workers have the impertinence to demand higher wages, American corporations can find low-wage labor in other countries.

This marks a historic change in the relationship between capital and labor in the U.S. The robber barons of the late 19th century generally lived near the American working class and could be threatened by strikes and frightened by the prospect of revolution. But rioting Chinese workers are not going to burn down New York City or march on the Hamptons.

What about markets? Many U.S. multinationals that have transferred production to other countries continue to depend on an American mass market. But that, too, may be changing. American consumers are tapped out, and as long as they are paying down their debts from the bubble years, private household demand for goods and services will grow slowly at best in the United States. In the long run, the fastest-growing consumer markets, like the fastest-growing labor markets, may be found in China, India and other developing countries.

This, too, marks a dramatic change. As bad as they were, the robber barons depended on the continental U.S. market for their incomes. The financier J.P. Morgan was not so much an international banker as a kind of industrial capitalist, organizing American industrial corporations that depended on predominantly domestic markets. He didn’t make most of his money from investing in other countries.

In contrast, many of the highest-paid individuals on Wall Street have grown rich through activities that have little or no connection with the American economy. They can flourish even if the U.S. declines, as long as they can tap into growth in other regions of the world.

A very interesting point of view that is worthy of consideration. What do you think? Will Americans ever get fed up enough to do anything?

Read more, get links here: Madison Independent Examiner