Fool us once blame you. Fool us twice and then again and again and again?
Obama is being credited due to the usual bureaucratic numbers twisting that though he hasn’t been able to increase jobs, he has at least arrested job losses. This is profound bullshit.
Hugh of correntewire has done the real math which deserves a serious read. He has dug into The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ September jobs report with its “undercount” and unearthed the real and horrifying dimensions of disemployment in America. He has also explained just how pathetically and grotesquely inadequate Obama’s and the Dem’s faux-emergency solution to the jobs crisis actually is.
Hugh:
For my alternate calculation of the BLS undercount, I first calculate what the labor force should be if we were in a reasonably robust expansion: .67(NIP) and then subtract the current labor force from it. The difference is the undercount. My calculation for the undercount in September is 6.831 million. This gives a disemployment number of 30.147 million and a disemployment rate also of 18.7%. I have not back calculated to the beginning of the December 2007 recession (using this calculation) but I believe this is the first time disemployment has broken 30 million. This is significant. You see while the official 9.1% unemployment rate is bad. It hasn't changed much from the 9.0% it was at the beginning of the year. This leaves the impression that while things have not been getting better, they haven't been getting worse. But this isn't true. When we look at the bigger picture, disemployment has been getting worse, much worse. Negative.
snip
In conclusion, 30 million is the number this month and it doesn't appear in the jobs report. 30 million Americans is a lot of Americans. It is a lot of families, a lot of hopes and dreams. The Republicans don't care at all. Neither do Obama and the Democrats. Even by Obama's own best case scenario, his jobs plan would create 1.9 million jobs (lasting about a year). The truth is the way his package is structured he would be lucky to create one million, but most of the plan is just an election campaign gesture. It is not meant to be enacted but to provide campaign talkingpoints. But even if it were, 1.9 million temporary jobs would, after taking into account population growth, improve the U-3 [household survey] unemployment rate by maybe 0.4%. Take my estimate of one million jobs and it would not cover population growth and have no positive effect on the U-3 rate at all. And this is the response of our political Establishment to a problem whose size they say is 14 million. Only it is more than twice that big, 30 million. To be blunt, we are so screwed. Not only do we have a huge jobs crisis that is getting worse but our political duopoly is committed to doing nothing about it beyond some short term exploitation of it to score a few political points.
Michael Hudson in his article "Obama’s Good Cop/ Bad Cop deal with the Republicans/Don’t Let Him Get Away With It: Occupy Wall St" refers to Obama’s "'dead-on-arrival 'job-creation' ploy". Mr. Hudson writes:
... on Wednesday, October 4, the president tried to represent the OccupyWallStreet movement as supportive for his efforts. He pretended to endorse a pro-consumer regulator to limit bank fraud, as if he had not dumped Elizabeth Warren on the advice of Mr. Geithner – who seems to be settling into the role of bagman for campaign contributors from Wall Street.
Can President Obama get away with it? Can he jump in front of the parade and represent himself as a friend of labor and consumers while his appointees support Wall Street and his Committee of 13 is waiting in the wings to perform its designated function of guillotining Social Security?
Hudson believes Obama will be given by the oligarchy running this country a second term in reward for further citizen betrayal. Why not? Win/win for both Obama and the kleptocrats. Obama has managed to razzle dazzle people into believing his “good cop” kabuki as he contributes his covert dead weight (but “look how hard I am trying”) obstructionism and pathetic token (e.g., the jobs recovery plan Hugh exposes above) incrementalism to help promote the goals of Reaganomics. To destroy “federal social spending.” With so many Democrats still blindly enabling Obama, it is a game worth playing for the kleptocrats and the supposedly “butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth” Obama.
Hudson writes:
The problem facing Mr. Obama is obvious enough: How can he hold the support of moderates and independents (or as Fox News calls them, socialists and anti-capitalists), students and labor, minorities and others who campaigned so heavily for him in 2008? He has double-crossed them – smoothly, with a gentle smile and patronizing patter talk, but with an iron determination to hand federal monetary and tax policy over to his largest campaign contributors: Wall Street and assorted special interests – the Democratic Party’s Rubinomics and Clintonomics core operators, plus smooth Bush Administration holdovers such as Tim Geithner, not to mention quasi-Cheney factotums in the Justice Department.
President Obama’s solution has been to do what any political demagogue does: Come out with loud populist campaign speeches that have no chance of becoming the law of the land, while quietly giving his campaign contributors what they’ve paid him for: giveaways to Wall Street, tax cuts for the wealthy (euphemized as tax “exemptions” and mark-to-model accounting, plus an agreement to count their income as “capital gains” – taxed at a much lower rate).
So here’s the deal the Democratic leadership has made with the Republicans. The Republicans will run someone from their present gamut of guaranteed losers, enabling Mr. Obama to run as the “voice of reason,” as if this somehow is Middle America. This will throw the 2012 election his way for a second term if he adopts their program – a set of rules paid for by the leading campaign contributors to both parties.
So don’t worry, all those fretting Obama won’t get that second term and it will go to the supposed greater of two evils. Obama will continue to screw the country as a significant part of the citizenry continues to champion and enable him. How tragically ironic.
Hudson asserts that America has a fatal POLITICAL and economic wound with more wounding to come as OBAMA’S Committee of 13 prepares “to wield its ax and cut federal social spending in keeping with its professed ideology.”
Hudson:
The Democrats are as much a part of the septic disease as the Republicans. Other countries face a similar problem. The Social Democratic regime in Iceland is acting as the party of bankers, and its government’s approval rating has fallen to 12 percent. But they refuse to step down....
snip
Likewise in Greece, the demonstrators are showing foreign bank interests that any agreement the European Central Bank makes to bail out French and German bondholders at the cost of increasing taxes on Greek labor (but not Greek property and wealth) cannot be viewed as democratically entered into.
snip
.... The cure will follow logically from the diagnosis. The role of OccupyWallStreet is to diagnose the financial polarization and corruption of the political process that extends right into the Supreme Court, the Presidency, and Mr. Obama’s soon-to-be notorious Committee of 13 once the happy-smoke settles from his present pretensions.[cross-posted at correntewire and sacramento for democracy]
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http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/ruin-nation-obama-catastrophe
From "Ruin-Nation: The Obama Catastrophe" by BAR executive editor Glen Ford:
"“History will, without doubt, lay this ruin of a nation at the doorstep of Obama, the corporate Democratic Trojan Horse.”
"Barack Obama finally got the grand, bipartisan consensus he’s been working towards for two and a half years. His implacable, deep-seated hostility to the left half of the Democratic Party (“retarded,” said his boy, Rahm Emanuel) – which includes most of the Congressional Black Caucus – transformed a 2008 popular mandate for progressive change into its opposite: a de facto center-right governing coalition of Republicans, rightwing Democrats and Obama’s Executive Branch arrayed against roughly half the Democrats (on a very good day) in the House of Representatives, plus a handful of liberal Senators.
"Obama’s unrelenting hostility to “entitlements,” which he vowed to put “on the table” for cutting two weeks before taking the oath of office in January, 2009, came to fruition this week, setting in motion a rolling implosion of Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society. It is a monumental catastrophe, worthy of a Mt. Rushmore in reverse (say, deep in a guano-filled bat cave). History will, without doubt, lay this ruin of a nation at the doorstep of Obama, the corporate Democratic Trojan Horse whose complexional characteristics neutered, neutralized or outright made insane the bulk of Black America and most of those whites that pass as “progressives.”
"Black Agenda Report and author Paul Street, among a very few others, warned long before the 2007 launch of Obama’s campaign that his own words, deeds, financial contributors and political associations showed him to be an eager operative of Wall Street and the Pentagon. As president, Obama has embraced or launched so many wars, he feels compelled to deny that his latest aggression, against Libya, is a war at all, lest he seem too full of bloodlust. Under the austerity regime jointly imposed by Obama and the GOP (his “Big Plan”) through a manufactured debt crisis (abetted by Obama over the years), the actual reins of the legislative process will pass to a Super Committee, a formalized version of the center-right senatorial “gangs” (health care and debt) and appointed commissions (debt reduction) favored by Obama as embodiments of his “grand consensus” politics. The formula guarantees a shutout of the Left – although, as long as Obama is around, the corporate media will continue to claim, nonsensically, that he represents the Left."
From "Ruin-Nation: The Obama Catastrophe" by BAR executive editor Glen Ford:
"“History will, without doubt, lay this ruin of a nation at the doorstep of Obama, the corporate Democratic Trojan Horse.”
"Barack Obama finally got the grand, bipartisan consensus he’s been working towards for two and a half years. His implacable, deep-seated hostility to the left half of the Democratic Party (“retarded,” said his boy, Rahm Emanuel) – which includes most of the Congressional Black Caucus – transformed a 2008 popular mandate for progressive change into its opposite: a de facto center-right governing coalition of Republicans, rightwing Democrats and Obama’s Executive Branch arrayed against roughly half the Democrats (on a very good day) in the House of Representatives, plus a handful of liberal Senators.
"Obama’s unrelenting hostility to “entitlements,” which he vowed to put “on the table” for cutting two weeks before taking the oath of office in January, 2009, came to fruition this week, setting in motion a rolling implosion of Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society. It is a monumental catastrophe, worthy of a Mt. Rushmore in reverse (say, deep in a guano-filled bat cave). History will, without doubt, lay this ruin of a nation at the doorstep of Obama, the corporate Democratic Trojan Horse whose complexional characteristics neutered, neutralized or outright made insane the bulk of Black America and most of those whites that pass as “progressives.”
"Black Agenda Report and author Paul Street, among a very few others, warned long before the 2007 launch of Obama’s campaign that his own words, deeds, financial contributors and political associations showed him to be an eager operative of Wall Street and the Pentagon. As president, Obama has embraced or launched so many wars, he feels compelled to deny that his latest aggression, against Libya, is a war at all, lest he seem too full of bloodlust. Under the austerity regime jointly imposed by Obama and the GOP (his “Big Plan”) through a manufactured debt crisis (abetted by Obama over the years), the actual reins of the legislative process will pass to a Super Committee, a formalized version of the center-right senatorial “gangs” (health care and debt) and appointed commissions (debt reduction) favored by Obama as embodiments of his “grand consensus” politics. The formula guarantees a shutout of the Left – although, as long as Obama is around, the corporate media will continue to claim, nonsensically, that he represents the Left."
mike hudson is one of the more brilliant economists out there... he warned of a bubble in the FIRE industry years before it blew up. Finance, Insurance, Real Estate. its exactly what melted down. in a real meritocracy he would be chief economist of the world bank, or something.....
Thank you for this, it is a must read. I am sure after theater is over they will all agree on taking more money from the poor to give to the "job creators." R
vzn, thanks for comment. I agree. Hudson is a straight talker! Honest and smart and earnest.
thoth, thanks for that generous comment. why can't everyone appreciate the repetition of the kabuki curtaining super-greed destructive opportunism????
libby
thoth, thanks for that generous comment. why can't everyone appreciate the repetition of the kabuki curtaining super-greed destructive opportunism????
libby
Another thing to keep in mind, as discussed previously, is what the jobs are designed to do. In the current system we create jobs when and only when it increases the profits of the oligarchies regardless of how much they benefit the majority including the consumers that are often encouraged to by shoddy or useless products.
What should be more important is creating jobs that benefit the majority regardless of whether or not they enable the rich to extort their share even when they don't do work that benefits the majority. In fact if we create more jobs that cut out the extortionary cuts that the oligarchies take and do more to improve the quality of life for the majority that would be better.
That is what the oligarchies have turned into, white caller extortionists!
What should be more important is creating jobs that benefit the majority regardless of whether or not they enable the rich to extort their share even when they don't do work that benefits the majority. In fact if we create more jobs that cut out the extortionary cuts that the oligarchies take and do more to improve the quality of life for the majority that would be better.
That is what the oligarchies have turned into, white caller extortionists!
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