Will desperation grow unquiet?
The report from the Labor Department Friday showed that employers added some 110,000 new jobs to the U.S. economy last month, the biggest one-month gain since last May. The report also revised figures showing a surprise loss of 4,000 jobs in August, now saying the economy actually added 89,000 new jobs.
- John W. Schoen, MSNBC, Oct. 5, 2007
Seems like a billion years ago, doesn't it? And, remember, the economy was declining in autumn 2007 - headed down the gentle slope that became a precipice in less than a year.
The world of high finance braced for and got another grim jobs report today, showing private, non-farm employers shed 263,000 jobs in September. That was worse than had been projected by any eggheads scoping our current catastrophe, and puts unemployment at just under 10 percent.
The Dow Jones industrial average tumbled 203 points Thursday, while all the major indexes fell between 2 percent and 3 percent. The slide intensified in the final minutes of the day, signaling that traders were growing nervous ahead of the government's key September jobs report due before the opening bell Friday [Source]
Although, the "big board" opened slow this morning, there is room for optimism - even with the slip, traders must be heartened that Wall Street enjoyed the strongest quarter since 1998.
The Dow Jones industrials and Standard & Poor's 500 index both ended the quarter with gains of more than 15 percent, even as they pulled back modestly on the quarter's last day... The gains didn't always come easily during the quarter, and the Dow's performance is proof. The average, which had its best three-month showing in nearly 11 years, came within 82 points of reclaiming 10,000, only to fall back as investors' optimism was chilled by news that housing and manufacturing weren't as strong as many had thought.
That kind of market success in the wake of the sharpest economic downturn since the Great Depression inspired Fed Chief Ben Bernanke to declare last month that the recession is likely over.
But for who?
Over the next few months, workers laid off in the first wave of downturn will be running out of their measly 72 weeks of unemployment insurance. With more jobs being cut, it's damn likely those jobless pioneers idled since summer 2008 will stay unemployed.
What will they do? Will they be cheered by news the recession is over? How long before this bullish market bounty trickles down to them, in the form of jobs, and security they haven't felt in an agonizingly long time?
On this site and on others, posters, myself included, have taken note of just how detached we've become from the pinnacle of our pyramid society. There is a place, up there in the clouds, near heaven, where there's no concern about job security, or health costs for our children. No worries about tomorrow, or, evidently, remorse about the past. There's no attention paid the rest of us, down here at the bottom of our social-compact temple; we are, at best, abstractions, and at worst, unfashionable rabble.
Congress' solution to the health care issue? They would mandate us to pay for health insurance - or face fine or jail. Why give a costly public option to surly peasants? Make it, on pain of penalty, unavoidable - like car insurance or crow's feet after 40. In 25 years of handing the banking and investment industries everything they want - with a sugar cookie and a big, wet kiss - if ever we doubted our lawmakers listen only to monied interests, this smashes that delusion. Enrich the insurance scoundrels or the bars clang shut behind us. Rubes!
Eighty years ago, our grandfathers and grandmothers help set up a system that rescued the country from the Depression. No... it didn't put Wall Street back in pinkie rings and champagne whores - God, what a myopic, money-centered denotation locks around our common existence. But the public works, social security and welfare programs instituted in the New Deal provided the safety net that kept our much-maligned forebears from starving homeless in the streets. Just knowing it was there gave them hope. Regardless of when the market recovered, those fundamentally compassionate programs put the country back on its feet.
Today, we're smarter, colder and wondrously soulless. We don't need all that hand-holding. After decades of being told to look out for number one, we've gotten the message: We've turned ourselves into number two.
Maybe we're not so smart, after all. Water trunk lines are bursting all over Los Angeles. They were laid throughout the Basin circa 1913, and old man Mulholland and his Department of Water and Power - who'd drained the Owens Valley to irrigate our sour urban dreams - told us the pipes would last about 100 years. We should have listened. These artifacts are rusted, riveted plates rolled circular, six feet in diameter - Industrial Age dragons feeble with age and snaking uneasily under our feet. When they pop, water pressure washes away concrete and asphalt like fragile sandcastles.
We're poor, stupid, brutal and falling apart. And no one cares.
And where are the jobless multitudes? The forgotten, forsaken and dispossessed? Are they steaming in anger, walking the streets on hopeless hunts? Have they nothing left to lose?
How soon before they pop?
Great post, Curt, and definitely rec'd!
"Where is the outrage?"
It's a question I keep asking. At what point do people say "Enough, already!" and start fighting to gain their appropriate place in this economy. Note to the teabaggers: Fealty to the "free market" is not "Liberty" or "Freedom" or any of the other patriotic words that asshats like Glen Beck would have you believe. No, it instead keeps you all on the path to serfdom. It is past time for the angry mob to slip the leash and turn on their owners with fangs bared.
You are correct in pointing out that the people at the top no longer make any pretense of concern for the working class. In a recent discussion on On Point Radio, Zanny Minton Beddoes of the The Economist talked about the requirements for an economic recovery:
Translation: "We've used up the American consumer (aka "the American worker"). They have nothing left to give. We've got it all. If we are going to continue increasing our wealth, we need to move on to the next group of suckers."
It really creeps me out to hear it stated so plainly as a matter of fact. Kind of like listening to Mengele explaining the art of medical science and investigation.
October 2, 2009 12:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
Strangely, there is no question whether any of this contagious consumption - for the sole benefit of an already-overstuffed wealthy elite - is either desireable or sustainable. Mr. Beddoes probably already has in mind the relay stooges who'll one day replace the Chinese on the shopper chain. Thanks for this, Sleepin'.
October 2, 2009 3:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
I guess all I can say is "read Steinbeck." The enormity of the oppression that can exist in our version of "free enterprise" may dwarf our imagination but it is writ large in our history. One need only look.
It seems a bit depraved to wait upon the time when some hapless souls throw themselves against the police sonic cannons and heat guns and gas dispensers in the hopes that some latent sense of decency with be pricked in the general public. Yet you briefly make the case here that such is the nature of our condition and I sadly agree. In such circumstances no one can be criticized for merely hoping to survive, but to survive as what? It may be time to construct a practical definition of personal dignity and then let that inform our choices. There is a lot of talk about sustainable agriculture and permaculture. What would constitute sustainable culture itself?
October 2, 2009 12:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yez, please read Steinbeck.
October 2, 2009 8:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
Lives of quiet desperation. You are probably not going to grab an axe handle.
You are going to have to hit a 7-11 or deal some dope. Hit some temp jobs, go to your uncle and see if you can work 'under the table' at his pizza joint. You are going to live out of your car.
When it gets to the point where you know if you are caught you are screwed...but you are screwed anyway.
WTF?
October 2, 2009 1:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
Not to sound hysterical, but is the working class and Wish-We-Were-Working-Class class now Third-Worlders?
October 2, 2009 2:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
If not, Wendy, we're headed there.
October 2, 2009 3:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
There will be no "popping". The usual way for Americans to deal with situations like this is to lazily wait for a demogague type who makes great promises and they will simply rally around that person.
Americans are far more likely to tilt to fascism than communism. It's far more likely for a Nazi style take-over than a Bolshevik one (to put it in the extremes).
We will end up with, not a Hitler, but perhaps a Mussolini.
October 2, 2009 2:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
Damn! I was hoping for big black boots and torchlit marching.
October 3, 2009 1:14 AM | Reply | Permalink
How so? When did that ever happen in our history - when the entire nation was seduced to hand power to a monster? Regionally, sure: Huey Long. And McCarthy had quite a bit of leverage - but not ultimate power - and when Stalin died and the basis of so much fear was gone, so was "our" Joe. Why would Americans tilt to fascism? Where's your evidence for that? The mere existence of racist hotheads and fringe groups? Sorry, in a country of 300 million, you'll have come up with a better argument. In 1932, when German elected Adolf Hitler, this country voted Franklin Roosevelt into office. Some difference; that wasn't just on the strength of self-congratulatory upper-income liberals, either. And where do you get "lazy"? Maybe they just have their hands full trying to feed and clotthe themselves and keep a roof over their heads. We're trained, like lapdogs, to ridicule Americans as simpletons and America as a backward menace. But the facts never support that nonsense, or the gullibility evident in comments like your's.
October 2, 2009 3:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
This is intended for clearthinker.
October 2, 2009 3:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
Lazy: people weren't even able to show in a tiny crowd of 60-70K to protest for health care. The teabaggers, say what you like, can show up in at least some number!
That's laziness.
Even the healthcare vigils couldn't pick up steam in New York and other major cities.
Of course, when this was argued about at TPM, people were claiming that the protests over the Iraq war were "huge" (they weren't) and didn't do anything so protesting is pointless. That was sour grapes, of course.
The left these days is lazy.
The blacks in the 50-60's who protested for civil rights were not particularly wealthy nor politically powerful or privileged. Somehow those protests happened.
The United States has the extremely good fortune to have leaders like Lincoln and FDR in office at moments of crisis. FDR was particularly impressive -- not because of what solutions he proposed, after all, he was willing to pack the Supreme Court, rather like a dictator, no? -- but because he knew he needed to throw a few bones out to defuse the mounting anger in the country. But that was in a time where Unions were on the rise, not decline, and Unions were not exposed as being as corrupt as the entities they were supposed to be negotiating with.
These situations don't exist today. Many unions aren't trusted (and rightly so). Many people inside the union resent them.
So what are the organizational mechanisms to get people to rally? Well, there is the church (that was the solution in the civil rights movement). There isn't much else. And without a structure already in place, it's very difficult to organize.
This is the reason why Obama has disappointed. He seemed from outside the system where now he is clearly very inside it. And Obama, as POTUS, can't organize people against the government, can he?
I was personally hoping that Obama would use his extraordinary communication skills to become the left's version of Ronald Reagan. This is clearly not going to happen.
The tilt to fascism is that Americans embrace the idea of strong national leadership and celebrity. This is the reason for Ted Kennedy getting far more airplay within the TPM crowd (before his death) than a Waxman. Americans like action, and action fast. They don't like careful thinking. They don't really respect education and learned people and view them suspiciously. They don't like even nuanced doubt or deep thoughtfulness. This allows them to rally quickly around someone who makes clear promises.
October 2, 2009 4:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
If she was your daughter - 13 or 31 - all your drippy abstraction wouldn't mean crap to you, either.
October 2, 2009 7:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
A Cross-meta-comment! Love it!
October 2, 2009 9:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
And unintentional. Wrong blog.
October 3, 2009 12:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think I'm inclined to agree with BOTH you AND Curt.
I have Curt's faith and optimism that America is ultimately pre-disposed toward a Progressive revolt rather than fascism. This belief is based upon our history, as Curt points out, as well as (I admit) an unwillingness to consider the terrible possibility that I could be wrong..
But I certainly agree with you that such a movement requires leadership - a feature that is sadly lacking at present. I had great hopes that Obama would be the leader we required, not so much for anything he showed in either past record or the particulars of his campaign promises, but rather because of the incredible opportunity he confronted when he came into office. It is almost as though the absence of any effective Progressive leadership to confront the Bush/Cheney years and the financial crisis, etc., had created a vacuum that would certainly propel Obama into position to accomplish great things. He had the tools and enough "outsider" cred to be able to kick ass and take names had he been so inclined. And he could easily have had the masses in his corner clamoring for "Change We Can Believe In" if he had chosen to move this country forward in addressing our grievances against the corporate class and their "know nothing" GOP lackeys who have so thoroughly fucked things up.
Instead, he has shown that he is a wholly-owned tool of the corporate ownership class. This became abundantly clear to me when his first action on the health care debate was to FORBID any discussion of single-payer coverage. In so doing, he preserved the conceit that our insurance industry is an integral component of our health care system and that "government run" health care is something to be avoided. This, despite facts which show we presently spend more for health care per capita than every other industrialized country, most of whom have some manner of single-payer health care delivery system. This, despite facts that show we have the worst outcomes of any industrialized country. This, despite the fact that we have nearly 60 million people who do not have ANY access to reasonable health care.
We need leadership that can first and foremost break free of the stranglehold that corporations and their lobbyists have placed upon Washington. We need leadership that can make the case for the people that there is little or no social justice to be found in our economics nor in our governance.
My contempt for Obama grows with each day for reason that he has been presented with opportunity to be a historically transformative leader, who instead shows every inclination to first make certain that he does nothing that will challenge the masters who keep him and everyone else in Washington on a very tight leash. If we do in fact slip into fascism, it will be because (as always) great men stood by and did nothing to prevent it.
October 2, 2009 7:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm glad you get my comment, SJ. It's unfortunate that making criticisms of the left at TPM is seen as equivalent to being against the left.
Indeed, I believe that's why the left is so weak in American politics.
October 2, 2009 9:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
I will save the sharp knives for discussions yet to come, CT. I'm certain you will provide plenty of impetus for my desire to pin your ears back as you so often have done in the past.
But it is important to understand that we all have common enemies that exist outside our ideological differences. And we all suffer from political leadership that is too busy serving its owners to engage in anything like providing for the common good. It's a dangerous dynamic that is unsustainable, and it leaves only the question of what kind of mob action revolution will be undertaken to eventually dismantle the present, unjust system of governance. Fascist or Progressive? We may not get any opportunity to choose.
October 2, 2009 9:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
PS I share concerns that Obama is in a unique position to be an extraordinary president, but, in fact, is turning out to be a rather ordinary one. The crisis in the financial markets and the availability of cheap energy aren't being addressed head on and these will cripple anything else (including healthcare, even if you got a single payer system). You and I can argue appropriate priorities, but there has been a desire to be conciliatory rather than lead across the entire board of crises currently facing the nation.
October 2, 2009 9:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
A leader is only as good as the people he was elected to lead.
In the case of this year's fully-telegraphed festivities, the democratic party's rank and file didn't follow Obama's lead in seeking reconciliation rather than recrimination with the republican party, no matter how nasty some GOPers gotten. His approval rating going into the presidency reflected the idea that he could indeed have been the progressive Reagan given half a chance.
Too bad so many democrats lost the forest for the trees in their zeal at taking the reigns of power, with very predictable counteractions on the part of their political rivals. Obama campaigned on closing our political divides and instead the partisan political pipes "popped" like pus-filled pimples once changing of the guard was complete.
It is apathy and magical thinking that is killing this country quicker than a slide into fascism or communism or whatever-the-fuckism, though I would agree that fascism would be our most likely extreme given our commercial and religious and nationalistic history.
I guess that means I agree with both of you, as did SJ at some point. It must be a time for mass hysteria.
PS: Great blog, Curt. Recommended.
October 3, 2009 9:49 AM | Reply | Permalink
Sorry, sport, but you lost any credibility as a spokesperson for your so-called vast majority in the political middle when you continued refusing to call for support of a public option after polls too numerous to mention showed that this is desired by the majority of Americans.
Not sure just what your game is, but sock puppet who sticks closely to the insurance industry PR line comes to mind, and my guess is that the contract ran out last week.
Who's next? The oil and gas industry? Who will you shill for now?
October 3, 2009 10:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
If we do in fact slip into fascism, it will be because (as always) great men stood by and did nothing to prevent it.
Then they weren't great men by that measure were they?
October 3, 2009 1:40 AM | Reply | Permalink
Depression is feeling like nothing can be done. In the Great Depression, people didn't feel that way like they do now.
America is a land of cynicism. And for good reason, given the system of legalized bribery that governs.
October 2, 2009 8:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
As long as there is a dollar menu at McDs and elsewhere, there will be no revolution.
How did the Bolsheviks seize power? Well, the slogan was "Peace, Land and Bread". Or, stop getting us all killed, give us our own place to live, and we want to eat. In the US, we are simply losing our own place to live. The War isn't killing enough people for too many people to be upset and we have the dollar menu. My 401K, last I looked, was good for $40,OOO, or a sandwich/day for 109 years. At 45, I only need just over 40 years for life expectancy, so I'm almost getting 3 meals a day! And I haven't even sold my baseball card collection yet!
Fact is, we are far from the misery needed to generate any real outrage. Most of us are too scared to even try outrage because if our employer knew we are fighting the system, they might tell us we no longer had a job, for some reason totally unrelated to our activism, of course.
October 3, 2009 1:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
Obama is trying like hell and I don't have a problem with his style of leadership but I'm afraid his embrace of a contradiction is a big limitation.
Over several decades we have been on a path that has produced consistently undesirable results. Washington has steadfastly refused to acknowledge this fundamental error in the direction we have gone. As a nation we have consistently acted in ways that do not serve the majority of citizens.
We have allowed jobs to go away by the bucketfull and have done nothing but create tax incentives which encourage that.
We have restructured the financial system in ways that encourage conduct that is morally, ethically and sometimes legally corrupt.
Our federal government agencies have conducted themselves according to the political frame of reference and plainly closed their eyes to illegal business conduct in spite of reportage and the sometimes official warnings from some agencies.
Congress refused to examine critically the transgressions of the prior administration even though it was quite clear that lines were crossed that before now no administration would have dared breach.
It is the violation of the above fundamentals of governance which have undeniably harmed this country. These are very basic, common sense things that in the entwined and decrepit politics of Washington have imprisoned this country. We have in fact forged shackles and fitted them to the nation without the slightest objection. And we have continued, very precisely, along that same road to ruin for this entire year with this new administration. The only change that will save us is a fundamental one that strips our captors of the power to imprison us. We have but one non-violent means at our disposal to bring about this change. The majority should just stop paying taxes and don't file come next April. And demand the obvious conflicts of interest, the corruption of congress, the influence of Wall Street and big business over our elected officials come to a halt. Our government must revert to actually representing the majority of people of this country.
The irony in all of this is our wayward adoption of a morality based upon money, the root of all evil, in violation of the christian ethic which we so proudly proclaim to be our guide. What a lie.
October 3, 2009 2:57 AM | Reply | Permalink