Labor Day; A view from the unemployment line

I find it ironic that on the first day of the weekend that we celebrate America's workers that the unemployment line grew a lot longer.  It is up to 9.7% or 16.8% depending on whether you want the governments rigged statistics to hide the truth or not.  It is up to 15 million and counting and those who are unemployed are having a harder and harder time finding work. In adition as Financial Times reported, the number of working Americans who require food stamps to make it has risen significantly as well.  Can't say that working hard and playing by the rules is paying off to well for all of us in the Middle Class.

In short, this Labor Day as we head out to picnics, back yard barbeque's or whatever, remember we are witness to the destruction of Middle Class America.  We have closed factories, outsourced high wage high tech jobs, insourced low wage jobs with no benefits and  have created an unsustainable attempt  to maintain our Middle Class living standards through borrowing on cheap credit to produce a debtor economy.

I agree with Damon Silvers in The American Prospect on 4/26/08 when he writes, " Our leaders have pursued policies designed to produce this low wage economy. But at the same time they have sought to maintain a high spending consumer economy."  This has changed our economy from an economy driven by assets to an economy driven by  false bubbles, such as the housing market, to finance buying based not wage gains but cheap debt.

The intellectual elites of this country, armed with fantasy land mathematical models of how it all should work,  have promoted not free markets but economic anarchy with no rules, no laws, and no consequences for those in the financial elite when their real life Monopoly game all goes horribly wrong for those of us who work and we no longer have jobs.

The truth is that this is not some economic downturn and now we will get back to prosperity. This is the crash landing of an entire theory, Globalization, that was based on naive faith in human beings being rational even in their self interest, and the promotion of mathematical hypotheses that have little basis in fact.

You don't have to be knowledgeable in political or social philosophy to question the idea that people, all of us, when it comes to our own self interest are rational, when we all know that in fact we are all capable of lying, cheating, stealing and swindling our fellow citizens for money and the financial industry collapse is just the latest object lesson.

In a so called Free Market, as Jane Smiley wrote in a blog post on Huffington Post, on 9/3/09, everything is for sale, such as people, families, countries; there is no loyalty to an idea only to profitability.  While our intellectual elites live in the Ivory Tower fantasy world of formula's and how things should work, the rest of us live in reality where our lives can be irrevocably altered by this fantasy fiction that looks so good in a controlled laboratory environment at some major university.

In their theories of Free Trade and Globalization our leaders forgot more econ 101 than most of the rest of us learned. Economics is not just about profits but also about productivity. You must produce things to make profits and you must have profits to reinvest to make more things.  In the La La Land world of Globalization economics they want to believe you can still create jobs while making nothing and treat it all as some kind of world wide Cumbiah moment instead of remembering that economics has aspects of real life warfare to it.

The real point of globalization is not teaching the whole world to sing, it is in maximizing profits, monopolizing all real assets, placing things in the hands of a very few extremely wealthy financial elites, while reducing the rest of the world to neo-serfdom. Our nations policies whether by design or by naive stupidity are rapidly destroying the Middle Class. Then they stand around in awe and presume that our anger at having our livelihood and lives destroyed is racism and that somehow we should all willingly lose our jobs and our houses for the sake of some idealized vision of acceptance and diversity.

Given the rationale of those fundamentalist believers in the religion of Globalization, one can presume that they would have called Native Americans racists for attacking the colonists coming to settle the new world because everyone would benefit from the civilizing influence of that era of Globalization even if it destroyed, as it did, the whole way of life.  On this score I side with the Native Americans.

America has no future let alone a high wage high tech one unless we take steps to protect our nation. If an American is told that he/she must train their insourced replacement after being told they are being laid off for a cheap foreign laborer, is there really a job skill shortage?  If people are being laid off because the training and experience they have makes their labor too expensive when the company can hire a low wage outsider to come in, do you really think getting more training is the answer?

Globalization is not inevitable, it is the conscious decisions made by people.  Those decisions can be different.  Competition does not have to be based on a race to the bottom of the barrel in terms of wages.  The threat from the private sector about wage gains costing jobs rings hollow.  The private sector hasn't created any jobs in America for ten years now.

We could just as easily make competition for jobs and productivity be based on the product quality, or the productivity of the work force.  We could just as easily have fair trade with nations that respect workers rights in the work place including the right to organize.  We could also negotiate treaties that protect the environment and begin to work towards dealing with the threats posed by global climate change.  We could trade with those nations that respect human rights and work towards becoming more Democratic but oh I almost lost myself and forgot our intellectual elites models are based on profitability as the only acceptable goal.  Maybe we will still have jobs next Labor Day.