This is how capitalism will end… all the money and wealth to the rich as they extract profits, eventually laying off their workers – they don’t need more wealth since they have it all.

Then there will be a flash and a real class warfare will erupt.

When the recession started at the beginning of 2008 the health care industry was touted as a job sector that couldn’t very easily outsource jobs. Now we have stories of major elective surgeries like hip replacements done cheaper in the East. Medical tourism they call it. The reserve labour market is expanding with no jobs to fill. When the cost of making and shipping a pair of Air Jordans is $7 Nike has no incentive to produce anything in the US, nor does any other manufacturer.

I think all articles predicting the future of the economy should begin with this disclaimer – It’s hard telling, not knowing.

this is a very good post, it’s incredible to me obama is spinning this economy as making a turn, using the “less people losing their jobs” statistic

that statistic is a factor of getting closer to the bottom not a factor of the economy turning around

obama COMPLETELY missed the boat and this is not hind sight it was said before he made his mistakes and then while he continued his mistakes

the economy DOES NOT need us bailing out gamblers calling themselves banks, it does NOT need guarantees to the losers who created this mess and it does NOT need the very people responsible for this problem tasked at getting us out of the problem

they are incapable of that, they actually believe some of their rhetoric and it is impossilbe to solve this problem with those losers

this economy needs one thing and one thing only;

HELP WANTED SIGNS

that’s all this economy needs, for a person to believe if he loses his job he can then get GAINFUL employment, a GOOD job with benefits and retirement

once we see those help wanted signs I GUARANTEE this economy turns around

here’s an example;

my lease is comming due in a few months, I have plenty of money to but this car out and can easily get a new lease if I wanted one

but because I do not know if I will have a job tomorrow I will not be able to tap my savings for this car or a new lease

HOWEVER

if I saw ONE help wanted sign promising GAINFUL employment I would not even think twice about buying this car

that’s what EVERYONE is going through right now

all we need is as follows;

HELP WANTED, GOOD BENEFITS AND RETIREMENT

put those signs out, alternative energy, roads, bridges, parks, global cooling jobs AND BING, problem solved

souther dragon, this recession started under reagan, quite a few years ago not in 2008, everyone has earned and saved less since his depraved redistribution of middle class assets

with a slight reprieve from carter

under bush we have been in depression not a recession for about 3 years, probably closer to 4 years

wages=depressed, savings=depressesd, investment in american industry=depressed, real assets=depressed, prospects for retirement=depressed

there are no factors that indicate anything but depression, except for the growth of national product but that’s not an indication since it increases even when you burn down a tree, when you get cancer, when you dump gallons of oil in our water

Can I interest anyone in a tax on capital? A tax on short term capital gain, say any holding less than 1 second? Extra brackets above $200K income? Taxes on foreign investment?

Not only that but some employers are stringing their ex employees along with false hope. My job went away in January but my company has been telling me all along that my job is going to come back. Then, after six months of promises and unsolicited communication, begging me to be patient, I was told a little less than two weeks ago that my job won’t be coming abck after all. That they had packed up the whole circus and consolidated all of the locations into one location in D.C. They actively tried to keep me available with lies and then discarded me like a fast food wrapper. Now my primary benefits are about to run out and I could have spent the last six months being much more serious about finding something new, (not that I didn’t look at all), and the company gets away with it. The moral of this story is that under Bush, the corporate interests were free to exploit people in a way that they haven’t been allowed to since prior to the great depression of the 1930s and so far it hasn’t changed under Obama. Most of them just don’t care because it’s all about the quarterly performance and the ability to pay dividends, no matter how unsustainable that may be or how many people they ruin in the process. I’m hoping for change still but neither Geithner nor Summers are as interested in my story and stories like mine as they are in rescuing the traders and banks who put us in this mess in the first place. I’m rapidly losing my audacity of hope.

The economy may have hit bottom ,but it has yet to rebound.
Jobs are usually the last thing to return , after a recession ends , so new jobs may not appear for some time to come

Excellent point. I worked in the health care sector. (Notice the past tense)

The obvious mistake in your comment is that James Earl Carter was the president BEFORE Reagan so there could have hardly been a repriev of Reagan policies under him. That doesn’t negate the overall legitimacy of your point though. It was the Republican philosophy and the mechinations of people like Phil Gramm that ultimately led us to where we are now. If those were the enablers, Bush presided over the actual raping of the middle class.

I’m not going to bother to comment on what is, imo, a misrepresentation designed to highlight your dissatisfaction.

Be patient 6 months is not nearly enough time to correct problems that were 30 years in the making.
Change comes about slow ,sometimes in little bits and pieces .
Obama inherited a mess I’ll give him a little more time to get things straightened out

I don’t think there’s anything the administration can do to remedy this situation as fast as many would like. Americans want everything right now. What, you can’t stop the war TODAY? What’s the matter with you? What, you can’t provide jobs for millions of people OVERNIGHT? What’s the matter with you?

As was reported in recent days the main economic game is finding where the percentages can be snatched and pocketed. Wall St. now very focused on computer driven spread search to claim transaction residual “profits”.

The American economy of the mid 20th century was a very different animal than the one we now are floating along on here in first decade of 21st century.

Manufacturing of a wide range of consumer goods for American homes from small appliances,dishware and furniture,clothing,shoes,textiles.Consumer electronics,toys and seasonal categories from outdoor furniture to holiday items like Xmas ornaments,artificial Xmas trees and light sets. All have been off shored.

All above items very much not Made In USA anymore.

These jobs and economic revenue streams are gone–not likely to come back.

An ongoing economic gaming the corporatists have set in motion that erodes wage bases,dilutes labor value and make labor a very portable factor.

So what is left behind? Just a shadow of American based manufacturing and factory work. The American workplace has been gutted.

We all cannot sell realestate,install cable,work in healthcare,police and fire service or mow lawns and remove snow for a living.

This corporatist money exploitation has now extended into raiding the American taxpayers Federal pay ins as well.

The above photo at top illustrates where American corporatism goes and ends for far too many working class Americans these days of this early 21st century.

The implication is American workers are in far surplus of economic/labor needs in the model American corporatism proposes and practices.

Perhaps if Americans settle for gutted environmental safeguards,workplace rules and will work for $2-$3 an hour and like it the jobs will return.

Or perhaps Americans should migrate to where work has gone. The logic lines have become ludicrous as idea was to import cheap goods into American homes but if Americans have no income who is buying anything?

To the delight of the trolls who refer to us as the “far left,” here is a talk between Dr Cornel West of Princeton and Carl Dix of the Revolutionary Communists from the middle of July.

“The Ascendancy of Obama…and the continued Need for Resistance and Liberation: a Dialogue between Cornel West & Carl Dix.”

Well being a victim of this economic mess I have to say with a stimulus package too small, and foreclosure program that isn’t very helpful, being patient is kind of hard since the legislation that has been put in place to help doesn’t offer me much hope.

Sadly, Congress in not interested in helping you or any other American. We serve as the objects of ridiculous lip service but that’s about it. We are no longer citizens, except in speeches, we are consumers. Our role is to prop up Wall Street’s wealth, nothing more.

The only thing we are now producing is weapons of war

Right on.

Gosh, I guess we all better move to Malaysia.
Come on, yes, we have problems, but we are
going to be just fine.

Personally I prefer France or Italy.

Random aside: if you click the link on the foreign beer brouhaha (no pun intended), it mentions that Bush’s whitehouse renamed the French souffle to a “chocolate freedom”. The man’s stupid just reached a new high.

I am sure you will be just fine, so will I, being that I retired 15 years ago and was smart enough to liquidate most of my stocks and turn them into cash. The only thing I did not change was my mutual funds, now I wish I had then I would not have lost 17% of my 401. But, I digress, the point I am making is that we are among the lucky ones, but only by the quirk of time, the generation coming up is screwed, they will pay for all these transgressions and receive nothing in return. I have great difficulty believing that we are going to be just fine, at least in the next ten or fifteen years, I am sure it will take the American Electorate that long to finally throw the bums out.

until we stop pretending that we are in a recession and not a depression, there will be little done to address the situation. The fact is that we’ve been pretending for almost a year now that this is a minor economic downturn, and it just isn’t so. It’s a depression (the difference being the deflationary spiral that is presently going on, which is masked by the games the Petrochemical giants play with our currency).

Until we stop trying to get a faltering economy going and realize that our economy is functionally stalled (that is, quit playing games about “shovel ready” projects and get busy with the REAL stimulus dollars for anything infrastructure project that we can think of), the whole economy will continue to do what it has been doing for a year now. I keep hearing that the stimulus package didn’t work (although only a fraction of the money allocated has been spent, because we seem to have a shortage of “shovel ready” projects).

The fact is that we have massive problems with our infrastructure that haven’t been addressed (or fixes properly funded, even) for nigh on 50 years, and we seriously need to stop worrying about if this project or that project can get started right away, because many of the projects that need to be done aren’t ready to be worked yet because we haven’t spent any money on the project development to get them ready (how can we fix bridges when we don’t even really know what bridges need fixing? Same goes for roads, sewers, electrical grid, telecommunications grid, and so on…). We expect the states to pay for the “get it ready” phase at a time when states are getting ready to declare bankruptcy because they can’t even pay their workers. How are they going to pay to get projects “shovel ready” at this time?

FWIW, I don’t blame the current administration for this situation. We have a political opposition that has made it their mission during this current session of Congress to stop anything that the Dems/progressives try to do. Until our congressional and senatorial delegations get a spine, tell the R’s to go to hell, and pass some legislation to address this and health care reform and more, we are going to continue on the same course. It’s time for a little FDR and a little Harry Truman style diplomacy…

Economic cheerleaders all over the world are terrified by the word “deflation,” and even when they have to move from denial…

“There Is No Deflation Threat In Europe” - Jean Claude Trichet

…a little closer to reality…

The European Union’s statistics office also said on Friday that inflation in the euro area had moved much further into negative territory than forecast in July, with consumer prices falling at an annualized rate of 0.6 percent.

Not to worry!

It isn’t deflation!

It’s…

Negative inflation!

I would also suggest that here in CA, the recession/depression started about the end of ‘03/early ‘04, as home building suddenly collapsed and the layoffs began in the building industry, all the trades that went with it, trucking industry, and on and on.

And it’s gotten steadily worse since.

I WILL admit I also believe Reagan first began to gut CA, then had 8 years to gut USA.

Although MY personal fortunes continued to get better as I retrained and left the food biz and entered into the office world, they have rapidly sunk since about ‘05 . . . . but there are others here in CA that have taken a real beating since the housing building collapse around ‘04.

Here’s hoping at SOME point soon, Obama will get around to WPA like jobs creation, and not waste any more time with jobs in healthcare and the green industry that aren’t really happening, and can’t POSSIBLY re employ the millions upon millions of people out of work across the nation . . . from skilled labor to office, the need is great. Our infrastructure alone, to be upgraded and maintained, would put us ALL to work . . .

A great thread topic, I hope to see MUCH more of this topic and people in the streets clamoring for jobs to pressure Obama and his admin to DO something, NOW!

This is a powder keg waiting to light . . . . people are really, really frustrated and suffering.

Remember when clinton was pushing NAFTA. The US had to think global. Our health insurance and environmental laws were just prohibitive for business. Now Washington has a chance to do something about it . But the frame work has totally changed.

Hard to believe the once great US ’s demise was totally legislated.

Better food; health care for all. What’s not to like?

Well, we handed the banksters $2 trillion of our own dollars with no accountability and no transparency*, and before we get that back, we’ve got to stand in line behind the banksters so they can collect their bonuses, which they’re getting for jacking up our credit card feeds and foreclosing our homes and not lending us any of our own money.

So my advice to you is to be patient, and when they’ve collected their bonus money, help will surely come.

NOTE * In good bipartisan fashion, I might add.

NAFTA took all those companies to third world countries where there is next to slave labor and no oversight at all..case in point..the Swine Flu that begun in a filthy NAFTA pig farm. The corporations are not in the U.S. There is no gong to a foreign country to live..you can not emigrate unless you have a substantial proven income and are not allowed to work or earn money in a foreign country..Not Europe or Mexico or Morocco..I know this because I have lived out of the U.S. for 10 years. You can begin companies but you must put up substantial guarantees and pay big taxes. You can live in some countries on visas , but they dont like it much. You are stuck there and with no jobs , you wont last the Years for things to turn around. When you run out of funds…the next week you are hungry and have no home.
I just read somewhere “Capitalism took over and ruined Communism and now it has done the same to Democracy.” Believe it.
We can not wait for companies to hire us..we must create our own income somehow. Creative thinking needed.
What ever happened to all that Infrastructure we were expecting? That is Jobs Now.
Forget Single Payer…it will never happen..its too late.
Yes, to what a few of you have been saying. ..its all going into the WARS…
I think its all over and we better get used to living in a corporate country..a Corproratocracy? And they dont care a fig for us…they have their cheap/slave labor in other countries already.

Okay, here we go again – a history lesson! Demand side economics overthrew the supply side view in the 1930’s following boom & bust in the 20’s (abetted by a severe co-incident downturn in the agricultural cycle). This was re-inforced by wars & re-armanent and a deficit driven economy thru’ the mid-60’s when LBJ’s overstretch between Vietnam and the Great Society finally unleashed the underlying inflationary trends. Keynes’ explanation of inflation was s real-side demand view, offsetting the monetary build-up in indebtedness (= no real change in debt).

Unfortunately the economy was not ‘closed’ as the General Theory inmplied. His arguments about balancing intra-country flow of fund transfers relied unrealistically on the Bretton Woods structure and the $’s link to gold. Both broke down under Nixon. This co-incided with the right’s revolt against the new freedoms of that time and Nixon’s resulting adoption of the Southern strategy. These changes allowed the forces of the right to re-emerge as the Democratic concensus broke down.

Successive presidents since Carter – our first ‘Evangelical’ leader – who initiated ‘de-regulation’ (e.g. the airline industry) – have ALL been Repubs of one shade or another. Thus Saint Reagan was allowed by a Democratic-controlled Congress to pass his ‘81 supply-side bulls**t and sell the masses on ‘trickle-down economics’. This resulting transfer of income & wealth to the upper classes over the past 35 years makes the U.S. look like a typical South American country. There the vast majority of the wealth & income is owned by 5-10% of the population. The latter maintains ‘control’ by militarising society and putting on the typical bread & circus shows necessary to keep the masses distracted (not to mention the occassional military coup).

As far as Obama & the current Dems are concerned, I’ve been arguing on this blog since the election that they’d be right at home in the party of Eisenhower (as were the Clintons). ‘Change you can believe in’ has conveniently morphed into an increasing Afghan morass, the failure of labor reform and the lack of a serious progress on health care.

The simultaneous promises of transparency in goverment & the photo-op of ‘closing Guantanimo’ on January 21st have given way to a continuation of Bush’s obscene & illegal policies on the domestic front and a ‘charm offensive’ abroad. Our new rulers didn’t even have the decency to sweep away the criminals who caused the current economic mess (going back to Clinton). Criminals and miscreants like Larry Summers, Geithner, Bernake, the Wall Street Masters of the Universe et al, are all still with us sucking the life from the Republic.

I forcast that the dis-integration of the Repubs, so evident since Bush’s failure to ‘privatise social security’ (Jan ‘05 State of the Union) would in turn threaten to spread to the Dems. in the face of Obama’s timidity. Looking at recent infighting on Waxman’s Energy & Commerce committee between the Blue Dogs & the CPC’ers (& the likly failure in the Senate Finance committe in September), I believe those odds must be shortening. FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION if the Democratic party doesn’t want to go the way of the Repugs!