Category: Economy

The ongoing and rapid collapse of the US and Global economy, far from being an abstract series of events, is being brought home forcefully and concretely to millions of people on a personal level with the loss of their jobs and consequent drastic reduction in their ability to not only purchase things they want for themselves and their families but even to purchase the basic necessities of life and obtain things they need.

A cycle pushing us into a self reinforcing deflationary spiral in which less and less people are able to support the dwindling economy with their purchases which causes even more job loss and less economic activity, and so on, as we saw highlighted in very sharp focus in How Bad? This Bad with the graph from Swampland compiled using Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers that:

…compares the job loss so far in this recession to job losses in the 1990-1991 recession and the 2001 recession — showing how dramatic and unprecedented the job loss over the last 13 months has been.  Over the last 13 months, our economy has lost a total of 3.6 million jobs – and continuing job losses in the next few months are predicted.

By comparison, we lost a total of 1.6 million jobs in the 1990-1991 recession, before the economy began turning around and jobs began increasing; and we lost a total of 2.7 million jobs in the 2001 recession, before the economy began turning around and jobs began increasing.

The response from the government so far, from the Bush administration and the Congress, and continuing through into the new Obama administration, has been attempts at bailouts of the very wealthy in the financial sector, through shoveling money at manufacturers such as the auto industry so they can continue producing products in the face of crippling reductions in sales revenues, effectively “stealing” money from their prospective customers who were already more and more unable to buy their products, to finally with the current administration to an ostensible “stimulus” bill supposedly aimed at “creating” jobs.

All of which has been and is being done by saddling taxpayers, the very people these attempts have been ostensibly aimed at “helping” with long-debunked “trickle down” economics, with enormous and growing crushing future debt and thus crippling their future as well as present ability to purchase products and services, and crippling future prospects for an economic recovery.  

If you are having trouble reading the fine print: The blue line shows job losses in the 1990 recession; the red line is 2001, and the green line is the path we are on now.

To clarify, these are not projections. This is actual job-loss data.

Hello friends, welcome to another edition of the Manufacturing series.  This was intended to be released yesterday, but family issues came up that needed to be resolved (this seems to be happening a lot to me on these days lately!).  So, please accept my appologies on the delay.  Saying that, though there is a silver lining, I’m going to go ahead and basically give you a more “fresher” version of what was planned for yesterday (I normally write these up on Saturday and Sunday). So without further adieu….

This is a followup to my diary on Post Office Murals in the New Deal.  

Lewis Hine was a great photographer, and also an intrepid social activist.  Amongst his most famous works are pictures of child laborers in the early part of the 20th century, for the National Child Labor Committee.  The black and white slides with this music are mostly all by Hine.

Cross-posted from Daily Kos

The dozen banks receiving the biggest rescue packages, totaling more than $150 billion, requested visas for more than 21,800 foreign workers over the past six years for positions that included senior vice presidents, corporate lawyers, junior investment analysts and human resources specialists. The average annual salary for those jobs was $90,721, nearly twice the median income for all American households.

The figures are significant because they show that the bailed-out banks, being kept afloat with U.S. taxpayer money, actively sought to hire foreign workers instead of American workers. As the economic collapse worsened last year – with huge numbers of bank employees laid off – the numbers of visas sought by the dozen banks in AP’s analysis increased by nearly one-third, from 3,258 in fiscal 2007 to 4,163 in fiscal 2008.  

Detroit Free Press

Just a whimsical post this morning. Several things of varying importance have occurred to me in passing this week. I review the importance of Flag Pins, shirt sleeves and a new description of the Republican strategy for defeating the stimulus package.  You also might want to check out the new word I found to “pin” on Republicans. I share below the Fold. Enjoy!

Greetings, Mister President, congratulations on your recent electoral victory and inauguration.  I, like many others, voted for you in the hopes that our nation would be steered in a new direction.  Normally, I try and put out a blog piece highlighting certain news and tidbits in regards to manufacturing in this country.  It’s not one of the best blogs in the world, nor one of the worst.  I’m no one of great importance either, just another blog writer among many who hope to voice an opinion or two or highlight something.  Trust me, there are much better bloggers out there.  Chances are you will never hear of this blog, or series, or entry.  Still, in the slight hope that you may hear about this or even read it, I wish to bring something up, that well to me at least, is of great importance.

When last we chatted.

Santa Claus Rally.  Or maybe not so much.

Madam Zelda, Madam Zelda- Do The Markets Lie?

No, the markets are perfect and flawless indicators.

I returned to New York from the four corners area in early 1998 and saw an economy that had completely decoupled from reality.  I was born in Westshecter County in 1965 and lived there until 1994.  When I returned in 1998, there was money pouring into NYC from all over the world and the Russian debt crisis and “Asian Contagion” did very little to slow it down.

By the time the tech crash and 9/11 attacks had tamped down somewhat on the economy, I had moved to Maine to teach high school there.  While in Maine, I picked up a copy of George Orwell’s essays and read it through.  I love his up front style.  In particluar, there were two sections of Such, Such Were the Joys dealing with Edwardian England that struck me as particularly relevant to America in those years.

There never was, I suppose, in the history of the world a time when the sheer fatness of wealth, without any kind of aristocratic elegance to redeem it, was so obtrusive as in those years before 1914…

The extraordinary thing was the way in which everyone took it for granted that this oozing, bulging wealth of the English upper and upper-middle classes would last forever…

The goodness of money was as unmistakable as the goodness of health or beauty, and a glittering car, a title, or a horde of servants was mixed up in people’s minds with the idea of actual moral virtue…

By the social standards that prevailed about me, I was no good, and could not be any good.  But all the different kinds of virtue seemed to be mysteriously interconnected and to belong to much the same people.  It was not only money that mattered: there were also strength, beauty, charm, athleticism and something called “guts” or “character,” which in reality meant the power to impose your will on others…

That was the pattern of school life – a continuous triumph of the strong over the weak.  Virtue consisted in winning: it consisted in being bigger, stronger, handsomer, richer, more popular, more elegant, more unscrupulous that other people – in dominating them, bullying them, making them suffer pain, making them look foolish, getting the better of them in every way.  Life was hierarchical and whatever happened was right.  There were the strong, who deserved to win and always did win, and there were the weak, who deserved to lose and always did lose, everlastingly.

This British idyll was, of course, ruptured by The Great War of 1914.  Personally, what I was seeing in those six months I spent in NY between January and August of 1998 was a mad scramble for a declining piece of what was once middle class America, but which had become harder and harder to come by since the 1970’s.  Remember that this was the beginning of the school shootings and the height of Rudolph Guiliani’s  reign as mayor.  The Abner Louima incident had occured the previous summer and 1998 would see Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond killed by NYPD as well an eruption of no-knock warrants and repeated stop and searches in minority neighborhoods.  I remember one statistic as being that 45,000 people in Brooklyn were stopped on the street and questioned by NYPD and 10,000 were cited for some offense, which means that 35,000 people were harassed by NYPD for no apparent reason.

Well, the page will turn in 8 days, and hopefully we can say good-bye to the Bush era and move on to a real effort to realize the potential of this country and its people.  This nation can no longer survive with its citizens focused on “me and mine.”  Rather, we must look out for all of US.  Peace.

I wrote about progressive criticism of the stimulus plan last week:

Sen. Harkin: Obama’s Plan looks like “trickle-down”; Summers: “Message Heard, Loud and Clear”  (also, an earlier version on docudharma: https://www.docudharma.com/show…

The message was heard and is being acted on.  Barack Obama and his administration-to-be has been listening to Democrats and now is revising the stimulus plan.

Emerging from a two-hour meeting in the Capitol with Obama advisers Lawrence Summers and Jason Furman, Senate Democrats praised the President-elect’s team for agreeing to make changes to its stimulus proposal based off of concerns senators raised last week at a meeting with the president-elect’s senior aides.

Politico: Big changes to Obama stimulus plan

More, after the fold