15 million long-term unemployed, an additional 6 million under-employed and millions more that have given up looking for work or gone into early retirement.
12 million American families are losing their homes.
The government is running up trillions of dollars in debt trying to keep the economy from completely collapsing.
And government and business leaders are talking about the situation as if they were discussing baseball scores. They have broken the fundamental laws of economics and then they wonder why the economy isn't working. No other Nation has leaders that are as profoundly ignorant as the political and corporate leaders in the United States.
What are you going to do about it?
This recession isn't the cause of the economic mess, it's a symptom of a system that has been mis-managed for more than 30 years. Wall Street is trying to pretend that the financial crash was caused by government regulators that didn't regulate- they want to hide the fact that it was the Wall Streeters themselves that conspired with Republicons to eliminate regulation by changing the laws, put their stooges in charge of the government regulatory agencies like Chris Cox as head of the Securities and Exchange Commission where he made sure that nothing was done to interfere with the Wall Street firms. The Republicons put Wall Streeters like Henry Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, in charge of the Treasury Department; they already had Alan Greenspan in charge of the Federal Reserve. Greenspan was a leading believer in free markets, part of the Chicago School of Economics / Martin Feldstein gang.
The Great Recession is the inevitable result of government policies that help the 'supply-side' by screwing workers; driving down their wages, attacking their pensions and healthcare plans, undermining Labor Unions and generally destroying any power that workers had to better their own economic position. Meanwhile, the investor-class and corporate management took an ever-increasing share of corporate profits and avoided inflation by stealing that larger share from ordinary workers.
The supply-side has been running a global financial experiment with us as the lab animals. No other nation has been as stupid about opening up trade with other countries with no regard for the impact on their workforce. Only the United States has an entrenched group of traitors including the entire Republicon Party that are nothing more than employees of global corporations that have no loyalty to the US. They only care about the US as markets for their goods and services.
They have violated the fundamental rule of supply and demand that requires a balance of workers being able to turn their time, labor and education into money that then allows them to create 'demand' for the productive output of our business sector. They have exported millions of jobs to foreign countries while telling the American People that we have moved beyond 'the industrial age'; China seems to be doing really well with manufacturing, it's not over for them. The Free Traders delude themselves into thinking that American innovation and small business will keep our economy going, that Americans can do things that the Chinese can't. I look forward to the day when Chinese corporations put American executives out in the street, unemployed. I can't wait to spit in their faces when they beg for money.
General Motors was the biggest corporation in the world until the Japanese car companies out-competed them. The Chinese have been brilliant in forcing American companies to manufacture in China where the Chinese workers have learned everything our companies knew; now the Chinese have announced that they are building jumbo jets to compete with Boeing and Airbus and they have done it 20 years before Boeing ever thought they could. In 10 years, Boeing will be where GM and Chrysler are now. Bankrupt.
One of the reasons that American executives are demanding multi-million dollar salaries; they want to build up a reserve 'before the whole shithouse goes up in smoke.'
Charlie Rose hosted a PBS panel discussion of leaders from Stanford University on how to fix the financial mess. These people are supposed to be the intellectual leaders of America and yet, it was clear that they are functional idiots when it comes to macro-economics. Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, suggested that we should rebuild US manufacturing but focus on high-tech products like the Germans do. He conveniently ignored the fact that the Chinese are perfectly capable of doing sophisticated manufacturing and do it at far lower cost than US or German workers. And what about American workers that do not have college educations? Do these so-called leaders think that these workers are just going to disappear? I will bet that in 10 years it will be the Chinese that will be doing the high-tech work and Americans will be making flip-flops and cheap plastic toys. We are on a track to disaster.
When our leaders talk about the massive unemployment problem, they are predicting that it will be years before the jobs will come back. They don't say how the unemployed are supposed to survive for years without any income and they don't really care because they don't associate with ordinary Americans anyway. And they're too dumb to realize that, if the wages of American workers decline, then revenues to universities will decline and so will the professors' paychecks.
Our leaders are experts in their professional fields but they are totally incapable of seeing how their actions affect the larger body-politic. They seem to have no comprehension of America as an economic system. And they don't admit any responsibility for causing the economic crash; in fact, they are fighting to keep the same policies in place that caused the crash in the first place. It will take a violent revolution to remove these people from their positions of influence.
They ignore any fact that doesn't fit their economic fantasy. Alan Greenspan testified to Congress that one of the main things he liked about globalization is that the world economic system is so complex that it could never be regulated; this is heaven to a free marketeer like him. Greenspan wouldn't think of having a corporation with no managers but he believed that the world economic system could run without management. Every other country manages its trade relationships to benefit its own citizens and companies but somehow Greenspan and his fellow Free Traders believed that our trading partners would just open their markets wide with no barriers to adverse trade.
Countries all over the world endorsed Free Trade and all dreamed of raiding other nations' markets. Any idiot would know that the poorest nations stood to benefit the most by having access to huge consumer markets like America while opening access to their pitifully small domestic markets. The richer the country, the less they benefit and the richest countries end up with a negative trade balance. The United States is the market for the over-production of the whole world. Since the Second World War, workers in Germany and Japan have been over-producing to sell into the US while they didn't consume much in their domestic markets. They never opened their markets fully to US goods and they've played us for suckers for more than 60 years. The US government was willing to screw our own workers because they wanted to have Germany and Japan as allies in the Cold War. Politicians should be prosecuted if they betray American workers; these jobs belong to us, not them.
Any government that does not understand that its greatest obligation is to protect the ability of its citizens to earn a living should be thrown out of office, preferably by hanging the politicians. With automation and computerization, it is already a problem to provide enough work for all citizens. We can't afford to give any jobs away to foreigners. Companies that send their factories offshore should be boycotted; BUY AMERICAN!
The Free Traders are like the Vikings that profited by raiding towns in other nations. We now have American producers selling pork into the Polish market that used to be served by Polish farmers. Huge American companies like Smithfield can produce and sell pork much cheaper than small farmers so Polish farmers are losing their ability to feed their families. As a result, the Poles migrated to England and France to find work where they displaced higher-paid local workers and drove down the wage rates in those advanced economies. Do you think the local workers are happy because they've lost their jobs? I bet they would love to kill the damned Americans that screwed them. Every country is dreaming of selling into other nations' markets; they're delusional, we can't all be robbing each other. If we end Free Trade, we will control the largest consumer market in the world; we wouldn't need a stimulus plan to create jobs, there wouldn't be enough workers to produce all the goods and services that America consumes. We would have the greatest economic boom in our history as companies had to build new factories and find workers here in America.
Europe had the best social service networks for their workers that any countries ever created. But they couldn't compete with American companies that force their workers to work harder for less pay and no vacations. So America undermined the lifestyles of European workers. Now China is doing the same to the United States. When this process has run its course, workers all over the world will be working for lousy wages, 6 to 7 days a week with no pensions or healthcare. How does this benefit anyone?
The problem is that supply-siders are applying micro-economic rules to macro-economics. It makes sense for a factory owner to drive down production costs so that he can beat his competition but when all of the competitors drive wages down to an equal level there is no individual benefit anymore and, in fact, everyone is hurt because the workers all end up with less money to buy products and services.
Supply-siders like to think that they create jobs and drive the world economy and that workers are a drain on employers. The truth is that they can only sell their products and services when there are workers with money to consume. It is the workers that create jobs; employers only hire when there is demand and they are forced to hire people to serve the customers' needs. Supply-siders earned their highest profits when Labor Unions forced workers' wages up so that they could buy cars and houses and refrigerators. Henry Ford knew that when he started to pay his workers $5 a day so that they could buy his cars. Modern executives are too dumb to understand what Ford knew a hundred years ago.
And our universities suck. They are teaching students how to run business tactically but not strategically. Most economics professors believe in Free Trade; their wages should be cut to the level of professors in the third world and see if they still like Free Trade. They endorse policies that screw American workers but the professors think they won't be hurt themselves. Thank to the recession and the loss of subsidies from State governments resulting from the reduced tax-base, the universities are beginning to see the future. Budgets are being cut and professors' pays along with them. I love it!
Unless we end Free Trade, the jobs are not coming back. And the situation will get worse as consumer spending declines because companies will be forced to reduce prices and costs by moving more and more production offshore to low-wage countries. And now that the Wall Street gang has ruined the US economy, they are planning to invest in China and other countries where there is better growth. We already have a situation where the retirement funds of US workers are managed by Wall Street who invest the money in Asia where it funds factories that compete with US workers- so American workers are funding their own destruction. European bankers took the retirement money of French, British and German workers and funded factories in poor Eastern European countries that then put the western factories out of business.
Free Trade is insanity. Free Traders are traitors that should be hanged. At the very least, they should be terrified that the 25 million unemployed Americans are going to rise up and kill the Free Traders. We need to scare them to force them to spend their money on security. They should live in constant fear that someone is going to sneak up at night and kill them and their families.
We need a 'French Revolution' to deal with these bastards. They don't give a damn about ordinary Americans. They buy $1000 pizzas covered with truffles and caviar while that money could be used to save someone's home from foreclosure. And now investors are taking their obscene profits and investing in commodities, running up the prices of gas and food and everything else. They swoop in to buy foreclosed homes at 10 cents on the dollar; first they set us up by changing the mortage rules and bankruptcy laws and now they're cleaning out the poor and middle class that are their victims. These people are liars and thieves and they are destroying America. And, when they ran the biggest Banks in the world into bankruptcy, they got the government to bail them out with OUR money.
Are you tired of being the sucker that everyone preys on? Time to get off your ass and strike back. Corporations should only be allowed to access our markets under OUR rules that benefit our society as a whole. I find it interesting that American corporate execs are always whining about American regulations and taxes but they never complain about Chinese rules and regulations. Know why? Because they know that China won't tolerate it; the Chinese government controls access to their markets and they make the rules to benefit China and its people, not the corporate pigs.
We need to break the back of Wall Street. American Labor Unions should pull their pension funds out of Wall Street; the money should be invested in creating a credit card company to compete with Visa and Mastercard. Union workers would get a much better return and NOT be at the mercy of the Wall Street scumbags that are making huge profits off our money. They are enemies of the American People; they hate Unions, why support them? Don't invest in Wall Street or large American corporations. Invest locally with small businesses in your own community.
Global corporations have taken control of our government; we need to take our Country back.
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