Tag: economy

Sputter, cough, stall — welcome to the new economy

The Huffington Post headline from earlier today pretty much says it all:

Stuck in the Mud

The headline, since replaced, neatly sums up the fate of the American economy as we steam toward the end of 2011 and full-bore into a presidential election year. The numbers back this up. As The Huffington Post reports,

The U.S. economy added 103,000 jobs in September, while the unemployment rate held steady at 9.1 percent, according to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The numbers beat economists’ expectations but barely keep pace with population growth, reinforcing the growing fear among many that the labor market recovery is dead in the water.

“We are still making no progress on a recovery that’s going to bring people back to work,” said Harvard economist Lawrence Katz. “What I see is an economy that can’t create enough opportunity to do more than just absorb the new population. Which is not much of a feat.”

A chunk of today’s headline number is attributed to the 45,000 striking Verizon workers who were not counted in last month’s report and are now back to work. The report revised the number of new jobs added in July and August upward, but the average over the last four months was still a paltry 64,000 new positions — well below the 100,000 to 150,000 jobs that economists generally believe are needed to account for population growth and lower than the average of the prior 14 months of job creation.

Meanwhile, the share of the unemployed who have been out of work for six months or longer crept up to 44.6 percent from 42.9 percent, as the number of long-term jobless increased from roughly 6 million to 6.2 million — up from a year ago. More than 2 million of those Americans have been out of a job for more than 99 weeks. Another grim detail: The number of Americans working part-time because they have been unable to find full-time work increased by 444,000 to nearly 9.3 million.

The nicest thing we can say is that the economy is stagnant. There is no growth, nothing that offers any sense of optimism in the economy. That is why the protests on Wall Street are spreading.

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Bloomberg, check your cops

The video from today’s protest, via Huffington Post and You Tube. Huffington Post has not been able to verify when exactly this is from — it is supposed to be tonight — but it really doesn’t matter. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg needs to order an investigation.

  • Send me an e-mail.
  • Read poetry at The Subterranean.
  • Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
  • Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Has the left found its voice?

The media has finally taken notice of the protests on Wall Street and it just may be taking them seriously. As it should.

The reality is that the Wall Street protests are far larger and sustained than the early Tea Party rallies and, now that the protests are spreading into other communities, it is clear that we are looking at something much bigger than just a fringe effort.

But it has to be about more than just signs and chants. Direct action, as Chris Hedges wrote last week, is a must in this time of corporate domination, but it has to be accompanied by a detailed explanation of why capitalism has failed and where we must go from here.

Corporate capitalism is about profits — and doing everything and anything possible to maximize those profits, including leaving the sick to die and the economically disenfranchised to grasp for crumbs or pick vegetables in sweltering heat for almost nonexistent wages.

Government’s role should be to act as protector of the weak, as leveler of the playing field — to make sure that corporations provide the services they have promised or to prevent them from dumping their waste on the public (literally and figuratively). But corporations have taken over the government and gamed the system.

Farm subsidies once meant to keep small farmers afloat now result in corn so cheap we use it in place of sugar, while the cost of fresh produce puts it out of reach of most in the lower classes, especially those in America’s depressed cities. Oil companies suck at the public teat and then turn around and gouge drivers and lobby Washington to gut what’s left our regulatory apparatus. And we make the banks whole without any strings or anything to ensure that the banks would keep credit flowing.

The list is long and seemingly endless and it leaves us with just two choices — give up or fight back. Sitting back and leaving it to a corrupted political process is the same as giving up. The protesters on Wall Street know this.  It’s time the rest of us figured this out.

  • Send me an e-mail.
  • Read poetry at The Subterranean.
  • Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
  • Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Targeting Wall Street

It’s direct-action time. We are in the 12th day of protests in New York’s financial district, and there is no sign that this “hostile takeover” is going to end anytime soon. It’s time we fought back, as
Brooklyn City Councilman Charles Barron of East New York told The Christian Post.

“We are up against a monster, we are up against a strong enemy and that is capitalism, greed, and prioritizing that greed over the need of the vulnerable people in this society.”

  • Send me an e-mail.
  • Read poetry at The Subterranean.
  • Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
  • Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

A shift in focus on the economy?

President Barack Obama may be taking his economic team in a different direction.

Alan Krueger, the Princeton University economist who is viewed as having a pro-labor focus, is expected to be named chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, replacing the more conservative, corporate-friendly Austan Goolsbee.

Such an appointment would be good news, but cannot undo the damage caused by the president’s early ties to the Lawrence Summers crowd. Summers, Goolsbee, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and the rest of the crowd he assembled have been far too committed to the financial system and maintaining the status quo. Krueger alters that mix, but may not have enough juice to offset the Ben Bernanke/Geithner axis.

What we need is an economic team comprised of Krueger, Dean Baker, Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz — which would move the president in a more progressive, pro-labor direction.

  • Send me an e-mail.
  • Read poetry at The Subterranean.
  • Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
  • Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.