Don’t expect the Federal and State governments to create many new jobs in the public or private sectors this year or this decade. Don’t expect the Private sector to care about hiring the tens of millions of Americans when new technologies have made many U.S. jobs obsolete, the remaining employees can be coerced to work even harder out of fear, and the other good jobs have been successfully outsourced to low-paying foreign countries.
The U.S. is undergoing fundamental economic, political, military and social change within an interlocked, highly competitive world for which our system is completely unprepared to address – it’s an “unprecedented” situation to quote our President.
For the next decade, there will be 10% permanent unemployment for people between 18 and 65, an additional 10% of the workforce permanently under-employed in marginal low-paying part-time jobs, and another 10% of the skilled labor force locked into permanent independent contractor, short-term, benefits-less, temporary work assignments, and life with 1099 income only. With about 20% of the total workforce still likely to be employed at the Federal, State and Municipal levels, there will remain about 50% of the population with modest but perpetually shrinking pension and healthcare benefits left working directly in the private sector.
This economic situation will not change over the foreseeable 10 years, regardless of population growth in the U.S., and assuming no national plans or new policies to change the current conditions. Of course with just over half the workforce able to pay most taxes, government is going to shrink drastically.
Over the past few decades and particularly since the turn of the 21st Century, Republicans have successfully discredited all forms of economic policy, particularly the Keynesian economic approach. By breaking the fiscal bank during relatively good economic times in running huge budget deficits, the sound idea of increased government spending to stimulate total demand in a recessionary economy is no longer readily understandable or fiscally possible.
Republicans were punished by the American people in 2006 and 2008 because after 30 years in power, most of their old ideologies and policies were discredited by the facts and reality. Furthermore, the U.S. population does not like to be globally embarrassed by poorly-conducted foreign wars and inept responses to climatic or economic disasters. However, this is a temporary punishment and not any impediment to Republicans resuming national political power in 2012 and making a decent comeback this November in an essentially center-right country.
Republicans have mastered the art of successfully manipulating the reptilian part of the brain in humans – and Democrats are perpetually unable to respond successfully. Actually, using the cerebral cortex and thinking rationally is perhaps an impossible feat for many Americans too uneducated, fearful, angry and congenitally stupid to accomplish. Even though the vast majority of Teabaggers are complete imbeciles, only Republicans will be able to channel their anger, fears, frustration, bigotries, and energy back into political power. Don’t expect many Teabaggers to end up in the Democratic fold despite their ranting about taking on some moderate Republicans.
Our political system has reached the apotheosis of gridlock, paralysis and partisanship. And don’t think things will get better – they will only get worse. Republicans are much better in “governing” or being in power in this environment than Democrats. All the talk about a new political shift to Democrats due to changing demographics is pure bullshit. Everyone from all parts of the political spectrum wants more government than they are willing to pay for, but at least Republicans will be able to shift the blame to Democrats – thanks to a population that has no patience, knowledge of history or economics, or long-term memories. The steady slide in the popularity of Democrats and President Obama is due to steadily shifting blame of the past onto them. It will spell their doom this November and in particular by the end of 2012.
Republicans realistically understand that the U.S. is an oligarchy (corrupt corporate state) effectively controlled by the financial sector, energy (oil & coal) interests, large insurance and healthcare providers, and the military industrial complex. The rest of the private sector has little or no influence on our government because it cannot or will not bribe them, and most of those companies do not operate as protected monopolies as do those who control our government.
This power structure has been built up over the past 3 decades and it’s not going to change. Republicans like the “corporatism” system and the large private monopolies that are their principle supporters and financiers. They don’t have a problem with poverty, income inequality, joblessness, environmental degradation, poor public education, or global competition because the industries that control the U.S. don’t either. Their core philosophical beliefs take these situations as immutable and they don’t lose any sleep worrying about them. When they return to power, does anyone believe Republicans will enact anything to adequately address long-term systemic unemployment and underemployment? Surely you jest but “socialistic” Democrats will bear the entire blame nevertheless and be demonized while they are again out of power.
Democrats keep promising change and some have a fundamental interest in ameliorating the lives of average persons and considering the best long-term interests of the entire country. This is remarkable when they know deep down that the Constitutional and political system of this country is rigged solidly against them and any meaningful changes. Democrats have also sold out their souls to large corporate benefactors in a feeble attempt to stay in power. Republicans once bought, stay bought. The unease by the controlling business powers is that Democrats might actually bolt and not stay bought and thus tow the corporate line. Our oligarchy obviously prefers Republican control but this temporary time period is penance for screwing up royally and a simple waiting game until all blame for their prior mistakes are shifted to Democrats.
Immigration reform will take place under the terms most favorable to our oligarchy – as was the passage of “free trade” during the Clinton era. Even though China is still one-fourth the economic size of the U.S. Economy in total GDP and 70% of its citizens are still woefully poor, the U.S. oligarchy decided to invest all their global manufacturing (along with other low-wage countries with good public educational systems for at least the top 20% of the population) in China, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Mexico, and elsewhere in the developing world.
Monopolists really like fascist dictatorships. Hitler got along very well with big German manufacturers and business entities. The dictatorial one-party Chinese leadership is particularly welcoming to American big business. The U.S. is not competing on a fair or level playing field with China because it manipulates its currency vis-à-vis the Dollar, Euro and other global currencies, and dumps its good in order to destroy the local industries in other countries.
The big manufacturing companies in China are principally government-owned entities, or joint ventures between duped foreign investors and the Chinese government. To insist up pursuing an imaginary pure free-market capitalistic system for the U.S. so it can compete globally denies reality. The pursuit is bound to utter long-term failure in the face of the cunning Chinese and against other smart nations who revel in our rigid ideological backwardness while they pursue winning at any cost. This has nothing to do with free-market capitalism.
Thus our national public dialog centers only on celebrities, only political horserace coverage and gotcha politics, Al Qaeda and extreme fears of terrorism, pointless foreign wars, new popular movies, and other worthless dribble day in and day out, month after meaningless month, year after depressing year. With the next elections less than a year away, don’t expect anything to be accomplished on any major issues facing the country. Our ADD population cannot focus on our bankrupt economic and political systems, actual current and future competition with China, Inc. and other mercantile, manipulative and Machiavellian powers, our dilapidated transportation, energy and educational infrastructures, and the overall welfare of the American people.
Our oligarchy has already placed its bets on China, India and other places on the planet, and the future of the U.S. is damned. Is it no wonder our stock markets – consisting more and more of U.S.-based multinational companies whose economic futures have uncoupled from the U.S. economy and people – are doing so well while the real U.S. economy is still in a deep recession?
Our perverted, greedy and sociopathic oligarchy does not want to lose its strong negotiating power over U.S. workers so it favors foreign workers at every opportunity because they earn less than $1 per hour and live in slave-like conditions inside backwards nations. This policy only strengthens its hands over U.S. workers who unfortunately thought that perpetual upward mobility was some God-given American right. Now we know the only way to compete globally is on price – not on the basis of education, talent, hard-work, or innovative abilities.
The U.S. will solve the unemployment problem simply and directly. We will marginalize, ostracize, and demonize those who cannot find work in this permanently-depressed American economy. They will be driven underground into the extra rooms, basements and garages of family and friends who have not lost homes to foreclosure or have smartly walked away from underwater mortgages. We won’t be able to extend unemployment and food stamp benefits perpetually due to the fiscal messes we have created at the Federal and State levels by artificially decreasing reasonable tax burdens on business, the wealthy and even the middle class. The unemployed and under-employed will effectively be treated as lepers and leaches on our system.
It doesn’t matter to the wealthy that nearly half of their fellow citizens can be destitute, uneducated and literally without any meaningful futures. People with no incomes have little influence over society, and its economic and political systems. They are often too uneducated, depressed and burnt out to protest or to take any concerted actions to help themselves against the mighty combined power of government and big business.
The wealthy do well in any society – no matter how dysfunctional or extreme in its allocations of wealth, assets and national income. Furthermore, the wealthy can move and live anywhere. As the U.S. continues to crumble over the next few decades, we will see our top 5 to 10 percent of the population continue to isolate themselves in segregated and gated communities, protected by well-armed private security forces. They will also settle around the globe in other protected havens for the wealthy, such as Luxembourg, Lichtenstein, Hong Kong, Singapore, Costa Rica and Belize.
Today the U.S. is in the same downward spiral and trajectory as were the Roman, Spanish, Dutch and British Empires before it. We know the problems and the best solutions but we do not have the political will among our ruling and economic elites, and there is no willingness for communal sacrifice on the part of most Americans, to do anything about it. Our shallow 24/7 Info-entertainment Media is not unlike the pervasive lead poisoning that helped deplete the mental acuity of the Roman Empire.
We also have a plurality of citizens who are too uneducated in everything and who can be easily manipulated into dreaming about past glories and denying present realities. Republicans really deserve to be “in power” over the next 2 decades so they can preside over this inevitable collapse of their own making. Democrats are really wasting their time and energy trying to change the inevitable when they will only reap the blame for everything that goes wrong. Simplistic yet wrong explanations always beat out thoughtful, multi-faceted, complex and alternative ideas.
Empires do not go out with a bang but a whimper. The U.S. is slouching towards oblivion regardless of what anyone tries to do. The only issue will be fixing the date when the end has occurred. That may have to wait a few more decades for historians (speaking a mix of English, Chinese, Spanish, and a few other languages) to determine that date for posterity.
Submitted by Marc Pascal, happily ranting in warm, sunny Phoenix, AZ which will likely survive the collapse of the U.S. and eventually be part of some new Southern Californian, Arizonan, and Northern Mexican nation.