More compelling data:
So why are we witnessing such fundamental changes? Well, the globalism and “free trade” that our politicians and business leaders insisted would be so good for us have had some rather nasty side effects. It turns out that they didn’t tell us that the “global economy” would mean that middle class American workers would eventually have to directly compete for jobs with people on the other side of the world where there is no minimum wage and very few regulations. The big global corporations have greatly benefited by exploiting third world labor pools over the last several decades, but middle class American workers have increasingly found things to be very tough.
Here are the statistics to prove it:
• 83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.
• 61 percent of Americans “always or usually” live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.
• 66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.
• 36 percent of Americans say that they don’t contribute anything to retirement savings.
• A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.
• 24 percent of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.
• Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.
• Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
• For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.
• In 1950, the ratio of the average executive’s paycheck to the average worker’s paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.
• As of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.
• The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.
• Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17 percent when compared with 2008.
• In the United States, the average federal worker now earns 60% MORE than the average worker in the private sector.
• The top 1 percent of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America’s corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.
• In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.
• More than 40 percent of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.
• or the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.
• This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.
• Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 – the highest rate in 20 years.
• Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.
• The top 10 percent of Americans now earn around 50 percent of our national income.
Learn how to garden and can.
PeakVT
Those numbers aren’t surprising for a country where 28% of the population is in the top 1%.
eric
Just watch the opening episode to James Burke’s Connections as he shows how you better know how to plough using oxen or you are effed…..
BR
This.
Does anyone know of a good short EMT-type course someone can sign up for? That covers the basics like sutures, basic diagnoses, CPR, etc.
Kryptik
Honestly, I swear that Carlin is laughing up to us. ‘Hey, fuckers, I got out while I could, and I just had to wait for a heart attack, how’s that life thing going for you now?!’
Davis X. Machina
Dear Michael Snyder — if that is your real name:
So long as
every knee bends at Jesus’ name;
foreigners tremble at our might;
women, gays, liberals, foreigners and coloreds know their place;
I get to keep my guns;
and all change stops, now, forever,
I couldn’t care less.
Sincerely,
Real America
CJ
Well, that just made my day even more depressing. God Bless America.
zmulls
Feature. Not bug. Feature.
“Ownership” society, bitches. Bush’s vision was a nation of stockholders in corporations staffed by third world serfs.
General Stuck
Why doesn’t Obama DO something?
On the upside, we will need less bankers to count the money we don’t have.
orogeny
Sent the list to a right-wing friend. His reply basically said…”See what Obama and the Democrats are doing to America?”
Cacti
As I’ve said before, despite all the good intentions and efforts of President Obama, I think the decline of the American Empire has so much forward momentum, all he’s doing is buying us time before the inevitable fall.
But on the bright side, we’ll all have a ring side seat to history!
gnomedad
Can ammonia production from used cat litter be commercialized?
BR
Maybe it’s time to revisit Citigroup’s Plutonomy Report:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/6674234/Citigroup-Oct-16-2005-Plutonomy-Report-Part-1
You know, the report whey they admit to the destruction of everything other than the plutocrats. Ah, 2005, the days before they had to at least pretend to care about the little guy.
AndyG
This is one of the reasons why Republicans want to drown the federal government in a bath tub,
Cris
Remember this next time some blowhard tries to get you worked up over the fact that the top 20% of earners pay 70% of all federal income tax. They want you to think it’s unfair. It isn’t.
roshan
That’s the problem, right there.
Cris
But government has never created a single job!
Davis X. Machina
@roshan: In other words, the only employer left we can count on to pay their workers a decent wage is us…..
Matt
Why can’t hedge fund managers be outsourced too?
JCT
Sigh.
My 20-year-old will soon be back from 6 months of intensive language study in the middle east. Great “kid”, stellar student at a fine school majoring in international studies, wants to join the govt and “make a difference”, has no interest whatsoever in joining the private sector. Doesn’t want to be an academic like her parents. .
She wants my advice on her “next step”. And reading all of these economic forecasts of doom I have no fucking idea in the world what to tell her.
Damn.
Mnemosyne
Good thing I’m learning how to spin. I’ll be able to barter clothing for food.
Violet
I know how to garden and can make things like jam. Pretty short hop to canning.
@BR:
I took an EMT course, but it was over several months. Most EMT courses are tied into state certifications, so whatever those requirements are in terms of classroom hours, ambulance runs, ER hours, etc. is what you will have in virtually any course. Then to be certified you have to pass the state exam.
For a better overview, I’d recommend taking a Wilderness First Responder or WEMT course. I took the WFR course from Wilderness Medical Associates and it was great. Gives you lots of good info for what to do when medical personnel aren’t available.
Cacti
@roshan:
How so?
wilfred
Data like this will revitalize the Left. In fact, it will convoke the appearance of political (class) consciousness for the first time in 70 years. Good things will come out the failure of the American political economy.
In the meantime, get ready for a lot of belt tightening.
Around necks.
BR
@JCT:
I’m nearing 30 and am wondering what my next step should be. It’s been pretty stressful. Those of us under 30 have been preparing ourselves for a future that no longer exists.
Lately I was trying to figure out whether taking part in my employer’s retirement match program is a good idea. I’ll only have this job for another 9 months, and they won’t let me take out the money until I turn 59. I just wonder whether that money will still be there when I’m 59…
BR
@Violet:
Awesome, I’ll check it out.
roshan
@Cacti:
Sorry, I was thinking like a teabagger (usually any random conservative). No offense intended, carry on.
D-Chance.
Carlin didn’t exactly live on food stamps, given his fame and income derived from said fame… guess he WAS having the last laugh. Hey, join me in cursing the MAN, and don’t forget to buy a ticket to my next show tomorrow night. Cash or credit, I’ll take it from you any way I can get it from you.
Kryptik
@wilfred:
And the Obama presidency was supposed to help us get race discussions out in the open and help us smooth over the issue. Instead, the racists and right-wing enablers have doubled down and made our current climate possibly one of the most nakedly racist in a long time.
You underestimate the power of people with vested interests in keeping things going in this direction, backed by spineless media hacks who thing the greatest danger in our country is some hippies and Paul Krugman.
NickM
Read the comments at the link to see why we’re allowing this to happen. There’s some doozies.
roshan
@Matt:
Ha. You anti-capitalist, you.
D-Chance.
Oh, an don’t forget to stop by the merchandise booth. I have CDs, DVDs, and t-shirts for sale in the front foyer… probably all made in China.
ChrisS
@Cacti:
In some regards it is a problem. All the people losing their jobs at the GM plant and textile mills are being asked to foot the bill for teachers and government employees that aren’t experiencing the same kind of downward wage pressure. Ditto for the medical industry (between the AMA restricting medical schools and graduation rates and not being able to outsource open heart surgery).
A vast bulk of middle class jobs vanished overseas and were replaced by tech jobs, which soon vanished as well. Plumbers, electricians, nurses, auto mechanics, etc. are the few middle class/blue collar jobs left, and they’re not getting the business they used to because people can’t afford them.
God bless globalization. The fix is to either put up the trade walls again, or raise taxes on the wealthiest 5% to obscene levels. Otherwise we’re on our way to a fucking ugly situation.
Cacti
NAFTA was the death knell of U.S. manufacturing.
How does Bill Clinton sleep at night knowing he put his name on that abomination?
Svensker
@JCT:
Foreign Service. Get in the govt and stick like glue. I’d get out of the M.E., tho, unless she’s very brave, has a heart of stone, or a death wish (sorry, but I’d be scared as hell if my American kid went to the M.E. now). Can she learn an Asian language fairly quickly? Enough to pass the proficiency test (which is pretty minimal)?
russell
Read’em and weep
Learn how to garden and can is not bad advice.
Neither is learning how to do basic first aid. Neither is learning how to do basic carpentry, plumbing, and wiring.
Even auto mechanics, although automotive systems are so computer-based now that I’m not sure what the average joe can do besides replacing consumables like tires and oil.
Carlin was a brilliant guy.
Ed Marshall
@BR:
I’m over thirty and I just went back to college when I got laid off a year ago. The job market has bounced back enough that if I wanted a job I could probably go back to what I was doing and work in PR but I’m glad to say I’m not doing that. I’m going to finish my degree and go to law school.
The education reforms on loans make that pretty doable. If nothing else the Obama administration saved my ass from going to hell in the media research industry.
Mnemosyne
@wilfred:
Or a right-wing demagogue will come along and fully exploit the ongoing meme that all of our economic troubles are because of the actions of black and brown people and, if we just get rid of them, we’ll be on our way to prosperity.
That seems to be the more likely scenario to me than some kind of golden age of leftist action.
Davis X. Machina
@wilfred: The problem is you need a level of immiseration 2x what we’ve got to get there, if the 1930’s are an accurate model. (U6 of just under 40% v. 18%)
The right has no problem inducing that, for its own ends — but do you help them? Hinder them? Do nothing in the meantime?
Kryptik
@NickM:
We may be financially fucked, but goddammit, we’re America, that means we’re still the best! If we’re fucked, that means everyone else must be more fucked! We’re #1! We’re #1!
…
bleh.
Keith G
As often happens here, I typed some ideas based on Johns last post only to immediately notice that a new and parallel post has just been put up.
Sigh.
@Keith G:
eemom
But those are Big Government, Another Goddamn Federal Bureaucracy “jobs”. They don’t count.
‘Sides, once we get us a Speaker No-Boner they’s all gonna get drownded in a bathtub, anyhoo.
eemom
@Kryptik:
We’re fucked, fuck yeah!
Cacti
@ChrisS:
Nobody’s losing jobs at textile mills.
Those have been gone for years now. :-(
BR
@Ed Marshall:
I’d be worried about taking on serious loans at the moment. I have friends who went to top 5 law schools who are worried about the security of their legal jobs, and they have hundreds of thousands in loans to pay off.
It might be worth it to go to a lower-ranked school if you can get them to pay your way.
Bill H
So much for George W. Bush’s fucking “ownership society” which actually was nothing more than a con job to make the hoipolloi happy when the stock market went to 16,000 and Wall Street sucked the life out of Main Street.
r€nato
@Mnemosyne:
gay marriage, ACORN, NAACP, illegals, flag-burning, atheists, abortion, and letting the estate tax/Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire. *That* is the real problem… amirite?
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@JCT:
Tell her to look into a graduate program offered by the University of Maryland: it’s an entre into the Foreign Service. I have a friend’s daughter who’s in it. Full scholarship, guaranteed job in the Foreign Service when she graduates.
roshan
@BR:
You’re lucky. In about 40 yrs (in other words by the time you retire), there will be many incremental changes in the system (2, if you are counting), and your life after 70 will be spent hiding in a cave due to all the awesome climate change super weather. So, please don’t bother thinking about retirement.
Zifnab
@Cacti:
The “American Empire” didn’t really exist until after WWI and didn’t start to peak until the 60s. The whole “American Exceptionalism” thing was always BS. Without WW2, there’s no reason we should have outperformed Europe or Asia. Forty years of relative peace have allowed for a great deal of readjustment.
The American Empire isn’t going to die. It’s just going to have to deal with a more serious level of foreign competition.
We squandered our substantial lead in national development, and we’ve got a serious mis-allocation of resources. But the United States didn’t evaporate between 1999 and 2009. The people are still here. The technology is still here. All the working parts remain.
When the United States decides to set aside childish economic theories and an unbalanced budget, we’ll turn around quickly enough. The recovery is inevitable. It’s just a matter of how long we choose to make ourselves suffer.
ChrisS
From the linked article:
Fucking name them. I’m so sick of this balanced bullshit. The rules and regulations have been tumbling for decades. Waahh, I’ve got to build a ramp next to the stairs and I can’t dump tetrachloroethylene out in the back ditch anymore. I’m going to Singapore.
Bullshit. It’s the fucking labor rates and the lack of any kind of environmental laws that protect these areas. Corporate profits are jacked up by cutting the two big costs with manufacturing: labor and waste.
EvolutionaryDesign
@D-Chance.: And if he was living on food stamps, we’d never hear his message. Carlin may be cynical, but it’s hard to be cynical about Carlin.
wilfred
I’m for both, but the first is more difficult since FREE TRADE has been the capitalist sine qua non mantra since the beginning. They got it. However, they didn’t foresee the obliteration of the political/economic class that enabled the process.
The bourgeoisie now find themselves back where they started. Workers of the world, united.
r€nato
@Bill H:
“ownership society” means you got PWN3D.
Unless of course you had the good sense to be born to wealth, you lazy shiftless slob.
Montysano
@JCT:
Same here. The only difference is that our son says “Let it collapse. It’s too rotten to continue.”
JCT, if you get any bright ideas, please share.
Beauzeaux
The more wealth that top 1% accumulates, the greedier they become. This will not end well for anyone.
Paula
Carlin? Try Marx [Karl, that is]. ;)
Seriously, economists and social justice activists in America have been warning about the shrinking of the middle class for @ least a decade now … But I guess it takes an article in Yahoo!Finance in order for it have traction?
Davis X. Machina
Economist roundtable on whether the US faces increased structural unemployment, and what should be done about it.
r€nato
@Zifnab: I’m not at all optimistic. There is a tremendously powerful propaganda machine which has convinced a substantial fraction of the population that the real problem is ni99ers, illegals, queers, atheists, abortionists and taxes on the very wealthy.
A convenient distraction while the middle class gets looted.
The Moar You Know
@BR: I recommend CERT training highly (this is basic stuff that everyone should know ho to do regardless).
But as I said last thread, if you’re looking at a society that has so gone to shit that you are trying to make a go out of growing food in your yard, this kind of training won’t do you a fucking bit of good. For that matter, med or dental school won’t do you much good without at least rudimentary painkillers (booze is easy to make), sterilization (again, alcohol is easy to make) and antibiotics (pretty well impossible for anyone to make on their own).
The only hedge against the downfall of a society is to insure that said society does not fall.
Good Carlin clip. As usual, he cuts through all the bullshit.
John PM
@Ed Marshall: #36
No! Don’t do it! The legal market is crap. My firm has been receiving resumes from top ten law schools, which is a first. It is brutal out there, and I only see it getting more so.
BR
@roshan:
Yeah, it’s a pretty dismal future my generation is looking forward to. The Long Emergency…
I’ve been waiting to see whether Obama finally snaps out of his doldrums and levels with us. But as James Howard Kunstler points out, Americans are so complacent right now that they’d probably just revolt against him for telling the truth.
Kryptik
It’s just amazing how prescient he was all over, once he started to get into the dark comedy of American society.
This, said about the FIRST Gulf War back in early 90s. Go back to that particular special, I forget the name exactly. It’s still scary how he basically pegged everything that went wrong with THIS, current war in Iraq at least 10 years before, and counting.
EDIT: Posted the whole quote itself.
Zifnab
@Mnemosyne:
Worked so well for Germany. And that was in a country the size of Texas enthralled by a singular political fever.
We couldn’t pass national immigration reform under Bush. It’s questionable whether we’ll pull it off under Obama. You going to conduct a pogrom from Washington to Florida in a country this divided? Good luck.
Ed Marshall
@BR:
Repayment is capped at 10% of disposable income and forgiven after 20 years, maybe there is something really wrong with my logic, but I figured either I’ll get a great job and it all gets repaid easily, or I get a crappy job but 10% of disposable income isn’t going to kill me, or I get no job and live on student loans the next five years or so and live in a dumpster afterwords and wait out twenty years and hope there is social security.
slag
OK. Why can’t I ever hear the sound on George Carlin YouTube videos? My sound is up. The volume on the YouTube player is always up. What gives?
And it the problem seems to be confined to George Carlin videos. Other YouTube videos work fine. I would assume copyright protection, but other people seem to be able to play these videos. I’m starting to think it’s a conspiracy.
r€nato
The Confederacy had an ‘ownership society’ too. Just sayin’.
Cacti
@ChrisS:
Truly. The banking crisis and stock market collapse were because of all those onerous regulations.
BP oil spill? Again, too many regulations.
BR
@The Moar You Know:
Yeah, it’s not an easy problem so solve, so mortality is going to go up, unfortunately. Which is why we need to decriminalize cannabis (dealing with the painkiller part) and folks can start growing their own. (This is the solution Spain had to the problem – growing for personal use is legal, but selling for profit isn’t. It’s a great solution.) As for alcohol, I imagine there will still be folks with the knowhow to make distilled spirits. As for antibiotics, we’re screwed.
Montysano
The idea that globalism is all about cheap labor is about 1/3 correct. It’s much more about cheap oil, about the ability to make a pair of sneakers in China, ship them here, and still turn a profit, to be able to package a salad in Central America and sell it for $4.00 at the Burger Doodle.
Eventually, Reality will put an end to that, and I for one welcome that day. The Chinese serfs will get fed up at being de facto slaves and slit the throats of their masters, the price of oil will make our current arrangement untenable, and more sane paradigm will take over………… or we’ll live in a Mad Max world. One of the two…
Svensker
@r€nato:
One of the commenters in the linked article said that the REAL reason the middle class is shrinking is that they are all becoming rich! I kid not, unfortunately.
Napoleon
@BR:
As I moved from job to job I have been able to roll money out of retirement account into an IRA I have. Call, say, a local Fidelity office or their main office and talk to them. I would guess their website has material on it.
r€nato
@Svensker:
Yeah, I heard that particular bit of nonsense at least 20 years ago. Put forth by a GOP apologist to explain the widening gap between the wealthy and the rest of us.
They keep recycling the same lies… because they fool enough of the people enough of the time.
Cacti
@John PM:
I’ve been looking for a legal job for 12 months now. I’ve probably interviewed for about 20 open positions in the past year with zero subsequent offers of employment.
If you’re a newly minted lawyer looking for work right now, you’ll be competing for entry-level positions with people with 5+ years of experience.
Nick
@Zifnab:
Nobody went to war with Germany over their treatment of the Jews.
BR
@Napoleon:
Unfortunately, I can’t move the money – the place I work has a rule that all of the retirement money has to stay in their pool with the financial institution they picked, and can’t be touched until 59.
DecidedFenceSitter
Yeah, friend of mine just graduated law school. Takes the bar sometime this week. Last year’s 3Ls got deferred to this year. This year’s graduated lawyers got fucked, next year they might have a chance, but doubtful.
Law is no longer a place to make money, especially not for the level of debt you have to take on.
roshan
Does anyone know how the liquor industry is doing? Their sales must be “muchos, gracias” in this economy.
Napoleon
@Cacti:
Reportedly Rahm Emanuel is proudest of that accomplishment during the Clinton Admin.
Brien Jackson
You know what pisses me off about as much as anything? “Progressives” insisting that the United States use its economic might to make sure billions of people around the world remain economically disadvantaged forever. It’s unbelievable, frankly, and smacks of more than a bit of ethnocentrism and, yes, a slight bit of racism.
JCT
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage:
@Svensker
Yup– that’s likely the Pickering fellowship, she’s definitely applying for that one and is pretty focused on the Foreign Service overall, it’s just profoundly difficult to get into the FS these days, especially straight out of college. So she’s trying to come up with contingency plans. The FS is filled with 2nd career types. The “funny” thing is she’s really doing well in her Arabic studies (academic minor) and now has made progress on a dialect — supposedly a desired skill. But who knows?
What blows my mind is that it isn’t like she is insisting on making big bucks — hell, I’ve been moonlighting for the past 4 years so that she can walk out of school debt-free and “theoretically” make her career choices without the weight of loans to pay back. Lot of good that seems to have done in the current economy.
And I really am not complaining per se, she can come home and figure things out after graduation (but knowing her she would hate that idea). It’s just not the situation I envisioned when I told her to study whatever interested her in college.
@Montysano — this just sucks from the parental standpoint, no?
@BR — I hear you, it’s really disorienting and disheartening. Kind of like “none of the old rules apply”.
and hah, @John PM — she brought up law school (a common first stop before the FS) and I was uh, not too encouraging. It’s supposed to be hell out there right now.
ksmiami
poor man wanna be rich
rich man wanna be king
and a king ain’t satisfied till he rules everything…
h/t Bruce Springsteen
p.s.: Republican fiscal policies are suicide
Bill Murray
@Zifnab: as long as you ignore the whole manifest destiny thing. Although I suppose most of those colonies were eventually made states
Seanly
@zmulls:
And we’re the serfs for that top 1%.
The entire housing bubble was based on convincing people to cash out the one decent asset they had to make up for 30 years of real wages declining.
But the owners found they still require us serfs to make the system work. Just shuffling money around doesn’t produce anything – somewhere goods and services need to be produced and sold.
Consumers, the middle class, were the golden goose and the owners decided to dine on us. Why? I suspect that there is a version of The Soylent Oceanographic Survey Report showing the whole shebang is likely to fail. The end of cheap fuel sooner than we all think? Irrational 2012 fears? Just plain old greed?
roshan
@russell:
Is this our “come to Jesus” moment? Carpentry is nothing to be sneezed at.
tworivers
@Cacti:
It’s certainly not a boring time to be alive (though, personally I wouldn’t mind a “boring” stretch of peace and prosperity).
And not to be overly bleak, but it’s tough to think of anything short of huge comprehensive change stopping the decline.
Unfortunately, huge comprehensive reform is a pipe dream in Washington today. The bankers (who, as Durbin noted, “own the place”) will never allow anything more than incremental reform to ever occur. But incremental reform ain’t gonna cut it. Not when things are as fucked up as they are now.
Something needs to be done about the connection between moneyed interests and politics. This seems to me to be the root of many of the country’s most pressing problems – the influence over government decisionmaking that money currently buys is poisonous to the entire country.
Sadly, the Roberts court has seen to it that this influence will only increase.
maskling
thought that link would be to some damn dirty hippy commy blog and it is to Yahoo finance. and the source is some guy who is also worried about the deficit and the coming expiration of bush’s tax cuts. has the left now joined hands with the right?
yeah who could have predicted that NAFTA would be the end? well, even a stupid young man like myself! and everyone who voted for ross perot (because no other candidate weighed in anti-NAFTA). oh and the amusement of all the serious people, liberal and conservative, over my and your vote for ross perot! “why you must be an idiot hahahahahahaha! not so smart like us hahahahaha!” after reagan (“when taxes go down, that causes revenues to go up! every fool knows that!”) people would believe anything!(“bubba at the assembly line will become a knowledge worker! he’ll design websites or t-shirts! he will thrive! no prob!”)
“you belong to a union? HAHAHAHAHAHA!! don’t you know that business will regulate itself causing fair wages and good safety standards and respectful workplaces throughout the entire blahblahblahblahblahblah…You must be a fucking moron! HAHAHAAHAHH!”
all these years, i have felt like a voice in the wilderness, and now Yahoo finance belabors the obvious! no shit?
brendancalling
@Davis X. Machina:
yes, in many ways. Which is why I’m torn between becoming a teacher or going into business as a brewer.
Most everyone likes beer. even alcoholics, even if they can’t drink the stuff.
BR
@maskling:
It’s actually a bear blog that was linked to by another site which is scraped by Yahoo finance…
Brien Jackson
@r€nato:
Amen. Now if only the good leftists in the country could figure out how to make everyone see that the real problem is spics, chinks, and turban wearers, amirite?
BR
@brendancalling:
I’ve been thinking I’d learn the combo (some day): how to grow good medical cannabis and how to brew good beer.
Paula
@Brien Jackson:
Really. I mean, is that worth getting pissed off about? As far as actual effect goes … they’re kinda harmless. I mean, we’re not exactly recalling armies from distant lands because of them …
ChrisS
It’s much more about cheap oil, about the ability to make a pair of sneakers in China, ship them here, and still turn a profit, to be able to package a salad in Central America and sell it for $4.00 at the Burger Doodle.
True enough. Not having to pay for the waste stream on all that transportation energy (climate change, not our problem! Doesn’t exist!) allows them to benefit even more on the dime an hour labor.
Brien Jackson
@maskling:
Because the 1990’s were a horrible economic dystopia?
Also, pretty sure I’m never going to take good-lefty advice from anyone who admits to voting for Ross Perot and is still proud of it.
brendancalling
@roshan:
liquor and drugs always do well.
When times are good, people drink to celebrate, and use designer drugs like cocaine.
when times are bad, people drown their sorrows with booze and numb the pain with oxycontin, meth, etc.
the difference, i would guess, would be in the type of booze consumed: scotch, designer vodka, etc when times are good, beer and cheaper hard liquor when times are bad.
Amir_Khalid
@ksmiami: I was just listening to the Hyde Park DVD. A more fitting Boss quote might be
From the Monongahela Valley
To the Mesabi iron range
To the coal mines of Appalachia
The story’s always the same:
Seven hundred tons of metal a day
Now, sir, you tell me the world’s changed
Once I made you rich enough
Rich enough to forget my name
roshan
@brendancalling:
Or how about this? Trying to keep your options open.
Montysano
@r€nato:
Howard Beale: And when the 12th largest company in the world controls the most awesome goddamn propaganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what shit will be peddled for truth on this network.
And my favorite: Television is not the truth. Television’s a goddamn amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers, and football players. We’re in the boredom-killing business.
Chayefsky and Carlin tried to warn us…
Davis X. Machina
@brendancalling: Skip public-school teaching. They’re all highly-paid civil service drones who need to experience the bracing discipline of the market.
My suggestion if you want the government to be your employer — check out whatever they’re calling Eleven Bravo today. Leg infantry. In constant demand.
TJ
@BR:
Not necessarily. As a chem-eng I could make penicillin bench-scale if I had to. What’s going to determine what could or could not be done is your local utility supply, especially electric power. You know what the biggest medical “drug” is? Oxygen. No way to make that without juice.
You need a community of a such a size that there can be specialization. And where’s there’s reliable power. Individual survivalists get dead quickly.
Napoleon
@Amir_Khalid:
That song is named after my home town, and my whole 49 years on Earth I have been watching this nation hollow out.
BTW, how is that DVD. I am thinking of getting it.
Elizabelle
Into the midst of all this Monday doom and gloom, injecting “The Vagabond Cat”, which tops the NY Times most emailed stories today.
The Vagabond Cat that Came to Stay
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/weekinreview/25burns.html?ref=homepage&src=me&pagewanted=all
A story about a creature’s resilience and adaptivity.
Maybe a sign that today people want to chill out and read something more mundane than the Wikileaks dump or continued bad economics news.
Maybe a sign that NY Times readers, like many Balloon Juicers, are cat lovers. Or know many.
(Recall the story on “Catios” was also email-worthy.)
Enjoy.
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
@Zifnab:
A sincere prayer: “From your keyboard to God’s eyes, Zif.”
roshan
@Elizabelle:
Dammit, just when we had this “The Shining” ambiance going, you come in with your feel good story.
ksmiami
One more problem is that the media has done a good job convincing morons that they too will be super rich one day so reduce the burden on the people getting the most out of the system. SUCKERS.
p.s. We are going to have to have a national discussion about whether we as a nation want to be more rich on a community scale and less rich as individuals, or if we want to continue on our present course which will only crash and burn. There was a reason that the Progressive movement came out as a reaction to the Robber Barons. Too much wealth concentration puts the whole country at risk and frankly, our infrastructure, our health system, our military and our energy policies need massive rethinking. People should not even work in an office 5 days per week – just a 4 day with one telecommute would save a ton of money and energy
russell
Neither are gardening, canning, plumbing, or electrical wiring.
I was just following up on the “gardening and canning” thing. The more you can do for yourself, no cash required, the better you will weather hard times.
roshan
Had to post this, some genius had commented at the yahoo link in all caps, so it must be important.
+5 for no spelling errors.
sven
This statistic is widely disseminated on the right but is very misleading.
First, it excludes all military jobs. As always, the military just doesn’t count as part of the federal government. (Post-Office may or may not be included; another group often excluded to inflate the numbers)
Next, since 1980 two trends have redefined the federal workforce; the hiring of subcontractors and the shifting of services to the state governments. Lower-wage work like construction, janitorial, and maintenance is almost always provided through a private organization and so not included in these numbers. Core ‘service’ type jobs handling benefits, social workers, housing admin, etc. are provided by or through the states, so are also not included in this statistic.
So who are left? About 2 million (depending on who are included) highly qualified federal employees. Employees at the VA, Justice Dept., Defense Dept, State Dept, OMB, Treasury Dept., etc. have very technical jobs and so are highly educated and yes, highly paid.
The question, after all, is not whether government employees are highly paid compared to the average private employee; the question is whether they are highly paid relative to the average private employee doing the same job! If you make that comparison, doctor for doctor, lawyer for lawyer, you find (surprise) that government employees earn the same, or slightly less than their private counterparts.
Sorry if this was handled above (and more concisely) but whenever I see this number thrown around it drives me f’ing nuts.
licensed to kill time
woke up, fell out of bed
dragged a comb across my head
made my way to BJ and read the top posts
Cole and Doug spoke and I went into a dream
ah ah ah ah, ah ah aah ah ah ahh
everything is fucked up everything is fucked up
so depressing
may just go back to bed sigh
(or maybe I’ll read the kitty story, thnx Elizabelle :)
Amir_Khalid
@Napoleon: The DVD arrived here in Kuala Lumpur last week, just in time for my own 49th birthday. Yes, you should get it. Bruce’s voice is a little rough(er than usual) in places, and Patti is not there because of family obligations. But by God, that E Street Band knows how to rock the house.
Some of those manufacturing jobs that got outsourced from the US came to Malaysia for a while, and helped us get our industrialization process started up in the 1970s and 1980s. But then places where the labor was even cheaper, and regulation absent or more easily got around, opened up in the late 80s and 90s — Vietnam, parts of China — and some of those jobs left again. The Very Big Corp of America has no real loyalty to its low-level people, not at home and certainly not in the countries it outsources jobs to.
Napoleon
@Amir_Khalid:
I saw him in Cleveland last year and it was a great concert.
Steaming Pile
@Cris: I just say, “so? You expect me to feel sorry for them? They should pay more.”
Wingnut: “That’s not fair.”
Me: “From he to whom much is given, more is expected.”
Wingnut: “That’s just liberal bullcrap.”
Me: “OK. Let’s relieve the rich from their horrible, horrible tax burden. Are you ready to take up the slack?”
Wingnut: “Uh,…”
Me: “What’s the matter? I thought you were a patriot. It says so on your truck.”
Wingnut: (head asplodes)
Napoleon
@Amir_Khalid:
PS, in the song you quote, where Springsteen says his dad worked at the Ohio Works, this is what happened to the US Steel Ohio Works:
http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/images/1502.jpg
brendancalling
@Davis X. Machina:
I am, indeed, cooling on teaching. My guitar player’s wife is a teacher in NJ and is currently waiting to see if she’s going to get a pink slip.
she’s super pissed.
sacman701
Protectionism may help the protected industries but won’t do any good for the nation as a whole. Most likely, other countries would retaliate by pushing up their own trade barriers on us, starting a trade war with a result of no net increase in demand, less competition, and more distortion. In the unlikely event that other countries don’t respond, domestic demand would get a minor boost in the short run (similar to a currency devaluation) which would quickly disappear as an increase in the value of the dollar would make all the non-protected goods and services less competitive.
brendancalling
@BR:
both are very, very easy to do.
there’s a damn good reason one of the many euphemisms for cannabis is “weed”. once it gets going, it doesn’t stop.
Same with hops, which happens to be cannabis’ first cousin. Comes back year after year, taller each time. My crop (of hops, not weed) made it to the second story last year, and is on track for the same this year.
roshan
@brendancalling:
Hey, why not change from hops to weed and become our in-house BJ drug dealer? Lord knows, we are going to need it soon.
fucen tarmal
but, hey guns are cheap and legal, there is the retirement plan they recommend for the rest of us.
Amir_Khalid
@Napoleon: There’s a lot of history in that song, and to me it’s one of Springsteen’s masterpieces. Too bad he’ll never play a show in Malaysia.
daryljfontaine
@roshan: Neither is knowing how to nail up the aristocracy when the time comes.
D
P.S.: Shorter D-Chance on Carlin: DERRRRRP DERP DERP.
rickles
From comments at that American Spectator column on Sherrod to this clip, OMG. I feel like putting a gun to my head. Be careful how much incredibly depressing (read: TRUE) stuff you include in one day or your entire readership will off themselves.
QuaintIrene
Yes, cause if we write it down on a piece of paper then we’ll HAVE to do it.
And letting Bush’s tax cuts to the richest lapse, is just so anti-capitalist.
**********************
Going back to a much earlier Carlin. I always think of him when the local weather comes on.(‘Specially in these past heat waves.) ‘Temperature at Newark Airport is 96 degrees.’ I can just hear Carlin’s stoned weatherman adding, ‘And I don’t know anybody who lives at the airport.”
toujoursdan
@BR:
This.
We are in the “Long Emergency” and instead of preparing for all the resource shortages we’re going to encounter, both conservatives AND liberals think a little tweak here and there will return us to [unlimited] growth.
Learning how to garden, can and a valuable trade will serve younger people at least as well as university.
I wish everyone would read Kunstler’s book. Even if you don’t reach his conclusions, he will make you look at things differently.
jibeaux
You know what I want to find? A community college continuing ed course called “How To Fix Basic Crap In Your House When For All You Know It Works By Magic”. We have an excellent local community college with an 88 page course catalog, and the closest thing it has is woodworking, and professional courses in plumbing and electrical work. A friend suggested watching a lot of HGTV, but I don’t have cable because I’m cheap already. I know there are books, but I don’t get as much out of books as a more visual representation. I guess I can just go to youtube and find how to do specific things, but I really want to just learn the basics of home construction and all the guts inside it.
toujoursdan
@QuaintIrene:
Exactly. Bush kept the two wars off the books.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
This is good advice, but thanks to a couple of generations of relentless propaganda everybody from about 40 years old and younger is convinced that preparing their own food, much less gardening and canning, is impossibly difficult and time-consuming. I truly feel sorry for people younger than myself, they not only are going to have every penny stolen from them to pay for a crumbling overseas Empire they will also be bereft of simple, self-supporting skills that my parents took for granted.
nightshift66
Learning to garden is only of use to those with access to sufficient amounts of soil to meet at least some basic needs. A window sill garden will not help.
brendancalling
@roshan:
because I live in PA, and it’s not legal here (although de facto decriminalized in Philly where it’s always sunny but relentlessly negative due to the blogosphere).
besides, you can do it yourself with seeds, dirt and water.
remember to get rid of the males, the growth cycle is 18-20 hours of light, and the budding cycle is 12 light/12 dark.
have fun!
jibeaux
@nightshift66:
Look into community gardens. Around here, there are for example several Methodist churches that have opened up their land for community gardens, don’t have to join the church or anything, just part of their outreach. There may be other groups if you’re skeevy of Methodists.
Comrade Kevin
Yes, because state legislators are so much harder to buy off.
brendancalling
@brendancalling:
PS: Hops, last year around this time.
my deck is about 5 feet off the ground. they weren’t even halfway full grown.
they provide a great green canopy, a privacy screen, and the honeybees love ’em.
nightshift66
@ jibeaux
Oh, I’m Methodist myself, so I’m somewhat comfortable around them. ;-) Indeed, as long as I can make my mortgage I have some yard in which to garden, and just last night canned a dozen jars of salsa, uber-spicy. I was thinking more about apartment dwellers and homeowners on micro-lots than myself. When/if the bottom truly falls out (e.g. Great Depression II), it is the urban and suburban millions who will be in truly dire straits.
russell
If you have access to anyplace outside that gets enough sun (rooftop, fire escape, driveway) there’s a lot of stuff you can plant in a 5 gallon joint compound bucket.
roshan
@brendancalling:
So, how much gallons (is that right?) of intoxicants does that kind of hop produce?
jibeaux
@nightshift66:
Yeah, you may be right, but maybe everyone will have something to barter for the extra produce. I am certainly not looking forward to the Great Depression II, but it seems to me that there are lessons we could stand to learn from that generation & from countless cultures today about thrift and re-using things. There is of course a huge subculture here dedicated to that sort of thing — I am still in search of any thing short of say, nuclear waste, that you could not send for re-use by putting it on craigslist’s free section — but it’s not really the dominant culture. We still have so many people who are basically interchangeable with the cast of the Jersey Shore and I think sooner than we know those folks are going to wish they knew how to sew or fix a toilet.
brendancalling
@roshan:
I generally make beer in 5-gallon batches (about 2 cases worth, although I keg because cleaning bottles is a wasteful and chemical-ridden pain in the ass). In any given 5-gallon batch, i use about 3-4 ounces of hops. Last year, i think I generated about a pound, maybe two pounds of hops, but to be honest, in 2009 I went on brewing hiatus and didn’t use any of my hops. But i would guess about 8 batches of beer, or about 16 cases. I have to post some shots of this year’s hops, they are HUGE. One flower is about the size of my phone when the phone is open.
ricky
Why isn’t this filed under “Chicken Little’s Guide to Statistical
Proof?”
Compelling statistics have also been offered that Phoenix is the kidnapping capital of the wrold.
Delia
@JCT:
My son took the written and oral FS exams his senior year at Berkeley and passed both of them. That was back in 2002. He had to stay on the wait list a year before he was offered a job, but from what he says, Obama has increased the number of Foreign Service officers significantly. It sounds like the master’s program your daughter is applying for is probably geared toward helping students pass the exams. Morale was pretty bad during Condi Rice’s tenure, mainly because she was insisting that everybody rotate through Baghdad at some point in their career, and a lot of people were looking to bail. Things are a lot better now, and my son’s really happy with his career choice. He went in knowing Spanish and Portuguese, which are not the most difficult languages, and they taught him Korean for his first assignment.
DBrown
Peak oil, which now appears to have occurred for liquid petroleum (luckily, peak oil has a flat top shape – to see this fact just subtract Canadian tar sands and the effects of the recession from the standard oil production/consumption graphs) is straying us in the face.
Yes, there is more oil out there but it is deeper, the fields are smaller and the quality is poorer (less gasoline per barrel) – we are there people. Thank God for tar sand (an environmental nightmare one step up from mountain top removal) we should have five more years of mixed (but moderatily increasing) prices for gasoline.
During this time oil production should remain relatively flat compared to demand causing slow increase in cost, even more slowly causing a small increase in production only to cause leading to a modest fall in price until, after a year or so, the price doesn’t ever fall again (even with modest demand fall) because we have started on the opposite side of the peak production curve.
During that time all the cheap goods from china will not be so cheap and over the next five years or so after that, we will not be able to afford all the goodies and a real world wide recession starts and food prices world wide steadily climbs as standards goods become more and more expensive.
Regan’s morning in America will finally be here – unions dead, middle class vanished, pensions a thing of the past (all retirements), and war in the world a common state as deserts grow, droughts intensify, rain extreme’s get worse leading to floods that do little for crops, fresh water becomes more difficult to get, electricity here in America blacks out for long periods every summer then spring/fall and winter, and family values finally become a reality because families will be broken with no jobs so what else but the opiate of the masses. Welcome to blue dogs/Regan democrats ultimate result of their stupidity (swinging the dying repub-a-thugs power; hope nader the asswipe is happy, too.)
Cole’s list is just the start of what will be the norm as these numbers just continue to grow. Thank god we spend so much on a military that costs more than the next twenty plus most rich countries pay combined. We are past the trip line and it is not going to ever get better.
Ruckus
@ChrisS:
There are no obscene tax levels on rich cocksuckers. At this point in time 95% would be acceptable to me. I was very young when the highest tax rate was 90% and the country ran just fine. They make more now, they should be able to pay more, not less.
Ruckus
@Ed Marshall:
Do we have enough lawyers now? Do we really need more over the next 5-10 years?
What will that law degree get you in the long run? Would there be a better degree that you could get? And use?
Right now the market looks over played and so that degree will not go far.
I do like the way you look at using the money to live till things get better though.
Delia
@ChrisS:
Excuse me, what state do you live in? All the ones I know of are laying off teachers and cutting essential programs in vain attempts to balance their budgets.
JCT
@Delia: Ah, neat! Always nice to hear a success story– it is quite the process, apparently.
The Pickering has been around under different names. At present it is a competitive program that pays for the last year of college and the first year of grad school (master’s program) and fellows also have to complete 2 internships. they are automatically hired by State and owe the govt a 3-year FS tour. So she will give it a shot.
That’s great that your son is enjoying it – it sounds like quite the career. When my girl was studying in Morocco she met a new FS officer who said that he had waited until Rice was gone to even apply…. some delightful legacy that administration.
Of course, I’m not too surprised at your boy’s success – Go Bears!
JT
Cal ’84
Chuck Butcher
So what I’m trying to figure out is why this Carlin clip and the yippie-eye-kiyaes over it shortly following lefty bashing. ah well, whatever the fuck.
This being what I do for my nickles.
Litlebritdifrnt
@brendancalling:
Will they grow in Eastern NC? It is very hot here in the summer and I would be interested to see if they can survive our rabid heat.
BrainGuy
@ChrisS: “All the people losing their jobs at the GM plant and textile mills are being asked to foot the bill for teachers and government employees that aren’t experiencing the same kind of downward wage pressure. ”
Huh?
1) Are there still domestic textile mills?
2) My dad is a high school math teacher and, while I can’t say whether he is, “experiencing the same kind of downward wage pressure”, I can say that he is taking a 30% pay cut at the beginning of the school year. And luckily he’s in the final couple of y
BrainGuy
@ChrisS: “All the people losing their jobs at the GM plant and textile mills are being asked to foot the bill for teachers and government employees that aren’t experiencing the same kind of downward wage pressure. ”
Huh?
1) Are there still domestic textile mills?
2) My dad is a high school math teacher and, while I can’t say whether he is, “experiencing the same kind of downward wage pressure”, I can say that he is taking a 30% pay cut at the beginning of the school year. And luckily he’s in the final couple of years before retirement, so that 30% cut will count against him when his retirement benefits are calculated and therefore decrease his income for the rest of his life. Lucky him.
*edited to add* oops! I apparently can’t delete or edit the incomplete version of this post. Sorry!
MikeTheZ
Ugh, I need a drink after all this.
Doubly so because of CNN’s little “Can The Economy Afford Taxing the Rich?” bullshit article today.
Triply so because, hey, I’m a college grad with no job, no prospects, and know my chances have been destroyed. But hey, at least I know the uber rich are well off and someday it will trickle down to me!
NoxiousNan
@D-Chance.:
Yes and Al Gore has that big old jet, yet preaches conservation, and let’s not even mention all those men with opinions on abortion.
George Carlin had a job that he accepted a paycheck for – the swine! That discounts anything he had to say about the economy.
please.