Obama happily reinflating the bubble
Primary tabs
Great news. At some point in the future the unemployment picture may become less horrific (except that unemployment for those who earn $150,000 or more is only 3%, while unemployment for the poor is 31%*).Fair using AP:
With industry demand on the rise for the third straight quarter, 37 percent of respondents plan to increase employment in the next six months, up from 29 percent in January. The net employment outlook index — job additions minus all cuts over the next six months — soared to 21 from 6 in the survey, with fewer respondents saying they planned to reduce staff through either attrition or layoffs. However, the bulk of employers — 46 percent, down from 48 percent — still plan no change to staffing levels.
And now the kicker:
By sector, the financial, insurance and real estate industries along with the service industry have had the most positive employment trends and continue to going forward.
Isn't that dandy? Obama got employment going in the FIRE sector! The banksters, who fucked us over so totally in the last crash, and were then bailed out by Bush and Obama, are going to get jobs doing the same thing. And the insurance companies, who are murdering us by taking our money and then denying us care, and who were bailed out by Obama with HCR (Higher Corporate Returns) are going to get jobs doing the same thing. Thanks, Ds! Thanks, "progressives"!
What to do, what to do...
In the micro, get resilient. Wherever you see some parasite sucking a percentage from one of your transactions, get out of that relation. No big banks, but local credit unions. As little plastic as possible. No ATM machine, at two bucks a pop, for gawd's sake. Don't buy your gardening supplies at big box stores, but buy local. If it costs more, it's local, and the money's more likely to come back to you. Buy as little food as you can at the big box stores, because there's no reason to think the whole food chain won't collapse, either from oil at $10.00 a gallon, or e. coli everywhere. And so on and so forth. And especially get to know your neighbors and arrange for mutual assistance.
In the macro... One of the advantages of the MMT way of thinking about budgeting is the perspective that in the United States all money is public money, since in a state whose currency is sovreign (like ours, but unlike the EU countries), money is created by the state (Article I, Section 8). That means that money should be used for the public good, and not the good of the banksters.** So why not use the state's money for the public purpose of ensuring full -- 100% -- unemployment? With our infrastructure the way it is, there are surely jobs for everywhere. Why piss all our money down a hole in Afghanistan? Why put all our money into the bankster's pockets? And on and on and on.
So, there's always something to do....
NOTE * This isn't a bug. It's a feature.
NOTE ** The banksters also have a nice little racket going where they charge us interest to lend us our own money (the so-called "deficit"). That needs to stop, although because the banksters like it -- and who wouldn't -- the legacy parties like it too.
- lambert's blog
- Log in or register to post comments
Comments
And if you have to shop at big box stores
Try to shop at ones that are union.
I have a small local grocery store near me, but when I tried to shop there, the extra money needed for my weekly groceries came close to breaking me.
So instead, I shop at the big box store that is even closer to my house, that has grocery prices cheaper than the "local" big box store, buys produce from local growers(something else the local BBS doesn't do), and offers union benefits to their employees.
there is a lot to be said for buying union
some of the money stays in the community in the form of worker wages.
how can you find out which are union?
?
I would say ask an employee
I suppose there might be a website. I know that the one I use is union, b/c I used to work there.
I would also recommend googling the name of the store and
"union"...and I do know that Costco has a very good track record related to their employees, and they are union. (If it's OK to name names?)
He's Forever Blowing Blubbles....should stick to Tiny Bubbles!
">It's a pretty idea, Mr. President,
as sung by Doris Day, but doesn't work all that well in real life.">Pretty amazing in a massed crowd!
As here when West Ham soccer fans sing it. Hearing English soccer fans sing their songs, sometimes called their hymns!, makes we wish we would do that here in the US. Does require learning the words.... Love the thought of sports hymns.Kind of scary how well these pop song words match what happens to our economy under the bubbles philosophy.
">Stick to tiny, manageable bubbles, Larry and Timmie
.Jawbone, there's one you forgot
Turn off the bubble machine!
Followed your first link to Naked Capitalism on unemployment
percentages related to income levels and found some pretty strong disagreement about the statistics and how they're being used. Such as, how is the $150K person counted when he or she loses a job? A slightly lower income level, based on part year earnings? Hence, fewer unemployed in the $150K level. Or...what? How?
Did find this interesting comment from DownSouth @ 8:25AM today--
Is Rand where the idea of the "creative class" came from? Directly? Or just absorbed and made it into current discourse?
It's followed by a pretty high flying comment from Noonballoon:
Sarcasm, joke? Serious Randian? Afterall, Greenspan still is, it seems.
origin of "creative class"
Jawbone, I think the term was coined by Richard Florida-- at least, that's where I first heard "creative class." He wrote an influential book called The Rise of the Creative Class.
Chris Bowers then popularized "creative class" ...
... in the political class, taking off from Fiorina's work.
The classic post, and be sure to put down your coffee.
The PBR post is my favorite post ever
I wrote Bowers off completely at that point, but others wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. Honestly, can you really trust a person who writes a post like that?
It's my favorite because it exposes the progressive blogosphere for what it really is: a classist faux-intellectual meme laundry.
Me too, me too!
Although when Bowers analyzed what the Obama administration will be like, he was pretty dead-on - a bunch of Libertarian faux-lefties who pretend to give a sh*t about the Bubbas, but are really only concerned with the elites.
Bizarrely (to me), he saw that as a good thing.
I had missed that post, but the ideas certainly got around
PDQ...just not to the PBR* drinkers...or most of them. Or if those comments, opinions did get around to them, it probably won't help a lot with getting their votes come future elections. Sheesh.
Also, good thing the Dems weren't going to depend on working class supporters and party workers, since so many working people don't have jobs to go to work at anymore....
But surely the Creatives will fill the voids...heh.
Saw a NYTimes article yesterday that Rep David Obey, along with other Dems formerly considered in safe districts, may be in trouble this coming election.
*Ah, Pabst Blue Ribbon. Regular Pabst was not my favorite beer, butI remember with delight an afternoon brewery tour on one hot summer day. Cool, dark, and they had some very good darks and ales. Can't recall the names, not widely sold iirc. Guess what stands out is the post-tour tasting room/tavern. I vaguely remember how immense the vats were and how they gleamed.
PBR is pisswater...
and yet it's "cool."
The lesson there seems fairly obvious.
Where I grew up, PBR was a working man's beer -- some
were cheaper, iirc, but PBR was right up there. Schlitz was the Champagne of Bottled Beer. Blatz's claim to fame I can't recall. PBR did have more flavor than Coors, however, which was really like drinking carbonated water.
It was not considered cool at all. How times change.
Well...
Buy as little food as you can at the big box stores, because there's no reason to think the whole food chain won't collapse, either from oil at $10.00 a gallon, or e. coli everywhere.
It's great advice to grow your own food and buy locally, but there's plenty of reasons to think that industrial food will continue to show up in grocery stores at prices most people can afford.
1. $10/gal fuel won't do it. Fuel costs are responsible for about 3.5% of retail food expenditures. Tripling the price of fuel raises retail prices no more than 7% -- not zero but very far from a Jared Diamond-type collapse.
2. Scarcity of fuel won't do it. Fuel was scarce during WWII but food shipments made it everywhere they needed to go -- because the government rationed fuel. There might not be much fuel for your car, but there will be for trains and long-haul trucks. It's just a matter of priorities.
3. The industrial food system is filled with companies with plenty of pull in the government -- do you think they're just going to roll over and play dead?
4. Finally, no american government is more than 3 meals away from a revolution. The industrial food system was largely created by Nixon to make sure this politically explosive issue was mooted. Nobody in charge is going to let the supermarkets go bare -- they'd be first up against the wall.
Let's be realistic, not like the collapse-porn addicts on the oil drum.
It was
always the plan. Said so long ago.
True, that was the plan
But it's nice to see it confirmed out of the economic statistics. No doubt they're breaking out the champagne in the West Wing.