Grapes of workamping

The race to the bottom is over. The 1% won. American capitalism - the kind without a human face - looks more and more like the bastard spawn of neo-feudalism and indenture to the company store.

Workampers - some of them, anyhow - are the Okies of the Great Recession. Psst, only white people have RVs. Good demographic!

At least the workampers can go mobile. The locals are completely stuck between penury and abuse as temporary, disposable employees:

Industry consultants describe the temp-staffing business as "very, very busy." "On fire." Maximizing profits means making sure no employee has a slow day, means having only as many employees as are necessary to get the job done, the number of which can be determined and ordered from a huge pool of on-demand labor literally by the day. Often, temp workers have to call in before shifts to see if they'll get work. Sometimes,they're paid piece rate, according to the number of units they fill or unload or move. Always, they can be let go in an instant, and replaced just as quickly.

In another mind-numbing warehouse:

A few days later, I had breakfast with someone who coincidentally works with the CEOs of logistics companies. Telling him about the conditions and the sterility and the mind-numbing sadness of the warehouse made him almost too bummed to eat his oatmeal. "Somebody did studies and spreadsheets and crunched those numbers," he said, "and figured out that the cheapest way to get that job done is to treat people like that." Which is important, he explained, because "the profit margins on those contracts are razor thin." Of course. A lot of the Internet retailers' merchandise is nearly worthless—ice princess star-shaped ice cube trays, cheap sunglasses, anthropomorphic stuffed bacon toys—and is sold for nearly nothing, often with free or reduced-price shipping.

Susie told me it's pretty dispiriting to act as though her workers are as disposable as the products they're shipping. But that's just the way it is, she said. The logistics clients aren't interested in spending money on a better or more sustainable work culture. Nor do they need to. There are 100 people employed in the warehouse I visited, and Susie could fire every one of them today without costing her bosses a dime of lost profits. She has applications from hundreds of people ready to take the job.

And the logistics companies call their abusive work rules their culture.

All I can say is that Americans are heavily armed, and woe be to those who are inflicting this "culture" on us when we finally figure out that it's not the liberals who are to blame for every ill the wealthy are inflicting on us.

Outsource your thinking to me

What Mitt Rmoney wants you to trust him about:

See full-size at BartCop.

Problem is, Mitt's not trustworthy about anything other than lower taxes for the rich - and lately, he's trying to claim he's not trustworthy about that, his single previously inviolate political principle.

Not worth celebrating yet

Those great employment numbers for September? Don't believe them.

No, there's no dark conspiracy to make President Obama look good. That's another zombie lie out of the feverish and fact-immune rationalization machines that wingnut brains are. It's just that the Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers are too imprecise to justify celebration:

These numbers are always tremendously volatile, but the reasons are statistical, not political. The volatility arises because the numbers are based on a tiny survey with a margin of error of 400,000. Every month there are wild swings that no one takes at face value.

So:

• The main signal is there in the data, but it's very noisy due to inherent uncertainty in a small survey.
• There may be an underlying longitudinal change in seasonal behavior that seasonal adjustment models simply haven't yet caught up with.

But that's too complex a reality for tiny wingnut amygdalas. Let's not join them in stupidity on the left, o.k.?

Update: Paul Krugman believes this jobs report is a return to trend:

[T]here is real if modest improvement over the past year. Also, the September numbers looks not like an aberration but like a return to trend from what looks like noise in the data over the previous couple of months.

Clearly far from party time, even so.

Suicide by central bank

Most analysts continue to parrot the wrong prescription for economic woes, at home and abroad:

The fact that Spanish public pensions are not only off limits to the budget knife but also are being enhanced, is a reminder of one reason that European debt and deficit problems have proved so difficult to resolve.

Only Greece, under duress and at a point where the move may be coming too late to salvage the government’s finances, seems prepared to risk the consequences of severe pension cutting.

The real crisis is not debt - although it's a long-term problem. The real crisis is:

In Spain, pensions have become a lifeline. With unemployment at 25 percent, and even higher among young people, many Spaniards now rely on pension-drawing parents and grandparents to support them. Economists estimate that up to 1.7 million of Spain’s 16 million households have no salary earners.

and:

Of course, as many economists would note, such a reduction in Greek public spending is likely only to compound an economic decline in which gross domestic product shrank 25 percent over the past five years.

These countries are in full-blown economic depression, yet their governments and their bankers continue to urge penury and worse on people who did not cause the debt crisis.

Europeans should be in the streets, should topple their governments. Americans should choose a better path, one that grows first, then reduces debt. Paul Krugman gets it, why not the rest of the New York Times?

(Note to American conservatrolls: You think Fannie and Freddie caused the mortgage loan debacles here in the U.S. Does their legal power over the market reach Europe? Of course not, you stupid twerps.)

Old media won't tell you this

(h/t MoveOn)

Wealth of bullshit

The wealthy and their lobbyists and media propagandists want us to believe that they are essential to job creation. Bullshit!

With cunning and contempt and catechismal fervor the super-rich have argued that all money should move to the top, where it will be used to stimulate the economy and create jobs. But they ignore the facts that prove them wrong.

What Republicans want

Disaster for America...

A single honest Republican

Bruce Bartlett is the sort of Republican we used to have - a well-reasoned and analytical reality-based conservative. He can look at the economy and state without fear:

The reason that unemployment is high clearly has nothing to do with taxes. Consequently, there is no reason to think that reducing taxes further will do anything to raise employment by reducing the tax wedge.

There aren't many of his kind left, and most of them have been abandoned by the Teapublican extremists.

Who is Mitt Romney for?

Hair to the throne

Click image for full J.D. Crowe/Mobile Register cartoon.

The proper role of envy is to make the unemployed dream of being the chauffeur, not to dream of government making a better life for them.

A tough time to be sane, 2011

Click image for full Tom Tomorrow/DailyKos cartoon.

The year in deja vu

American and European elites fucked up 2011:

The bottom line is that 2011 was a year in which our political elite obsessed over short-term deficits that aren’t actually a problem and, in the process, made the real problem — a depressed economy and mass unemployment — worse.

Of course, moronic teabaggers - members of the 99% fighting for the 1% - aren't elite. They may think of themselves as elite. After all, they're white and old, so they expect to be elite as their birthright, as their due of Confucian filial piety Ten Commandment Christian honor. And the teabaggers contributed with every vociferous shout-down and reactionary vote to the total fuck-up that was 2011, due to the completely irrational mindfuck of the 2010 midterm elections.

The elite central bankers took care of other bankers and told the rest of us that our dire straits were our own damn fault, never mind that the very same profligate bankers crashed the world economy. But they went to Harvard and the Sorbonne and Heidelberg, so we have to take care of them and their vacation homes and their taxpayer-funded bonuses, even if it means they have to sacrifice - oh, the humanity - by witnessing with their virgin eyes the homeless living in refrigerator boxes - how gauche, how outré, how lacking in fellow feeling toward their noble betters. Where's a Potemkin village when they need one for their refined sensibilities!

I am really fucking sick of the blind selfish wealthy, tired of being an upper middle class peasant with a white-knuckle death grip on my job, destined for Ayn Rand penury in old age, blamed for my own laziness, when in fact I work much harder than the shitheads who cream off an ever-larger proportion of the GDP.

Let me say this right now: If I find myself broke and hungry in old age, screwed out of Social Security and Medicare in a giant profit-making game of three-card monte, discarded by craven plutocratic feudal elites, I will not go gentle into that good night.

Is that a threat? You're goddamn right it is.

No deal

John Boehner (R-tea-drinker) may have the title and office of Speaker, but no deal he makes is worth the air he wastes in agreeing to it:

Speaker John A. Boehner, who had urged his members on Saturday to support the bill, seemingly [sic] did an about-face on Sunday and said he and other House Republicans were opposed to the temporary extension, part of a $33 billion package of bills that the Senate passed Saturday. In addition to extending the payroll tax cut for millions of workers, the legislation extends unemployment benefits and avoid cuts in payments to doctors who accept Medicare. The measure would be effective through February.

I'm getting strong feelings that America is doomed. Even should the unlikely happen and the Democrats sweep away the teabaggers in 2012, we are sooo divided, and the wingnuts are sooo adamantly determined on a course of fascism.

Fascism? No exaggeration - the Republican option doesn't just tend toward oligarchic rule by wealthy corporate interests. It is oligarchy. They cynically and demagogically fan the nationalism, bigotry, fundamentalism, and hatred of the liberal principles that founded this country. Instead, they off the feudal tribalism in which one aristocrat's peasants fight another aristocrat's serfs, all for the greater glory of the so-called nobles.

Even if Democrats, wishy-washy and thoroughly compromised as they are, win the coming election, Republicans have made the country ungovernable. They did it on purpose because they would rather endanger the country than surrender power, even to a majority. As soon as the 2008 election was called, they set out to take America hostage. And our fellow citizens were too stupid, too easily demagogued, and too irrational to resist.

Yeah, I'm such a ray of sunshine these days.

A stimulus Perry can believe it

Click image for full Garry Trudeau/Doonesbury cartoon.

Truth on employment

The drop in official unemployment is not good news. It only looks like good news. Labor force participation is horrible.

I would guess that the picture for would-be workers between 55 and 67 (the most recent full Social Security retirement age) is even worse.

According to Republicans, all this despair is the fault of the despairing. According to Democrats, there's not much more they can do.

The Occupiers are right.

So-called Democrats

The millionaires won again yesterday. Who were the so-called Democrats who joined the Republican filibuster of Obama's jobs bill?

One of them was, of course, Joe Lieberman, who hasn't been a Democrat for...ever.

I hope Barack Obama and Harry Reid regret their failure to send him packing to the Republican caucus when they had the chance in January 2009 - to repay his betrayal with the back of their hand.

The others were Ben Nelson, always reliable voting for a Republican filibuster, and Mark Pryor. I refuse to put a D next to their names.

Meta-question: Why did I have to visit a third site before finding who the turncoats were? Don't journalists find the question who an important question any more?

How could higher savings be bad?

Paul Krugman puts the pipsqueak stimulus in context:

[C]onsumers suddenly increased their savings. ...

[Y]ou have a negative shock on the order of 6 percent of GDP.

Against this you had a stimulus bill of $800 billion — except $100 billion of that was AMT extension that was going to happen anyway, another $200 billion was other tax cuts of dubious effectiveness, so you were left with $500 billion of spending, spread over more than 2 years — maybe 1.5 percent of GDP or less.

It just wasn’t big enough to do the job.

The $1.5 trillion stimulus package - the one that Larry Summers refused even to present to President Obama - and it's Obama's fault for appointing Summers, whose foremost attribute is undeserved arrogance (though he thinks it's brilliance) - would have filled 75% of the demand gap. We wouldn't have 9% unemployment if Obama had taken this case to the people:

• It's free to borrow money.
• The best way out of recession is to grow.
• We're going to build useful infrastructure that we and our children will benefit from for the next 30 to 60 years.
• This will heal unemployment, which will take much of the pain - and there will be some pain - out of repaying the debt.

The estimable professor forgets to explain why higher savings in face of a recession could possibly be bad. People are tightening their belts in the face of hard times. Rational, careful, conservative (in the good sense).

The paradox of thrift is the textbook example of the fallacy of composition in Keynesian economics. Behavior that's good for an individual or a family makes a recession worse. Money that's saved - not because people suddenly became virtuous but because they are fearful about the future - is money that's not spent. Since it's not spent, businesses have to contract their economic activity. They may be sitting on big profits (sound familiar?), but there's no reason at all for them to build more capacity, much less to hire unemployed workers.

Only the government, acting on behalf of all of us, can break this vicious cycle with deficit spending. And again, borrowing money is as close to free as it has ever been in history.

Unemployed, tough luck

The Republican view is that unemployment doesn't matter at all:

“We have serious concerns that further intervention by the Federal Reserve could exacerbate current problems or further harm the U.S. economy,” said the letter, signed by four of the top Republicans in Congress: Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate Republican leader; Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Senate Republican whip; House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia.

As they were during the debt ceiling hostage crisis, all the Republican "leadership" is willing, eager, even happy to sacrifice America for the sake of their power.

And they call stimulus treason.

Come again another day

Click image for full Clay Bennett/Chattanooga Times Free Press cartoon.

Could Rick Perry do for America what he did for Texas?

Total effing boatloads of government jobs:

Over the last few years, government jobs have been awfully consequential in Texas: 47% of all government jobs added in the US between 2007 and 2010 were added in Texas.

I'm for it.