In State of the Union, Obama to return to jobs and the economy

Hundreds of reasons have been adduced for the fall of Rome and the end of the Old Regime in 18th-century France. Reasons run from inflation and excessive spending to resource depletion and enemy invasion, when historians attempt to understand the sudden collapse of the Mycenaeans, the Aztecs, and, apparently, the modern Greeks. In literature from Catullus to Edward Gibbon, wealth and leisure — and who gets the most of both — more often than poverty and exhaustion, cause civilization to implode.

One recurring theme seems consistent in Athenian literature on the eve of the city’s takeover by Macedon: social squabbling over slicing up a shrinking pie. Athenian speeches from that era make frequent reference to lawsuits over property and inheritance, evading taxes, and fudging eligibility for the dole. After the end of the Roman Republic, reactionary Latin literature — from the likes of Juvenal, Petronius, Suetonius, and Tacitus — pointed to “bread and circuses,” as well as excessive wealth, corruption, and top-heavy government.

For Gibbon and later French scholars, “Byzantine” became a pejorative description of a top-heavy Greek bureaucracy that could not tax enough vanishing producers to sustain a growing number of bureaucrats. In antiquity, inflating the currency by turning out cheap bronze coins was often the favored way to pay off public debts, while the law became fluid to address popular demands rather than to protect time-honored justice.

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After the end of World War II, most of today’s powerhouses — China, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Russia, and Taiwan — were either in ruins or still pre-industrial. Only the United States and Great Britain had sophisticated economies that survived the destruction of the war. Both were poised to resupply a devastated world with new ships, cars, machinery, and communications.

In comparison with those of Frankfurt, the factories of 1945 Liverpool had survived mostly intact. Yet Britain missed out on the postwar German economic miracles, in part because after the deprivations of the war, the war-weary British turned to class warfare and nationalized their main industries, which soon became uncompetitive.

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King Xerxes’ huge Persian force of 250,000 sailors and soldiers could not defeat a rather poor Greece in 480 b.c. Yet a century and a half later, a much smaller invading force from the north under Philip II of Macedon overwhelmed the far more prosperous Greek descendants of the victors of Salamis.

For hundreds of years, the outmanned legions of the tiny and poor Roman Republic survived foreign invasions. Yet centuries later, tribal Goths, Visigoths, Vandals, and Huns overran the huge Mediterranean-wide Roman Empire.

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Americans have never led such affluent material lives — at least as measured by access to cell phones, big-screen TVs, cheap jet travel, and fast food. Obesity rather than malnutrition is the greater threat to national health. Flash mobs go after electronics stores, not food markets. Americans spend more money on Botox, face lifts, and tummy tucks than on the age-old scourges of polio, smallpox, and malaria.

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By any historical marker, the future of Americans has never been brighter. The United States has it all: undreamed-of new finds of natural gas and oil, the world’s preeminent food production, continual technological wizardry, strong demographic growth, a superb military, and constitutional stability.

Yet we don’t talk confidently about capitalizing and expanding on our natural and inherited wealth. Instead, Americans bicker over entitlement spoils as the nation continues to pile up trillion-dollar-plus deficits. Enforced equality, rather than liberty, is the new national creed. The medicine of cutting back on government goodies seems far worse than the disease of borrowing trillions from the unborn to pay for them.

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vetteman said:

Ishmael said:

Define for us all exactly what this "better future" looks like.

Ishmael

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A Utopia maintained by liberals and run by the administrative state in support of a tyranny against the constitutional sovereignty of the civil society. About sums it up.

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4est_4est_Gump said:

Ishmael said:

Define for us all exactly what this "better future" looks like.

Ishmael

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The Progressive Left is not sure of what that better future is, but it can only be delivered by government for they have rewritten history and made it their "Robin Hood" myth that the only thing the Private sector delivers is

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4est_4est_Gump said:

Once again, the Austrian economists will be vindicated.

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4est_4est_Gump said:

Only fools think they can manage the future.


Only fools can believe their dreams will materialize.


When writers try to envision the future, we include them in the genre called "Science Fiction."

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As an immigrant to the United States, and thus a sideline spectator of the panorama that is American society, as well as someone who has spent most of his adult life in the field of international finance dealing with a myriad of countries and nationalities, I have been fascinated by the characteristics of the American left as compared to their counterparts in the rest of the world. While on the surface there may appear to be similarities, at least on a so-called philosophical basis, there are, however, virtually none when it comes to the motivation and personality quirks of the American left.

In 1904 Scottish playwright J.M. Barrie introduced to the world a play entitled: "Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up". Similar to the central character in that stage production the American left is primarily made up of those who will not grow up. However, unlike the central character in the play, far too many on the left are self-centered, willfully ignorant and lazy.

...

Among the traits expected of those in their adolescent years is the conviction that they are always right and the rest of the world is wrong -- that they are, in fact, much smarter than those silly and inane adults around them. However, being part of the in-crowd is really, really important thus they must look for guidance to the cool guys to establish what they are supposed to believe in. And, as in the fairy tales relayed to them while in childhood, there will always be some monolithic entity that will be there to rescue them and insure joy and happiness. Therein are the basic personality parameters of the entity known as the modern American left.

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Membership in the American left is, thus, easily attained. All one needs to do is believe and accept the following:



a) Those at the top of the pyramid, the self-anointed leaders of the left, claim to always be the smartest and most sophisticated people in any room. Therefore to envision oneself as part of this circle all one has to do is to robotically espouse leftist ideology without having the foggiest idea of what it means or its ultimate outcome.


b) All the really cool people are on the left since they believe there are no moral absolutes and one can party on having a supposed endless good time. The modern American left is the current in-crowd corralling those mesmerized with celebrity and too lazy to be aware of the world around them.


c) Government, that great and infallible monolith behind the green curtain, can solve all of mankind's problems. Its primary function is to make certain the people are taken care of and assured of equal outcomes--as long as it is dominated by the leaders of the left--who are equally infallible. Barack Obama's self-proclaimed role as the "messiah" fits in nicely with this tenet.


d) Those on the right are mean and determined to take away not only the good times but make certain government -- see (c) above -- will not take care of everyone and too many true-believers may actually have to find meaningful work.


e) It is mandatory, when confronted with an alternative point of view, to throw a tantrum, as one used to do on a school playground, and call conservatives (i.e. adults) any conceivable name or accuse them of anything since the left's cause is just and those on the right are Neanderthals who could never be correct about anything. Actually the country would be far better off if conservatives were made to walk the plank on Captain Hook's pirate ship.


f) Guilt is the ultimate weapon. (Remember it worked with one's parents) There is always something in the United States to be guilty about and that guilt requires restitution or public humiliation. Besides, just as there is a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, there is a bottomless pit of wealth in America, but only the government--see (c) above-- can distribute this never ending bounty.

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4est_4est_Gump said:

"It is mandatory, when confronted with an alternative point of view, to throw a tantrum, as one used to do on a school playground, and call conservatives (i.e. adults) any conceivable name or accuse them of anything since the left's cause is just and those on the right are Neanderthals who could never be correct about anything. Actually the country would be far better off if conservatives were made to walk the plank on Captain Hook's pirate ship."




How many times have we seen that played out, not just here, but in real life...

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mercury14 said:

The last time you said the Austrian economists will be vindicated, the Dow was at 6,900 and you swore the market would never have faith in Obama. In fact you warned all of us to sell out of our 401(k)s because they would soon be worth nothing, indicating that you believed a much further decline was on the way.

Then the marked added +7,100 points. Austrian economists, vindicated again!

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BUSYBODY-II said:

"Striking it Richer," a paper by Emmanuel Saez (an economist at UC Berkeley) looks at the way that the dividends of the slow US "economic recovery" have been distributed. Saez finds that 121% of the economic gains since 2009 have been captured by the richest 1% of Americans -- in other words, despite economic growth, the poorest 99% of Americans actually got poorer through the "recovery."

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/...ince-2009.html

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Ishmael said:

Why should there be any surprise? Indeed, why is there even the need to write a paper about it?

The top 1% got the bailout at the taxpayer's expense. The bottom 47% got welfare of one sort or another, and everyone else got the shaft.

Ishmael

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Ishmael said:

If the market was a true indication of national economic viability anymore unemployment would be back below 5% and we'd all be rolling in the clover. Why aren't we?

First I'd direct you to the price of gold. Gold hasn't all of a sudden attained new found value. Gold produces nothing, creates no jobs, does no investing, and it's not a consumable. The best way to look at gold is to assume that the value of gold is constant and that the only variable is the amount of any given currency that is required to buy any measure of the commodity. Therefore the rise in the price of gold is more a measure of the erosion of the value of the dollar than any particular increase in the value of gold.

By extension this holds true for the markets as well. The rise in the markets is as much a reflection of the erosion of the value of the dollar than it is any particular value of any given stock. Further there has been a significant decline in market volumes. What this reflects is the degree to which institutional traders are driving the trades. The little guy has mostly evaporated from the markets. I will hasten to point out that these institutional traders are the very ones that received taxpayer funded bailouts AND the very ones that damn near caused the collapse of the economy to begin with. Obama's policies and remedies not only did nothing to restore any market balance, they have essentially perpetuated that which brought us to our knees to begin with. The bills passed that were to allegedly make a rehash of 2008 impossible to occur again merely formed an unholy alliance between the 10 largest financial houses and the Fed. thereby insuring that any future hiccups in the financial sector will be bailed out by the taxpayer.

Ishmael

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Ishmael said:

If the market was a true indication of national economic viability anymore unemployment would be back below 5% and we'd all be rolling in the clover. Why aren't we?

First I'd direct you to the price of gold. Gold hasn't all of a sudden attained new found value. Gold produces nothing, creates no jobs, does no investing, and it's not a consumable. The best way to look at gold is to assume that the value of gold is constant and that the only variable is the amount of any given currency that is required to buy any measure of the commodity. Therefore the rise in the price of gold is more a measure of the erosion of the value of the dollar than any particular increase in the value of gold.

By extension this holds true for the markets as well. The rise in the markets is as much a reflection of the erosion of the value of the dollar than it is any particular value of any given stock. Further there has been a significant decline in market volumes. What this reflects is the degree to which institutional traders are driving the trades. The little guy has mostly evaporated from the markets. I will hasten to point out that these institutional traders are the very ones that received taxpayer funded bailouts AND the very ones that damn near caused the collapse of the economy to begin with. Obama's policies and remedies not only did nothing to restore any market balance, they have essentially perpetuated that which brought us to our knees to begin with. The bills passed that were to allegedly make a rehash of 2008 impossible to occur again merely formed an unholy alliance between the 10 largest financial houses and the Fed. thereby insuring that any future hiccups in the financial sector will be bailed out by the taxpayer. Given the above situation is it any wonder that the financial houses are reporting record profits with absolutely nothing happening in the general economy?

In spite of the rise in the markets there has been NO translation of that wealth, if you care to call it that, into the real metrics of the economy, ie. jobs and GDP growth.

The markets are no longer a true reflection of the overall economy and without some serious changes in the law and policy never will be again.

Ishmael

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mercury14 said:

I know what the future does *not* hold and that is your philosophy. Ayn Rand will not go down in history as having a significant influence on economics or policy. Sorry bro.

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mercury14 said:

I don't think you're wrong because you're a neanderthal. I think you're wrong because you're coming off a decade of being wrong so it's pretty much impossible to take you seriously. Similarly I'm not going to take Dick Morris' political analysis seriously in 2013.

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Ishmael said:

The rise in the markets is as much a reflection of the erosion of the value of the dollar than it is any particular value of any given stock.

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mercury14 said:

And a lot of them would probably be interested in coming to the US for a season or a couple years to work and then go back to their homes in Central America. Not every worker who's in Cali picking fruit to feed their family in Jalisco is trying to become an American.

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Tuesday, Jan 29, 2013 07:00 PM EST

Immigration, yes. Indentured serfdom, no

The dark side of immigration reform: A new "guest worker program" that's as close as we may get to modern slavery

By Michael Lind

The outlines of a bipartisan plan for immigration reform have been announced by a group of senators. While most of its provisions are reasonable — a path to citizenship for most illegal immigrants, increased skilled immigration and increased law enforcement — one provision stinks to high heaven and should be rejected by Americans of left, right and center. That provision is a massive, special-interest-driven expansion of indentured servitude in the United States, in the form of a new “guest-worker program.” (President Obama, while hailing the plan in general on Tuesday, has not weighed in on the specifics of the guest-worker program.)

Indentured servitude or contract labor, like slavery, is a form of unfree labor. Unfortunately, the U.S., having abolished slavery, still has pockets of indentured servant labor. Whether relatively well-paid, like many highly educated H-1B workers, or poorly paid, like many H-2A agricultural workers, indentured servants are, in effect, indentured serfs. Because their presence in the U.S. is dependent on their employment by a particular employer, they cannot quit and are motivated to appease their employer, no matter how brutally they are exploited. If they protest maltreatment, they can be fired and forced to return to their home countries.

Many indentured servants also are compelled to pay exorbitant amounts of their salaries to contractors who act as intermediaries between them and their sponsor employers, like the notorious “body shops” that exploit many H-1b workers. Having fleeced and otherwise cheated the guest workers, these body shops often threaten to sue their victims when they become eligible for green cards and quit, on the basis of fine print in documents that the guest workers were earlier forced to sign.

Most Americans, not knowing the technicalities of immigration law, can be bamboozled by corporate lobbyists and propagandists who seek to blur the distinction between guest workers and legal permanent residents with “green cards.” But green card holders — some of them former indentured servants who have earned green cards, after years of exploitation — have economic rights that guest workers do not, the rights that make up the core of the notion of “free labor” in the U.S. and other societies. While legal permanent residents do not have the right to vote, they have the right to quit their jobs without being deported. The psychological difference is profound — a foreign national working in the U.S. with a green card does not have to cringe and grovel before an employer, as an indentured guest worker is compelled to do, out of fear.

The draft bipartisan proposal reads: “Our proposal will provide businesses with the ability to hire lower-skilled workers in a timely manner when Americans are unavailable or unwilling to fill those jobs.” In theory, employers of guest workers are already supposed to prove that no American citizens or legal permanent immigrants are available to perform a job. In practice, this is a joke. Employers in industries that use guest workers routinely turn to body shops for foreign indentured servants, with only token gestures of advertising the jobs.

These Democratic and Republican senators, echoing the well-paid lobbyists for indentured serfdom, few if any of whom are in danger of being deported if they displease their bosses, promise that abuses can be prevented, by including stronger standards in new indentured serf programs. But if the federal government, corrupted by pressure from powerful business lobbies, does not enforce today’s laws, why should we expect pro-guest-worker laws to be enforced in the future — particularly if an increase is guest workers is successfully extorted from the federal government by lobbyists and donors representing agribusiness and Silicon Valley?

In a 2007 report titled “Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States,” the Southern Poverty Law Center described the existing H-2 guest worker program, which would presumably be a model for any expanded agricultural guest worker program included in a bipartisan immigration bill:

Federal law and U.S. Department of Labor regulations provide some basic protections to H-2 guestworkers — but they exist mainly on paper. Government enforcement of their rights is almost non-existent. Private attorneys typically won’t take up their cause.

Bound to a single employer and without access to legal resources, guestworkers are:

• routinely cheated out of wages;

• forced to mortgage their futures to obtain low-wage, temporary jobs;

• held virtually captive by employers or labor brokers who seize their documents;

• forced to live in squalid conditions; and,

• denied medical benefits for on-the-job injuries.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel recently put it this way: “This guestworker program’s the closest thing I’ve ever seen to slavery.”

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In 2010, Mother Jones published an exposé of the corrupt H-2A agricultural guest worker program, entled “Bound for America”:

Several recent court cases document how easily guest-worker status devolves into forced labor. In one 2009 case, US v. Sou, three Hawaii growers were indicted for bringing in 44 Thai workers, pocketing a portion of their recruitment fees, then “maintaining their labor at the farm through threats of serious economic harm,” according to the Justice Department. In another case, Asanok v. Million Express Manpower, Thai and Indonesian workers alleged that they had been promised well-paying, steady farmwork in North Carolina, only to find themselves housed in a Katrina-damaged New Orleans hotel, demolishing the building by day and sleeping in what remained at night, going so hungry they sometimes trapped pigeons for dinner. The list could go on, with several cases filed each year for as long as the US has deployed guest-worker schemes.

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Instead of expanding indentured servitude in America, we should be putting it on the path to permanent extinction, like slavery, segregated labor and child labor. There are two compelling arguments for abolishing indentured serfdom in the U.S.: one economic, one political.

The economic argument is that indentured serfdom, by allowing agribusiness to pay poverty wages to workers, has bad macroeconomic effects and bad microeconomic effects. With respect to macroeconomics, guest-worker serfdom is the opposite of a “Fordist” economy in which workers are paid well enough to purchase the products they made — as Henry Ford’s auto workers could afford Ford automobiles. The low-wage foreign national picking lettuce destined for affluent hipster stores like Fresh Fields and Whole Foods won’t be able to afford it, at a subsistence wage.

This macroeconomic argument might be dismissed, because of the slight contribution to aggregate demand by the minority of all farm workers, including guest workers. The microeconomic argument against low-wage labor of any kind is more persuasive: It reduces the incentive for American agribusiness to increase its productivity, by investing in labor-saving technology.

Guest-worker programs are in-kind government subsidies to agribusiness. By lowering the cost of a particular input to the production process — in this case, low-wage, non-union foreign labor — the government is subsidizing a particular industry.

A low-wage guest-worker program is not only an example of an industrial policy that “picks winners,” but the stupidest and most destructive kind of industrial policy imaginable: one that favors backward, primitive, labor-intensive productive techniques, over advanced, capital-intensive mechanization and automation. Other countries manage to grow affordable lettuce, tomatoes and other produce without importing serfs to do so. The U.S. can do so as well.

The idea that we Americans will starve, unless our government provides agribusiness with an imported foreign underclass to harvest our food, is pure special interest propaganda, echoed by the uncritical stenographers of the mass media who pass as “reporters” nowadays. The Washington Post story on the proposed reform deserves a Pulitzer for gullibility: “The framework identifies two groups as deserving of special consideration for a separate and potentially speedier pathway to full citizenship: young people who were brought to the country illegally as minors and agricultural workers whose labor, often at subsistence wages, has long been critical to the nation’s food supply. [emphasis added].”

By providing in-kind labor subsidies to particular favored economic sectors, U.S. guest-worker programs intervene in the market on behalf of employers and at the expense of workers. Adam Smith would have agreed with this objection. In “The Wealth of Nations,” he argued that slavery retarded economic growth by reducing the incentives for innovation. And he wrote: “The pride of man makes him love to domineer, and nothing mortifies him so much as to be obliged to condescend to persuade his inferiors. Wherever the law allows it, and the nature of the work can afford it, therefore, he will generally prefer the service of slaves to that of freemen.” Smith would not be surprised that so many American employers pretend they cannot find American citizens or free legal permanent residents to do jobs and demand the right to import unfree contract labor from other countries.

The political argument ought to be decisive. In a democratic republic, free citizen-workers should not be compelled to compete against unfree workers with limited rights — slaves, segregated workers, illegal aliens or contract laborers/guest workers. To put this another way, employers should not be able to engage in a divide-and-rule strategy of pitting different classes of workers, with different levels of rights, against one another in a single U.S. labor market.

Most of the jobs being created in the U.S. today are low-wage jobs with minimal educational requirements in healthcare, recreation and retail. If employer lobbyists succeed in creating a permanent caste of indentured serfs in agribusiness, the lobbies for the healthcare, fast food and hotel lobbies are sure to follow, whining that they cannot find American citizens, or legal permanent resident aliens, to do the work. Free workers in America will be forced to compete with unfree foreign contract laborers, in industry after industry, for the worst jobs in the country.

We can debate what the total amount of legal immigration should be, as well as how it is allotted among categories, including family unification and skills and national quotas. And we can also debate whether, and how, to provide a path to citizenship for many of the millions of illegal immigrants who reside in the U.S. But all Americans who do not profit from exploited labor should agree on one principle, regardless of other partisan differences: All legal immigrants, and all amnestied illegal immigrants, should have exactly the same workplace rights as American citizen-workers — including the right to quit and take another job in the U.S. A one-tier labor market is in the interest of citizen-workers themselves. There should be no place in the American labor market for a primitive, labor-intensive sub-economy — a modern plantation zone — with a caste of unfree workers.

One of the proudest achievements of the Civil Rights Revolution was the success of civil rights activists and unions in pressuring Congress to abolish the Bracero Program. This exploitative guest-worker program was shut down in 1964, after years of criticism by Latino civil rights groups in the U.S. as well as by the Mexican government. For progressives to cave in to extortion by the sleazy agribusiness lobby on the question of guest-workers, in order to obtain a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, would be an appalling surrender — like agreeing to let businesses revive child labor, as the price of passing reforms to promote childcare and child nutrition.

Employers and investors who insist that they cannot operate in the U.S. if they are forced to employ free citizen-workers or free legal permanent resident immigrants with the right to quit and unionize are the 21st-century equivalent of the unpatriotic and illiberal Southern planter class that preferred slavery and later segregation to free labor. Nineteenth-century abolitionists called the selfish planters the Slave Power. Twenty-first century Americans should call the selfish industries that demand indentured servants instead of free workers what they are: the Serf Power.

Immigration reform should provide a path to citizenship, not a road to serfdom. If Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez were alive, they would be protesting against guest-worker programs, even if they favored other elements of immigration reform. It would be a tragedy as well as an irony if the first African-American president, in the name of immigration reform, presided over the greatest expansion of unfree labor in the U.S. since the abolition of the Bracero program during the civil rights era.

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vetteman said:

The point being, there is no better future under the tyranny proposed by Democrats.

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