Bob Herbert in today’s New York Times laments the failure of the current macro business model to create new jobs.
The economy is sick, and all efforts to revive it that do not directly confront the staggering levels of joblessness are doomed. Even the meager job growth in the private sector last month was composed mostly of temporary work. Lawrence Mishel, the president of the Economic Policy Institute, had the right take when he said, “These new data do not present a picture of a healthy private sector and offer nothing even closely resembling the job growth we need to dig us out of a very deep hole.”
More than 15 million Americans are out of work, and nearly half have been jobless for six months or longer. New college graduates are having a terrible time finding work, and many are taking jobs that require only a high school education. Teachers are facing the worst employment market since the Depression.
Entire communities are going under. A remarkable article in The Times last week detailed what has happened in Memphis, where a majority of the residents are black. It said the city epitomizes “how rising unemployment and growing foreclosures in the recession have combined to destroy black wealth and income and erase two decades of slow progress.”
The median income of black homeowners in Memphis has dropped to a level below that of 1990.
Obviously, the Times is the establishment’s mouthpiece. None therein can see beyond that establishment’s institutional constraints. Herbert’s Business as Usual approach is:
What is needed are the same things that have been needed all along: a vast program of infrastructure repair and renewal; an enormous national investment in clean energy aimed at transforming the way we develop and use energy in this country; and a transformation of the public schools to guarantee every child a first-rate education in a first-rate facility.
That is, more ‘stimulus’ on more highways, more subsidies to existing, bloated businesses with underwater business plans, energy systems that use more than they either liberate or transfer and more TV- centric mis- education. Not working is it?
What is ‘Plan B’?
How about realigning our country away from energy consumption? Wouldn’t that reduce the stress on the current energy- delivery infrastructure and reduce the need to divert declining energy inputs into it? With less consumption, the least efficient parts of the energy infrastructure can be retired with no loss of utiliity. Isn’t that the easiest approach?
‘Transforming’ the current supply and distribution systems is just another way for the Federal Government to compete with its citizens who would otherwise ‘develop’ energy by using less of what is produced today.
How about engaging more people in agriculture? There is a real trend of people wanting to get into farming but having to compete with the Federal Government and its arrays of subsidies for infrastructure- dependent industrial agriculture.
Industrial agriculture that is making Americans sicker and costing the country through its bloated, government- subsidized healthcare sector. Isn’t making people sicker indirectly just more of the government competing with its own citizens?
Wouldn’t a smaller- scale ag sector with many more farmers also help revive our smaller towns? Wouldn’t healthier food cut health care costs and make other improvements elsewhere more affordable?
How about demolishing the abandoned and useless outer rings of car- dependent suburbia and returning the land to local agriculture and resource development? Isn’t building these heavily subsidized outer suburbs just another way for the government to compete with its own citizens?
How about watershed and forestry recovery? Both of these would employ millions, ultimately. Where is our version of Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corp? We need it, now!
Instead, there are payouts to housing developers to create more out of reach suburbs. Why?
Where is our military? Why is it overseas? Can’t we have the military defending this country rather than defending mullahs in Iraq and poppy farmers in Afghanistan? When is the US and its proxies such as Israel going to stop inflating the imperial bubble? How does this American Empire at a remove help ordinary Americans?
Where are our craftsmen and artisans? Why is the education ‘du jour’ always directed toward servicing consumption? Do we need more advertising directors or iPod apps? Where are America’s carpenters and stone masons? Mexico? Why?
When is the government going to get serious about immigration and outsourcing? How can we employ our own citizens when our businesses are hell- bent on employing the rest of the world’s citizens?
In other words, where are all of our customers? Mexico?
When is the government going to stop competing with its citizens in almost every aspect of life: education, doctoring, farming, business generation, community development, finance … ?
New players cannot gain entry to markets because subsidized participants raise barriers to entry and form monopolies. Isn’t this the problem with ‘too big to fail’?
When is the establishment going to stop picking ‘winners’ from that group which has spent the most to corrupt the same establishment?
When is the establishment going to get serious about oil consumption? Our energy bill is a drain against dollars that would otherwise wind up in citizens’ pockets but instead wind up in Saudi Arabians’ pockets. Right now, the choice in this country is to have a job … or drive a car.
When is America going to start on the road to making the right choice? When is the America that isn’t for, by and about the automobile going to emerge? Why isn’t our country more like Tuscany and less like an industrial site?
When will we start building the new, auto free America? It will be a millenial task and require the efforts of generations, in a hundred years the country – all of its denizens including birds, fish, water and air – would be much improved.
What’s wrong with that?
In the Gulf the bell is tolling to mark the end of the auto age. The new age is almost upon us whether we want it to arrive or not. That awful bell:
Drip, drip, drip, drip …