Robert Parry: Some Hard Truths about America

[marmar]

from Consortium News:




Some Hard Truths about America

By Robert Parry
July 15, 2010


A hard truth about the U.S. economy is that corporations don’t need as many of us as workers but still need us as consumers. That dilemma helps explain why unemployment is stuck near 10 percent and why the economic recovery is stumbling toward a double dip.

The Washington Post reported Thursday that nonfinancial companies are sitting on $1.8 trillion – about one-fourth more than at the start of the recession – but won’t add personnel in part because they’re waiting for consumer demand to pick up, which isn’t happening because many Americans don’t have jobs or are afraid of losing theirs.

Yet, even if that vicious cycle could be broken, there’s another reason for the lack of hiring: companies have found they can make do with a lot fewer American workers. The recession has been a way to cull payrolls – and to discover that many jobs don’t have to be filled again, either because of new technologies or because the jobs have been shifted overseas.

Both these trends predated the recession but the rapid shedding of jobs since the Wall Street financial crash in 2008 – some eight million jobs lost – has spotlighted this structural change. Further, corporate determination to remain “lean” has turned the worker-surplus issue from a personal crisis for many American families into a systemic one for the country's economy.

Predictably, the free-marketers at CNBC and the Wall Street Journal have echoed the political message of the Chamber of Commerce and other right-wingers who blame the sluggish rehiring on the Obama administration’s health-care reform and the likelihood that President George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the rich will lapse. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/071510.html

[Enthusiast]

1. They are holding the recovery

hostage until the administration agrees to make the Bush tax cuts permanent. That is exactly what is happening.

[Octafish]

2. Gosh. No wonder AP fired Parry.

The guy tells the truth.

[Daveparts still]

3. Of course they don't

need as many workers. We've outsourced 40% of our industrail base overseas.
GM is the number 2 car maker in China so when Obama said, "We won't tell the company when or where to open factories that's what he's talking about.

Ford has spent $3 billion dollars in Mexico and created thousands of jobs.
Mexico accounts for 12% of North American Production and is expected to reach 19% before the end of the decade.

[glitch]

4. Casinos don't really need consumers (of real products) either.

The American middle class is being systematically destroyed precisely because the people running this racket do not need consumers anymore.
They just need fellow gamblers. Right now they're feeding off their latest prey (us) and starting to move on each other.
We're really way beyond a "normal" economy (such at is was: supply and demand, production and consumption) at this point.

[tom_paine]

5. Parry lays it out straightforwardly for all to see

Which is why the Corporate Aristocracy will make certain that such truths never pierce the veil of False Reality of any significant number of people.

In the old days, information-poor days, shall we say, the Aristocracy would have had to murder him, frame him, or otherwise discredit him in order to ensure that his observations didn't "go viral" like Thomas Jefferson or Madame DeFarge.

In these days, literally awash in information, making misinformation, disinformation, half-truths, and all the rest of the mother's milk of sociopaths and authoritarians, the sciences of advertising, marketing, PR and mass psychology in the service of Inverted Totalitarianism have a better, more subtle, more plausibly deniable methodology.

Starve and ignore the ideas so that they are drowned out in the cacophony. This was not a strategy available to the Aristocracy but for the last 100 years. They lacked the depth of understanding of how the human mind worked, particularly in large groups, to take the risk of attempting this strategy when more conventional methods had worked well enough for millennia.

But now, in this unique time of High Technology and Cheap Energy (likely coming to a close within a century or two at most), science and circumstance have given our Aristocrats, whether they are a bunch of tightly-coordinated Bilderbergs or just a bunch of rich assholes with parallel self-interests inadvertently, a power undreamed of to deceive whole populaces, amass wealth of many magnitudes higher than their predecessors, and cloak it all in scientifically calculated plausible deniability.

Poor Robert. Poor all of us. The future is almost certain the see the penultimate and final results of this new reality, all against the backdrop of population contraction or extinction.

The only thing that is seems certain is that the Aristocracy will continue to surf this wave of human tragedy in the maximum of comfort and power over the writhing masses below.

Please don't shoot the messenger. I don't make reality, I just observe it.