LAT: With Consumers Wary, Bush Summons Cavalry

THE NATION
With Consumers Wary, Bush Summons Cavalry
By Joel Havemann and Warren Vieth, Times Staff Writers

WASHINGTON — Frustrated that Americans are giving him low marks for economic stewardship, President Bush and about two dozen of his top aides will hit the road today to argue that the economy is in better shape than many people think, and that Bush deserves some of the credit.

They may find that much of the nation is skeptical.

Polls show that more than half of the public thinks the economy is in bad shape and that Bush is doing a poor job of managing it. In one recent survey, three in 10 participants said the country was in a recession, even though the economy has grown for the last 2½ years.

Workers and consumers have reasons to be anxious.

Although the economy as a whole is growing, many analysts attribute its progress in part to a far more competitive — and less secure — workplace.

"This Darwinian economy has got people concerned," said John R. Stanek, chairman of ISR, a research firm in Chicago that conducts worker surveys. "If you feel there's a decent chance you may be laid off — and over a third of U.S. workers feel that could happen to them — you're not going to stop looking over your shoulder. You realize that the laying off of you may be part of the 'good things' that are happening to the overall economy."

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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-bushecon6jan06,1,6576954.story?coll=la-headlines-nation

but the sheeple, I don't know. Maybe, maybe they're finally waking up to realize that it's not all rosy.

It's just the people who are well and truly fucked.

it is working two jobs, trying to keep ahead of debt and wondering what would happen if your job got moved to India.

but as the country falls deeper into debt, I will not consider it a success. If the economy is doing so good, we or the misadministration should be clearing up the debt and stop deficit spending.

On a couple of other boards, the SAME broken record:

"Economy is doing FABULOUS"
"Gas prices are DROPPING"
"Jobs going to other countries is GOOD NEWS for the USA"
"Incomes are UP"
"If you lose your job, you probably deserved it"

Same shit, different day...the GOP mantra

I have NO DOUBT that they'll go to great lengths to enable the "cavalry," but at some point, most ordinary people are going to start believing their own lying eyes- and disappearing jobs, benefit and pensions.

But what else should we expect?

so a) try to convince folks that the economy is doing better;

and b) then tie Bush for credit for the economy.

All they will end up with is point B.

The thing is that even though we are told inflation is low - even if we don't know that they re-did the inflation index to deflate the numbers - we do see our monthly in and out flow of money. We see rising costs, and fairly flat inflow. All the dog and pony shows won't change what we experience each month as we try to manage our living expenses. So all the bushco campaign does - is strengthen the public mental link to bush as deserving credit for folks stressful economic times - which is how most folks 'read' the economy (in terms of how they are experiencing the economy.)

Him: Hey I was reading this great book over the break, 'The World is Flat'...

Me: oh ugh Friedman, he is just shilling for the elites. So how has globalization benefited you?

Him: Uh, well, hmmm... but there is no stopping it.

Me: sure there is - we don't have to export all of our high tech high skilled jobs to India and China - that is just the sort of crap they pay shills like Friedman to try and convince you to believe. Their solution for the global economy is that we should all work for chinese wages and benefits. Somehow I don't think that is the only alternative, nor the best alternative for anyone except the elites.

So we talked for a while about how Friedman et all are just shilling for the elites, about how, other than cheap ipods and dvds we common working folks don't get anything beneficial out of globalization, about how our economy has become a circle-jerk of people trading real estate to each other with no wealth other than the paper wealth of inflated home prices being generated, about how while we have globalized our jobs we have done so while not globalizing fair wages and benefits, not globalizing environmental protections, not globalizing workplace safety, about how we are for the most part wrecking the economies of the third world, and about how the whole concept of globalization runs headlong into the problems of energy and water and that there is simply no way that the planet can sustain the current economic system with the populations of India and China brought online.

I suggested that he check out the Times Op Ed anti-friedman: Paul Krugman, for a different point of view. He did. People are ready to have the facade of rightwing bullshit stripped bare.

was forced to. He's THAT bad. I've read his Lexus and Olive Tree wherein he extolls US corporations -- one of which was, get this, ENRON ! He stresses the automated assembly line Lexus plant but boo-hoos the more humane 'olive tree' strawman he sets up.

Friedman is a dangerous bullshitter. The NYTimes needs a countervailing force (as John Kenneth Galbraith would say) to really be fair and balanced. Also, Krugman's professor and mentor is an ardent supporter of globalization and outsourcing, so don't be too sure about him. He may have begun to smell the coffee, but...

William Grieder's One World, Ready Or Not and column at Rolling Stone are a good place to start.

Prosperity in George Bush's Economy
by Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted January 6, 2006.
http://www.alternet.org/story/30447/

tells us why the disconnect from what they're telling us and what real people already know...we're being nickeled and dimed

""Consider these numbers from the Economic Policy Institute -- a left-leaning think-tank (this essay leans heavily on EPI's excellent research):

Salaries are still below where they were at the start of the recovery in November 2001. That, while productivity -- the growth of the economic pie -- is up by almost 15 percent. Meaning we're working harder, producing more, for the same money as five years ago. Since the recession ended in 2001, 50 percent more of the growth in corporate income was sucked up as profits than after past recessions. That's left less for those of us who work for a living. As a result, median household income has now fallen for five years in a row. It was 4 percent, or $2,000, lower in 2004 than it was in 1999.

That last figure means that Joe and Jane Average American -- the household smack in the middle of the booming go-go American economy -- have gotten a pay cut for five years in a row. Small wonder they're sporting long faces.

And that hasn't occurred in a bubble; health care costs for that same family (with kids) rose over 40 percent -- yeah, 40 percent --between 2000 and 2003.""

And with the stock market, most profits nowadays weren't returned to employees/consumers as in the past but kept as 'profits' by the corporations, as EPI's figures above show, and then those profits were offshored, along with jobs. No wonder things are looking poorly on Main Street as opposed to the go-go Wall Streeters !

On top of that, the corporations are dumping their pension and healthcare benefits to workers/consumers (the theme here is that these CEOs are all cutting off their noses to spite their faces and using 'globalization' as the excuse), the same people who--if they had the money-- would be buying more of their products !

Consider the article in Businessweek July 2004 The Benefits Trap
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_29/b3892001_mz001.htm , where you find this telling tidbit:

""Perhaps most important, in the global economy, long-established U.S. companies are competing against younger rivals here and abroad that pay little or nothing toward their workers' retirement, giving the older companies a huge incentive to dump their plans.""

Part of the Race To The Bottom, as Alan Tonelson puts it. Companies need to compete (with their foreign subsidiaries) by becoming more like the Third World: no benefits, low wages, Dickensian/Crony Capitalism, tut tut.

Not just older companies but all companies are bailing out of health and pension benefit plans and dumping that responsibility onto 'government'. It's the old socialize the risks, privatize the profits routine. Funny thing is that most of the money in those company pension and insurance plans went into the coffers of the large institutional investment firms on Wall Street. The insurance industry probably has a better clue on what's going to happen in the future than they will let on. Meanwhile, when it all sinks in the business cycle will dip into a recession, or worse, and things are going to get VERY bleak.

In any event, Big Businessman, it's not smart to be out on a limb of a tree while you're busy sawing off the base of the tree. Consumers still 'rule', despite the Supply-Side B.S.ers out there. When you go back to your textbooks be sure to look up 'marginal propensity to consume'. There's a whole lotta poor and would-be middle class out there than there are tiny numbers of super-rich.

It's time to reverse the Bush Tax-Cuts for the richest 1 and 1/2 percent ! And it's also time to make the 2005 tax year Capital Repatriation program permanent, possibly with a one or two percent higher rate than the current 5% (that program expires this year, yet brought in around $350 Billion to the US economy, which is what kept the ship afloat !).

that the stock market is steady because the corporations are making a FORTUNE and instead of investing in R&D or new jobs, they are buying up more and more of their own stock! Nice going, America!

Not like the Bush administration is going to do anything like, I dunno, not cut taxes further for the richest of the rich, so Something's Gotta Be Done. Hey Boss, how's about we all go out and just tell the suckers how much better they're doing? The newspapers and the TV will report it as if it wuz true, and we'll convince the slow and the feeble-minded (you know, the other part of your base) that they're really better off working two and three jobs.

Brilliant!