Must Read from Paul Craig Roberts.

In an article titled,AMERICA IS LOSING:MORE PHONY JOBS HYPE, he dissects the recent announcement of a greater than expected increase in jobs, 274,000 to be exact.

Link: http://www.Counterpunch.com/roberts05122005.html

What Roberts correctly sees is that these jobs are in what are called the nontradable services sector.Things like construction jobs, hospitality jobs like hotels and motels,landcaping services etc.Very few jobs were in the high technology areas which have eefctively been eviscerated.These are precisely the jobs that allowed people in the past to achieve social mobility.Those are gone.In effect, America's middle income families can look forward to a bleak furture for themselves and children.No amount of education is going to save them from stagnation and even outright relapse into poverty.

This article which spells out what is in store for us comes at a time when GM and Ford are staggering in the marketplace,United Airlines has eliminated its pension obligations through a legal maneuver and Delta and the other big airlines are following suit. The landscape is going to be litterd with the corpses of formerly strong companies.Their deaths and the outsourcing phenomenon are the ways the purchsing power of our middle class are being transferred to India and China.

As we see the outsourcing phenomenon is in its infancy, it is likely to grow into what have been high wage occupations like legal services, medical professions and Banking and accounting.When this happens, even the smug upper middle class which is always looking down its nose at the proles, will be affected and that is when we will see some action.Until then, our ideological fixations about free trade and other rightwing panaceas will be the norm.

The BFEE has done all it can to penure the middle class -- fiscal policy, legislation, deficit spending all benefit these globalist superrich superturds supercrooks.

Bush DOES believe in the Golden Rule. "He who has the gold, rules." And in Bushco's Amerika, it's the corporations what have all the gold. And they're making life such that fewer and fewer people have any economic power.

Gee. Like in Congress, these fascists want everything. They took the political power away on November 22, 1963.

corporations is happening on a global scale. In the corporate hierarchy, you become vulnerable the minute you become a high wage earner approaching your fiftieth year.You can be easily replaced by a youngster fresh out of college at half your wages. That is being implemented witha vengeance on a global scale. Who is going to be able to compete with a young engineer from one of India's elite Institutes of Technology who earns $2500 a year?

That same trend is happening at Law Schools, Medical Schools and Accounting Schools.There are going to be very few jobs left that provided the first steps in the ladder to success.

the type of construction jobs that show growth oddly favor seasonal Hispanic immigrants in effect providing jobs for those people who cross the border just for that purpose. That is also happening with the H1 Visa holders in the IT industry and may very well pervade all professions. If the can bring in labor willing to work at minimum wage or even higher wages with no benefits, most of corporations will be prepared to go to Mars to find such a workforce. They simply do not know how to operate a corporation profitably with the domestic workforce.Their bankruptcy of ideas has now translated into bankruptcy of their corporations.

They'll be O.K.

Remember how the Harvard prof characterized the young coward from Crawford? The guy became a citizen so he could vote against the smirking moron.

President George Bush and the Gilded Age

Yoshi Tsurumi (Professor of International Business, Baruch College, the City University of New York )

EXCERPT...

At Harvard Business School, thirty years ago, George Bush was a student of mine. I still vividly remember him. In my class, he declared that "people are poor because they are lazy." He was opposed to labor unions, social security, environmental protection, Medicare, and public schools. To him, the antitrust watch dog, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Securities Exchange Commission were unnecessary hindrances to "free market competition." To him, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal was "socialism." Recently, President Bush's Federal Appeals Court Nominee, California's Supreme Court Justice Janice Brown, repeated the same broadside at her Senate hearing. She knew that her pronouncement would please President Bush and Karl Rove and their Senators. President Bush and his brain, Karl Rove, are leading a radical revolution of destroying all the democratic political, social, judiciary, and economic institutions that both Democrats and moderate Republicans had built together since Roosevelt's New Deal.

In June 2003, Bill Moyers said that "Karl Rove has modeled the Bush presidency on that of William Mckinley (1897-1901) and modeled himself on Mark Hanna, the man who virtually manufactured McKinley. Mark Hanna saw to it that Washington was ruled by business, railroads, and public utility corporations." President Bush's tax cuts have given over 93% of their benefits to large corporations and well-to-do households with over 250,000 dollars of annual income (about 10% of the U.S. households). Moreover, President Bush's tax cuts are abolishing taxes on such asset-based income as stock dividends and capital gains. He is opposed to taxing management aristocrats' self-dealt stock options (salary payment in kind). He is opposed to requiring the corporations to treat such stock options as their personnel expenses. More than anything else, management aristocrats' stock options are encouraging many corporations to abandon manufacturing-and-supply procurements at home and switching to imports from China and other lower-wage countries. He is phasing out estate taxes. All these measures are transforming the past "potbelly flower vase" shape of the U.S. income distribution to the "bottom-heavy hour glass" shape.

This was the same kind of income distribution that the U.S. built during the McKinley-Gilded Age. There was no Securitiesy Exchange Commission to check "creative accounting" and Enron-WorldCom like malfeasance of corporations. America had poor public schools and medical care. There was no minimum wage or labor standard. Both federal and state governments and courts were hostile to labor unions and civic groups protesting the "injustices" of the society. The natural environment was ravaged by railroads, mining, lumbering, and newly emerging oil and gas firms. Abortion was illegal. Women did not even have the vote. In the South, Christian fundamentalists were pressuring public schools to stop teaching Charles Darwin's evolution theories. During the McKinley-Gilded Age, America's democracy atrophied. And America embarked on her imperialistic expansions of colonising Cuba, Panama, and the Philippines.

SOURCE:

http://www.glocom.org/opinions/essays/20040301_tsurumi_president/

disappeared from our public life.What makes people who are far superior to Bush in their intellect, courage and moral standing to become cowards, I would never know. May be the fear displayed by all these people is justified and I think the Anthrax episodes were designed to send just such a message.

Almost too well said, frankly. The full impact could launch one into perpetual depression. :evilgrin:

Let me just also point out several additional things:

* The large multi-nationals not only don't have any real loyalty to the U.S., they probably would prefer the U.S. reach (via downward mobility) something approaching the level of some of the poorer nations so there aren't so many drains on their bottom line for labor costs of various types. We already see what's happening to our pensions, and about to happen to our pensions.

* The Bush cabal is very busy raiding the Treasury and everything else they can. Once upon a time some years ago I read that the mafia will typically buy companies, move in and steal all its assets, then file bankruptcy or just walk away. If you think about it, it's precisely what George W. Bush did in his companies -- personally enrich himself at the expense of those who were stockholders and employees, and what Enron and some of the others did. There's more of it afoot, and will be. They are stealing everything they can from us, and not only leaving us penniless and bereft, but devoid of resources and (most of all) anything approaching bootstraps.

* Then there's the issue of the S&L Scandal, which I don't pretend to understand except in very broad overview: the American taxpayer got stuck with a shitload of debt thanks to the tricks that went on during the Bush 1 administration, and Neil Bush was one beneficiary. My ears perked up BIG TIME when I heard some cable reporter (using the term broadly) mention the pension "problems" at United and elsewhere will end up being shouldered by the U.S. and the U.S. taxpayer may be picking up the pieces once again, just as we did for the S&L scandal. Yet another way to steal from us.

* We're all familiar with what they're doing to the environment, our food supply, education, anything involved in the social "safety net," etc., etc., etc. They are literally -- and I believe purposefully -- trying to destroy this country. And doing a damn fine job of it.

The S&L crisis doeswn't entirely belong in the lap of the BFEE: The ball got rolling in the late 70s, Reagan strapped rocket boosters to it, and it blew up and needed cleanup under Bush41.

S&Ls were the "mom & pop" operations of the banking industry, offering fixed-rate mortgages (with legal caps on interest) secured mostly by local real estate, and Federally insured savings accounts, for which they had to endure close scruitiny from federal bank examiners.

Thanks to the oil-shocked high inflation of the 70's, the caps on the interest they could charge for loans cause them to bleed money: If you're loaning money at 4% but inflation is 8%, you're losing money.

Rationally, the fix would be to remive the fixed cap in favor of a floating one, but the people who were aware of the problem and lobbying politicians for a change in the regulations didn't just want a fix; they wanted all sorts of regulations removed. And since "deregulation" was the "pro-business" fad of the day, a lot of regulations were removed.

After Reagan was came into office with an explicit deregulatory agendea, even more regulations were removed, the sums for which accounts could be federally insured were dramatically raised (increasing potential federal liability),AND (at a time when S&Ls were doing more and riskier things than they ever had) they cut back on the examiners, who were the people protecting the tax payers in all this.

At its height, it required less oversight to establish an S&L than to open a casino in Las Vegas. And may "entrepreneurs" took advantage of this (Remember, what one man calls a "high risk, high gain endeavor" more reasonable people might call "piracy").

The results of too-little oversight in a go-go environment filled with people out of their depth (salted heavily with a faction of outright swindlers) were predictable: most went bust, leaving the FDIC to pick up the tab on the insured accounts. And since just about everyone in Congress -- Dems and republicans alike -- had some S&L-connected backers, few of the truly egregious villains in the matter were brought to justice.

Evil incarnate, most likely.

You put into words EXACTLY what the BFEE is doing to America, Eloriel. It's a classic bust-out where the Mob moves a guy who looks clean into an office. Then, like Kenny Boy Lay, he loots everything in sight. Afterward, it's the U.S. taxpayer left holding the empty bag.

the rules must be immense. These are the losers in their definition of the term.Here is a an immense number of people who have swallowed the story of a terror attack on the U.S., elected a non entity to the highest office of the land believing in his phony religiosity and his prescriptions of tax cuts as a way to economic growth and have allowed their children to be served up as fodder for a war launched on phony pretexts.In the end, after I analyze what I have just said, it is Bush who has sized us up correctly.

probably LAUGHING at us almost makes me maddest of all when I think about it.

frankly, I was not too impressed with that prong of Clinton's plan for prosperity. He had great jobs numbers, but they were all diddly jobs