It is American workers who built us up, it is the wages of American workers that will rescue us

Yes, some of those Americans were slaves, some were children working in mines, some were immigrants in sweat shops, and migrants harvesting crops...all true. Yes, the nation has taken advantage of them, but at the same time those workers provided the productivity that made this a wealthy nation.

As members of a wealthy nation, American workers have been the great consumers of the world for going on 70 years. Selling things to Americans has been THE way to MAKE IT on this planet. Everyone wanted to tap into the wealth American workers built. And everyone did. To get a little more profit those greedy bastards we always hear about tapped into wages and benefits by moving factories to places with no unions, cut health and retirement benefits and finally just packed up entire factories and sent them to other countries. They thought they could do that with impunity.

Well now, nine straight months of job losses, $4+ a gallon gasoline, and record home foreclosures and evictions have the good old American consumer sitting at the kitchen table deciding about what the family is NOT going to spend its shrinking amount of money on...and the investor class is frightened.

When those greedy bastards pulled the plug on the American worker's ability to consume they pulled the plug on the nation's economy and the economy of the world. It's just taken a while for that giant flywheel to slow down. But the grit that's recently been thrown in the bearings is really braking now.

Billions on bank rescues aren't gonna fix this. The leaders of the nation seem to have completely forgotten that in addition to those who invest wealth to buy production capacity there are those whose sweat actually creates the added value on raw materials by turing them into finished products. It is the recycling of the wages of those workers through economic communities that creates the demand for goods and services that makes investing in production a worthwhile venture.

The little rubber band that is the wind-up motor of consumer power has been snapped. The solution isn't facile punishing of the greedy, the solution is recreating consumer buying power. It's gonna be bad times until good jobs come back, until some notion of being able to get ahead to have some security in home economics. Until the dread of job loss, foreclosure, illness, old-age is removed from consumer consciousness, the economy isn't going to recover.

When once again American workers have consumer power they will turn the economy around.

You said that right.

So many of us know it here, how come so many of the powerful don't? Or they just don't give a shit?

Henry Ford knew it decades ago. :shrug:

In their model there is not an understanding that nations are an important economic unit and that a national economy depends on healthy sectors producing and healthy sectors consuming.

Globalization takes managing a national economy way beyond the complexities of the old closed-system model they still have in their decrepit brains.

They talk about how helping the rich leads to investment and new jobs as if the investment and new jobs are being created in the US. They are not. And our old jobs are being shipped to other locations. That draws dawn consumer power, it's been drawn down so low that the US consumer side is now unhealthy.

No nation has ever had the raw consuming power of post WWII America. It's not just that our wages were good, its that there were so many of us employed and consquently spending huge amounts of money. When you strip the nation of that level of consumption it wrecks the economy.

It is as if they have put the goose that lays the golden egg on a crash economic diet. The result is showing up as lost demand for what the producers are offering. It started with the big dollar items that could be put off until later: home sales, car sales, vacations involving air fares. Then when gasoline prices spiked suddenly became urgent to cut out all deferrable retail spending in order to have money for essentials like food, and heating/cooling.

It's bad and its gonna get worse as the US and world economy seeks a new equilibrium for US consumer power. As it looks, American consumer power is going to be a lot more like that of today's Bangladesh than Buffalo or Toledo in 1955.

I have never had consumer power.

pomposity it looms as a red flag to those tempted to to subject themselves to your version of half truths.
Sure, like Marx said, the worker creates all wealth but the workers you speak of would have produced nothing with out stolen real estate/natural resources!
Lacing up a new pair of Mall Walkers as you suggest, and jumping back into the consumer circle jerk ain't gonna get it.

civilization is completely to blame. And nothing good has ever come from civilization.

Let's you and me go eat worms that will solve everything.

you are capable of recognizing it? If something good has come from civilization you would recognize that also? You seem to have some rather ridged beliefs, included amongst them that a "solution" exists.

I'm not sure why but I sense you are capable of better. You and me and a feed of worms? I'm not quite there yet but I could pick a bucket of wrinkles to steam if you're up for it. Sated we would probably understand each other a lot better and hell, we may even wind up liking each other. Wouldn't that be a hoot.

but this is the nature of DU.

If you can't recognize the value of what was built here, then you could always form a commune of one out in the woods.

I can never understand why this is so hard for some to grasp. I always knew the bankers were greedy bastards, but until the last few years, I really didn't think they were just plain clueless enough to "kill the goose" that laid their "golden eggs" for them. But that clueless they ARE!!! Wow. They're pretty stupid businessmen aren't they? So then what good are they? Just what IS their "area of expertise"? The Emperor isn't wearing any clothes. It isn't funny but it is ludicrous.

You're entirely right, when we cut the cost of making it for the middle class (restructuring the terms on all debt asap), and then increase the minimum wage marked to cost of living... then we can get on with rebuilding our manufacturing base HERE. Our trade concept is LOONEY. We all, who have any sense, know it. Now it's obvious to the money-groupies. Gee... it just don't work this way! Lol. But when smacked in the wallet, they sober up.

Yes, there is a way out of this - but not any old way. It has to be the way that works. Which is... a rising tide raises all boats. And if we're to continue with any globalization, which I'd hope not, but if we do, it has to be with a global minimum wage and other standards which keep the ship from listing over to one side. Or to use another metaphor, we had two different water levels (wages), and expected it not to flow to a common level. Of course it will! That pulled us down (and our buying power), while doing nothing for the slave labor we were competing with (which has none). Dumb. All to put a bigger share into a few already overstuffed pockets. Can that handful of private billionaires consume enough to carry the world's economy? Not likely, no.

We learned that we can't annul practicality and reality, just b/c the bankers want to and say so. They've spun nothing but webs of deceit and tried to pass it off as wealth.

The simple fact is, interest is a "cost of doing business" for individuals too, and when that is too high and labor's wages are too low, the engine of product consumption is going to slow down and ultimately stop. Ask China and Japan if they realize this now. Western "investors" may catch on slower.