![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The Rare Economics Brain Dump
Mar. 3rd, 2011 11:43 am
These images coming from the Libyan border are brutal.
Imagine being packed like that, shoulder to shoulder with 180,000 other people under broiling sunlight for days and days. Refugees aren’t Libyans for the most part; they’re the foreign workers who came to Libya to seek their fortunes. Under Gadhafi, you see, Libya was relatively prosperous. That’s why I have such a hard time wrapping my brain around a Libyan “revolution:” It was always my impression that Gadhafi was extremely popular in his native land. I can’t help thinking the executive producers of the Libyan Revolution are all CIA operatives.
Had a long talk last night with a guy who was making $80,000 annually two years ago and now is lucky to make $14,000 a year. He was a psychologist, ran a community health clinic in rural upstate New York; presently he’s a fry cook on the morning shift of the local greasy spoon. Maybe could get a job commensurate with his abilities if he relocated. Won’t relocate because he’s caring for his elderly parents.
Six months from now he probably won’t be able to get a job commensurate with his abilities no matter where he lives. More and more HR departments are adding this caveat to the Help Wanted announcements: Don’t bother to apply unless you’re currently employed.
The 2008 recession left a permanent labor oversupply. It was a surgical strike that eliminated jobs permanently, made approximately 30% of the workforce obsolete. For the 70% of the workforce whose jobs weren’t affected, life hasn’t really changed all that much: yes, a temporary dip in the value of their 401K’s, an end to their fantasies of getting rich quick off real estate equity.
But for those of us in that 30%...
Sigh.
In Wisconsin, the same Budget Repair Bill which contains that controversial provision that would strip public sector workers of many of their collective bargaining rights, also contains a much less publicized provision that allows for the sale of state-owned assets like heating/cooling/power plants without bids and without reference to legally-defined public interest.
Who’s currently the largest private owner of utilities in the state of Wisconsin? Why, the Koch brothers who funded Scott Walker’s recent successful gubernatorial campaign and are also said to be the Tea Party’s deep pockets.
Whatever you feel collective bargaining and public sector employees, this bill shouldn’t be passed.
Although, of course, it will be.
I just don’t get why unions are so unpopular right now. I guess it’s because the bread and circuses model of governance has successfully managed to brainwash the masses into manifesting the symptoms of hysterical blindness where their own economic self-interest is concerned.
I mean, Hel-lo! Yes! There are certainly examples galore of union corruption. But that’s true of just about every organizational entity in the United States these days.
The criticism that unions pushed the cost of labor up so high that those poor corporations were simply forced to send their jobs overseas is simply not true.
What happened was the Internet, which in economic terms pushed down the administrative costs associated with communication to close to nothing, making a zero-cost workforce a reality. Of course this is a workforce that is not particularly well trained – hence the hideously high rates at which manufactured goods break and malfunction. Owners of the companies that manufacture these goods probably see this breakage and malfunction as a positive thing since it accelerates the cycle of consumption.
Of course it’s kind of a cliché by now to point out that every age seems apocalyptic unto itself. End times were signaled in the Middle Ages through the Black Plague, a proxy for God’s righteous and unforgiving nature. In the 1960s, doomsday was the shadow of a mushroom-shaped cloud.
So, yeah, yeah – if things seem irredeemably fucked in the present tense, get over yourself.
And yet, and yet…
