LIBERAL DEMOCRATS VS THE WAR MACHINE

I'm beginning to see criticism of Biden from the Left, of which I am a moderate member. Did anyone think that Biden was anything but a standard issue liberal Democrat? Remember LBJ and Vietnam? (But also LBJ's Medicare, AFDC, Job Corps, etc.?)

From a policy standpoint, liberal Democrats have always faced a puzzling paradox since World War II concerning the military. Think of the economic effects of military spending:

1) The military yields higher employment for otherwise unqualified lower-middle class and poor citizens and a generally very nice, wholly subsidized, suburban lifestyle for military families. (Admittedly, with drawbacks such as injury and death. Although US casualties have usually been kept comparably low. No wars since 1941 have involved civilian deaths in the mainland USA. In WW2, the USSR had 11 million military deaths, Germany 4 million ; the USA 407,000, less than half a million. With civilian deaths, in Europe and Asia, some 70 million were killed. The much vaunted 55,000 US dead in Vietnam pale next to the 700,000 military Vietnamese dead and the million or so civilians killed in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.)

2) The Pentagon also subsidizes a nice chunk of the civilian economy. Boeing workers, for example, are highly paid and unionized, as are most major military contractors. After WW2, Boeing declined to the point it shrank to having a clothing store, in Seattle I think, as its main facility in the late 1940s. The Korean War saved Boeing.

3) Then there are the communities in which bases are located, which, once again, reap untold indirect economic subsidies.

4) The military is the only social welfare program that can be sold as pro-business and "patriotic."

So the question is: with what do we replace the war machine?

Financiers' Goal on Argentina Shouldn't End the Game

In these World Cup days, it is easy to see a U.S. Supreme Court's decision as a decisive financiers' goal scored against Argentina, but the game isn't over. The court let stand a lower court judgment requiring Argentina to pay $1.3 billion to creditors means different things to different people, but it is actually the human writ small.

For Argentina, and Argentines I know, it's a disaster that causes anxiety. Among Americans, most of whom are completely unaware of the news, those who are up on the events are scratching their heads: what are Argentines complaining about, didn't they borrow the money?

The International Monetary Fund has taken a position of concern about the possible repercussions well beyond the republic of the Southern Cone.

It does not take great theological acumen to realize that from the point of view of the Argentine pope this is an injustice. And it is. The Argentina bad debt was wrongly acquired. Worse, those who will suffer will be children without a meal at school, their teachers who may not get paid and otherwise needy people who never got the least benefit from the loans.

The debt doesn't just go back to the year in which the Argentine peso rapidly lost two thirds of its value overnight (when Argentines say "2001" they mean this event, not September 11). It goes back much earlier. There were the abysmal governments by military officers who borrowed to buy useless weapons (and certainly to fund their retirements) and at least one subsequent civil government (that of Carlos Menem), which essentially carried out a monetary scam, peso parity with the dollar.

To complicate matters, this is not fair in even for those of us who live in the wealthy First World. These investment pools are not just for millionaires (I mean, billionaires), men who fit the image of the fat Monopoly man with a top hat and cigar. These funds are freely sold to the common middle-class citizen who has some put away a little something for old age or medical expenses. This man or woman also had nothing to do with Argentine governments' waste.

Moreover, the Supreme Court didn't actually rule against Argentina. Rather, the justices simply declined to hear the case, without explanation as is common in most such petitions. And, actually, I don't see a legal issue in this matter. The bonds were developed and sold in accordance with current laws and their constitutionality is not in question, which is what the high court judges.

In Argentine eyes, the move will be seen as part of U.S. foreign policy, but Supreme Court justices cannot be removed unless they are charged with serious wrongdoing and their decisions can not be modified or President Obama, or Congress.

So it's not an American "trick." Nor a goal by a foreign soccer team. It is undoubtedly the result of a sad story, one very well known in Latin America. National leaders have been very bad, there have been too many dictators and even democracies have been undemocratic.

As to consequences, there are few countries that historically have been able to escape their debts as tried by Argentina under Presidents Nestor and Cristina Kirchner. Greece is trying today (using the Argentine "model," which some say is merely a bad example).

When someone does not pay a debt, he is considered bad debtor and the cost of borrowing goes up for the debtor because the risk of loss is higher. All loans follow this pattern going back to the Church's abandonment of its traditional condemnation of usury, a fact that coincided with the rise of Italian banking in the Renaissance (and ecclesiastical money needs for monumental works such as St. Peter's Basilica in Rome).

The great historical exception was Russia. In 1917, Lenin refused repay foreign debt (also internal debt, but that's another story), arguing that the debt belonged to tsars and not the people. He got as a response a military intervention by Great Britain, United States and other creditor countries from 1918 to 1920.

The Soviet Union won milityarily, but the nation was an economic pariah until the fall of the Communist Party. The ruble ceased to be convertible currency and Russia could not buy anything on the world market without paying for it with hard currency obtained through exports. However, the USSR had vast internal resources and made use of them to survive.

Partly in preparation for the eventuality of such an isolation the Kirchner governments have restricted and controlled trade and monetary exchange, a move that may have seemed crazy to anyone who did not consider the default problem. Like Russia, Argentina is one of the few countries in the world that is physically self-sufficient: it has enough food to feed all of Europe, let alone merely 40 million Argentines, plus it has oil, minerals and untold natural raw materials and industries.

It's not entirely insane to think that, with doors closed to external funding, Argentina must find a way to survive on its own.

But of course, for the IMF, which bears the responsibility the debt of all, this situation is a potential global disaster. The international economy depends on a degree of cooperation between all people, rich and poor, creditors and debtors.

Indeed, human beings are not independent and autonomous. We are born thanks to the love of our parents (in the best cases) or instinct, but not on our own. We survive at least the first 10 years thanks to someone who feeds, dresses and shelters us.

Human societies bear a resemblance to individuals. We all depend on each other. The owner of factory depends on workers and vice versa. Sellers on buyers. Professionals on those who don't have their specialized knowledge, and vice versa.

Societies also need one another. Think of Colombian Coffee, Brazilian bananas, Argentine beef, Sri Lanka's tea, Chilean copper and Venezuelan oil. Consider the cultural diversity that enriches us all: what would we read without Tolstoy, Mafoud, Cortázar or Naipaul? What would we listen to without Beethoven or Menuchin?

In short, this is one of those times when you have to wear the uniform of the human team. In fact, I think that's what everyone with the power of persuasion in this matter will wear. If not, we all lose.

Why do we have to work, anyway?

The answer to a declining need for workers is, of course, not to work so much. Or, seen another way, who says work has to be punishing drudgery performed 40 hours a week for 40-plus years?

We in America are such Puritans that we are constantly in dread that someone somewhere is having fun. We live by the biblical curse: “By the sweat of your face you will eat bread, till you return to the ground” (Genesis 3:19).

Europeans are no better. Sure, there's the French month-long vacation and Italy’s ferragosto (or, literally closed August), which have spread all over the Old World. The British worker seems to love striking and habitually appears at the workplace following his own unscheduled notion of a short workday, often intoxicated. This behavior actually upholds the very same Puritan work ethic—through transgression.

Effectively, the European welfare states (and American unemployment) have produced masses of people to whom life without work is one long stretch of daytime television watching while drunk or high, with the occasional sex break during commercials or the news. That’s no answer to work; it’s an inhumane wasting of the most precious non-renewable resource we have: life itself.

There has to be a better way. Indeed, there is. It’s called the society of leisure.

The idea has been around at least since British sociologist Kenneth Roberts’ original work The Society of Leisure, published in the 1970s. Sadly it's out of print and I was not able to find it anywhere on the Internet, although there are copious references.

However, I did find Roberts himself and a later work of his, Leisure in Contemporary Society. If you are as fond of social science theory as I am, you will recognize it as a positive and upside-down spin on Thorstein Veblen’s ideas.

“Say what,” you ask? Allow me to explain.

Restated for the era of the Internet and incipient robot-controlled machines, from which the 1970s were very far, the underlying premise is that a society that can produce enough food and consumer goods for all using diminishing inputs of human work—defined as toil for wages—will reach the point at which workers as we know them will, on the whole, become unnecessary.

All that will eventually be needed are a few specialists to check on the systems now and then; there’s no reason they could not be volunteers who simply love to check the running of systems. There will always be someone who does.

This might be something as imagined by Richard Brautigan in his poem "All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace," which in part says

I like to think (it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

Next Roberts stipulates that all of us enjoy applying our innate talents in a way that provides structure to our lives. If we could wave a magic wand, we would all choose to do something productive with our brains, our hands, our eye-hand coordination, etc.

I should have been a lawyer and that gene was passed on to the son who became one. I could also have been a programmer and that gene was passed on to the son who became one.

The point is that we all enjoy some quantity and form of what is known as work today. What we don’t like are bosses, or generically, people who tell us to work at their convenience rather than ours. We don’t like the compulsion, mind-numbing tasks (except if we are obsessive-compulsive or temporarily upset), unhealthy work conditions or hours and so on and so forth.

Of course, right now no one is prepared for world without work. Unemployment or retirement are unmitigated human disasters. But what if things changed? What if we didn’t have to bear with work as we know it?

Next: Why society has failed to change.

Maybe the economy doesn't need full employment any more

Instead of arguing whether raising the minimum wage will destroy jobs—which it won’t*—let’s consider a new International Labor Organization report that tells us that, globally, the labor market is not likely to come close to recovering before 2018. That's not even counting the catchup needed to employ the workers added each year.

This brings me to the thought that has been haunting me since 2008: What if we don’t ever get everybody back to work again right here in the good old U.S. of A.? It seems more likely every year.

This is a prospect looming over workers everywhere, and particularly in the technologically advanced United States since the 1970s. It was then that premature predictions of the Luddites—the textile artisans who protested against newly developed labor-saving machinery in the 1810s—began to come true.

Since then a long slump in average wages, from which we have yet to recover, has occurred despite enormous productivity gains, sucking profits to the investing class in the now popularly known top 1% income bracket (I would include the top 20%, but that).

In 1978, President Carter signed the Humphrey–Hawkins Full Employment Act (formally the Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act), which set full employment as a national goal, defining that condition as 3% unemployment for adults and 4% for youths.

Those rates were never reached. For three months in 2000, national rates for the civilian labor force slipped below 4% and the national average for that last year of the Clinton Administration was 4%. But the complete goal, which coincided with the well-known view of economist William Beveridge, was never reached.

What if the modern economy doesn’t need full employment to function?

For five full years in United States, which has the world’s largest economy with the world’s largest functioning internal market, has been able to chug along with roughly 1 in 10 workers idled or involuntarily employed part-time. Growth has not been great, but profits (and the stock market) have soared.

The plutocracy (which comes from the Greek for “the wealthiest rule”) has been perfectly content to effectively toss into the garbage the 30% to 40% of the American human beings directly affected by this (assume one worker per roughly three people, including children and the aged).

Unemployment insurance and food stamps have been cut in a time of continuing need; welfare didn’t need to be cut because it’s been effectively frozen since 1996 (that’s 18 years ago).

Welcome to the United States of Brazil or Argentina ... or even Greece.

Next: an immodest proposal ...

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* Every respectable piece of research since the 1994 “Ur” study by Card and Krueger has proven—contrary to the repeated argument of the restaurant industry’s fake “Employment Policies Institute” plastered in a full page ad in The New York Times this week—that increasing minimum wage has no negative effect on employment. Some have suggested there may be a positive, job-generating effect.

The "cliff" is moral, not fiscal

At the close of this last business day of 2012 no deal appeared possible before the midnight deadline to avoid what Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke dubbed a "fiscal cliff." I defer to a young lady who requested a "lecture" on the subject to begin by stating that it's not actually a cliff and its nature is not economic, but moral.

Now that the United States is poised to go over it, very little of any serious consequence will happen at 12:01 am Eastern time, the time zone of Washington, D.C.

Federal automatic sequestrations will only take about 1 cent a month from every dollar spent for discretionary expenses. This will not affect Social Security, Medicaid, federal civilian or military pay and pensions, or veterans' benefits. More than likely something to prevent tax rises for the middle class and the end of unemployment insurance benefits for the long-term unemployed will pass within the first weeks of 2013.

Fiscally, that is, in terms of government spending, even the worst is nowhere near a cliff. It's more like a slight tilt. If it replaced a slide on the average playground, no one would use it because it would be nearly flat.

The cliff is moral. The United States will join the rather large club of nations whose governments cannot be relied upon to punctually raise revenue and pay debts.

This is not because revenues will not be raised — the top moneymakers will pay proportionally more. Nor is it because payments of debts will cease —do remember that every U.S. dollar remains legal tender for  "all debts public and private."

But Congress, specifically the Republicans in the House, engaged in what is known in economics as moral hazard: the willingness to take foolhardy risks because someone else will bear the consequences.

No more stasis

There's a time for everything under the heavens, wrote the much-quoted and little-known Qoheleth. This time is the time to break out of stasis, to do something about the lingering global economic toothache, to speak up one's frustrations, act on needs, think of solutions.

I've been studiously avoiding saying a word about the Occupy movement and the various bits of startling economic news, in part for professional reasons, in part because I have so very little to say that others aren't already saying.

I don't think it's too sectarian to see in all of them signs that the reign of God is "at hand." Although I borrow from the New Testament, when I say "God," I mean the unimaginably wondrous one who is the ground of all being. Of whom I can say next to nothing otherwise. Similarly, her reign is as unfathomable as herself, except that it is exceptionally different from everything as we know it and would be as much of a surprise as meeting her face to face.

I think this is the message of the Occupy movement: the order of things wants changing. To what, ask the pundits?

We are slouching toward something that reaches out to all and in some way gathers us all in the folds of God's robe and the warmth of her breast. The new arrangement calls for a world of loving, caring, respecting, life giving, all flowing from us with abandon without thought for tomorrow, for efficiency or for gain.

We just need to begin to live in it, like OWS, ready to weather weather, cops, anything, all with the expectation that everyone will be provided for and fed.

What if we really did cut out the tax "loopholes"?

Republicans in the default or no-default negotiations are now making noises that they're willing to contemplate getting rid of "loopholes" in the tax code to achieve what they will accept as deficit reduction. Of course, my loophole is your sacred cow and there ain't no such thing as deficit reduction. But let's dream ... and consider a modest proposal.

I'll call it the Simple Tax Act, because that's what it is: a tax code that is nothing more than a schedule of tax rates and a few simple definitions. Ten pages, max.

No mortgage deductions, no housing tax credit, but no oil depletion allowance and no fancy depreciation. Just levy X taxes on Y income (or Z profit).

Keep progressivity: lower brackets should pay smaller proportions than higher brackets. Keep the grand givaway of taxing corporate profits rather than income (define allowable "expenses" only as cash and carry items, no fancy deeming of anything that is not an actual exchange of goods, services and money ... bye-bye, Ken Lay). Even keep low (but not zero) inheritance and capital gains taxes.

Because that's the little secret: if everyone pays a fair share, each one of us can get to pay little less to balance the budget and get our goodies, like the occasional chest-thumping war or three, Medicaid and Medicare, federal student loans, etc.

What's more: eliminate all the deductions, credits and allowances and you don't have to file a tax declaration at the end of the year. What gets deducted is what you owe! Period. Bye-bye April 15 deadline. Let's have a tax parade and cookout, instead ... I'll bring the hot dogs.

What If We Don't Need the Unemployed?

Here's a thought: what if the 10 percent who aren't working on a paid job, just aren't necessary to the economy. Sure, we need their consumption. But we're all so productive that fewer people need actually work.

Not proposing this as a final conclusion, but as the theory of an economics layman.

Insofar as this employed — knock on wood! —observer is concerned, right now the problem is that there are lots of things being made on which fewer and fewer people feel comfortable spending money. That’s why savvy people, such as Economics Nobelist Paul Krugman and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, are worried about deflation rather than the government's deficit.

But suppose, just suppose, that the 10 percent of the workforce that's been on the bench for about a year is never going to work again. There are certainly many jobs that are never coming back, ask a linotypist, if you know what that is or someone who still calls himself that.

What then? Are we just going to go up to them, hand them a Luger like in the World War II movies, and walk away secure that they understand they’re supposed to do the "honorable" thing and shoot themselves?

Wait! Don't shoot yourselves yet. We need your consumption. Wouldn't it make sense to accept a high structural unemployment and instead fund a portion of the population as consumers?

As someone on the hiring side of the table employer, I remember the high-employment 1990s as a nightmare in which anyone who had a pulse could get a job. If you weren't in a Fortune 500 company with gazillions, you had to hire from the bottom of the barrel, as I realized when a candidate's reference suggested I call her parole officer.

Notice how courteous customer service folks have become since the recession started? They're the motivated folks who want to do a good job, or who understand the connection between treating customers well and holding onto one's job.

Why not subsidize the grumpy folks who really hated their job to stay home and shop online, pumping money into the economy and keeping the rest of us chugging along? Or am I missing something?

How hot is it in the hustings?

It's not what Robin Sparkles (Scherbatsky) had in mind when she was a teeny-bopper rock queen (see here), but in some places it's hot enough that one local newspaper feature on the heat had a doctor recommending that people without air-conditioning go to the mall (see here). Not the summer I would like to spend on the campaign trail.

We here in Washington have no lack of hot air, despite the congressional recess, but I shudder to think of the diabetic guy in that story who lives on disability aid, which turns out not to be enough to have A/C.

Some of us who grew up without A/C everywhere are tempted to scream: Stop whining, you Southern, do-nothing slobs! (You do know that Southern states are net takers of the federal aid your lawmakers are constantly trying to shrink, dontcha?) Most of humanity did fine without A/C for millions of years.

Yet the story's not the heat. It's the poverty—in the richest country in the world.

Nobody, not even bigoted, lazy Southern slobs who hate the hand that feeds them, deserves poverty. We're forgetting, aren't we, that as we lick our portfolio's chops in expectation of GM's IPO, there's a lot of poverty out there.

The rising new wave of home foreclosures is almost all caused by unemployment—not Wall Street shenanigans (although those are coming back, too). Just think: the government is giving up its share of GM, after reviving it, now that there's real profit to be made.

Where's the Reform in Health Reform?

Having lived in Canada and the United Kingdom, I would have happily had single-payer socialized medicine in the United States, just as President Truman proposed in 1947. But I am mad as hell as I see President Obama's "reform" kick in.

My company got no increase last year for health care (note: it's two words!). That's when the whole medical gouging system was afraid of reform. Now they got the reform they want and rates have jacked up: 29 % for us in no-inflation times!

That's not the worst case.

An acquaintance, I'll call him Bob, lost health insurance because he is unemployed. United Healthcare and Kaiser Permanente rejected him because he suffers from depression -- I'm talking serious, clinical depression. As always, you have to be healthy to sign up for medical care, right?

Bob is on disability. He could work with medication, but he can't get any prescribed.

OK, "reform" kicked in during July. Everyone has to be insured. But if commercial firms won't insure you, Bob learned, you have to have been uninsured 6 months to qualify for "high risk" pool. Then he gets to pay more than $600 a month for insurance that has a $6,000 deductible.

So if you're unemployed, you have to have spent about $13,000 out of pocket. Where, pray tell does someone uninsured (because he is unemployed), get $13,000 in the first place? Get it, unemployed? Meaning little or no income?

This is not the "change" I voted for, Mr. Obama.

45 Days without Money

If you have ever gone without any income or benefits for 45 days, welcome to the world of roughly 2,138,000 Americans this week. What crime did they commit? They had the effrontery of not being able to find a job before June 2, 2010, when Congress allowed extended unemployment benefits to expire.

"Oh, extended" you say? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 6.8 million unemployed Americans have lacked a job for more than six months. That's 46% of out-of-work Americans, which is an all-time historical high (a detailed study on this is available from the National Employment Law Project here).

Now, of course, not all of them will lose benefits right now. But keep in mind that federal extended benefits had provided up 99 weeks (close to two years) of benefits in some states.

That sound too long? Republicans thinks so: they say the benefits are keeping people from looking for a job, which is ridiculous since the last national unemployment figure shrank to 9.5 percent only because people left the workforce in huge numbers. They were discouraged just before Congress cut them off.

Now they're just plain desperate.

Haiti: the event

Woke up to an e-mail from iTunes offering an album of songs from the "one of the biggest events in broadcast history," which iTunes says was brought about by "the tragic events in Haiti." Who'd a thunk it?

The poorest, most miserable land in the Western Hemisphere -- the first black-majority independent republic in the world ... coincidence? -- had an annihilating earthquake just so Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera and friends in New York, Los Angeles, and London could have a star-studded telethon.

So get yer tunes for only 8 buckeroos.

Oh, sure, "100% of proceeds from the sale" go to the the Clinton-Bush (or should it be Clinton-Bush-Bush?) Haiti Fund, the UN and several other nongovernment charities, including a token Haitian group, named last because no one has ever heard of it.

What are they gonna say: "This is the greatest, cheapest, career boosting promo for managers, producers, singers and distributors ever to come our way and we're doing our darndest to get our share of the limelight"?

Wait!

There's even a book out -- written before the fact -- about "disaster capitalism." Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism spells out how disaster-shocked people and countries faces with wars, coups and natural catastrophes are rapaciously picked clean and reordered into "free" market economies by corporate reingeneering.

It's happening now in Haiti.

Scam Nation's Great Recession

Washington Post headline: "Redskins Fans Waited While Brokers Got Tickets." Don't get me wrong. I'm no football fan. But do the i-bankers always have to get zillions in bonuses, while the rubes they fleeced get foreclosed and evicted?

John Steinbeck described the age-old story in his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath like in this car lot conversation: "Watch the woman’s face," one salesman tells another. "If the woman likes it we can screw the old man. Start 'em on that Cad'. Then you can work 'em down to that '26 Buick. 'F you start on the Buick, they'll go for a Ford."

Now it's done on TV. Sell your gold to us, we're so trustworthy. Get fast cash for a car lien. Slim down with [insert gadget here]. Sickening.

The End of Liberalism?

The fanfare around Ted Kennedy's death is linked to the demise of U.S. political liberalism, even though liberalism died between the presidential elections of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Liberalism could be declared dead by 1973, when the doubling of worker incomes since 1946 turned into a wage stagnation that has yet to end. On Saturday, August 29, 2009, liberalism was merely given its long overdue burial.

"Liberalism" was an American weasel term to avoid being called -- the salts! -- Red. In Europe, "liberalism" was understood as the ideology of the wealthy class spawned by the industrial revolution. They believed free markets should be unfettered, or liberated (hence "liberal"), from government intervention. We in the United States call that view "conservatism."

U.S. liberalism was originally an unorthodox alliance between the political machine of a New York governor from a patrician family of extremely deep pockets and the unions, the Catholic sons of immigrants and even "the Negroes" (where allowed to vote). I'm talking, of course, of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a man praiseworthy -- as Ted Kennedy is not -- for having transcended his upbringing and class destiny. His New Deal wove a threadbare safety net for the average citizen, without risk to a single mansion or trust fund.

President Kennedy drew on that coalition, which mistrusted him for good reason, to win election in 1960. Accidental President Lyndon Johnson, himself from a background close to those lifted from poverty by the New Deal but still without an upward socioeconomic ladder by the 1960s, expanded the New Deal into some, but not all, of its logical consequences.

The War on Poverty was a resounding success: poverty dropped in Johnson's one term from 19.0 percent to 12.1 percent -- nearly 7 percentage points down between 1964 and 1968, a record never equalled since (the 2007 poverty rate was 12.5 percent).

All the political battles since 1929 have been about whether to distribute the fruits of labor among the many who work or among the few who live off the profits. Liberalism had been moderately on the side of the many, while conservatism remains quite rabidly for the few.

Conservatism, of course, has successfully cultivated smokescreen "social issues" such as identity politics (whites vs. blacks vs. gays vs. women, etc.) and fundamentalist-leaning morality (abortion, family values, heterosexual marriage, etc.) to hide the elite's real economic agenda. But that's a whole other post.

The problem with U.S. liberalism is that it ultimately amounted to little more than noblesse oblige, political charity dispensed from limousines. The unions were co-opted -- and forcibly purged of "Reds" -- by the pressure and deals of the big oligopolies of the 1940s and 50s, which turned union leaders into domesticated members of the American managerial class.

The liberals purportedly believed that workers could get their fair share under their moderate reforms of the rapacious system we know as capitalism. But their gradualism led to gradual deterioration. In 2006 the average workers' inflation-adjusted wages were 22 percent below that of their peers in 1973. As noted at the outset, in 1973, they had been 200 percent (or double) what they were in 1946 -- same wages, same inflation adjustments.

The debacle occurred on the watch of Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodd and all the old liberal dinosaurs who still think it's 1965 and thought it was 1965 when Reagan won and still thought it was 1965 when the Republicans took Congress, thanks to liberal spinelessness, in 1994.

Liberalism is dead. Is the new, still unveiling, Obama paradigm up to the task the dying liberal elders flubbed? Or is it merely the same old liberal Kool-Aid with different food colors?

The Worst Is Over?

Hand it to the economists, business reporters and Wall Street talking heads to heave up a massive sigh of relief that "only" 345,000 people lost their jobs last month. The average Josephine on the street doesn't share the feeling because neither she nor her mate, Joe, ever see the money from profits during the booms and they always feel the pinch in the busts.

They only see the unemployment line, the cutoff notices when money begins to get tight and eventually more and more losses. Is it getting better at the home of J&J?

Let's see ... there are 14.5 million Americans unemployed. That's double the number of people who were jobless before the recession started.

This just like saying that in 2004 there was a great recovery, or that it was "morning in America" under Ronald Reagan, whose sharp rightward economic shift in 1981 brought us 9.4% unemployment precisely 27 years ago last month.

So, no, the gross domestic product may be poised to post a positive growth number. To you and me, that means nothing.

Preparing for Living

In advance of the coming economic bad news -- bank "stress test" results on Monday, unemployment on Friday -- allow me to ponder what is really happening at a level that affects all of us: a profound job insecurity that won't get better even when the so-called "macro" numbers look better.

Then allow me to bring up a comment by my friend and reader Luciano in response to my post of March 19: "Post-industrial production is production without labor. This means the END OF THE JOB. Repeat after me: The AGE OF THE JOB is past. The traditional 'job,' which has determined our consciousness for 300 years, is gone forever. The jobs now being lost will not come back. We don't need the workers anymore."

In technical principle, this has been possible for at least half a century. A relatively small -- and declining -- proportion of the population is needed to produce the materials essential to human dignity, such as food, clothing and shelter, much as was foreseen by John Maynard Keynes in his 1930 essay "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren."

He saw the end of "the struggle for subsistence" in the then-unthinkable year of 2030. That struggle persists today largely due to disparities and injustices, but not actual need. We have and produce more than enough for everyone.

Confront the equity issue, however, and we come to the real future problem, also prophesied by Keynes:

... for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem-how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.

The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes.

This is what today's children -- who will be young adults in 2030 -- should be learning: the art of life itself. This is education not merely to have a skill to make a living, but education to learn how to learn and live and grow, in harmony and fairness.

It's our AIG, isn't it?

The real AIG bonus scandal is that a majority stockholder cannot prevent nonsense set in motion before the stocks were eagerly tossed like confetti at the federal government by management begging on its knees for cash.

We, the people, now own 80 percent (!!!) of AIG at a cost of about $170 billion of our money; about $165 million in bonuses was scheduled to be paid by March 15; some of the individual bonuses range between $1.5 to $3 million, but most are merely in the thousands; the government-appointed overseer was told by lawyers that the bonuses must be paid under pre-existing employee-retention contracts.

The single fact that stands out to me is that March 15 is the deadline for filing corporate taxes. Typically, corporate expenses booked as 2008 prior-year accruals (in English: owed, but not paid, in 2008) must be actually paid out before that date. So the overriding urgency to make the payments is a tax filing.

Well, hell, Tim Geithner, let's have our AIG accountant file for an extension of the deadline while we figure out why these bonuses are being paid at all. There's still time: extension applications can still be filed today.

But what about the alleged top talent AIG stands to lose? Let's challenge them to go get another job with "AIG" on their résumés.

Is it a D-word yet?

Signs abound that the economy is slumping deeper and faster than anyone expected. At about 6,500 last week, the Dow will reach what I -- a nonexpert, noneconomist journalist -- think is the infamous "bottom" before the summer. That's too soon, as the economic stimulus effects won't begin to be felt at least until the fall.

Could it go lower than "Dr. Doom" predicted? Don't panic, but the D-word may soon aptly describe prevailing economic conditions.

In fact, I understand that Japan's much-feared "lost decade" was less severe, at an average 5.5 unemployment, than our current much higher jobless rate. The Japanese tanked and stayed tanked for a decade, but at much higher levels of well-being than the United States is at right now.

And they kept up their cradle-to-grave universal national health system, which we don't have.

It's no reason to cheer, but even in the depths of the Great Depression -- and we're not even remotely going there -- 77 percent of the workforce was employed. At worst we'll hit maybe 90 percent. That's bad if you're one of the unemployed, but ... you'll still have 9 in 10 chances of keeping your job -- and even better chances right now.

You're going to live through the fourth economic depression the United States has ever experienced. It's OK, we can all make it if we stick together.

Geithner: Too Many Zeroes

A better idea than the Tim Geithner plan to lend trillions to the financial sector would be to make the financiers pay. I mean, really pay. From  their banks, their companies and their pockets. For once.

The very same bank that on this very day would charge you more than 5% interest on a 30-year fixed rate mortgage for a home (assuming you offer your first-born child as collateral) can borrow the money from the Federal Reserve -- that's you and me -- for 0.5%. You knew that, right?

They've been making a killing all our lives off our tax money.

So why not sell their houses, cars, offices, fancy office furniture and office bars, yachts and jets,  golf courses, the jewelry they've given their wives and mistresses, and so on and on and on? Then, why not throw them in jail and toss the key when it turns out that selling everything is not nearly enough to repay us?

After that, let's nationalize the business of lending and borrowing and never let any financial shark play with our money ever again.

Efficiency vs. Well-being

Should society be primarily an efficient arrangement or should it aim to promote the well-being of its members? If it's efficiency you favor, then go ahead, lay off as many workers as you wish so long as you can still provide the goods and services demanded by paying consumers. However, if it's the general welfare you're concerned with, get ready to accept some inefficiencies.

This is the fundamental debate underlying key policy decisions: Should we stimulate the economy? Should we subsidize arts, education or public transportation? Should we spend resource on people unlikely to produce something of equivalent value?

I'd argue that, at heart, human beings are fundamentally inefficient. Let's do the return on investment (ROI) math.

1. Most human beings take about 22-23 years of utter subsidization -- infancy, parenting and schooling -- at a cost of $125,000 to $250,000, depending on household income level, not counting college.
   
2.  Add college: from about $40,000 to $200,000 for a 4-year undergraduate degree.
3. So society has invested between $125,000 and $450,000 on each person before they have produced a single widget or service of any economic value.
   
4. Then, let's assume that for about 40-45 years this person works. 
5. Subtract from this person's income his or her living expenses, then ask, at age 65, has society recovered $125,000-$450,000, adjusted for inflation?
6. Wait! From age 65 to whatever (100?), as a norm human beings go back to being non-productive resource consumers; in most cases, they end up being subsidized by someone else. So subtract what is spent in those years. Do we still have a profitable ROI?
   

So, you see, human beings are inherently inefficient. Let's get rid of them, shall we?