The unemployment rate is 9 percent. But it’s not evenly distributed. The unemployment rate of the kind of college educated middle aged white people who run key institutions is much lower than that. I simply find it impossible to believe that if 9 percent of Richard Fishers friends were unemployed, that we’d be getting the same outcomes. If 9 percent of Ben Bernanke’s family members were unemployed, he’d be dusting off old papers about “Rooseveltian resolve” and “self-induced paralysis.” Protesters in the streets probably aren’t going to solve our problems, but if they can bring some sense of urgency to the people in power, they’ll be doing the world a huge favor. -YggsYou know. Like in Syria. Our good friend is you'llpardontheexpression laboring under the impression that Ben Bernanke and Richard Fisher and their friends are unaffected by a high jobless rate; that the precarious condition of the American worker and the abject condition of the American workforce have no impact on the lives of Richard Fisher and Ben Bernanke and friends. Well obviously the Ben Bernankes and Richard Fishers of the world are deeply affected by the current state of the economy--just not negatively. Don't bogart that joint my friend. They and their friends are immensely rich. They are getting richer. Their speculative financial business ventures are guaranteed by state-created capital. 9% unemployment (and obviously the real percentage of unemployed people is much, much higher than this) isn't some alien territory these fuckers happenstanced across; they created it! This isn't a failed labor policy. This is the labor policy.
Thursday, October 06, 2011
L'esprit de 89
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36 comments:
Nine percent?
Fatt Piglazyass obviously doesn't ever leave his feeding pen.
More like 25-35%.
But that's never-you-mind to Fatt.
Yes, but would any of them admit to creating the situation? Seems more likely they feel smiled upon by the God of Carnage.
un- & under-employment now approaches 50%, no?
during the swine flu dust up back whenever, a juicy fact came to light: 40% of the US work force has not one day of sick leave. not one.
ie, most of the employed's work is ultra-shitty.
Yes sir you are correct sir,I think. It started with deindustrislization and is now in it's postconsumerist transitional phase. The desired result is a sort of neofeudalist debt peonage. Why this is so is something to ask the Liege lords who run the international banking cartel.
I made a sign I'm going to carry in the protests: "Get off your ass Ben and do something!" I can't wait to see what he does with this extra motivation!
"if they can bring some sense of urgency to the people in power"
That bit amused me. In a face-palm sort of way.
God knows Yglesias usually deserves the criticism you give him, but you're acting like he's making some huge fundamental error here, when you're really just taking what he is saying one step further. I'm not even sure he would disagree with you on this one.
How many Yglesias posts hinge on "I have a hard time believing ..." or a similar turn of phrase?
I have a hard time believing that H. Rap Woodchuck waddled down to the quad to fight the power at Harvard.
WHAT DO WE WANT! INFLATION TARGETING!
WHEN DO WE WANT IT! NOW!
"If they can bring some sense of urgency to the people in power?" WTF? He really went there - to "if only the Fuhrer knew?" That has to be snark. Even Wiggles can't be that fucking stupid.
when people's justice, in the form of self-organizing assemblages of roving activists, comes to the housing areas of the ruling class, there are so many questions -
take over the mansions, or burn them down?
lump the children in with the adults, or establish an age below which they will be let go? perhaps the youngest children could be adopted out, as happened in argentina.
what is to be done with the servants?
it may seem to be to early to consider such issues, but chance favors the prepared mind
My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir.
Fatt Piglazyass? Really?
Were I to attend such a gathering with a homemade sign, my homemade sign might say
FAIR TRIALS FOR BANKSTERS
@Rowan:
Don't you get it? Yglesias is overweight! Haw haw! It is a trenchant critique of the man's politics and moral character, which would otherwise afford scant purchase for mockery.
Oooohhhh... the fish are biting.
I mean, it's not like Fatty's views are obviously idiotic, or anything like that. No, they deserve serious dissection. By serious internet PowerNoggins!
Yes, we should treat him seriously. I mean that seriously.
Karl, I would give your argument its due, but you have a stupid name.
Guys, stop making fun of Fatty's obesity when his mental handicap is right there for the mocking, the fucking retard.
Unfortunately, the extent to which the Wall Street protesters are even willing to bring a sense of urgency to the people in power is questionable. I'm supportive of the demonstrations because, hey, at least it's something, but a number of people involved (I hesitate to say most people, but it wouldn't surprise me) seem eager to concede ground and compromise before they're even offered scraps from the negotiation table. A friend and I were arguing with some of the would-be occupiers on Facebook (I'm assuming they were middle class "Starbucks liberals") who dismissed our proposed demands as "socialistic" (which they absolutely are, but why the fuck is that inherently negative?), and spoke about the need to rid ourselves of lobbyists and get back to the Consitution, because those are clearly surefire ways to wrench the political process free from the clutches of corporate owners and return to the good old days of egalitarianism and populist rule that I hear so much about but have yet to actually encounter in studying American history. One person even mentioned that our unemployment crisis had been a boon for out-of-work entreprenuers because it allowed them the opportunity to unleash their dormant creative capital or something like that. I wanted to bang my face on my keyboard.
Nutella, that is a genuine funny.
We will fight to the death for our proposal for a 1/20th.Of 1% tax on all stock transactions. Does that seem to maximilist?
@Troville
One of the things I like best about this thing is that it's a revealing moment.
The impression I get when I've gone down there is that the Forever People are profoundly dissatisfied with the whole shebang, and are unlikely to accept half-measures. (And everything is a half-measure.) I wouldn't bet against their resolve. But I am worried that the cops will arrest/disperse everyone the minute the news media gets bored.
Hey IOZ! Can you use your Foodie Friday powers to recommend something for me to cook for these hippies. These kids have been subsisting on really shitty pizza and processed foods for weeks. Figure out something nutritious, delicious, and easy (and cheap) to make, and I will make it, either today or on Monday.
I have got: a reasonably well stocked kitchen. I've got two shitty grocery stores, a Whole Foods, and Chinese and Italian specialty stores in walking distance. The Dinner Impossible parameters are that the dish needs to be transported about 1500 feet by one person on foot, but the more it can feed within that limitation, the better.
Hippie Stew?
the bums will always lose.
Plz don't ever say "Dinner Impossible" again.
Aw, Ozzie, I knew if I were not-a-democrat long enough you'd start to like me.
Musical fruit?
Dunno about the stew. My experience with hippies is that you have to brine them for a couple of days or they're really tough.
@IOZ: "Nutella, that is a genuine funny."
The Nut does give a right rough chuckle now and again, and for this we thank and praise him. As with many things, we likes it rough from time to time.
I think Anon 2:00pm might be Matt Yglesias.
HEY....EYEOZZZ!
Actually that was an excellent observation about the onslaught of " soon to be junk " products that we are inundated with these days. However I submit to you that this is indeed the face of progress in all of its inefficient and ineffectual glory.
Do I have to remind y'all again that an undue concern with obesity no longer belongs in the homonoietic time-frame?
Do you think you're all entitled to be Youssafaki, or be him?
Thank You Mystery Blogger for calling attention to the fact that Amerka's ridiculous economy is not an act of the god of "market forces", but a massively centrally controlled and PLANNED montrosity, worked out in mind(and soul) numbing detail, solely for the benefit of a handful culturally and psychologically isolated, morally inverted inbred, billionaires. If one came face to face with the tiny Anglo and Jewish ruling elite who freemarketcapitalism works just fine for, one would be reminded of an HP Lovecraft tale where the clueless hapless Yankee mommas boy, out on a sisghtseeing walk of the old remote and forshadowingly decrepit houses of Bumfuck New Hampshire, and who talks like wimpy from Popeye, finds himself surrounded by a hideous degenerate race of half human-half gelatinous deep ocean fish.
@anon 12:17
the mommas boy protaganist is drawn deeper and deeper into a progressively more monstrous society of monsters until he reaches its center where a patriarch of the monster clan (who is not only a "paleo conservative" and a strict constructionist but was actually there in 1787 when the fucking thing was written) exists Kept "alive" by being fed the blood and flesh of the children of the paupers who live in the squalid and depressed Connecticut River mill towns on the edge of the monsters estates. The protaganist suffers a break at this point, his mind unable to accept the horror of a hideous and inherently disordered economy, er, universe, and runs shrieking until his lungs hemmorage and he is found collapsed on the edge of a road. Taken to an assylum and chained to the wall of a padded cell he gibbers away unceasingly of the horror which exists right under our noses, as the earth goes on spinning under a sun now blackened. Unwilling to face the truth and not wishing to become gibbering nuts themselves, his petitbourgeoise caretakers ignore him.
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