Modern Theology

       On the same day Apple released its new super I-Pads this week it was given a free pass for its practice of outsourcing millions of jobs.  None other than California’s  Democrat  Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsome (former mayor of San Francisco) proclaimed on his website that the new California Economic Agenda does not intend “to recreate the past and restore the jobs lost to global competition.” [http://www.ltg.ca.gov/s_aneconomicandcompetitivnessagenda.html[

         

        In a magisterial article also out this week, Harvard’s professor of political economy, Benjamin M. Friedman, laments the growing jobs gap but utters not a single word about deterring or correcting Silicon Valley’s massive export of jobs to China. [see “Brave New Capitalists’ Paradise: The Jobs,” The New York Review of Books, 11/7/20013] 

      

        Inevitability is the theme here; meaning corporate success and its consequence are in the same category as an act of god, like lightening or hurricanes.  It’s an inexact analogy since there always are alternatives to corporate lightening, but obeisance is the thing.  When decisions were made in the private sector fifty years ago that would doom Detroit, Cleveland and swaths of cities like Chicago and Los Angeles as U. S. capitalists decided they could make more money in overseas manufacturing, it was the worshipful obedience to such decisions that closed the deal and destroyed whole cities.  Memories are soon lost, as in the old quip about the difference between de jure and de facto segregation: de facto meant nobody did it. It was just modern theology at work.

       

       This adds up to the huge importance of the current prosecutions of corporate fraud and setting in place tough regulations under the Dodd-Frank law.  The dramatis persona embodies a great sameness.  Big money can make you look the other way, especially if it’s the gods at work. 

       

        Such dollars without sense show parallel dramas. Over the last fifty years it’s possible to watch a whole generation of glittering universities rise and brilliant scholars write their juried journal articles but still discover that the high school dropout rate in many urban school districts hovers around 40 to 50 percent today, just as it did in 1963.  Articles written back then always mentioned the family environment of low income people whose limited vocabulary limits their children’s.  Articles written today repeat the observation.  Fifty years of familiar stories about kids getting on drugs, committing crimes, heading to prison. It was also fifty years without decent incomes for millions of families, who if they had time and money to grow their vocabularies they could have advanced themselves.

        This week’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports unemployment offers a continuing picture of the deepening disaster for millions of our sisters and brothers:  “Despite 43 months of private-sector job growth, there were still 1.8 million fewer jobs on nonfarm payrolls and 1.3 million fewer jobs on private payrolls in September than when the recession began in December 2007.”       

       

        The Times' Catherine Rampell writes that “the labor market lost, rather than gained, momentum over the summer, leaving us with less than a desirable cushion just as the government was shuttered in response to political shenanigans,” citing Diane Swonk, chief economist at Mesirow Financial about the new data from the BLS.  [NY Times 10/22]  Even before the recent shutdown the federal government had the lowest number of civilian employees on its payrolls since 1966, according to their delayed September jobs report.”    The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington reported:

*  The Labor Department’s most comprehensive alternative unemployment rate measure — which includes people who want to work but are discouraged from looking is still 4.8 percentage points higher than at the start of the recession.  By that measure, over 21 million 

people are unemployed or underemployed….

* ….there were still 1.8 million fewer jobs on nonfarm payrolls and 1.3 million fewer jobs on private payrolls in September than when the recession began in December 2007. 

 * Nearly two-fifths (36.9 percent) of the 11.3 million people who are unemployed — 4.1 million people — have been looking for work for 27 weeks or longer.  These long-term unemployed represent 2.7 percent of the labor force.  Before this recession, the previous highs for these statistics over the past six decades were 26.0 percent and 2.6 percent, respectively, in June 1983.  [Oct 22 CBPP web]

         This is huge and very bad news. Or is it just the gods disposing?