Month: August 2009

Everyone in our society, we presume, has the opportunity to work hard, to better themselves, to achieve a comfortable if not prosperous life. The Calvinists had a similar notion, that if you worked hard and if the god of Abraham blessed you, you could succeed. Conservatives justify their privileges by saying you need to work hard and to have “merit.” I call it the myth of unlimited opportunity.

Some myths are charming stories. There is an entire canon of Greek and Roman mythology and there are the mythologies of other cultures. They often reflect themes of heroism or of morality, of values we think we should preserve in society. Then there are darker myths. The biblical creation myth, for instance, of Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden for eating from the forbidden tree of knowledge of good and evil, can be understood as humanity seeking to establish an understanding of morality independent of the Creator, to gain an independence we as a species perhaps are still not ready for. I interpreted it in terms of body shame, for as the story goes, it was their desperate attempts at modesty that tipped off an angered god. The story ends with the deity condemning women to servitude, to painful childbirth, and both men and women to mortality.

If we are to believe that everyone has the opportunity to succeed, this requires the resources for everyone to succeed, which means that we must be able to expand into infinity. It means, for example, that in 1774, the British Parliament could not pass the Quebec Act reserving much territory west of the Appalachians to the Indians. I guess Parliament missed that memo. It means of course that people on territory that we are to expand into will just have to go elsewhere, and if there is no where left for them to go, they’ll just have to be extinguished. The American Indians were the topic of that memo. And of course, any other countries thinking that the god of Abraham was talking to them when it came to conquering territory and saving heathen souls will forcefully have to be shown the error of their ways. Hence Mexico and Spain. Hence the fact that in all of U.S. history, there are less than twenty years (some say zero–it’s actually hard to find a truly comprehensive list of U.S. military engagements) in which its military has not been involved somewhere, somehow. Hence the fact the U.S. has military bases all around the world and feels righteous intervening wherever it wants, on whatever pretext.

Having conquered all this territory. and thus opened up all this opportunity, it follows that anyone who fails to succeed must have only themselves to blame. Thus, there is a tremendous shame in being poor. And conservatives believe we really don’t owe anything to the poor, no matter what. Hence welfare “reform.” Hence health care as “socialism.” Hence tax breaks for the rich.

So now the U.S. has a problem. Those people who have worked hard and who have “merit” are working day and night to move as many jobs that pay anything to places that pay less, to places where environmental and labor protections are weak or nonexistent. And politicians talk about restoring U.S. “competitiveness,” which means 1) letting the rich export jobs, 2) weakening protections in the U.S., 3) giving corporations massive tax breaks and other subsidies, while 4) letting them pay ever lower wages to their workers.

And when people working low-wage jobs can’t pay their mortgages, we don’t give them any help, but we bail out the banks that shouldn’t have lent them the money in the first place. After all, the financial system is essential. Ordinary people, the ones who actually pay taxes, can wait. We are not entitled to those rights enshrined beginning with Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that the United States ratified under a constitution whose Article 6 enshrines treaties with the highest law in the land and whose ninth amendment states that “[t]he enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people,” like perhaps those rights our politicians agreed to in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And our politicians will congratulate themselves, claiming without even the possibility of proof that they have reduced the rate of job loss. They will remain silent about the loss of full-time work. They will remain silent about lower wages. They will remain silent about the loss of dignity when people find they cannot pay their bills because their wages don’t even pay rent (do the arithmetic).

This is the story of my life. And though I have worked hard, have achieved my master’s degree, and am on my way to a Ph.D., I guess I just don’t have “merit.” Or maybe Jesus hates me.

I shop at Whole Foods.

If that sounds like a confession, that’s because it is. I do this despite CEO John Mackey’s union busting, despite his opposition to health care reform, and despite the often exorbitant prices. I do this because I have little choice.

I am vegan. That does not mean I live by produce alone. I like alternative burgers. I like fake cheese. I like particular kinds of granola that I can add to well, lots of things. Locally-owned stores either do not carry a large enough selection or do not carry it consistently. I’d have to burn a lot more gas to find what I need elsewhere.

I order what I can, on line, but a lot of it is perishable and can’t be shipped. And of course there are the occasional things that I need right this very minute.

You see, there just aren’t a lot of options. Whole Foods either bought them out or put them out of business.

I understand that Mackey calls himself a libertarian. That should be with a capital L, for the Libertarian party, which isn’t really libertarian at all; capitalist Libertarians do not acknowledge economic hierarchy. And when John Mackey locates his stores only in upscale neighborhoods, resists unions, and promotes health insurance plans with $2500 deductibles for low-paid workers, it is hard to say he acknowledges economic hierarchy.

When I go into a Whole Foods market, the appearance of wholesome food is overwhelming. The employees (oh, but I’m supposed to call them “team members”) are always friendly, even anxious to serve.

I’ve worked in customer service. I know that the mantra that “the customer is always right” would be laughable if it did not cause so much suffering, especially among low-paid workers. This attitude further demeans low-paid workers in a society that mostly values humans only for their money. So I worry for the people who treat me so nicely.

And I have to remember that many neighborhoods don’t have grocery stores at all. Convenience stores and fast food outlets are the only options many people have. They certainly don’t have anything like a Whole Foods.

While Libertarians trust the market place to regulate social values, the experience of Whole Foods shows that this simply isn’t so. Capitalism has one core value: return on investment. In a Grist interview, Mackey, who calls himself vegan despite eating eggs,

wish[es] Whole Foods didn’t sell animal products, but the fact of the matter is that the population of vegetarians in America is like 5 percent, and vegans are like 25 or 30 percent of the vegetarians. So if we were to become a vegan store, we’d go out of business, we’d cease to exist. And that wouldn’t be good for the animals, for our customers, our employees, our stockholders, or anybody else. If I were to take Whole Foods in this direction I would be removed as CEO.

Mackey denies a dichotomy that “people are either doing things for altruistic reasons or they are greedy and selfish, just after profit,” insisting “the whole idea is to do both.”

Mackey’s approach is to achieve spectacular profits by marketing to well-off health-conscious and environment-conscious consumers. He claims core values besides monetary profitability, but the success of Whole Foods means that I don’t have the option to choose organizations whose practices actually reflect my values.

So yes, I shop at Whole Foods. That doesn’t mean I’m happy about it.

I’ve been going back over my old blog entries, I am reminded that I have been forecasting trouble for President Barack Obama with, given that I’ve made this forecast to several audiences over a period of time, a vagueness as to timing.

I will not be resolving that ambiguity today. There is no way I can precisely forecast the moment when a confluence of several factors hits. And some things have played out a little differently than I expected, which is unsurprising. What I will say is that I believe the danger is greater than I thought.

I have been forecasting that a year or so down the road from Obama’s election or inauguration, the United States would still be bogged down in Iraq, the economy would be in a shambles, and that it was going to be very interesting to see how things played out. I both relished the possibility of a significant transformation and feared that revolution would simply replace one set of thugs with another. I also conceded the possibility that the elites whom Howard Zinn describes as having been guiding this country through a series of difficult times, conceding the absolute minimum necessary to the minimum number of people to avoid an insurrection, might pull it off again.

At this moment, the last of these possibilities is not manifest. Everything I see suggests to me that the elite are generally so persuaded that rescuing the financial institutions and guiding automakers through bankruptcy is more than enough to, as some have phrased it, pacify Wall Street, that they will utterly neglect Main Street. I firmly believe that a more fundamental cause than reckless lending and incomprehensible financial instruments of the present economic crisis lies in the great disparities of wealth that both created the opportunity for subprime lending and made it unsustainable. I do not see this problem being addressed.

Rather, I see a rush to rescue the rich while everyone else is left to suffer.

To my great disbelief, the United States does seem to be backing out of Iraq. The government I have called a U.S. puppet has insisted on at least an appearance of withdrawal. It remains to be seen how increasing violence will affect this outcome. But the U.S. is increasing its commitment to what many have called the “graveyard of empires,” Afghanistan. General Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander there, acknowledges that the Taliban have made significant strategic gains. McChrystal’s primary military response appears tactical, combined with increased troop levels. His strategic response lies in reconstruction efforts that have so far been a huge boondoggle. Casualties are increasing, and he believe they will continue to rise.

There are two huge problems with our presence in Afghanistan. First, the U.S. has lost sight of its original purpose for being there, which was to apprehend Osama bin Laden, blamed for the 9/11 attacks. The 9/11 attacks have been attributed not to the Taliban whom the U.S. now fights but rather to the focus of its rhetoric, al Qaeda. This leads to the second huge problem, which is the presumption of a right for the U.S. to be there. This war cannot be rationalized by Taliban attitudes towards women; these attitudes are a product of local culture rather than of a particular group, and an activist film-making group, Rethink Afghanistan, has documented how U.S. influence has allowed girls to go to school and a few women to exercise political influence but how, overall, the war has made conditions far worse for women.

As casualties mount and the U.S. defeat becomes more apparent, there is little reason to believe the U.S. public will not come to the same conclusion it reached with Vietnam and with Iraq. This won’t just be losing the war the U.S. had already lost in Iraq; it will be losing a second one as well. This, with a military budget of a half a trillion dollars, an amount some have said exceeds the expenditure of the rest of the world combined. (They appear to exaggerate, but only by a little.)

Here lies the confluence of two problems. The U.S. spends exorbitantly bailing out the rich. The U.S. spends exorbitantly on imperialism. Both excite popular anger. Both aggravate a huge U.S. debt. Whether this debt is sustainable is in dispute. And given that U.S. economic statistics are manipulated, the ratio of debt to gross domestic product may not be what it appears. Some, including the U.S.’ biggest creditor, China, have expressed concern. There are moves to reduce world reliance of the dollar as a reserve currency; these don’t appear likely to come to fruition quickly, but if they do, the Chinese will be eating their losses as the dollar loses value, and the U.S. government will lose a considerable portion of the market for its debt.

Now we come to a problem I have not been factoring into my thinking but which has become apparent this week with the “Town Hell meetings.” Garry Trudeau, in his Doonesbury comic, has suggested that the endgame to all this is to discredit the Obama presidency. William Kristol has advised Republicans to “go for the kill” on health care. At this writing, it is far from clear that they will fail.

And whether or not the Republicans, working with “Blue Dog” Democrats, succeed in killing health care reform, their ability to mobilize these angry crowds points to an ugly reality in the United States, that there is a significant conservative base of ignorant, manipulable people who will threaten violence to preserve white wealthy privilege. They voted for George Bush in sufficient numbers that it was possible for him to steal two elections. They are stupid. They are real. They are numerous. They blame immigrants, minorities, and women for their economic suffering rather than the wealthy. They are willing to kill. We ignore this base at our peril.

I am thinking of the Spanish Civil War, in which as I understand it, a three-way conflict was reduced to a two-way conflict because the government preferred fascism to anarchism, because the elite were determined to maintain a position of privilege that anarchists threatened and that fascists enhanced.

We now face a three-way conflict in the United States which has come to the brink of violence at “Town Hell meetings.” One side consists, as always, of the elite, manipulating factions among the public in their contest for power. Republicans have appealed to evangelical Protestants and delivered as much to them as they thought they could get away with. Democrats have appealed to progressives and delivered virtually nothing. Neither evangelicals nor progressives have any plausible alternatives at election time. The mystery, as always, lies in the leanings of the general population, presumably somewhere in between, and always with lots of demagogues citing polls and claiming to speak for the “silent majority.” So few people vote, and they are offered such poor alternatives that elections are no measure. Poll questions are often phrased in ways that reflect the biases of the poll takers. Anyone who thinks they really know how the “general” public feels–to the extent it can be generalized–about the culture war that plagues this country is a fool.

Today, no more than I did two years ago, do I have any idea how this plays out.

“May you live in interesting times.” Whether or not this is indeed an ancient Chinese curse, we most certainly live in cursed times. People are losing their jobs and their homes. Their only hope is to be cannon fodder in a losing war. They are still up in arms about social issues which a few pundits call divisive and distracting. And these times are certainly interesting.

It is all the rage right now to rag on the mobs descending on town hall meetings spouting off lies they’ve been fed from mainstream politicians in the Republican faction about a pathetically watered-down health care plan emerging from Congress. The odd part about this is that it frames the Democrats as innocently (and perhaps too sheepishly) defending the Truth against budding fascists.

There is a huge problem with this picture. Democrats have been economical with the truth as well. Not only were they complicit with Bush administration crimes for eight long years, but now that they are in power, they not only perpetuate those crimes and participate in a cover-up, even going so far as to seek to withhold evidence from a British court, to conceal photographs of torture from the public, and to only selectively prosecute torturers. This is the president, who as candidate, promised to improve the U.S. image around the world.

On health care, Democrats were less than honest in excluding a single-payer proposal from the “full” range of ideas to be considered, even going so far as to have advocates arrested. Even the promised floor vote is nothing more than a show for “liberal” lawmakers to record their votes.

After all this, Obama condemns “wild misrepresentations by opponents of health care reform. I posted on the then-president-elect’s web site back in November: We’ve endured a lot of lies. It is time for some truth.

But Obama chose a different path.

In March of this year, less than two months into Barack Obama’s presidency, I published a blog entry entitled, “I told you so.” As have others, I pointed out how Obama had betrayed not only Progressive hopes but any hopes of disenfranchised African-Americans. Drawing upon Malcolm X’s masterful speech, “Message to the Grassroots,” I said that Obama was playing a role of the “house negro.”

I take it back. Yes, I was wrong.

To call Obama a “house negro” is to imply that he was playing the role of a slave, just in a more comfortable position than the “field negros” to which Malcolm X referred in his allegory. In making this comparison, I was also drawing upon Paulo Freire, who in Pedagogy of the Oppressed wrote that it was the peasant who was elevated to a position to oversee his former colleagues would be crueler to them than the landowner ever thought of being. But there is a nuance between these two conditions, that of the “house negro” and of the overseer” that I overlooked.

The “house negro,” at least as portrayed by Malcolm X, exercises no oversight role. Obama is president; he answers to corporate masters, and like the “house negro,” he may live in a nice house (though I gather it has a nasty housefly problem), but he exercises power over others. Both Freire and Malcolm X referred largely to plantations, with oppressed workers and a very small aristocracy in command. But where Malcolm X was talking about slaves who are fortunate to be fed, Freire was talking about miserably paid workers.

It is possible to argue that in one crucial respect, African-American slaves (but not other slaves) in the United States were better off than today’s workers, for their owners had invested sums of money in them, and therefore had an interest in their health. It is not a strong argument; in Medical Apartheid, Harriet Washington recounts how much of today’s medical science is based on extraordinarily cruel human experimentation, which often served no scientific purpose and which was certainly not beneficial for slaves’ health. But capitalists deem Freire’s plantation workers and most others of the working class to be infinitely replaceable.

Obama has now made his position clear. No, he is not a “house negro,” but an overseer.

Obama has reversed his campaign promise to renegotate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Workers in all three countries have an interest in renegotiation: U.S. workers cannot compete with those who labor under weaker environmental and labor protections. Mexican farmers are being ruined by a flood of U.S. agricultural products like those from the U.S. factory hog farm which may be the source of the H1N1 “swine flu” virus. Mexican woes have meant more desperate people flooding across the border to fuel a nativist image of immigrants stealing U.S. jobs. And as Laura Carlsen puts it, Canadian citizens would like “greater control over their natural resources. “

The only justification for the status quo is that major corporations like NAFTA the way it is. And that’s just how Barack Obama, Mexican President Felipe Calderon and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper intend to keep it.

There are a couple ways to understand the “Town Hell” meetings–not really meetings but the equivalents of torch-bearing mobs whipped into hysterics by mainstream politicians in the faction that has been displaced from power.

First, I remember a number of stunts including at least one attempt to arrest a Bush administration official for crimes against humanity and protests against the invasion of Iraq that blocked San Francisco intersections. We on the left have been angry too for reasons that are both different from and similar to those menacing politicians who support even a pathetic attempt at health care reform.

These differences and similarities reflect the culture wars that have recently most visibly divided this country since George W. Bush stole the election in 2000, but which I think historians could trace to about the time of the Industrial Revolution. Yes, the Industrial Revolution.

The Industrial Revolution in the latter half of the 19th Century nearly coincides with a number of other developments in the United States. The Confederacy had lost the Civil War, African-Americans had been freed, the men among them had even been given the vote, and white bitterness was so palpable that the fact that middle and upper class white women were exercising greater control over their fertility, in combination of a wave of immigration consisting largely of darker-skinned, non-English speaking Catholics, led to cries of “race suicide.” It was a time for lynchings. “Race suicide” was code for white fear that they would be outnumbered politically, that they would lose their privileges in a heavily segregated, bigoted society.

Evangelical Protestants had been in North America since colonization but it was about the time of the Industrial Revolution that massive revivals began. Sex became an issue in this country like it never had been before as a more mobile population began to concentrate in cities. Men met women, women got pregnant, men moved on, and women bore the consequences. Ironically, this fed a backlash that sought to reinforce patriarchal control over women’s bodies. White women existed primarily to preserve the race; they were not to sleep with whomever they chose and they were absolutely to produce as many offspring as possible.

That the “culture war” in this country is rooted both in racism and in sexism is no surprise, at least to those on the left. And that is the difference from protests against the Bush administration. Intellectually, we on the left can argue that the war on Iraq is illegal and that the abrogation of civil liberties undermines the very values the “war on terror” putatively seeks to defend. We can accept that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. We can see that the health care package emerging from Congress will do nothing that budding fascists claim it will do.

I am deeply skeptical that this country will resist the rise of fascism. We have been at war nearly our entire history to assert the privilege of wealthy white men to dominate and exploit everyone else. That includes the war and genocide on American Indians, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and a series of lesser known actions in between so pervasive that there are fewer than twenty years in the United States chronology in which its military has not been engaged somewhere, somehow.

Residents of the United States overwhelmingly respond with patriotic fervor whenever their leaders want war and with apathy whenever the action is not so grand. A part of the U.S. foundational mythology is “American exceptionalism,” that the god of Abraham has blessed this country with a right to intervene wherever and whenever to impose “capitalist democracy.” And it is not to avoid sending young men and women into harm’s way, but rather to challenge this myth that is to “betray our troops.”

I was raised in this mythology. Though I have been on the left my entire life, it is only within the last few years that I have come to recognize the evil in the soul of this nation. And even having come to this understanding, I have been complicit in this evil to the extent that I have failed to do everything in my power to stop it. I have understood that Barack Obama was not the great progressive hope but a mainstream Democrat, an enabler of Bush crimes, what Malcolm X called a “house negro.” But even his election is intolerable to a faction among politicians and among the public whose only answer is “no,” who will manipulate his race to advance a conservative agenda even beyond the horror of the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush years.

I do not wish to remain among such people.

I’m seeing reports on Twitter that protesters who have been detained by the Iranian regime have suffered severe injuries from rapes that have occurred within the prisons. Stories too have emerged of detainees compelled to lick toilets (possibly out of thirst). Confessions extracted through torture are presented in the courts.

It is well that the United States keeps its mouth shut. For its own record in Bagram and in Guantanamo is little better. Just like the Iranian regime, the U.S. regime wants to present confessions in court, or if they are unacceptable there, then in military tribunals. Convictions are the goal, not justice, as the Obama administration upholds the crimes of its predecessors.

Interrogation experts know that torture doesn’t work. According to U.S. Army Field Manual 34-52, chapter 1, “The goal of any interrogation is to obtain usable and reliable information,” but social scientists understand that the goal of torture is not information but intimidation, not so much even of the victim but of the surrounding society.

And that’s why — there was an earlier question about has the President said anything to people in his own party — they’re reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do.

—Ari Fleischer, September 26, 2001

Iranian society is to fear the Iranian regime. Muslims around the world are to fear the U.S. government. U.S. citizens are to fear the U.S. government.

Information is not the goal. Justice is not the goal. Submission is the goal.

There’s an old metaphor often used as a pejorative against someone, that they shall “reap what they sow.” In other words, that if they act in a way that is not in accordance with traditional notions of morality, the outcome will be bad and they shall suffer the consequences. It is sort of a Biblical version of Karma.

I’m becoming more alert to signs of economic despair. I’m seeing the boarded up storefronts, the vacant buildings, the unharvested trees that we might just drive past without noticing. I don’t see the unemployed (except for myself); we are shamed into invisibility. And I think of the relentless corporate “downsizing,” the export of skilled and unskilled jobs again and again to cheaper places, utterly without regard to what should happen to those left behind.

The rich, we are to understand, reap what they sow. They harvest ever larger profits, ever larger bonuses, ever greater tax breaks. Meanwhile, the country invests in education, making a primary and secondary education compulsory. It encourages students to continue on with a post-secondary education, with community colleges, training programs, financial aid, and public universities; and it discourages them as well, with increasing student loan burdens and higher costs. And students invest their time, energy, and money for a promise that should benefit not only themselves, but society as a whole.

I’ve been noticing these apple trees for a while now; we have resources in this country we do not use. Someone planted these trees but has not harvested the fruit. Instead, they allow their rewards to rot on the ground.

As a society, we persist in rewarding the rich. Am I wrong to notice the toll of humans left to waste?

I hate it when somebody posts an opinion piece I want to agree with, but just can’t.

Eric Alterman raises some good points about the “birther” bizarreness on CNN. Let’s face it, questions about John McCain’s claim to U.S. citizenship (he was born in the Panama Canal zone to citizens) have a lot more substance (which isn’t saying much) than questions about Barack Obama’s. But Obama is Black (partly, anyway) and McCain is white (enough, anyway, that no one questions it). I’ll let you draw your own conclusion about that.

Alterman expresses outrage, as have many on the left and among Progressives, that CNN allows Lou Dobbs to continue feeding wingnuts, giving credence to utterly discredited claims. He castigates the network for “tak[ing] no responsibility for whether the ‘news’ it broadcasts on its network is true or false, even if calls into question the fundamental legitimacy of our political system.”

“Fundamental legitimacy of our political system?” After all the shenanigans, including two stolen presidential elections, the Patriot Act, domestic spying, preemptive wars on false pretenses, of the Bush years, Alterman worries about the “fundamental legitimacy of our political system?” After the media served as a collective echo chamber for “Swift Boat” claims against John Kerry, but generated so much flack that then CBS anchor Dan Rather had to be fired for a story challenging George W. Bush’s draft dodging service to the Texas Air National Guard in 2004, Alterman worries about the “fundamental legitimacy of our political system?” Now?

Eric, I like you, but I gotta explain something. This horse left the barn a long, long time ago, and the discussion we need to be having now is not whether the mainstream media are serving their proper role in our political system, but how that role will now be filled in an era where traditional models have proven economically unsustainable.

I have some friends who are fond of a phrase, “damnation through faint praise.” I asked them where they heard it and they think they might have heard it someplace. It refers to praise so weak that it amounts to a rather severe condemnation.

And as I drive around Sonoma County, seeing the places where the environment has already been ravaged to make way for now vacant, some boarded-up buildings, including entire condominium complexes, office space, and lots of retail space, I have little good to say about the economy. Speaking for myself, the dot-com boom was the only time in my life when I felt like I was actually making a living: Before the bust, I made $50,000 per year as a technical writer for a company that finally shut down its final, prolonged incarnation recently. When I see all the prosperity that surrounds me, even here in Sonoma County, but particularly in the next county south, Marin, you’ll just have to forgive me for feeling like I’m just not asking for a whole lot. I now have a Master’s degree, I’m fifty years old, and I really think I’ve “paid my dues.”

New unemployment numbers for the United States came out this morning. I’ve long been suspicious of these, because I have seen how they manipulate the numbers. If you stop counting underemployed and discouraged workers, you can make the unemployment numbers a whole lot more politically palatable. Between a fact that a majority of people who seek to be employed remain so and a myth of self-reliance that encourages the unemployed to blame themselves, you can silence a whole lot of dissent, even among “discouraged workers.”

I went to Sonoma County Job Link for a “Hidden Job Market” workshop. They now count long-term employment as lasting two years. Where I have lived my entire life with the notion that making oneself into a salesperson to find a job should be a necessary, temporary, and rare aspect of life, they are now essentially saying that this is a permanent condition. In other words, it is a permanent condition for workers that they are to beg for work, to beg for their very survival.

So I’ve been picking apart the numbers, trying to get a better picture of what’s really going on. I assume that a lot of people who are no longer counted as being part of the labor force would in fact work if they could. I assume a lot of people who are working part time would work full time if they could. Old people may retire or die, young people may come into the workforce, but I assume that workers’ need for jobs remains relatively constant.

There are some weaknesses in what I do. Any measure of inflation is arbitrary so I haven’t at all been able to settle on a good way to measure wages. The numbers I’m using for population are labeled, “civilian, noninstitutionalized,” which means I don’t count people who have gone to prison, possibly for crimes they wouldn’t have committed if the economy made any sense, and I don’t consider those people signing up to be cannon fodder in the military, perhaps because this is the only opportunity they see. I assume there are other weaknesses in this analysis that I haven’t thought of.

So what do I see? For the first time in many months that mainstream economists have been heralding a decline in the rate that jobs were being lost, it shows up in my numbers. Mind you, fewer people still had jobs in July than in June, but for the first time since April 2008, the increase in the rate at which the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted people as unemployed went negative. Hence the title of this entry, “damnation through faint praise.”

As a percentage of population, 59.49 percent were employed in June. 59.37 percent were employed in July. That’s 155,000 fewer people.

In the year 2000, just as the dot-coms were beginning to bust, we reached a peak employment of 64.40 percent of the “civilian, noninstitutionalized” population. In 2000, the Bureau of Labor Statistics excluded 32.93 percent of the population from the job market. It excludes 34.50 percent now, over eleven million more people. The population has grown by about 23 million in that time. Just three million more people have jobs.

Wall Street and mainstream economists all say things are looking up. We’re bottoming out, they say. President Barack Obama even takes credit for “losing jobs at less than half the rate we were when [he] took office.” Here’s what they don’t say:

• Wages are dropping because people desperate for jobs will accept lower wages.
• People are exhausting their unemployment benefits.
• Homeowners are finding very little help in avoiding foreclosure.
• By 2011, nearly half of homeowners will be “underwater” in their mortgages.

But while leaving the middle and working classes to strangle, the U.S. government moved at lightning speed to bail out the financial industry and pushed General Motors and Chrysler through bankruptcies at an astonishing pace. Even the great celebrator of capitalism, Forbes, has published an article criticizing the lavish bonuses doled out at taxpayer expense. In it, Robert Lenzner wrote, “One of the failures of capitalism is the pathetic lack of responsibility taken by the owners of American business and finance, who have sat idly by getting free cheese from Uncle Sam.”

But we are to understand that these priorities were essential in arresting a precipitous decline in the economy. As Noam Chomsky wrote in 1990, “For the homeless in the streets, then, the primary objective is to ensure that the rich live happily in their mansions.”