Monday, June 18, 2012

Slipping on the Banana (Republic) Peel

The American Job Market - like the American Economy, an artificial construct foisted on the people through manipulation of government policy, tax law and media disinfotainment -- is clogged with talented, experienced professionals, as well as with well-educated and -trained young workers who can't find jobs due to ridiculous application requirements by companies who really don't need to hire.

This is just one more aspect of the race to the bottom. The point is to build a large pool of highly-skilled people who are under- or un-employed, so that the employed live in fear of losing their jobs to the many qualified candidates out there, to put strong downward pressure on wages and expectations.

it can happen because most "work" in America is unnecessary - paper pushing, PR disseminating, useless product promoting. The necessary work of producing food, maintaining order and public safety, creating and maintaining housing, energy, transportation, is done by a very small fraction of the population.

We have graduated - thanks to technology - into that "future of the past" when people "don't have to work" anymore because all the necessities are supplied by robots and a small cadre of folks who control them and keep them in repair.

But that future is too egalitarian and leaves the mass of people with too much time to study, to think for themselves, to plan a better world. The Fascist powers can't allow that. They create crisis after crisis (or spectacle after spectacle - vide The Kardashians and Jersey Shore)  to distract people from what is right in front of them and maintain an artificial hierarchy in which they increasingly control everything.

The Student Debt scheme is the new "indentured servitude," as the "housing bubble' was a way to separate the rubes from their assets and make them more compliant and desperate for State support (and control!).

The Stock Market Churn, which makes "financiers" rich while doing nothing for the economy or the mass of people - in fact, tends to damage small investors, who are the "marks" in this game where the house always wins and the occasional apparent winner is often a shill - while the consistent winners are those who have rigged the game in their own favor.

The Banana Republicans are intent on turning our country into Colombia or pre-Fidel Cuba. The puppet show of the War On Drugsā„¢ - actually a War on Blacks, Hispanics and The Poor - has turned the country into a militarized prison state to prepare the way for further oppression to come.

I know I sound like a wild-eyed militia-man - but I'm not. I'm a patriotic, middle-class American looking at the handwriting on the wall with a growing sense of horror.

We finally elected our first black President, a man who had known poverty and discrimination, and what have we gotten? A toady for Wall Street and the moneyed special interests who doesn't stand up to the anti-democratic initiatives of the Republicans not because he hasn't got the backbone or because he's  somehow "powerless," but because he wants the same things they want - more money and more power for himself and his rich friends and supporters.
The whole economic system is dysfunctional, from the administrative practices, where the "leaders" who brought the big banks to ruin still have their jobs and 7-figure salaries, to hiring, where talented recent college graduates battle displaced, experienced, skilled workers to beg for jobs at little above minimum wage.

If there is a way out, it has to be with a new grass-roots political organization, but at the moment the mass of the population is so stupified (in the most literal sense) by the media circus, so lulled into complacency on the one hand and so frightened on the other that they are being driven like sheep.

The Occupy Movement - or whatever may grow out of it - holds the most hope, but most people are so bamboozled that they are terrified of demanding change, equality and democracy. Just artificially deflate the artificially inflated price of gas by 10% and they are suddenly convinced that "everythings getting better!"

The message we send - "WTFU, America!" needs to keep being sent, but history argues that until the moment is right - whenever that may be - the message will not be heard.

Sadly, human history is mostly a record of cataclysms brought about by desperation. Hopefully some day we'll get by that. The current squeeze may be our opportunity to find an alternative way of evolving, and I hope we will seize it, but I'm not holding my breath, if you know what I mean...