Posted on 09/03/2011 5:52:01 AM PDT by IbJensen
There Is No There There
Zero jobs last month — a net change of zero job growth? It was just announced that last month’s unemployment is still above 9% — despite the nearly five trillion dollars in Keynesian pump-priming, the near zero interest rates, the expanded unemployment and food stamp support, and the government takeovers and subsidies of businesses. There is a scary sort of deer-in-the-headlights look about Obama and Biden that is quite disturbing, as if they are thinking, “This was not supposed to happened to us. Geithner, Goolsbee, Orszag, Romer, Summers assured us that all this borrowing would turn things around — but they are all gone or leaving, so now we are alone? What to do? Hmmm. More them/us class warfare rhetoric? Embrace more of the California/Illinois/New York blue-state model? More European Union emulation? A national high-speed rail jobs program? Bring back Van Jones and “millions of green jobs”? Borrow another $5 trillion? Maybe negative interest rates? Seventy-five million on food stamps? Four years of unemployment insurance? A new Department of Jobs? Call in Jimmy Carter for advice about 1979? $100 billion more in green subsidies to progressive caring companies? Take over Ford? Another speech from Buffett? Unleash the Congressional Black Caucus?”
Two Sorts of Depression
Job growth is as often driven by psychological impulses on the part of employers as actual facts on the ground, given the requirement of a business that it must plan for the unknown future better than do its rivals. While business people don’t read every economic report or follow every political psychodrama, they do watch for trends, know hourly the pulse of their businesses, and talk to colleagues and rivals to form general opinions about business climate and government attitudes and future policies. I’ve been speaking a lot lately to civic groups, a few firms, investors, large and small farmers and farm suppliers, and individual employers. And the following would fairly sum up their current state of mind.
The Great Sit-Down Strike
In the last 30 months, the Obama administration has created a psychological landscape that finally just seemed, whether fairly or not, too hostile to most employers to risk new hiring and buying. Each act, in and of itself, was irrelevant. Together they are proving catastrophic and doing the near impossible of turning a brief recovery into another recession.
Here is the lament I heard: the near $5 trillion in borrowing in just three years, the radical growth in the size of the federal government and its regulatory zeal, ObamaCare, the Boeing plant closure threat, the green jobs sweet-heart deals and Van Jones-like “Millions of Green Jobs” nonsense, the vast expansion in food stamps and unemployment pay-outs, the reversal of the Chrysler creditors, politically driven interference in the car industry, the failed efforts to get card check and cap and trade, the moratoria on new drilling in the Gulf, the general antipathy to new fossil fuel exploitation coupled with new finds of vast new reserves, the new financial regulations, an aggressive EPA oblivious to the effects of its advocacy on jobs, the threatened close-down of energy plants, the support for idling thousands of acres of irrigated farmland due to environmental regulations, the constant talk of higher taxes, the needlessly provocative rhetoric of “fat cat”, “millionaires and billionaires,” “corporate jet owners,” etc. juxtaposed, in hypocritical fashion, to Martha’s Vineyard, Costa del Sol, and Vail First Family getaways — all of these isolated strains finally are becoming a harrowing opera to business people.
Despite enormous opportunity for many cash-rich firms to take advantage of the down cycles (low interest, plentiful potential employees, discounted prices, etc.), they are taking a pass, almost as if to collectively sigh, “This bunch doesn’t like me much and I’m going to hunker down, hoard my cash, and sit out the next year and a half until they are gone.” And the administration’s efforts to counteract these symbols and impressions by courting a high-profile, hyper-capitalist Warren Buffett, or a GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt have proven even more ironic: the former calls for higher taxes that his firms seek to avoid, or targets his post-mortem wealth to (more efficient?) private foundations that rob the Treasury of billions in lost inheritance taxes, or knows higher taxes won’t much matter to his tens of billions in net worth; the latter’s firm paid no 2010 U.S. income taxes on many of its profits and outsourced jobs overseas. And when Obama is told by his base to “get tough,” “get angry,” and “double-down” on the EU-like statist policies and Chicago-organizing, get-in-their-face rhetoric that got him into this jobs stagnation mess, should we laugh or cry? Get furious and demand — what? Snarl and scream about the right to go “big” from $1.6 trillion to $2 trillion in annual borrowing?
Highly publicized visits to bankrupt subsidized green plants, blaming George Bush, new racially-driven invective from some congresspeople against the Tea Party, sermons about the sensitivities of illegal aliens, politically-correct tutorials about Islam — all that might rally the base or in isolation be understandable, but again fairly or not, such liberal rhetoric simply adds to the problem from yet another dimension: confirming perceptions that employers are about the last people in the world that this administration is worried about.
The Upper-Middle-Class Lament
I talked to a gentleman in the Central Valley the other day; he voiced a rarely heard lament. He was a private business person who thought he had saved enough for retirement but could not see any income anywhere: (1) his cash is getting almost no interest in a variety of savings accounts; (2) he can’t sell his house without a loss and can’t see any foreseeable increase in its equity; (3) his 401(K) is still down and never quite recovered from the post-2008 dive and is now simply too volatile for him to know what to do; (4) he assumes taxes will go up to pay for the subsidies of others for which he does not qualify for —yet; (5) he has no public pension and has less income than those who used to make far less but worked for the federal government, state, or city. I could only say that Obama would say, “Well, your’re better off than many in my base.”
Vandal Watch
Last week, I mentioned that my local community is struggling with council members calling each other names and alleging serial conflicts of interest, theft of the city’s manhole covers by public employees, and child pornography charges lodged against a policeman. This week? An epidemic of the theft of honorific bronze plaques from the walls of the city’s schools, civic centers, and public buildings — the sort of commemoration for good deeds that are the stuff of civilization. It reminds me of Procopius’s description of post-Roman Italy in the 6th-century AD, when lost Ostrogoth and Visigoth souls drifted amid the great cities of the Old Romans, cannibalizing the ancients’ marble, bronze, and lead clamps, and melting down monuments for lime. What scares me is that the gang bangers, who are prying these plaques off the walls and selling them, for pennies on their original dollars, for scrap, have no idea of the now dead who built and created these buildings and institutions, but so often in extremis will expect to use them. Did the man who built a school or the woman who founded a civic club ever expect that their commemorative citations would end up in a melt-down pile in the local wrecking yard?
Copper wire torn out from agricultural pumps? Manhole covers stolen by their very custodians? Commemorative plaques pried out? We are almost an entire generation of parasites that cannot create anything new and so feed on the capital and labor of the past. Sixth-century Rome to the core, or maybe Dark-Age Greece around 1000 BC where the illiterate and ignorant were wandering beneath the walls of Mycenae or Pylos looking for shelter that they could not build for themselves, and swearing superhuman “gods” must have erected such walls. Who knows, just as the most fertile period of Greek myth-making came out of the oral traditions of the Dark Ages as an impoverished and illiterate age tried to make sense of the monumental traces of a lost civilization, so too soon we may think our forgotten dam builders and water project architects of the last century were Apollo or the Cyclops, as we watch their legacies erode and crumble.
Book Watch
I will post a review of Dick Cheney’s memoir that I just finished this morning on the Hoover “Defining Ideas” website. I’m just finishing a book review of Eliot Cohen’s fascinating history of the French-British-American-Indian fighting down the northeastern seaboard in the late 18th-century. Tomorrow I leave for my annual visit to Hillsdale College to teach a military history intensive class for the next month during my vacation from the Hoover Institution, and look forward to the change of scenery. The End of the Sparta comes out at the end of the month; the first review from Publishers’ Weekly recently came out:
Leading classicist Hanson (The Father of Us All) focuses on the Theban defeat of the renowned Spartan army in 371 B.C.E. The hero of the tale is the Theban general Epaminondas, a devotee of Pythagoras and a warrior with unconventional attitudes about warfare, life, and death. His unexpected choices—not to mention the Spartan underestimation of the Theban “pigs”—allow the Thebans to fulfill the prophecies of Sparta’s downfall, many of which focus on the farmer Mêlon (meaning “apple”), whose journey from reluctant soldier to enthusiastic liberator gives the novel its emotional heart. Battle scenes are conveyed in exacting detail; a glossary of names and numerous line diagrams help readers differentiate characters and envisage the sites of central dramas. Told in a somewhat elevated style that simultaneously honors and updates the rhetorical heights of classic Greek histories, Hanson’s novel is both old-fashioned and lively. Given his notable body of work, it’s no wonder that his first fiction effort is rich in authentic detail and narrated with a confident authorial voice. His vigorous narrative not only offers insight into arms and armor, but also into the hearts of the men who bore them. (Oct.)
Obama is right on track with his intentions to diminish and/or destroy the USA. When does the revolution start ? Passively waiting for him to be out of office will be too late. Our children and grandchildren are destined to be hopelessly in debt and enslaved to the monster one party central socialist governnent. A general strike and 10 million plus citizens camped on the white house lawn is called for by we who recall what it was like to live in a great country. Nothing short of starving the beast will work. Let Warren Buffet and the rest of the elete cronies rot before getting one more dime. Lead the way with some concrete plans. Talk is cheap.
“The time to guard against corruption and tyranny is before they shall have gotten hold of us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered.”
Thomas Jefferson
“Notes on the State of Virginia”
“When Law and Morality contradict each other the Citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his sense of morality or his respect for the Law.”
Frederic Bastiat
Great column by VDH (as usual) and it is scary to consider all we have seen so far and what we still face ahead of us. When Obama is voted out at long last, I believe he is capable of triggering a race war in the process.
The bottom line here is that it will be neither easy or clean to fix this mess no matter how we go about doing it. But it must be done.
And so it begins in the national media...
Krauthammer: ‘President Zero’ Is A Good Name For Obama
http://www.thehopeforamerica.com/play.php?id=8944
obama and holder are setting up for the race war and have been all along.
It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if they are involved in social media helping to instigate the black violent mob action against whites.
An America-loving “black” President would have taken advantage of his position to set these black “youths” straight. obama has not one word to say. This speaks VOLUMES.
IMHO, the two BIG factors are the GM bankruptcy and the Gulf drilling.
In both cases, 0bama changed the rules. The bond holders, secured creditors and white collar pensions were wiped clean in favor of the unions.
Oil exploration companies sued to protect their legal rights. A Judge ruled against the Federal Government and demanded the Federal Government allow drilling. 0bama thumbed his nose at the decision.
You have to forecast a Very large short term return to even consider putting capital at risk in a new venture.
On the bright side, as conditions decline under the Kenyan lizard king, it sets the stage for the acceptance for a powerful right wing counter revolution.
| Zero jobs in August 2011. It's the great goose-egg economy. He really is President Zero. His class-warfare tour of 2012 is under way. It's all the Rats have. Saul Alinsky would be so proud. So now we all know, except you drones... 'CHANGE' = MORE Spending MORE Debt MORE Golf MORE Taxes MORE Welfare MORE Abortions MORE Regulation MORE Government MORE Speeches MORE Money Printing MORE Vacations MORE Porkulus MORE Failure LESS WOOD (Gibson Guitars Strung Up by Feds)
Countdown until Obama leaves Office: 504 days as of September 3, 2011. |
Thank you both. The article and commentary were excellent and the graphic couldn’t have been more apt.
On the bright side, as conditions decline under the Kenyan lizard king, it sets the stage for the acceptance for a powerful right wing counter revolution.
Not if the GOP establishment can help it.
And they certainly won't learn about the people who built these things in the schools they attend. Even if the names are in their unread books, they simply will not be able to understand the mindset of those who seek to create and build rather than to pillage and destroy.
The underground economy IS the revolution.
What do we do about the fools that adore the Prince?
A majority of people in this country have no respect for private property (earnings). They believe you can pull down the successful and lift up the clueless.
If these low IQ POS continue the race baiting and rabble rousing, we'll have a race war during this depression. I'm also tired of hearing how bad we Americans are.
People have had absolutely enough of the race harping and 'gimme more' culture.
Everything you wrote is spot on. But I differ with your view re the above statement....in terms of the time line. I believe that Obama, the Congressional Black Caucus, illegal alien rights groups and the unions will launch a race war after the first of the year and the country will be in absolute turmoil in the summer of 2012.
yep...the CBC has already started with the extreme rhetoric against the Tea Party (Maxine Waters for example) but they are also unloading against Obama and the volume will keep increasing.
You would think that Blacks in America would wake up and realize that despite voting almost exclusively for Dhimmies for 60 some years, the unemployment rate among young black males is only exceeded by the rate that they are killing one another in the inner city ‘hoods.
How is it that even though Maxine Waters has been in Congress so long she’s grown roots out her arse, that there still isn’t a Kroger’s in Watts??
And La Raza will probably take most of California soon, almost unopposed. That should be an interesting war between them and Maxine Water’s constituents...
One of the things that makes me glad I live in SW Washington is that I have the Columbia River and Oregon between me and California. If worse comes to worst, we can blow the bridges over the river and make a stand right here....
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
