Chart: Comparative percentage of children in poverty, USA vs. 34 countries

 

UNITED STATES OF AUSTERITY 

Best collection of charts yet showing the self-destruct phase of capitalism

Best collection of charts yet showing the self-destruct phase of capitalism
http://www.businessinsider.com/dear-america-you-should-be-mad-as-hell-about-this-charts-2012-6?op=1

for the visual thinkers out there, or people who prefer the charts-and-graphs mode of getting their data, this is it. 

How do you maintain a "consumer economy" when you're hard at work destroying the consuming classes on which your economy depends?

This is the question our 1% needs to answer.

A collection of readings on why "job creation" isn't working: the self-destruction phase of capitalism

Here’s a brief intro to a suite of articles that every candidate running in Wisconsin elections, whether recalls, or the fall elections, should take the time to read.

I deliberately avoided any Marxist, Leninist, Stalinist, or anarchist writings on the topic. After reading, a person should have a better grasp on why the concept of “job creation” and ‘job creators” is really meaningless Newspeak.  Also the reader may see why capitalism seems to be undercutting its own consumer base--a kind of self-destructive sequence.

Jan 13, 2013--
Recent 60 Minutes segment "Are Robots Hurting Job Growth?" link
(short answer:  yes, yes they are).
Interview with Race Against the Machine authors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew ­McAfee.

Breaking News, 12/12/2012, from Andrew McAfee's blog:


The Great Decoupling of the U.S. Economy

So how have we actually been doing in the US? Well, as the graphs below show we’ve been experiencing a long, slow decoupling between the first two of these — output and productivity — and the last two — jobs and wages. For more than three decades after the end of World War II all four of these measures went up together:

apparently, even Krugman has taken notice, quoted as commenting on the above blog material:

Krugman writes that “I think it’s fair to say that the shift of income from labor to capital has not yet made it into our national discourse… but it’s time to get started, before the robots and the robber barons turn our society into something unrecognizable.”

Just in, Oct. 27 2012
A part-time life as hours shrink and shift for American workers

Recently, in a Detroit newspaper:
Leonard Pitts, Jr. Driving toward human obsolescence (Detroit Free Press)

So Much for the Benefits of College in America's "New Normal"
Piece by "Tyler Durden" on Zero Hedge --

Shows the long slow decline in labor force participation for both high-school graduated, and college-graduated, young people, over a 20 year period including the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations.  And the staggering rise in student loan debt. 

Temp Worker Nation -- If You Do Get Hired, It Might Not Be for Long
"Instability is going to be with us,” says Sara Horowitz, head of the New York-based Freelancers Union. “The truth is that we’re in a period of decline for workers.”

"The post-employee economy: Why sky-high profits are here to stay." (Archived out of The Atlantic).
http://workerspartypac.blogspot.com/2012/07/post-employee-economy-why-sky-high.html

"Number of long-term unemployed older workers has quintupled. The help (for these workers-ed.) hasn't."
http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2012/0423/Number-of-long-term-unemployed-older-workers-quintupled.-The-help-hasn-t

"From  unemployed to unemployable" - National Public Radio piece. Here's the gist:  "More than 6 million Americans are now among the long-term unemployed, up from about 1 million before the recession. The long-term unemployment rate is far higher than it's been at any time since before War II."
http://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/npr/140122883/from-unemployed-to-unemployable

“The increasingly irrelevant unemployment rate”
http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2012/06/01/unemployment-rate-may/?section=money_topstories&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fmoney_topstories+%28Top+Stories%29

“Race Against the Machine” by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew ­McAfee, two economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is reviewed in Financial Times–and archived on our blog
http://workerspartypac.blogspot.com/2012/01/race-against-machine-review.html

“Tectonic Shifts in Employment” – also covers “Race Against the Machine” and other topics
http://workerspartypac.blogspot.com/2012/01/tectonic-shifts-in-employment-precariat.html

“Robotic Nation” by Marshall Brain, explores some of the sociology that comes with a rapidly displaced working class. In particular, pay attention to his comments about what will become of the people made homeless in this onslaught–
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm

“The Precariat: the New Dangerous Class” – A really smart effort at new class analysis for the early 21st century. 

The Future of Mining:  Less Workers, More Robots
–Why the Gogebic Taconite mine proposal is nothing but a cruel hoax.

New indentured servitude?

From Mark, in Occupy Detroit:

Is it an exaggeration to say America is returning to indentured servitude?

Student loan debt has exceeded $1 trillion for the first time. Yes, TRILLION. Americans now owe more on student loans than on credit cards, reports the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the U.S. Department of Education and private sources. Like colonial indentured servitude, the student-loan contract is virtually unbreakable. In the U.S., student loans are enforced by garnishing wages, and, unlike most other forms of debt, student debt is almost never forgiven in personal bankruptcy. By comparison, Finland, Brazil, and Chile remain tuition free, and France, Germany, Austria, Iran and Denmark remain minimal compared with American tuition and fees. Add to this a weak job market, where graduation does not guarantee full-time employment. Even if the financial benefits of higher education are more than the debt accrued for it, the subduing effects of that debt still exist. In a vicious cycle, studen debt has a subduing effect on activism, and political passivity makes it more likely that students will accept such debt as a natural part of life. (source: Get Up, Stand Up, by Bruce E. Levine, published 2011).

"It's going to create a generation of wage slavery," says Nick Pardini, a Villanova University graduate student in finance who has warned on a blog for investors that student loans are the next credit bubble — with borrowers, rather than lenders, as the losers. (source: USA Today, October 25, 2011)

In other related news, state troopers are knocking on your neighbor's door and taking them away in handcuffs for not paying a small $280 medical bill. Not in America, you say? Think again. Although the U.S. abolished debtors' prisons in the 1830s, more than a third of U.S. states allow the police to haul people in who don't pay all manner of debts, from bills for health care services to credit card and auto loans. In parts of Illinois, debt collectors commonly use publicly funded courts, sheriff's deputies, and country jails to pressure people who owe even small amounts to pay up, according to the AP. How did breast cancer survivor Lisa Lindsay end up behind bars? She didn't pay a medical bill -- one the Herrin, Ill., teaching assistant was told she didn't owe. "She got a $280 medical bill in error and was told she didn't have to pay it," The Associated Press reports. "But the bill was turned over to a collection agency, and eventually state troopers showed up at her home and took her to jail in handcuffs." (source: Yahoo! Finance, April 23, 2012)

Peak Jobs, Peak Real Wages, Peak Labor Force Participation, Peak Unionization

NOTE:  We are not claiming correlation or causality between these various charts.  That would require a degree of rigor in the social sciences that is beyond our level of expertise.  Instead, we want you to just admire the coincidence in the similar shape of these charts.

Chart of manufacturing employment, long term from 1941 until depth of "Great Recession" Part I.

Chart of real wages, dating from 1970 through 2010. We prefer the light green "Shadow Stats" graph, because we believe they are being more honest about the method of measuring inflation (cost of living).

Chart of labor force participation rate, dated 1970-2009.  Back to the level of 1979-1980, also the time of peak real wages, and peak manufacturing employment.

Percent of U.S. workers in unions vs. "middle class income share" (we're not sure how they define "middle class" on this site). The source seems to be confusing "middle income workers" for "middle class" (dentists, doctors, lawyers, small-business people etc.) But do you get the point?  The trajectory of all these charts over the past many years goes in the same direction, doesn't it?  This is what you call a systemic crisis.

IMPACT UPON THE YOUTH
(source:  "Tyler Durden" over at zerohedge.com blog)

Continuing with the theme of the secular shift in the labor pool (not cyclical, as the Fed still mistakenly believes: it will take it at least one more year to understand it has been wrong about this aspect of the New Normal economy too, just as it was wrong for decades about the Flow vs Stock debate), it is not only men who are fresh out of luck. As a reminder, we observed earlier that the labor force participation rate for men has just dropped to an all time low. It turns out there is another class of workers whose participation rate is at the lowest in series history: that of "25 year olds with a Bachelor's degree and higher", i.e. college grads. At 75.5%, it is the lowest since this data has been kept by the BLS. But not all is abysmal in America's labor force. While the share of workers with a college degree has plunged to all time lows, a bright spot can be found when observing the labor force participation rate of those who never bothered with college, and for whom high school was their last known degree-granting institution. At 59.9%, the participation rate is well of its 2012 lows of 59.0% and steadily rising, in fact, to borrow a term from the housing bulls, it may well have "bottomed". Now there is some truly great news for the future of America's highly educated workforce.

Peak Jobs Chart. Manufacturing employment is a good indicator of "peak jobs" in the USA

Labor force participation recent years