The American Third World Job Market
I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson
It was at Rosh Hashana 2008 that the world changed as we know it. On that date, Wall Street plummeted 777 points and the world economy took a nose dive. As we watched in stunned silence over the next ten days, when on Yom Kippur, the finance ministers met together to meet their own judgment. On that day of “fear”, they “plotted” a strategy that would eventually create trillions of dollars of fiat money as unemployment skyrocketed, families lost their homes, their jobs, and their health insurance went from a $15 copay to a $2000 deductible – up front.
Two years ago, most Americans would have denied that the sovereignty and the Constitution of the United States were at risk to be exterminated as a New World Order was rising on the global economic scene. Today, most of these Americans speak with hushed fear and resignation that destiny and independence of America will soon be a part of the historical past. What is felt in most people’s hearts is that the American Middle Class is systematically being eliminated from the world economic order.
Today, the dividing line between and rich and poor is widening at a staggering rate. In the land that had the most prosperous middle class in history is now being transformed by globalism and “free trade” that has now turned against the people that once “fed the world”. As the corporate businesses continue to flee the United States to lands where there is no minimum wage and few regulations on how to treat their employees, the “poor” in those lands are today being exploited mercilessly by the internationalists whose industries have no national boundaries and become an international political force upon their own.
The fundamentals of global change under the banner of “free trade” has abruptly and rudely changed our lives, for today American workers, once living as the largest middle class in the world are now competing directly for jobs against people in other countries that are virtually regulation free, no minimum wage and child labor is the standard of the cultural economy.
The effect has been that international companies have profited immensely, the American worker bound by high standards of quality control are competing against exploited world labor pools. Net results, plummeting job losses as American descends into a third-world economic job market. The facts of what we fear has now been put into print by Business Insider, when they published the article titled, “22 Statistics That Prove The Middle Class Is Being Systematically Wiped Out Of Existence In America.” Here are the statistics on the world of “change” brought to us by the Obama White House.
1. 83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.
2. 61 percent of Americans "always or usually" live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.
3. 66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.
4. 36 percent of Americans say that they don't contribute anything to retirement savings.
5. A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.
6. 24 percent of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.
7. Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.
8. Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
9. For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.
10. In 1950, the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.
11. As of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.
12. The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.
13. Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17 percent when compared with 2008.
14. In the United States, the average federal worker now earns 60% MORE than the average worker in the private sector.
15. The top 1 percent of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America's corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.
16. In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.
17. More than 40 percent of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.
18. For the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.
19. This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.
20. Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 - the highest rate in 20 years.
21. Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.
22. The top 10 percent of Americans now earn around 50 percent of our national income.
It took a little commentary from David Chandler, on Earthside.com – “What is obvious is that all of the talk of 'recovery' from the politicians and Wall Street gamblers in the past few months was nothing but spin. Their efforts to talk the U.S. out of recession have clearly failed.
The problem is that we are still very much in the midst of a terrific debt crisis and because we refuse to demand and enact real economic, political and social change, things are actually getting worse instead of better. The Obama 'change' is merely tinkering at the edges based on the almost quaint notion that this slump is just a rather more severe sequence in the usual business cycle. Evidence that this is not the case is the fact, for instance, that the country is bankrupt ... take a look at this analysis for further elucidation on this point: U.S. Is Bankrupt and We Don't Even Know It by Laurence Kotlikoff.
This never was an economic crisis that could have been fixed using the traditional Keynesian tool box -- this is at its heart a resource and corruption based catastrophe. There are too many people demanding too many cheap products made from diminishing natural resources ... and a greedy, amoral corporate culture that has corruptly exploited this emerging reality for their own nefarious ends. This meant that change would have to have been fundamental and systemic if we were to get any kind of 'soft landing' out of this crisis.
But it is, in our opinion, probably too late now for a relatively peaceful resolution. We let ourselves be fooled by the Obama mantra of 'change' ... because as we see now, there isn't any real change. We wanted things to somehow get better without any sacrifice…
Consequently, as the economic and political environment further degrades we will be looking for a response from the people of either an upheaval of revolutionary proportions ... or many, many years of servitude, peasantry and drudgery under the yoke of an increasingly totalitarian corporate state. It took David Chandler on the website Earthside in the article titled, “The Numbers are Bad!” when he published “15 Economic Statistics That Just Keep Getting Worse”.
1. The U.S. economy lost 131,000 more jobs during the month of July. But the truth is that the U.S. economy has been bleeding jobs for a long time. According to one analysis, the United States has lost 10.5 million jobs since 2007. Meanwhile, immigrants (both legal and illegal) continue to pour into this nation in unprecedented numbers.
2. Americans who are out of work are finding it incredibly difficult to get back into the workforce. In the United States today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to an all-time record of 35.2 weeks.
3. The U.S. government keeps trying to pump up the economy with debt, and in the process things are getting wildly out of control. According to a U.S. Treasury Department report to Congress, the U.S. national debt will top $13.6 trillion this year and climb to an estimated $19.6 trillion by 2015.
4. The interest on all of this debt is becoming increasingly oppressive. As of July 1st, the U.S. government had spent $355 billion so far in 2010 on interest payments to the holders of the national debt. The total for 2010 should be somewhere in the neighborhood of $700 billion. According to Erskine Bowles, one of the heads of Barack Obama's national debt commission, the U.S. government will be spending $2 trillion just on interest on the national debt by 2020. Keep in mind that the entire U.S. government budget is less than $4 trillion for the entire year of 2010.
5. If the U.S. government was forced to use GAAP accounting principles (like all publicly-traded corporations must), the annual U.S. government budget deficit would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $4 trillion to $5 trillion.
6. The number of Americans who are receiving food stamps rose to a new all-time record of 40.8 million in May. The number of Americans receiving food stamps has set a new all-time record for 18 months in a row. But there is every indication that things are going to get even worse. The U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that the number of Americans on food stamps will increase to 43 million in 2011.
7. Social Security will pay out more in benefits in 2010 than it receives in payroll taxes. This was not supposed to happen until at least 2015. In the years ahead, these new "Social Security deficits" are projected to be absolutely catastrophic.
8. There are simply far too many retirees and not nearly enough workers to support them. Back in 1950 each retiree's Social Security benefit was paid for by 16 workers. Today, each retiree's Social Security benefit is paid for by approximately 3.3 workers. By 2025 it is projected that there will be approximately two workers for each retiree.
9. Wealth continues to become highly concentrated at the top. Since 1973, the average CEO’s salary has increased from 26 times the median income to over 300 times the median income.
10. According to a poll taken in 2009, 61 percent of Americans "always or usually" live paycheck to paycheck. That was up significantly from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.
11. The Mortgage Bankers Association recently announced that more than 10% of all U.S. homeowners with a mortgage had missed at least one mortgage payment during the January to March time period. That was a new all-time record and represented an increase from 9.1 percent a year ago.
12. A recent survey of last year's college graduates found that 80 percent moved right back home with their parents after graduation. That was up substantially from 63 percent in 2006.
13. During the first quarter of 2010, the total number of loans that are at least three months past due in the United States increased for the 16th consecutive quarter.
14. The total number of U.S. bank failures passed the 100 mark in July of this year. In 2009, the total number of U.S. bank failures did not pass the century barrier until October.
15. The U.S. dollar continues to rapidly decline in value. An item that cost $20.00 in 1970 would cost you $112.35 today. An item that cost $20.00 in 1913 would cost you $440.33 today.
Credit to Business Insider – “22 Statistics That Prove The Middle Class Is Being Systematically Wiped Out Of Existence In America.” – July 15, 2010
Credit to David Chandler’s Earthside – “The Numbers are Bad” – August 12, 2010