The past couple of months have seen some “good news” about job creation, meaning mostly that more jobs were created than were lost. That the numbers of jobs created only slightly exceeded the number needed just to keep up with population growth didn’t get much press. The real bottom line is that not much is changing for the unemployed and underemployed, which is to say that the jobs market recovery is weak at best. And, as I pointed out earlier, the “new” jobs the economy creates tend to suck.
But we are also seeing corporate profits doing very well. Shareholders can look forward to some nice dividends since profit margins are at their highest since 1993. Another number that is on the rise is the number of millionaires in this country, which has increased by 8% over the past year. So profits are way, way up, but not as a result of jobs, or at least not because of jobs created here in the US.
Contrary to what one might think, capitalism is not about the creation of jobs. That is not its purpose. It’s purpose is to make money for people who own businesses. If some of that money finds its way to workers and other forms of overhead, fine. But the mutant capitalism embraced by today’s financial elite worships at the altar of efficiency and maximizing profits in a way that has not been seen since the Bad Old Days before workers began to secure their rights to a decent share for their labor. If a business can make money without spending a lot of money on costs like labor, they will do that. In fact, they have. They have learned how to make huge profits with little or no help from American labor. And since much of American manufacturing is not only happening overseas, the products made in those foreign plants is being sold overseas as well, the American worker is cut out of the cycle with less and less leverage. Do not pass GO, do not collect $200.
Assuming Congress would do so, laws penalizing the offshoring of American jobs would help some, but at this point the GOP’s Blitzkrieg against American workers and unions is simply an effort to codify both the current reality and the corporatist utopia: a nation of workers who are completely dis-empowered and at the non-existent mercy of the richest of the rich. Labor is fighting back, and has acquitted itself surprisingly well thus far. They might even win this, but it will take not only fierce commitment and fiendish cunning, it also needs alternative economies that are both independent from the rapine of large corporations and willing and able to defend themselves through local ordinances that hold abusive scofflaw companies accountable. Now in some places this, too is under attack.
In his blog last Wednesday Paul Krugman pointed out that the unemployed, particularly those who are easy for politicos and the media to miss–the very long-term unemployed–are being literally written off. To hear what they are saying in Washington and on the pages of financial publications, one would think that they don’t even exist.
