Now that the debt deal has passed, promising more restrictive domestic spending and not much economic hope, it's time for the good news about the US economy. The good news is, it looks like the economy is going to get worse again! Here's why Americans should not only embrace this fact, but get ready to delebrate!
(1) The economy is what makes Americans have to go to their lousy, stupid jobs. Americans hate their jobs, and hate their rotten scumbag bosses. If the economy completely collapsed, these problems would go away.
(2) This one is a little complicated. The US economy is driven entirely by consumer spending on credit. That means the economy depends on people getting into more debt, and banks getting richer and richer (I'm looking at you, HSBC). If the economy tanks, the banks go with it. Sure, last time the federal government bailed out the banks -- but if there's a strict spending limit and no new revenue, obviously that's not going to be an option. Bye-bye, banks!
(3) Because the US economy depends on consumer spending, and most of what we buy is crap made in China, the US economic collapse will weaken Chinese economic power. In fact, it may be the last, best way to restore US economic independence from China!
(4) As the economy collapses, more retail giants like Borders will go into liquidation - and pass the savings on to you!
(5) Economic collapse will bring about unpredictable shortages, skyrocketing prices, inflation, deflation, and utter fiscal chaos. This will allow savvy Americans to make a killing on the inevitable Fiscal Chaos Futures & Derivatives market!
Showing posts with label economy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label economy. Show all posts
Monday, August 01, 2011
Monday, June 08, 2009
everything must go!
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.
- Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto
We ended up at the mall today, for no really good reason, other than already finding ourselves in Modesto, and thinking of a trip to Trader Joe's. We went to a closing sale at a local department store, a chain with stores mainly in the Central Valley, called Gottschalks. They tried to sell out to somebody last fall, and no one took them up on it. So they're clearing out everything.
And I mean everything: all the stuff on the floor, in warehouses, all the store furnishings and equipment, all the manikins, racks, display tables, fixtures - even the dollies the stock staff (in jeans and t-shirts) were using had price tags on them.
All the desperation of trying to sell the place past, all attempts at dignity, polish and shine ended, the store was reduced to dishevelment, or, to coin an appropriate term, disshelvement.
What was revealed by this series of events are the basic tricks of retail: controlling perception. Because, you see, they'd given up on it. The normal look of a retail department store, which prevents you from seeing in depth, which fills as much of every direction with images, words of inducement, merchandise displays, was gone. All the racks were at the same level, and there were items stacked on floors or behind counters where they didn't belong.
The staff were disgruntled, and joined by this invading army of overly-casual employees (in dress and in work status, no doubt), hired by a group a cashier identified as "the liquidators" to move stock around. The muzak was on a weirdly upbeat channel doing lots of late 70s, heavy on the disco.
Aside from the sudden elimination of the usual fetishization of commodities - the pornography that takes place routinely in retail - what struck me was that, with the pretense gone, the impoverishment, callousness, and shabbiness of it was impossible to deny. For instance, in the pile of cast-off and for-sale display tables and racks, without being covered with brightly colored stuff as was their function, you could see how poorly made, how scuffed, how tatty all of it is. The conceits of fashion and elegance, which is the basic come-on of retail seduction, no longer hide this.
Especially thrilling to me was that you could buy literally anything in the store, including giant cardboard hearts covered in red and pink tissue paper roses used as Valentine's Day decorations, metal sign frames with signs still in them, hat dummies, segments of manikins, and those weird partial manikins - just a torso, or just legs, or - the one I wanted most - just a butt (I thought it would make a nice gift). My loveliest (known today by one of my random endearments for her - Pinky) was looking for and buying ladies' unmentionables, and the racks they were on were on sale too. For some reason, the whole thing struck us as hilarious.
Friday, May 15, 2009
finally, some good environmental news
Hooray! We're slightly less doomed!
If sea levels only rise 10 feet, rather than 16 feet, well then, everything will be just peachy. I plan to carry this in my heart through the weekend.
That and Governor Schwarzedoofus' latest budgetplan farce. The basic gist here is that he's threatening the folks opposing the nonsensical ballot propositions that were part of the equally nonsensical February budget deal. If those don't pass, the budget is back to the drawing board, almost at the end of the fiscal year, and the Gubernator is antagonizing voters and the opponents of the insane ballot props by offering a new plan (same as the old plan, incidentally).
Hisransom demand "budget proposal" cuts education (including $1 billion from higher ed), releases prisoners, requires every household in the state currently earning more than $45,000 to take in at least one prisoner or one college student without compensation for room and board, and will sequester 37% of all state tax receipts for a special fund with the line-item name "Public Employee Butt-Kicking."
In a few years, we'll all be paupers out here, especially in the Central Valley, but hey, we'll have ocean-front property by then.
If sea levels only rise 10 feet, rather than 16 feet, well then, everything will be just peachy. I plan to carry this in my heart through the weekend.
That and Governor Schwarzedoofus' latest budget
His
In a few years, we'll all be paupers out here, especially in the Central Valley, but hey, we'll have ocean-front property by then.
Sunday, April 05, 2009
facebook spring
I've just returned tonight from the California Faculty Association's 70th Assembly.
The California State University is in peril. My own campus, Stanislaus, is at the precipice of catastrophe. Terrible economic times are only the beginning of the story, and anyone who has paid attention to the trends in public higher education in the US over the past 20 years or more would be able to tell you that this is no sudden crisis. Public higher education has been systematically de-funded all this time. Our current depress/recession has only brought the whole thing to its horrific climax.
For longer than I've taught at the CSU, the state budget has underfunded its mission. Considering that the CSU's mission is to educate the citizens of California so they become productive, tax-paying members of society, this clearly makes no sense... unless you believe public institutions are ipso facto essentially and irretrievably corrupt... and you believe that increasing state revenues only creates more of the same corruption.
Corruption: you know, like teachers, nurses, doctors, engineers, public servants.
This is not just a matter of the budget crisis that California, like every other state, is facing. This is what happens when a budget crisis hits an institution that has been fighting for its life for years.
Within the next 2 years, California will spend more on prisons than on all forms of public higher education.
The state's bizarre budget priorities are the major cause of the CSU's catastrophic condition. The CSU's astounding level of mismanagement is another.
So here's an interesting catch-22: The CSU desperately needs additional funding from the state. My colleagues' livelihoods, our students' educations, and the state's future economic health basically depend on better funding for this primary engine of California's economy. But CSU's management has demonstrated time and again that it is uninterested in either securing the CSU's future, or spending the ever-reduced funding the CSU receives wisely.
Nevertheless, the CFA works tirelessly to improve the standing of the CSU in the state, to make the case that the CSU contributes to, rather than costs, the state economy. We constantly seek new ways to send our message, to make our case, and to push the point.
This weekend, facing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression (or maybe worse), facing the worst possible budget outlook for the CSU, and locally, facing a quintuple crisis from the state and campus budget crises, the CFA launched a new campaign.
Facebook. We've launched a campaign to fight the catastrophe of the CSU, on Facebook.
I'm not being critical. I think this is a smart move. I believe using Facebook will create an ongoing sense of virtual CFA community, and may extend our connections to students and staff, and the public we ultimately serve. As they told us at the Assembly, Barack Obama's campaign used Facebook. It seems to have helped.
Tonight, I friended a number of CFA colleagues on Facebook, and I now have many more friends. I'll diligently check in on Facebook to read their status updates, their notes on my wall or theirs, read what's on their minds (TM), and swap stories, links, and tactics. It will be a good tool, they told us, for organizing.
My question is: how many of them will disappear from CFA in the next year?
And many of these are not the Facebook kind of friend, but actual friends (no insult meant to Facebook friends), actual flesh, blood, brains, and heart friends that I've strategized with and talked late into the night with, and laughed with and eaten and drunk with, and argued with, and fought with, and fought alongside. And I am sore afraid, they will Facebook their fight, Youtube their dissent, email their legislators, flashmob their campuses, and then they will disappear.
I love my union siblings. I wish them better fates.
The California State University is in peril. My own campus, Stanislaus, is at the precipice of catastrophe. Terrible economic times are only the beginning of the story, and anyone who has paid attention to the trends in public higher education in the US over the past 20 years or more would be able to tell you that this is no sudden crisis. Public higher education has been systematically de-funded all this time. Our current depress/recession has only brought the whole thing to its horrific climax.
For longer than I've taught at the CSU, the state budget has underfunded its mission. Considering that the CSU's mission is to educate the citizens of California so they become productive, tax-paying members of society, this clearly makes no sense... unless you believe public institutions are ipso facto essentially and irretrievably corrupt... and you believe that increasing state revenues only creates more of the same corruption.
Corruption: you know, like teachers, nurses, doctors, engineers, public servants.
This is not just a matter of the budget crisis that California, like every other state, is facing. This is what happens when a budget crisis hits an institution that has been fighting for its life for years.
Within the next 2 years, California will spend more on prisons than on all forms of public higher education.
The state's bizarre budget priorities are the major cause of the CSU's catastrophic condition. The CSU's astounding level of mismanagement is another.
So here's an interesting catch-22: The CSU desperately needs additional funding from the state. My colleagues' livelihoods, our students' educations, and the state's future economic health basically depend on better funding for this primary engine of California's economy. But CSU's management has demonstrated time and again that it is uninterested in either securing the CSU's future, or spending the ever-reduced funding the CSU receives wisely.
Nevertheless, the CFA works tirelessly to improve the standing of the CSU in the state, to make the case that the CSU contributes to, rather than costs, the state economy. We constantly seek new ways to send our message, to make our case, and to push the point.
This weekend, facing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression (or maybe worse), facing the worst possible budget outlook for the CSU, and locally, facing a quintuple crisis from the state and campus budget crises, the CFA launched a new campaign.
Facebook. We've launched a campaign to fight the catastrophe of the CSU, on Facebook.
I'm not being critical. I think this is a smart move. I believe using Facebook will create an ongoing sense of virtual CFA community, and may extend our connections to students and staff, and the public we ultimately serve. As they told us at the Assembly, Barack Obama's campaign used Facebook. It seems to have helped.
Tonight, I friended a number of CFA colleagues on Facebook, and I now have many more friends. I'll diligently check in on Facebook to read their status updates, their notes on my wall or theirs, read what's on their minds (TM), and swap stories, links, and tactics. It will be a good tool, they told us, for organizing.
My question is: how many of them will disappear from CFA in the next year?
And many of these are not the Facebook kind of friend, but actual friends (no insult meant to Facebook friends), actual flesh, blood, brains, and heart friends that I've strategized with and talked late into the night with, and laughed with and eaten and drunk with, and argued with, and fought with, and fought alongside. And I am sore afraid, they will Facebook their fight, Youtube their dissent, email their legislators, flashmob their campuses, and then they will disappear.
I love my union siblings. I wish them better fates.
Friday, March 13, 2009
pink, but no slip
I hope I see some people on campus wearing pink today in solidarity with public school teachers across the state. Today is Pink Friday, when 26,000 layoff notices are expected to be sent to teachers, due mainly to budget cuts.
Again and again the argument is made that everyone is hurting in this depression, so public employees shouldn't be immune. My response is that cuts to state budgets still represent political choices, and the choice being made is to cut education spending.
Granted, in some districts there are compound problems - Modesto's schools have lost enrollment because families with children are being forced out of town by the house price collapse and bad mortgage crisis, for instance. But overall, the state is basically reneging on agreements to fund education at a certain level, and with certain student-to-faculty ratios. It's not as though education stops being important when the economy tanks. Some might argue that it's most important precisely when the economy tanks.
So, I'm wearing pink high-tops and a pink vest today - more to express my sympathy than as an act of protest. However, I refuse to wear a slip.
Again and again the argument is made that everyone is hurting in this depression, so public employees shouldn't be immune. My response is that cuts to state budgets still represent political choices, and the choice being made is to cut education spending.
Granted, in some districts there are compound problems - Modesto's schools have lost enrollment because families with children are being forced out of town by the house price collapse and bad mortgage crisis, for instance. But overall, the state is basically reneging on agreements to fund education at a certain level, and with certain student-to-faculty ratios. It's not as though education stops being important when the economy tanks. Some might argue that it's most important precisely when the economy tanks.
So, I'm wearing pink high-tops and a pink vest today - more to express my sympathy than as an act of protest. However, I refuse to wear a slip.
Friday, March 06, 2009
unemployment
The story in the Modesto Bee was headlined Brutal.
Stanislaus County unemployment reached 16% in January. Merced County had 18.9%.
The kicker: Unemployment rates don't count seasonal work, for instance, farm labor. So how many people are actually unemployed right now in the Central Valley?
The second kicker: Unemployment rates don't count those who have used up all their eligibility, those who for whatever reason don't apply, or those who are under-employed rather than unemployed.
The third kicker: It doesn't count students, including those who are students because they lost their jobs.
In sum: Lots of people getting kicked.
Stanislaus County unemployment reached 16% in January. Merced County had 18.9%.
The kicker: Unemployment rates don't count seasonal work, for instance, farm labor. So how many people are actually unemployed right now in the Central Valley?
The second kicker: Unemployment rates don't count those who have used up all their eligibility, those who for whatever reason don't apply, or those who are under-employed rather than unemployed.
The third kicker: It doesn't count students, including those who are students because they lost their jobs.
In sum: Lots of people getting kicked.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
an open letter to the governor
Dear Governor Schwarzenegger,
I realize you have difficult choices to make during this fiscal and economic crisis. As a member of the California Faculty Association, and a member of the Alliance for the CSU, I have already let you know that I believe cutting the budget for the CSU is a shortsighted and ultimately destructive move. The CSU contributes to the state's economy. It's the best, most secure investment the public can make.
It's important that you have all the information pertinent to these decisions, and that is the reason I'm writing to you today.
I earned a PhD in philosophy at Duquesne University in 1996. I have taught philosophy at CSU Stanislaus for 10 years. Teaching philosophy may not make any direct, sizable contribution to the economy, and I can't say I'm responsible for much economic growth, but I am at least a marginally functional member of society, and a taxpayer.
Cuts to the CSU budget would threaten my job. Since what I teach is philosophy, I'm sure you'll recognize that I clearly have no marketable skills outside of higher education. Certainly corporate America has no place for me.
I would have no choice but to turn to a life of crime. I would be forced out of quasi-productive employment into anomic, desperate felony. From being somewhat-less-than-thoroughly-useless to the many students at the CSU, I would be thrust out into the world, totally unhinged, having utterly lost any sense of right and wrong, and with no prospects for any job (did I mention: philosophy), would simply have to begin burgling, thieving, and mugging.
I hasten to point out that, although I have no criminal record, I do have some relevant experience, particularly of picking locks, breaking & entering, vandalism, petty larceny, and loitering and vagrancy.
I don't mean to threaten anything, of course. I just wanted to make sure you were properly informed about the potential impact of the fiscal choices you and the legislature have to make.
Thank you for your consideration,
Chris Nagel, PhD
I mean, consider these options:
I don't want any of those. I'm not angry/crazy enough, for starters.
I realize you have difficult choices to make during this fiscal and economic crisis. As a member of the California Faculty Association, and a member of the Alliance for the CSU, I have already let you know that I believe cutting the budget for the CSU is a shortsighted and ultimately destructive move. The CSU contributes to the state's economy. It's the best, most secure investment the public can make.
It's important that you have all the information pertinent to these decisions, and that is the reason I'm writing to you today.
I earned a PhD in philosophy at Duquesne University in 1996. I have taught philosophy at CSU Stanislaus for 10 years. Teaching philosophy may not make any direct, sizable contribution to the economy, and I can't say I'm responsible for much economic growth, but I am at least a marginally functional member of society, and a taxpayer.
Cuts to the CSU budget would threaten my job. Since what I teach is philosophy, I'm sure you'll recognize that I clearly have no marketable skills outside of higher education. Certainly corporate America has no place for me.
I would have no choice but to turn to a life of crime. I would be forced out of quasi-productive employment into anomic, desperate felony. From being somewhat-less-than-thoroughly-useless to the many students at the CSU, I would be thrust out into the world, totally unhinged, having utterly lost any sense of right and wrong, and with no prospects for any job (did I mention: philosophy), would simply have to begin burgling, thieving, and mugging.
I hasten to point out that, although I have no criminal record, I do have some relevant experience, particularly of picking locks, breaking & entering, vandalism, petty larceny, and loitering and vagrancy.
I don't mean to threaten anything, of course. I just wanted to make sure you were properly informed about the potential impact of the fiscal choices you and the legislature have to make.
Thank you for your consideration,
Chris Nagel, PhD
I mean, consider these options:
I don't want any of those. I'm not angry/crazy enough, for starters.
Wednesday, October 08, 2008
the market is always right, except when it isn't
A Reuters story this morning detailed the International Monetary Fund's warning of global recession. First of all, friggin' duh! Note to powerful/moneyed elites: stop saying we may be headed toward recession or we're on the verge of recession. It makes you look stupid.
Secondly:
Turns out, the free market is self-correcting and always moves in the proper direction, and can be trusted to regulate itself, except that when you let it, it fucks up.
If a joke is in order here: Who knew the free market was built by Dodge?
But luckily, the market has determined how to fix the problem, which is the way it always fixes problems, by making all of us without any wealth pay for it. Ironically, to the extent there is any genuine wealth, we created it in the first place.
Secondly:
"The world economy is now entering a major downturn in the face of the most dangerous shock in mature financial markets since the 1930s," the IMF said in its World Economic Outlook.
In hindsight, the IMF said lax economic and regulatory policies probably allowed the global economy to "exceed its speed limit." At the same time, market flaws, together with policy shortcomings, allowed stresses to build.
Now, the global economy is about to pay the price.
Turns out, the free market is self-correcting and always moves in the proper direction, and can be trusted to regulate itself, except that when you let it, it fucks up.
If a joke is in order here: Who knew the free market was built by Dodge?
But luckily, the market has determined how to fix the problem, which is the way it always fixes problems, by making all of us without any wealth pay for it. Ironically, to the extent there is any genuine wealth, we created it in the first place.
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