InsaneJournal

Current mood:	cynical
Entry tags:	politics

Step 1: decide to innovate. Step 2: innovative idea is?? Step 3: Profit!
The economic meltdown becomes more real when it effects your job.

What I secretly and shamefully enjoyed -- shaking a fist at Bush and glad, glad, glad his legacy's in the garbage disposal -- has now hit home. My university's budget is going to be cut by 30% due to falling state revenues. My entire tutoring department has been eliminated.

I've been able to not-think about it, but I just composed a desperate-sounding email to the other tutoring departments to try to find work for the summer and next year.

Funny how you can't quite keep that quaver out of your voice, even on paper.

I know various explanations of our financial crisis. It seems to boil down to the fact that, while I've been responsible with my finances (if not saving enough), experts were rewarded for playing fast and loose and even cheating people. Then many people were ignorant and easily cheated (or took risks and are in trouble). Then there were cons, big ones, run by supposedly clean-cut executives. The market being the way it is, so long as people think all is well, stocks stay high. So companies have a lot invested in keeping up their image. This seems to encourage dishonesty and even downright fraud.

But at the core, our real problem is that the housing boom disguised the fact that for over the last 20 years, American jobs have been slipping overseas.

This has been going on a long time, but it accelerated under the Clinton administration (see? I'm not blindly partisan), and then accelerated again after the tech bubble collapsed, and again after 9/11.

Americans have been the major buyers of goods produced elsewhere. Our "service economy" is all about us spending money to buy things, thus keeping ourselves employed as middlemen between goods produced overseas and buyers here.

Companies have a strategy to make more money: pay fifteen cents on the dollar for employees overseas. Sell at the same high prices here. Keep the profit. And so more and more of those middleman jobs have been going overseas.

There's been no adjustment in American prices despite dwindling middle class incomes. Now theoretically, the wealthy who are scraping off those profits pay into the "service economy," so they'd spend more while the poor (former middle class) spends less. But ... that's not what happens.

The US collapse affected overseas not just because of the stock market, but because we stopped buying (entire Chinese factories have closed). Our remaining "middleman" jobs were immediately affected while more "middleman" jobs were sent overseas (IBM for example has laid off Americans and increased their overseas employees).

Businesses will continue to ship jobs overseas. There are too many rewards in doing so. They will eventually have to find more customers overseas as Americans begin to realize they can't afford to keep buying. All of our capitalist trade agreements force us to not protect American jobs.

US capitalism has us trapped in an eroding economic position.

Clinton, Bush, Obama ... all repeated that we need "innovation."

I read this as no one knows what to do.

What can we do?

Options:

1 - Switch to socialism. Stop laughing, it's on the table.
2 - Move overseas to where the jobs have gone.
3 - Re-train into US jobs that are hard to ship overseas; medical, teaching.
4 - Arm the unions.
5 - Revolution.
6 - Start innovative new industry. Stop laughing, it's on the table.
7 - Convince whole country to go Amish.
8 - Other-?