Wall Street is up! Goldman Sachs is raking in the dough! Spread the good news. As for this story, it’s probably best to ignore it all together, because who wants to be a party pooper?
The U.S. manufacturing sector is clawing back from a deep downturn, and manufacturing globally is on the skids. The climb back will be long and painful because the situation facing the sector isn’t just bad. It’s awful.
The Federal Reserve’s latest measure of industrial output shows that in June, U.S. manufacturers were operating at 64.6 percent of their installed capacity. It means they are producing at more than a third below their potential, and this is the worst rate since these records began being kept in 1948. Since the recession began in December 2007, through last month, manufacturers shed 1.9 million jobs, according to the U.S. Labor Department.
Please note, the starting date of said recession: 2007. Personally I saw signs of a downturn much earlier than that, but I’m no fancy schmansy economist. But I will say this: it sure looks to me like we are headed for nuclear superpower status combined with third world economic conditions, where the rich make more and more, the poor get less and less, and the middle class essentially disappears. In other words, the Middle Ages (or Russia in the 1990’s)! But with cell phones and the internet! Whoo Hoo!
But at least Wall Street will still be in business, and really, what else matters? Thanks Big Ben Bernanke and Little Timmy Geithner and Larry “I’m an asshole and I still got to be Obama’s Economic adviser” Summers. You’ve made all this possible, along with the Blue Dogs in Congress, by resisting the progressive policies (like restructuring mortgages in bankruptcy, cutting credit card usury, etc.) that might have made a difference in resurrecting that part of our economy that produces tangible goods rather than CDO’s and CDS’s and all the other alphabet soup derivatives our Masters of the Universe call their “product line.” Sure Bush’s wars, tax cuts and deregulation of the financial industry combined with Alan Greenspan’s cheap money factory (otherwise known as the Federal Reserve) created the conditions that led to the real estate bubble that burst round the world, but throwing money at Wall Street doesn’t seem to have done much for the rest of us.
Mr. President, you’re a smart guy so please don’t take this the wrong way, but you’ve bought into some really dumb advice from your “best and brightest” economic fixers. We don’t need higher stock prices, we need jobs. Lots and lots of jobs. Jobs that pay enough to reinvigorate and expand the Great American Middle Class. Until we start seeing those jobs, all this blather about the recession ending doesn’t amount to a hill of beans.
