This is America. This is today’s Christmas as November brought us another round of layoffs, this time numbering 533,000 newly unemployed. The numbers keep climbing. This time we reached a 15 year high, with the steepest slide in 34 years (non-farm payroll unemployment). When factoring in the unemployed, underemployed, and discouraged workers, the real unemployment rate is 13%. This will like reach, at least, 20% this time next year. According to Robert Reich, in order to keep up with population growth, employment needs to increase by 125,000 jobs per month. Not happening!!! Also, he says that the length of the work week for many has dropped to 33.5 hours. That does not help wages. The Department of Labor reported that this cut back of hours was the worst since 1964. November has been the 11th straight monthly decline of lost jobs. 2008 has been the Year of Jobs Losses. Consumer spending is at a 28 year low. This is the new America brought to us by the corporate cannibals and financial predators of our country.
Instead of the American worker cannibalized by the corporate predators making a stand against their diminished retirement fund, evaporating salaries and wages, underwater mortgages, and destabilizing future, and saying they will not submit to wasting their fragile wages on this Wal-Mart-style Christmas, they fill the parking lot lanes with their SUVs and minivans and proceed with their roboticized consumeristic bad habits as they willingly drown themselves even further into more and more debt pleasing the corporate cannibals as they make Wal-Mart the fattest predatory cat in the retail neighborhood.
What will it take for them to raise up the windows, lean out and yell, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore.” No doubt, a soup kitchen voucher, might not wake up most.
General Motors corporatists continue to pump out SUVs and even roll out their newest versions which only get 16 miles per gallon!! The cannibals have no shame while sitting before Congress with their hands out for cash advances on corporate rebuilds. These predatory CEOs and top tier executives made billions of dollars over the last several years investing in the non-regulated securitized toxic derivative bubble, while their workers got blamed for receiving too much earned income with their supported benefits, as they drove around in their Bentleys motoring off to their 10-20,000 square foot palatial weekend ocean side estates in the Hamptons or a getaway mountain surround-sound 6,000 square foot townhome in the ski haven of Vail. Yet, they were the very people that destroyed their own companies, and now ask for their workers to give them their income checks back in the form of bailouts. Not the workers. Oh, the sweet smell of Reagan's regressive trickle-down economics keeps bubbling up like a virgin field of that delightful crude oil.
These corporate cannibals bask in their corporate trickle-down bailouts, while their displaced, or laid-off workers who now stand in the long lines of their local unemployment office. This is the 2008 Predatory Christmas. So, go out and shop!
In doing so, the Chinese will enjoy a 10% GDP, while the U.S. sees their GDP at 0.5%. Experts say that the real U.S. GDP is in the negative range. It will fall even more as valuable resources go to bailout the financial sector at a cost estimated to fall in the range of $7.7 TRILLION!!!! This does not buy jobs, wages and health care. This does not help the Wal-Mart shopper who is presently handing their wages over to Da' Man down in their corporate Arkansas headquarters, while he writes those checks to China.
So, call up Santa Claus on your cell phone and order up a new multi-function, high deluxe cell phone, and a giant wall-mounted, digital high-resolution T.V, along with a sweet Nintendo Wii. You can rationalize the Wii by telling yourself that this is a family gift. You and your kids will use it as an exercise device to work off those extra pounds.
Go ahead and rack up your credit card debt to new and spectacular heights with head spinning compounding interest rates, while paying down your interest-only mortgage. Step up your joy! Click those heels together. Toto says, Disney World is calling you! Ignore your state-of-mind. What else is there to do? The Chinese own you, your kids and me, as well as the Japanese, and the Taiwanese, and of course, our good friends in the UK. They hold the greatest amount of U.S. debt, which they will want back, with interest, once they decide to cash it in.
So, get ready to sit down to a wholesome Subway Hoagie Holiday Christmas dinner. You DO remember what that Thanksgiving one cost you; don't you? That killed your monthly budget.
Peter Morici, an economist at the University of Maryland, says that recessions are like stock markets, which correct themselves, and after a time, a down market rebounds without government intervention. This is not the case in 2008. He says that a depression is not self-correcting. I am saying that this market is not self-correcting. The rise in the equities market is based upon nothing—no good news. It is rebounding only because President-elect Obama is making statements that bring on the rallies. This does not make any sense. Another reason why this market is rebounding, and we can suspect with confidence that the Fed and the PPT (Plunge Protection Team) do not want to see the DOW below 8000. This would bring on more sell-offs and a jittery Wall-Street. It is a psychological downward benchmark. Bada Bing Bernanke does not want this. The market should really be under 8000 today, but he and the PPT are likely preventing it by intervening in the market through the buying of equity futures.
Some experts are saying that the bottom of the market will see the S & P hit 700 before it finally begins to level out. Today the S & P is at 909.
Rakesh Saxena of Seekingalpha.com, said that there will be a record number of European corporations on the verge of default due to deepening financial problems, and these are non-investment grade corporations. This has been happening in the U.S. for over a year. This crisis is now reverberating worldwide.
This is not only the new America, but what we are experiencing here may also be the new world. Will this be a Subway Hoagie Holiday Christmas dinner for many others around the world? It could easily fit right in the Christmas stocking for easy delivery. Pull out your hoagie and we will all sit down at the table and join in together.
Thanks for reading, Jerry
