On March 1, 2013, Paul Craig Robers writes on OPEDNews.com:
Officially, since June 2009 the US economy has been undergoing an economic recovery from the December 2007 recession. But where is this recovery? I cannot find it, and neither can millions of unemployed Americans.
The recovery exists only in the official measure of real GDP, which is deflated by an understated measure of inflation, and in the U.3 measure of the unemployment rate, which is declining because it does not count discouraged job seekers who have given up looking for a job.
No other data series indicates an economic recovery. Neither real retail sales nor housing starts, consumer confidence, payroll employment, or average weekly earnings indicate economic recovery.
Neither does the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy. The Fed’s expansive monetary policy of bond purchases to maintain negative real interest rates continues 3.5 years into the recovery. Of course, the reason for the Fed’s negative interest rates is not to boost the economy but to boost asset values on the books of “banks too big to fail.”
The low interest rates raise the prices of the mortgage-backed derivatives and other debt-related assets on the banks’ balance sheets at the expense of interest income for retirees on their savings accounts, money market funds, and Treasury bonds.
Despite recovery’s absence and the lack of job opportunities for Americans, Republicans in Congress are sponsoring bills to enlarge the number of foreigners that corporations can bring in on work visas. The large corporations claim that they cannot find enough skilled Americans. This is one of the most transparent of the constant stream of lies that we are told.
Foreign hires are not additions to the work force, but replacements. The corporations force their American employees to train the foreigners, and then the American employees are discharged. Obviously, if skilled employees were in short supply, they would not be laid off. Moreover, if the skills were in short supply, salaries would be bid up, not down, and the 36% of those who graduated in 2011 with doctorate degrees in engineering would not have been left unemployed. The National Science Foundation’s report, “Doctorate Recipients From U.S. Universities,” says that only 64% of the Ph.D. engineering graduates found a pay check.
As I have reported on numerous occasions for many years, neither the payroll jobs statistics nor the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ job projections show job opportunities for university graduates. But this doesn’t stop Congress from helping US corporations get rid of their American employees in exchange for campaign donations.
The “American Dream” of 1776 enunciated in the founding papers of the Republic, underwrote minimal Government and maximal individual political and economic liberty, and drew inspiration from the widely held view that life, liberty, and property were an inseparable trinity.
That dream has largely been converted into a nightmare in modern America through the concentrated control effects of giant Government and monopoly capitalism, which may be handmaidens in tyranny. This situation has come about because of philosophical thinking that is inadequate to meet the needs of the 21st century, thinking which has not kept pace with the fruits of science; and the situation is also due to a combination of conspiracy, greed, and archaic political philosophy.
In a modern, technological era it is the ownership of productive capital wealth, not the labor of people that is the primary creator of affluence.
Hence, it is access to ownership of productive capital wealth, not to jobs, wherein the national economic policy guidelines for the 21st century ought to lie. As ownership of productive capital wealth becomes widely diffused, political power ought also to be widely diffused.
The United States economy is limping along with puny GDP growth at the rate of 2.2 percent last year, 1.8 percent the year before, and 2.4 percent in 2010, with at least 12 million Americans still looking for work. As a result of this sluggish growth, longtime unemployed workers have lost skills, making it harder for them to find work when it does open up. Executives have lost confidence in the economy’s ability to expand and willingness to invest in it because of the subsequent lack of “customers with money” to purchase their products and services. Without system reform, the future will continue to lower expectations for growth and this subpar growth will continue to render millions more of workers effectively unemployable. Designing and targeting skills-training programs is a partial solution that will benefit a relative few seeking jobs in the private sector. Without significant economic growth, there is no way that even with a every citizen educated to the university level will there be sufficient private sector job creation in numbers that match the pool of people willing and able to work. This is because in reality, job creation is constantly being eroded by physical productive capital’s ever increasing role as the primary means to produce products and services. New technological innovation and invention are changing the realities of the workplace and how we think about work. Without robust investment in economic growth America’s economic decline will continue.
Why is this happening?
The reason is simple. A relative few people OWN the preponderance of the nation’s productive capital wealth and are positioned to OWN the FUTURE productive wealth, from which they earn dividend income and valuable capital gains asset growth. This is why there is widening economic inequality resulting in class conflict between the so-called 1 percent “successful” ownership class and the 99 percent, who are capital-less or under-capitalized, and whose ONLY source of income is a job or taxpayer supported government welfare derived from tax extraction and national debt. This Income inequality is exponentially crippling the United States from realizing its creative and social and just economic potential.
Thus, there is the imbalance between production and consumption. A few wealthy people are thereby able to rig the “system” to manipulate the lives of people who struggle with declining labor worker earnings and job opportunities, and then accumulate the bulk of the money through monopolized productive capital ownership. Our scientists, engineers, and executive managers who are not owners themselves, except for those in the highest employed positions, are encouraged to work to destroy employment by making the capital owner more productive. How much employment can be destroyed by substituting machines for people or lowering operational costs is a measure of their success––always focused on producing at the lowest cost. Only the people who already own productive capital are the beneficiaries of their work, as they systematically concentrate more and more capital ownership in their stationary 1 percent ranks. Yet the 1 percent are not the people who do the overwhelming consuming. The result is the consumer populous is not able to get the money to buy the products and services produced as a result of substituting “machines” for people or devaluing labor wages and salaries. And yet you can’t have mass production without mass human consumption. It is the exponential disassociation of production and consumption, which is the problem with the United States economy, and the reason that ordinary citizens must gain access to productive capital ownership to improve their economic well-being.
For the nation to overcome widening income inequality, the obvious, logical solution is for people to OWN THE “MACHINES” and non-human means of production that result from technology. Broadening productive capital ownership should be the priority course of action for the FUTURE.
The balanced Just Third Way approach to building a FUTURE economy that supports affluence for EVERY American is presently not in the national discussion. It appears that the President of the United States, the elected Congressional representatives and Senators, academia, and the media are oblivious to this principled solution that has the ingredients to power economic growth at double-digit GNP rates.
This goal requires investment in FUTURE income-producing productive capital assets while simultaneously broadening private, individual ownership of the resulting expansion of existing large corporations and future corporations. Not only is employee ownership the norm to be sought wherever there are workers but beyond employee ownership the norm should be to create an OWNERSHIP CULTURE whereby EVERY American can benefit financially by owning a SUPER IRA-TYPE Capital Homestead Account (CHA) portfolio of income-producing, full-voting, full-dividend payout securities in America’s expanding corporations and those newly created to produce the future products and services needed and wanted by society.
Support the Agenda of The Just Third Way Movement at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797.
Support the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm
http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Missing-Recovery-by-Paul-Craig-Roberts-130301-410.html
