Slouching Toward a Double-Dip Recession
"But we seem to have got the worst of all worlds. The bank
bailout, the stimulus, and the Fed brought us back from the brink just
enough to dampen zeal for anything more......"
By Robert Reich, Robert Reichs Blog
03 July 2010
Or a Lousy Recovery at Best
The economy is still in the gravitational pull of the Great Recession and
all the booster rockets for getting us beyond it are failing. The odds of a
double dip are increasing.
In June the nation added fewer jobs than necessary merely to keep up with
population growth (private hiring rose by 83,000 after adding only 33,000
jobs in May). The typical workweek declined. Average earnings dropped. Home
sales are down. Retail sales are down. Factory orders in May suffered their
biggest tumble since March of last year.
So what are we doing about it? Less than nothing. The states are running an
anti-stimulus program (raising taxes, cutting services, laying off teachers,
firefighters, police and other employees) that's now bigger than the federal
stimulus program. That federal stimulus is 75 percent gone anyway. And the
House and Senate refuse to pass another one. (The Senate left Washington for
the July 4th weekend without even extending unemployment benefits for
millions of jobless Americans now running out.)
The second booster rocket - the Fed's rock-bottom short-term interest
rates - are having almost no effect. That's because jobs and wages are so
lousy that consumers don't have enough money to buy much of anything, making
small businesses bad credit risks and causing big ones to sit on the huge
pile of cash they've accumulated.
Wall Street and the other biggest global banks, meanwhile, are making piles
of money betting against government debt all over the world. These were the
same banks and financiers, remember, that were bailed out by government not
long ago. But now they're demanding fiscal austerity, and politicians are
once again doing their bidding - cutting deficits in every rich economy that
should now be doing the reverse.
The people who are suffering the most from the failure of public officials
and the greed of large bankers are the least able to endure it. Unemployment
among people with four-year college degrees is barely over 5 percent; among
high-school dropouts it's over 25 percent. Those who have been jobless the
longest or who have left the labor force altogether are men over fifty who
are least likely to get back in. Families most in need are losing the
services - state-supported Medicaid, child dental care, after-school
programs for the kids, public transit - they most depend on.
The irony is that had there been no bank bailout in 2008 and 2009, no large
stimulus, and no extraordinary efforts by the Fed to pump trillions of
dollars into the economy, we'd have had another Great Depression. And
because it would have sucked almost everyone down with it, the nation would
have demanded from politicians larger and more fundamental reforms that
might well have lifted everyone, and set America and the world on a more
sustainable path toward growth and shared prosperity: A stimulus that
financed the rebuilding of the nation's infrastructure and alternative
energies, single-payer health care, a cap on the size of big banks and
resurrection of Glass-Steagall, earnings insurance, an Earned Income Tax
Credit that extended into the middle class, and a truly progressive tax
coupled with a price on carbon to pay for all of this over the long term.
No one in their right mind would have wished for another Great Depression,
of course. But we seem to have got the worst of all worlds. The bank
bailout, the stimulus, and the Fed brought us back from the brink just
enough to dampen zeal for anything more. As a result, we are now slouching
toward a tepid recovery that could just as well fall into a double dip
recession, while a large portion of our population suffers immensely.
Robert Reich is Professor of Public Policy at the University of California
at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently
as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written twelve
books, including "The Work of Nations," "Locked in the Cabinet," and his
most recent book, "Supercapitalism." His "Marketplace" commentaries can be
found on publicradio.com and iTunes.
***
The G20 summit's grim lessons for civil liberties
Thomas Walkom
Toronto Star: July 03, 2010
Two things stand out from the street riots and subsequent police actions
that swept downtown Toronto last weekend.
The first is the state blatantly abused its powers. Summits legitimately
require security; but in this one, governments went over the top.
The federal government transformed the city's downtown into a no-go zone.
The provincial government secretly passed new regulations to give police
extraordinary search and seizure powers and then, when citizens found out,
pretended that it hadn't. The police used their authority to prevent
breaches of the peace as an excuse to jail citizens who were committing no
crimes
The second is that most people don't care. Polls show that more than 70 per
cent of Torontonians approve of these abuses.
For that we can thank the small group of rioters who burned police cars and
smashed store windows last Saturday. The logic behind those actions (and yes
there is a logic) flows from the theory that capitalism is based on
violence, albeit violence that is usually veiled. By provoking the state,
this intrinsic violence will be revealed, thereby radicalizing the
population against both capitalism and the state.
The problem with this theory, as the Red Brigades and other left-wing
terrorists found in the 1970s, is that such provocations drive the general
population to authoritarianism, not revolution.
Faced with a choice between order and civil liberties, people almost
invariably choose order. Think the Nazis in 1930s Germany; think the PATRIOT
Act in post 9/11 America.
In last weekend's brouhaha, governments and the so-called anarchists fed on
and supported one another. By threatening to disrupt the summit, the
anarchists ensured that the fence would be built. By building the fence, the
government ensured that the anarchists would try to attack it. Each side
kept upping the ante until the events of last weekend became almost
inevitable.
In the end, the violence that always lies behind state authority did show
itself to those who had assumed they were immune.
Andrew MacIsaac, a 24-year-old lawyer observing the demonstrations for the
Law Union, was swept up by police early Sunday morning and held at the
Eastern Ave. detention centre for almost 20 hours. He tells a now-familiar
story.
MacIsaac says he and others in the peaceful protest were arrested under the
broad authority of police to detain those they think might be about to
engage in a breach of the peace.
He was not permitted to contact a lawyer; he was kept handcuffed in a cage
with others. He was given two cheese sandwiches over the period and three
styrofoam cups of water. The open portable toilet in his cage had no toilet
paper (MacIsaac tore off part of his shirt sleeve to help a fellow inmate);
he was never formally notified of the charges-if any-levied against him.
In police state terms, this is relatively minor. MacIsaac wasn't chained in
stress positions, as he might have been at Guantanamo Bay. Nor was he flayed
with rubber cables, as he might have been in Egypt.
But what's interesting is that some of the elements of classic authoritarian
detention were there, albeit in embryonic forms. He was kept deliberately
disoriented; usually, he didn't know what time it was. He was kept
uncomfortable; the combination of bound wrists and concrete floor made it
impossible for him to sleep. His sense of self-worth was undermined by an
array of minor indignities such as the lack of toilet paper.
In particular, he was kept isolated from the outside world. Requests to call
a lawyer were never formally denied, just put off to some undefined and
never-reached point in the future.
At one point, an official in plain-clothes told him that the federal
government had declared martial law.
When he was released, MacIsaac phoned his mother (it was her birthday).
Then, in what may be a fitting epitaph for the entire Toronto G20 Summit
disaster, he describes what he did next.
"I took a cab home and I wept."
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