This is your life

And possibly your future.

Washington (AP, January 9) - The nation's unemployment rate dropped to 5.7 percent in December, the lowest level in 14 months, as frustrated jobseekers gave up their searches with hiring at a near standstill.

The anemic report, released Friday by the Labor Department, raised new fears about the strength of an economic recovery that is producing so few new U.S. jobs. Businesses overall added just 1,000 new American jobs last month, the department reported, far fewer than economists had expected.

"Take your pick: awful, sobering, pathetic," lamented Bill Cheney, chief economist at John Hancock Financial Services.

The 5.7 percent jobless rate, down 0.2 percentage point from November, was the lowest since October 2002. The decline didn't reflect new hiring, but frustrated workers, almost 310,000, who left the labor force. The government's rate counts only people actively seeking work. ...

Businesses have added just 277,000 new jobs since July, the report showed, cutting earlier estimates of growth in October and November.

So in the period August to December, 277,000 new jobs, an average of 55,400 per month. About 150,000 jobs have to be added in an average month just to keep pace with population growth and economists are looking for 200,000-300,000 every month to significantly reduce unemployment. "Sobering" doesn't begin to describe it.

Oh, but there was one person who found good news in all this.

Bush seized on the lower jobless rate as reason to be optimistic about the economy.

"We want more people still working," the president said at a small business forum. "But nevertheless, it is a positive sign that the economy is getting better."

Now, I just do not believe that George Bush, who has the worst job creation record of any president since Herbert Hoover, is so out to lunch that he doesn't know what's going on here. If he was, you could call that remark pathetic. But in reality you have to call it a crude, cruel, vicious lie.

But please don't kid yourselves that if only we get a Democrat in the White House everything will be fine. It might - maybe - be a tad better, but only a tad and not fine by any means. The forces that are driving this will not be overcome by some tinkering at the federal level. A massive public works program with a price tag no one of them will touch would be a start - but what it would really take is a restructured economy of a kind that is not even on the radar screen of either major party.

In writing this I was reminded of something I wrote a while ago, so I dug it out. It turns out to have been from a letter to a friend in the UK, written In November, 1993. It's not precisely related to the above, but I think it bears mention. I was writing about NAFTA and the predictions that it would produce "regional dislocations," where one part of the country would be helped while another part was hurt by the same changes. I noted that if, for a purely hypothetical example, if as a result of the agreement the southwest gained a million jobs while New England lost a million, the effect on total employment is zero, but the social disruption in both regions could be considerable. I went on to say

That, in turn, raises another issue which predates NAFTA (and GATT) but is closely connected to them: loss of community or, rather, the creation of what I call rootless workers. For a few decades now, capital has become more and more mobile, shifting from place to place more by electronic transfers than by the movement of actual bonds, bills, and coins. (You've heard of virtual reality; this is like virtual money.) Corporations have become freer than ever to chase around a country or the world, leaping from enterprise to enterprise, even industry to industry, in pursuit of profit. The result has been regional booms and busts as one area competes with others to see who could offer the most to Big Business in a downward spiral of self-flagellation that inevitably left the losers gasping for economic breath - and, often, the "winners" with a temporary if not downright pyrrhic "victory." (Consider Texas, whose "boom towns" of the ‘70s became the empty husks of the ‘80s; consider Korea, whose "economic miracle" of the ‘80s, built on the infusion of transnational capital in search of low-wage labor, is turning sour as corporations move on to the Philippines in search of even lower-wage labor.)

The corporate response to this undeniable reality has been to trumpet "emerging opportunities," "growth regions," and "market expansion." Implicit in all this staged euphoria is the notion that working stiffs, ordinary folks, everyday people, or whatever other folksy label we want to put on the 90% of us left out of the considerations of the powerful, are no different than the parts on a machine: replaceable, disposable, even interchangeable. And that the only way for us to survive in this bold new economic future is to be as mobile as capital - that is, to chase work around the country or the world as rapidly as money chases profit. We dare not attach ourselves to a place, a people, a community, or even a particular sort of work because we may have to abandon it on short notice for the sake of our own and our families' survival, perpetually chasing behind - always, of course, behind - capital in what gives a new, more sinister meaning to "the rat race."

We have to drink the shallow economic water that runs on the surface of a local economy because if we dare to set down roots and try to drink from a deeper source, we may find the watershed pumped away to feed another, distant, plain, leaving the earth cracked, dry, and barren and ourselves (and the stable communities we hoped to find) to wither. We must, that is, become nomads - no, not even nomads, which implies purposeful ranging over well-known territory, but mere wanderers, emotionally isolated in order to be emotionally insulated against the constant risk and frequent reality of loss. We must be homeless, placeless, rootless.

If that sounds melodramatic it's because it describes not what's fully formed today but the end of a process that has been going for some time and will only be accelerated by NAFTA and GATT, which make the macroeconomics of transnational corporations and not the microeconomics of actual human beings not merely the central (that'd be nothing new) but increasingly the only economic standard of measure. On the other hand, if it sounds melancholic, that's because it is.

With the number of "discouraged workers" having surged 20% in the last year, it just may be that I was wrong in one way - that instead of becoming rootless, many of us have just given up.

Go here for a post with some links to other posts on the economy.