Worse Than It Seems

[bronxiteforever]

Drilling down to the rotten foundation of the economic crisis
by Dean Starkman
Columbia School of Journalism May/June 2008

with the economy apparently already in recession, gas prices near record levels, food prices rising, and inflation generally gaining momentum, economic issues are moving to the center of the presidential campaign. Political reporters have been forced to learn the financial crisis on the fly, while business reporters have had to learn to speak to an ever-growing audience. In March, Dean Starkman,who runs The Audit on CJR.org, spoke with Jeff Madrick, the editor of Challenge magazine, to discuss the roiling economy and how the press is covering it. Madrick is also a visiting professor of humanities at The Cooper Union, and director of policy research at the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis, The New School. He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, and a former economics columnist for The New York Times. His forthcoming books are The Case for Big Government (Princeton) and The Age of Greed…And the Men Who Made It (Alfred A. Knopf).

Why has that happened?

It’s a complex set of issues. The conventional economic issues have to do with jobs becoming more sophisticated due to changing technologies. So you need a better education than you did before. But that doesn’t explain everything, because college-educated people aren’t doing that well either. There are also issues about business norms now that have changed significantly from the fifties and sixties. There is no hesitation to fire people, for example; there is no hesitation to keep wages down. The government and the Federal Reserve participate in this—since the seventies, every serious wage increase has been considered inflationary, so keep it down. The minimum wage wasn’t raised for many years, and it’s much lower than it used to be in real terms. That’s a sign the federal government isn’t paying attention.

Isn’t it true, though, that because people overseas will work for pennies, Americans must accept job losses?

Trade issues do have some effect, but we’re not necessarily losing the better-paying jobs, or even the middle-income jobs, due to trade. I think it’s just less of an issue than we’ve been led to believe by mainstream economists and the press, though it is an issue and it will be a growing issue. I think globalization also makes it easier to overlook and excuse the deterioration in business norms and government norms—businesses shouldn’t be able to throw their workers out, especially as unions have lost so much power. We’ve just lost all of those cultural and political restraints in the great shift in attitude toward business.

Journalists see optimism as a fifties-type thing?

Yeah, worker optimism. Workers could take care of their families; they could take care of themselves; there was a future out there, and they could say, “Holy cow, my kids are going to have a great life.” And then you have people who say, “Well, that was only in the fifties and the sixties,” but, you know, there’s been a long period of progress in America. There’s a serious lack of historical perspective from many of these writers, and they reflect a high level of ideology, leading them to accept as fact what are really just neoliberal assumptions about regulation, trade, inequality, and the economy in general. They kind of believe economists at Harvard must be right. Economics is too important to be left solely to the economic sciences now being practiced.

more here

http://www.cjr.org/q_and_a/worse_than_it_seems.php?page=all

[Vincardog]

1. As long as the two primary industries of the USA are WAR and prisons there is no hope

for the average working person.

[bronxiteforever]

2. Sad ain't it-

:banghead:

[defendandprotect]

3. The GOP has wanted to bring back the 50's . . . Segregation, Sexism, Homophobia ...

How come we never hear any of the corporate-media reporters say, "Is Capitalism really that great?"

... or . .. "How about nationalizing our oil resources?" ---

"Where are the electric cars?" ---

And would our society be better off with democratic socialism?

It's the concepts which are sucidal --- from pariarchy to organized patriarchal religion,
from unregulated capitalism to "Manifest Destiny" and "Man's Dominion Over Nature" --

"Man's Dominion Over Nature" --- a suicidal concept which is laughable ---

[bronxiteforever]

4. You are right about the bad part of the 50s but what is never discussed

is that segregation ended (legal) just at the time the manufacturing jobs and the unions died.Or rather were drowned in the bathtub by the GOP.

But the big issue about what type of economy we have needs to be debated -for me a much greater governmental hand and to closely paraphrase Kurt the late and great Vonnegut "don't you hate liberalism, social security and public schools -doesn't it make you want to vomit?"

[defendandprotect]

5. Love Vonnegut ---

Well, segregation ended to a degree --- now a huge number of African-Americans are in jail ---
or faced with 50% unemployment rates for AA males. I think that's the number/?.

Rather than making female salaries equal to male salaries where the work was the same,
corporations simply let male salaries stagnate until the gap was smaller.

Citizens don't debate these questions because they don't hear them mentioned in corporate-press...