The United States of Crap
A cheerless editorial in the NYTimes this morning:
The numbers are undeniable. The economy created 117,000 jobs in July, but at comparable points in the recoveries from other severe recessions, the economy was adding about 400,000 jobs a month.
Even at that rate, it would be three years before the unemployment rate was down to its prerecession level of 5 percent. In the last three months, job growth has averaged 72,000.
The downtick in the unemployment rate, to 9.1 percent from 9.2 percent, is also dismaying on closer inspection. It does not reflect an increase in the share of workers finding jobs. Rather, it reflects a shrinking labor force, as the long-term unemployed and other jobless workers give up looking for jobs. If nearly three million sidelined workers were included in the official unemployment rate, it would be 10.7 percent. (The rate is higher still, 16.1 percent, when people who can only find part-time jobs are included.)
Washington may be in denial, but the rest of the country knows what’s going on. A New York Times/CBS News Poll, released the same day as the July jobs report, showed that by a ratio of more than two to one, Americans say that creating jobs should be a higher priority than cutting spending.
The poll also showed that a record 82 percent of Americans now say they disapprove of Congress, a sentiment that is surely fed by the belief of an overwhelming majority who told the pollsters that the debt ceiling fight was more about gaining political advantage than doing what is best for the country.
Is it too late? I think the best indicator of that will be when newspapers start running editorials like this one on Sundays instead of Saturdays.
China is telling us to live within our means, but what they really mean is that we should only buy cheap shit (like what they make) because we’re broke. Yet the smart thing over the long haul is to buy quality, durable goods. Items that will last you a lifetime and that will still have value for successive generations. The kind of stuff we used to make in this country before we started hiring smarter executives.
The hideous phrase used by my and previous generations of America for this is nigger rich. Like most negative traits insultingly ascribed to the descendants of African slaves, this one speaks directly to the consumer behavior of less educated, usually lower income people. China wants us to buy crap and then when the crap breaks, buy more crap. And we do.
We buy crap because our entire economy is crap-based. The pressure to buy (consume) is enormous, and when you’re broke you can only sate this need to buy by buying crap. (Crap is cheap.) We’ve become the United States of Crap, which is probably the only thing worse than being the People’s Republic of Crap Manufacturing. The world economy runs on the manufacturing, distribution, sales and disposal of crap, and our financial institutions are all devoted to enabling the flow of crap between sellers and buyers (crap and trade).
But yes, things could get worse
The teabagger tax is $322 per American
Yves Smith with that al Jazeera video for those of you who still haven’t watched it
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The Taliban shot down a U.S. helicopter, claiming 31 Americans and seven Afghan soldiers.
And Petraeus still has a job despite all his failures. Fucking amazing. Since even the Wile E. Coyote supergenius of all supergenius generals can’t keep our troops safe, why don’t we just get the fuck out now?
emptywheel asks, Who will be the last 31 Americans to die in effort to kill the last 31 al Qaeda members in Afghanistan?
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The Washington Post keeps hauling water for the Mormons. Today they have another of their Five Myths series, except this time they’re lying out their ass on behalf of America’s second-weirdest religion. (And, needless to say, they let a Mormon write this one so it’s really, really objective!)
Mormons practice polygamy. WaPost says myth, but admits it’s historically accurate and still practiced by splinter groups. Under Fox News Islamaphobia standards, ALL MORMONS ARE STILL POLYGAMISTS.
Mormons aren’t Christians. Mormons say they are. I’m guessing tens of millions of right-wing evangelicals will disagree with them but that’s OK, because evangelicals aren’t Christians either. A true follower of Jesus Christ would barely bother to vote, let alone hold strong political opinions.
Most Mormons are white, English-speaking conservatives. [insert blather about overseas converts] False. They mostly live in Utah and surrounding states, are overwhelmingly of European descent and the only ones who speak Spanish are most likely hard core polygamists. Saying Mormons are a mixed bunch is like saying the Nazis were ethnically diverse after taking over most of Europe.
Mormon women are second-class citizens. The Post actually allows the female author of this tract to acknowledge that women are TOTALLY shut out of leadership positions in their church, and still claim this is false despite Mormons being the top church for turning women’s vaginas into clown cars.
A Mormon president would blur the line between church and state. This one is actually true. When you talk to cult leaders, they’re rarely persuasive as to their own personal faith. Mitt Romney believes in gold plates like I believe in Wotan and Valhalla.
Five golden plates, the Angel Moroni? No, Mormons don’t like to talk about their real beliefs. Mormonism is a fake bullshit religion for otherwise decent but spiritually fake people. File alongside nonobservant Jews, average Catholics and Sunday golfers everywhere. Religion is dying, but the dumber religions take longer to die.
The bottom line? Mitt Romney abuses his dog, and a man who treats his dog like shit would make for a shitty president.
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Rick Santorum makes it incredibly easy to hate Rick Santorum.
Liberals care more about caribou than about people who are struggling with health care problems and can’t get health insurance, an exasperated Rick Santorum told opinion writers Friday.
Yes, he really said that. Santorum’s right, of course. My caribou is in the kitchen making breakfast for us both right now. My caribou is from the Svalbord islands and she’s a beauty: young, tight where it counts — everything a red-blooded liberal male would want in a reindeer.
But you can’t buy health insurance for a caribou, and that’s why Rick Santorum is full of shit (unlike Mitt Romney’s dog who evacuated all over the back window of the family station wagon before they even pulled out of the driveway).
The Des Moines Register, however, loves Santorum because it’s easy to sound fluent and knowledgeable when everything you know is something you made up all by yourself. Another fact-free Republican and yes, when Rick’s not fantasizing about having anal sex with dogs, I think he’s lusting after my reindeer.
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Getting late so I guess I’ll leave the etc. for later. Time to run some errands (i.e., buy some more crap.)
Very revealing that the American media are uniformly referring to the Afghanistan helicopter shoot-down as a crash. “Crash” means mechanical failure or pilot error or bad weather or something. “Shot down” means the people we are trying to “liberate” hate us, which in turn means that the longest war in US history isn’t going so well.
It’s not the media. They have so few boots on the ground they have to take press releases from the military, and it usually takes the miitary quite a while to acknowledge that aircraft shot down by missiles were in fact shot down by missiles. This is playing out just like all the other helicopter “crashes.”
UPDATE: Seal Team Six was on that helicopter so yeah, the Taliban has now taken out the team that took out bin Laden. Think they’ll play that up at all?
I heard on the radio is was not the team that took out bin Laden.
Radio? They have news on radio now?
But you’re right. The NYTimes is now saying they were from the “broader unit” that the bin Laden team was from, but none of the actual team members were on that helicopter.
Someone sent me an email pointing which featured a depiction of somebody’s house emptied out of all things not made in America and it was pretty empty. The message was that even if the country does not officially sanction trade barriers against the crap, we can institute out own personal trade barriers. They suggested buying e.g. Libby’s canned peaches rather than “Our Family” because the latter is processed in China (I’m going to have to check that one out).
I’m all for buying American but the lst time I looked into this which was probably 20 years ago now you could not avoid it then because if you bought something labeled “Made in America”, it often had hidden components that were not so even the “Made in America” labels were false!
Wow! Just read Des Moines Register’s take on Santorum and PiPress article on Bachmann. These two really lay out a stark choice for the American people. Try the laissez faire government which failed in 1929, 1933 and 1937 with the Republican Party or take continuation of the policies starting in 1980 with Sir Ronnie to their logical conclusion with the Democratic/Republican Party. It’s morning in America once again!