busyMichael Moore | Goodbye, GM
Michael Moore, MichaelMoore.com: "I write this on the morning of the end of the once-mighty General Motors. By high noon, the President of the United States will have made it official: General Motors, as we know it, has been totaled. As I sit here in GM's birthplace, Flint, Michigan, I am surrounded by friends and family who are filled with anxiety about what will happen to them and to the town. Forty percent of the homes and businesses in the city have been abandoned.
This has its ups and downs. I believe that mismanaged companies must be allowed to fail, so I'm pleased that the government has stopped pouring money down this particular rat hole. However, much distress and damage had already resulted from this company's collapse; more is to come; and I'm unhappy about that. I think the situation could have been handled better, and that our social support network is disgracefully shabby.
Dean Baker | Investigating the Collapse: Looking for the Killer We Already Know
Dean Baker, Truthout: "Congress may establish a commission to investigate the causes of the economic crisis. This may be a useful exercise in publicly shaming those who are responsible for an enormous amount of unnecessary suffering. That would be a good thing. These people should be held accountable. Those in the financial sector who broke the law should go to jail, or at the least, lose their ill-gotten fortunes. The public officials whose incompetence and/or corruption allowed for this disaster should lose their jobs and never again be given a position of public trust."
I really like Baker's core premises here: 1) Analyze failures to determine why they happened. 2) Ensure that those whose incompetence, greed, and/or other foolishness caused the problems are censured and prevented from repeating the performance elsewhere. 3) Establish protections to prevent future repetitions.
Robert Reich | The Future of Manufacturing, GM, and American Workers
Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog: "We should stop pining after the days when millions of Americans stood along assembly lines and continuously bolted, fit, soldered or clamped what went by. Those days are over.... Any job that's even slightly routine is disappearing from the US. But this doesn't mean we are left with fewer jobs. It means only that we have fewer routine jobs, including traditional manufacturing. When the US economy gets back on track, many routine jobs won't be returning - but new jobs will take their place."
The problem I see with this is that the jobs we're losing are substantially better than the jobs we're gaining. Manufacture is skilled labor that traditionally commands decent wages and regular hours plus a benefits package with health care, pension, vacation time, sick leave, etc. The job market is overwhelmingly swinging towards retail and service jobs with low wages, short and/or erratic hours, few or no benefits, and low job security. This is part of how we got from an economy where one job would support a household to an economy where it takes 2-5 jobs to support a household. People are overworked, underpaid, overstressed ... and it's making them sick and insane in ever increasing numbers. This is not sustainable. We need to fix it.
June 3 2009, 13:33:19 UTC 12 years ago
With all the progress that has been made in efficiency and productivity, the raw labour needed to provide us with all the goods and services we need has been drastically reduced, we don't even need a fraction of the man-hours available in order to keep the economy running.
Unfortunately, we're still living in this system of wage slavery, which means that people's lives depend on their wages. With many man-hours available and few needed, unemployment explodes, and so does poverty.
We need to get rid of the old wage system. We need to find a way to provide all the people with what they need, to distribute all the goods... you see, this could be some sort of Utopia, a world in which nobody would have to work more than 3 hours a day, 3 days a week, go on vacation for three months a year, and we would still have plenty of everything...
Hmm...
June 3 2009, 18:17:50 UTC 12 years ago
I think this is partly right. The economy does seem to need fewer man-hours for producing goods, and unemployment is certainly rising as jobs (especially good ones) disappear never to be replaced.
Some kind of system other than wage-slavery might work better. Then again, it might not. People need to be active and productive, or they go crazy. I don't think 3 hours a day would be enough, although it would if balanced with other types of productive activity.
The piece missing from the equation is that there are tons of things that need doing, but mostly aren't getting done or are only done poorly. We could do a lot better with child care and elder care than we are. We need to maintain our infrastructure better. There are lots of social and environmental tasks that need attention.
If I were going to redesign the economy, I'd look for ways to maximize efficiency, close gaps between needs and resources, reward people for good productivity, and get things done without exhausting people or resources.