In a recent article entitled “Stimulating Unemployment” the Wall Street Journal inadvertently showed its true colors. Black. They would like us all to wear black as a symbol of the death of the Middle Class which they are applauding and encouraging at every turn.
It is quite (more than) probable that it is the work of their new leader, the autocratic, greed-bound, dedicated plutocrat, Rupert Murdoch and his family. Their goals will not be achieved, it would seem, until…having come here as an immigrant billionaire…he destroys this country.
He has already hired Roger Ailes to head Fox News Channel and Ailes hired people like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Sarah Palin. Ostensibly not for their intellectual capacity, but for their willingness to do whatever they are told and make it sound convincing. He also hired gossip commentator Bill O’Reilly, who continues in the same mold. A fop.
Ailes is the master of dirty-tricks in politicking, the vicious former head of the Neocon-Republican Party, the fascist-corporatist organization that is now merely the campaign wing of the Chamber of Commerce, the American Petroleum Institute, the Koch Foundation and their Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the American Mining Congress. And Walmart of course.
In a real revolution, one would expect that all these people, Murdoch and his family, Ailes, Hannity, Beck, O’Reilly, Palin, as well as those who are even too vulgar to appear on television any longer, Michael Savage and Ann Coulter…would be the first to go under the falling blade. They would be the most visible proponents of the “let them eat cake” philosophy of the Fascist-Neocons and therefore the first to be swept away.
But the Wall Street Journal made an interesting point…even though they backed into it. They complained that President Obama is basically encouraging unemployment. They say that, by having produced a stimulus that they claim did not work, i.e., should not have been attempted, even though one-third of it was Neocon tax cuts without which they would not even have allowed it to pass, he furthered unemployment. And now he is encouraging it.
Well, here’s the truth.
Let’s start off by stating the obvious. The Wall Street Journal, far from trying to alleviate the situation, offers only a Murdoch solution. In other words…and this is it, really…no kidding…just get out and find a job even though, as the WSJ says, there are five applicants for every job available.
Soon, says the Wall Street Journal, we will have 2.5 million people who have run out of 2 years, 99 weeks of unemployment. Whatever shall we do then? (We might create 5 million jobs at $40,000 a year for one year, which would create another 4 million) Or so say the same economists that the Wall Street Journal ignores…people like Nobel Laureates Stiglitz and Krugman, plus others like Dean Baker, Jamie Galbraith and Ben Bernanke.
People who have jobs spend money. The places where they spend the money spend that money. It is basic economics. Since the Wall Street Journal quotes economists, they know this for certain. That makes the Wall Street Journal on its very face…a liar.
But they don’t stop there. Oh no. They have a lot of lies ready for us. We could surmise that they do it for the same reason that Murdoch’s little henchman, Ailes was told to be a good little boy and earn his millions by trying to shut down the health insurance reform bill. Why should corporations pay less for insurance when they can write it all off on their taxes? It is only the little people, BP Oil’s “small people” who will suffer and only then if they can’t afford their premiums or have their policies canceled.
How many people could that be? Only a dozen million or so. Not worth worrying about. Murdoch has that many gullible people watching his Fox News Channel every night. He’ll just have Hannity and Beck and O’Reilly lie to them. What’s the worst that can happen? If a mob shows up, he’ll just hop on his private jet and scurry away until the military and the National Guard and the police set up protection for him. He figures that it’s why they exist. To protect society…and he is society. He alone is important.
In the meantime, he’ll just keep running the same old lies, getting big money for advertising. After all, it is big corporations who spend money on his media. His constituents are CEOs of big corporations, not those “small people” the 2.5 million about to run out of unemployment benefits.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the “economic consensus” says that “The results (of a 1990 study) indicate that a one week increase in potential benefit duration increases the average duration of the unemployment spells of UI (unemployment insurance) recipients by 0.16 to 0.20 weeks.”
In other words for every week of unemployment you get, the duration of your next unemployment “spell” you will somehow be able to increase by one-fifteenth of a week. That means that the next time you decide that you want to get fired, as the WSJ seems to think you do, and the next time after that and three more times after that, the duration of your unemployment will increase by another day.
Wow! That is something to really strive for. An extra day of unemployment if you can just wait to be unemployed five more times. This is reality as the well-fed, well-raised, well-educated, upper-class editors of the Wall Street Journal define it. Total rubbish.
But why should they care? They are not rated by the truth that they produce. Only by the Murdoch propaganda that they can flush from the debased information they scurry around to find.
The fact is that in much more reliable surveys, almost all of them, every time, find that unemployed workers in overwhelming numbers would take almost any job rather than go through the humiliating experience of asking for the very unemployment insurance that they pay for in their paychecks, the paychecks without which they would get no unemployment insurance at all.
But let’s get back to this totally incompetent Obama guy. He wants to give people unemployment longer if they really need it. Here is the Wall Street Journal’s suggestion, word for word: “…paying people not to work and adding $30 billion more to nearly $1.4 trillion of deficit spending is a dismal substitute for real economic growth and private job creation.”
Do you read a solution in there? Do you see some hidden message in there that says that financial institutions are going to start lending to businesses and businesses are going to start hiring? Do you see something in there that explains what will keep people from starving? Do you see something that says that there are jobs for those four other people who apply for each job who do not get the one job that is available?
There is no reason to believe anything that the Wall Street Journal says. They list two suspect studies, both of which show infinitesimally small damage from providing unemployment benefits, one produced by an economist for JP Morgan/Chase, hardly an objective institution, having been one of the big TARP recipients and one of the five largest banks in the country.
In other words, an economist from one of the banks that caused the huge economic meltdown and 15 million unemployed, a bank that is sitting on its money and not helping to create new jobs, this guy says that…maybe…unemployment is up by 1.5% more than it would be. But no proof. And no one else is saying it, but the Wall Street Journal says it. Murdoch says it. Murdoch the internationally infamous liar.
The Wall Street Journal is the daily newspaper of the rich and powerful. It has nothing to do with the average man, although occasionally an average man may read it for financial information. More lies from the Neocons on the Right.
