Given the media's endless resuscitation of upward trends in stock market charts, graphs and quarterly earnings, we would think we’ve transcended the slump of our latest recession. Sure unemployment is still quite high (at around 9% officially), but this isn’t such a problem because our unemployment rate has nothing to do with impeding profits; it actually guarantees them in fact. An unemployment rate such as ours has less to do with a lack of availability than with an unwillingness to hire. This serves its purpose well, it drives wages down and keeps workers in a perpetual state of dependency because, as Marx noted, there is a “reserve army of labour” ready and willing to take their place at all times. Granted, a robust economy used to be described in terms of how many people were off of the street and able to purchase goods and services; these days massive unemployment is a precondition for a robust economy. The question that should immediately come to mind is, “a robust economy for who?” This is a critical inquiry indeed, because our economy is inherently undemocratic. It is an economy steered by the super-rich at the expense of all others and its management flows directly from that fundamental premise. Collectively addressing the issue about how the American recession (and consequently the global recession) started should have been the starting point for a national dialogue. Instead, the historical conditions that allowed the financial collapse to occur have largely been reduced to ad-hominem attacks and non-sequitur logic by our government and media officials...
Click for Full Text!
