the Atlantic - It's Worse Than You Think

Excellent analysis by Jack Goldstone at the Atlantic -

It's Worse Than You Think: Halftime Between Two Lost Decades

As I've argued elsewhere on this blog, I would add a technological component to this analysis, in that rapidly changing technology is allowing companies to make product, and record profits, with fewer people... thus, figuring out how these 'extra' bodies are going to make it moving forward is an equally difficult challenge.  Nevertheless, a really good piece...

An excerpt:

"So we are headed down and out for the next few years. Nonetheless, capitalism will survive, and spread, likely emerging stronger than ever, as it has done in previous crises. But it is time to face up the magnitude of the current crisis. This is not a "normal" recession that will quickly pass, or from which the economy will just bounce back on its own. We need address its root causes, both cyclical and structural, find ways to fairly share the costs that must be paid, and forge agreements on the new institutions and frameworks we need to move forward."

How Austerity Destroyed our Small Towns

Interesting piece from Alternet/Dissent Magazine - Holy Shit, What a Nightmare! How Austerity Destroyed our Small Towns - two excerpts:

"The gap between comfortable and confident got much wider in the spring of 2011, when a Republican-dominated state legislature passed a battery of laws that tightened school standards, imposed a merit-pay system on teachers, limited their collective bargaining rights, and diverted substantial funds from an already struggling public education system to a private voucher program."

We're seeing this pattern in many of the Republican led states, the school systems are literally being starved to death, all the while the conservatives in control are promoting 'market led solutions'... which means charters... more often than not, corporate led, private charters... the conspiracy theorist in me thinks back to Grover Norquist wish that Government get so small it could be drowned in the bath tub, Grover's dream is damn near a reality.

The only thing more precarious than being an itinerant GM worker, it turns out, is working for a Japanese automaker. Maybe in Japan there’s still something called lifetime employment, but in Nissan’s Smyrna plant, forty miles east of Spring Hill, permanent insecurity comes with the job.

Like the other foreign automakers that have concentrated in right-to-work states in the South over the last thirty years, Nissan has kept the UAW out of Smyrna and its two other U.S. plants, in nearby Decherd, Tennessee, and Canton, Mississippi. Employment-at-will, which is how Nissan prefers its relationship to its 13,000 American workers, implies no long-term commitment in the event of injury, illness, layoff—one reason why so many of the workers on the line today are younger than LaDonna and Tony. Nissan is not a place that many people retire from. And, in 2006, the company made it a lot harder for those who might want to when it cut retiree health coverage and switched all new hires from a defined benefit pension to a 401(k). After Nissan bought out a third of its Smyrna workforce a few years ago, it started replacing many of them with temporary subcontracted employees starting at lower rates than direct hires.

Economic developers believe it to be a home run to locate that big plant in town, the South has been named the new Automotive Corridor in the United States... this illustrates why... the workers will continue to be squeezed, the middle class will continue to shrink, and all the while corporate leaders will scream for our education system to be more "Demand Driven"... because they demand a docile labor force, that won't push back against a system that increasing is stacked against them and putting them and their families in no-win cycles right on the edge of poverty... 

Generation Flux - Fast Company

Good piece @ Fast Company - This Is Generation Flux:

"This is the moment for an explosion of opportunity, there for the taking by those prepared to embrace the change. We have been through a version of this before. At the turn of the 20th century, as cities grew to be the center of American culture, those accustomed to the agrarian clock of sunrise-sunset and the pace of the growing season were forced to learn the faster ways of the urban-manufacturing world. There was widespread uneasiness about the future, about what a job would be, about what a community would be. Fringe political groups and popular movements gave expression to that anxiety. Yet from those days of ambiguity emerged a century of tremendous progress.
Today we face a similar transition, this time born of technology and globalization--an unhinging of the expected, from employment to markets to corporate leadership. "There are all kinds of reasons to be afraid of this economy," says Microsoft Research's boyd. "Technology forces disruption, and not all of the change will be good. Optimists look to all the excitement. Pessimists look to all that gets lost. They're both right. How you react depends on what you have to gain versus what you have to lose.""