Permanent Depression, Oil Patch and Dustbowl Blues

I’ve been reading Sebastian Junger’s book War and am finding it painfully accurate; soldiers suffer, the grunts suffer the most, and the experience transcends human life. It makes no sense to many who watch it from the sidelines – firefighters, cops, coal miners and fishermen probably understand it better than most, but ultimately, as he said on a recent interview, it’s about brotherhood.

And then, of course, you come home and life just sucks, and entropy being what it is, generationally it gets weirder –when the World War II generation came home, there were jobs and the GI Bill paid for just about everything. Korean Vets faced a similar situation; Vietnam vets found the GI Bill pretty inadequate, barely covering tuition in a lot of cases; there were pockets of problems on the job front, but there were generally jobs until the chickens all came home to roost starting in 1973 with the awakening of OPEC. The newest iteration looks to be a pretty decent package, although not as good as deserved; but, the job situation is horrible.

A kid comes home to the world and discovers that not only is he alone in terms of his experience, he’s out of work. Lots of veterans are always out of work. The longer you hang out in the service, the less you are likely to dig the ditches that corporate America wants you to dig. When you’ve bet your life on the guy next to you in insane situations, it’s hard when the guy next to you is a sniveling crack head who doesn’t show up that often. Meaningful work is replaced by a stint in telemarketing, or working in a Wal-Mart or some equally silly activity. You go to school, you get an education and find yourself not on the day shift, but working for Labor Ready. Or doing consulting, or writing for a blog. Life gets weirder. The last weeks have shown us how much the Senate and the Republicans don’t get it; I’m not sure to what extent the Democrats get it, when Diane Feinstein starts wondering how long to extend the unemployment benefits.

The idea of not adding entitlements without paying for them seems like a great one, but we’ve killed a lot of our young people and wasted a lot of treasure on two wars without anyone every accepting that we have to pay for them. While I fully support adding prescription drugs to Medicare, they didn't bother to pay for that either, subsidizing largely retired and ergo nonproductive workers at the future expense of somebody...

So Schmedlap comes back, can’t sit in a classroom without feeling claustrophobic and finds himself with no job and no prospects and, since he just got back, 26 weeks of unemployment, if he’s lucky. Some states like to fight unemployment for people leaving the service; after all, it's their fault they're out of work, eh? Bastards...
Now, it’s equally rotten for everybody. But, the unemployment situation for veterans is a great illustration. People are still amazed that a college degree is not automatic employment; well, Veterans’ Status isn’t either; far from it. We’re already seeing pushback from employers wondering about PTSD and TBI and general craziness; when I was last working a W2 gig, I watched my employer start to back away from hiring veterans, and my employer was a Defense Contractor! So, if you do everything you’re supposed to do and there’s nothing for you, what exactly can you do? Well, it is an election year; Veterans need to be angry and vote accordingly against anyone who thinks it’s time to cut back on stimulus and unemployment spending. Anyone who opposes jobs bills or demands that we pay for them up front needs to find a new occupation. Trickle down economics don’t work, and it’s time to spike that puppy through the heart.

The theory that we need to pay upfront for jobs bills is flawed for a lot of reasons. Like it or not, the US is not Iceland or Malta or Greece or the Scandinavian countries. Sorry, Austrian School, but we have assets that Schumpeter and Hayek never considered. I enjoy their work as much as the next fugitive from Economic thought – run away, run away – but the fact is that reality is Keynesian. The way to turn the economy around is to produce excess wealth for all, and the way to do that is to increase production, which can only happen if you maintain and grow demand. The only way you can grow demand beyond subsistence level is to get people spending actual  money, and the only way to get them to spend actual money is to get actual money in their hands. Credit and debt is fine up to a point, but we passed that when someone decided houses make great piggy banks. Unemployment insurance is a way of keeping subsistence demand up, but if you really want to bitchslap it and wake it up, you need to put people to work doing meaningful things.

Paul Krugman has a Nobel Prize in economic theory; Jim Bunning is a goddamn troglodyte; for some reason, Bunning has more impact on the economic direction of the country than Krugman. Frankly, and this is one of my personal bête noirs and hobby horses, I blame the disparity of influence on the basic ignorance of the American people. We don’t understand math, and graphs are confusing. The talking Barbie that said “Math is hard!” may been a sexist statement, but it also spoke for generations. Problem is, Math may be hard and  rigorous, but it is kinda, sorta, oh, FUCKING INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT when you’re talking about money and the economy.

When Vice President Biden says we’re not going to bring jobs back that were lost in the Great Recession, he’s being math-ignorant. We need to create new jobs, lots of the damn things, far more than the 8 million he says we lost. Unfortunately, the world is not static – people keep breeding, and they keeping growing up, and they keep graduating from high school, college and reform schools, boot camps and VA hospitals, and they all need jobs. Real jobs – Americans with MBAs and PHDs and Certificates in System Management and Administration from CISCO and IBM are not going to be satisfied taking jobs away from undocumented immigrants standing outside of Home Depot and Wal-Mart.

I was talking to a senior person with a major defense contractor the other day, and I commented that I was surprised that the DOD hand not been tasked with some greater part of the defense and recuperation of the Gulf. He said not to be surprised when it happened, that for a number of the big contractors, “War, famine, pestilence and disaster are our business.” While I’m not surprised that the Bobby Jindals and Hailey Barbours of the world are sitting on their hands not calling out the authorized Guardsmen and indicating that if the 33 wells that the deep-water drilling moratorium would shut temporarily, everything would be wonderful, I think it’s time to put a helluva lot of people to work tending the silly damn absorbent barriers and distributing respirators and hazmat suits and on and on and on. Instead, BP does a quarter-assed job on shore to go along with the brain dead approach on the water, and the Feds are excited about it. Idiots.

The reason AXE's approach would work is fairly simple. Let’s say we contract to UMR and KBR to run the cleanup properly and pay prevailing wage oil patch wages plus hazardous duty pay to the workers, and do it on a cost plus award fee basis. If you think of the number of people realistically needed, on shore and close in and what they’d need to do the job, you can see a huge economic boost not just to the local area but to the manufacturers of appropriate hazmat materials – respirators, suits, booties, steel-toed shoes, small boats, outboard motors, bottled water, etc. etc. etc. Bubba Dean and Sally Sue will make a living wage and spend it; this will result in additional spending. Which will result in additional production, transportation, distribution resulting in maintaining jobs and starting new ones to meet demand.

The Republican approach is to cut taxes. Seriously, if you cut Dick Cheney’s taxes $100 grand, do you think he’s going to spend it? No. If you take that same $100K and pay it to autoworkers and cleanup crews, they’ll spend it. The people they give it to for goods and services will spend most of it. The people they give it to will spend most of it. The people they give it to will spend most of it. This is the basic of John Maynard Keynes and his thought and why trickle down economics is a failure. The Cheney’s of the world horde their surplus; the working class spends far more percentage wise; the middle class spends almost as much. One reason that the top 5% controls 90% of the wealth is that they can – how many thoroughbred race horses do Lynn, Liz and Mary Cheney need to inherit?

I was interested the night the Senate failed to get a cloture vote on the extension of unemployment to hear Senator Sherrod Brown say that the same day that we failed to get that done, the first $1 Billion Dollar estate was able to be executed without paying any inheritance tax. That’s trickle down at its most obvious, oblivious and odious. It's up to us to do something about it, now and in November.

(Alternatively published on Veterans Today with less swearing, no music and under an assumed name...)

Comments

[coach sale]

Spend time offering assistance to those who are less fortunate than you, so that you may gain perspective.

[HCG Diet]

I am reading your blog for the first time and I must say your approach is different. What sets bloggers apart is how they connect to their readers; you really connected with me. Great post!

[kids shoes]

Great videos! Although some are in a very low resolution, maybe because of the video's age, still it was nice watching them!