Where are the Jobs?

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The big problem President Obama is accused of not solving is actually two questions that look like one question: (A) Where are the jobs?  and (B) Why isn't the Economy bouncing back?

As the media fact-checkers remind us, there have been 250,000 jobs created in the automobile industry alone.  These jobs are probably concentrated in certain areas that have been traditionally where the Auto Industry had their factories, etc, at least some of which do not need any additional persuasion to vote to keep the President in office.  (Auto Industry executives, I imagine, have probably slid off large portions of their supplying industry offshore to places like China and Mexico and South America, where labor is --for the present-- cheaper.  If not for this, there would be still more jobs.)

A large proportion of the jobs that have disappeared are probably related to the big time investors, commercial real-estate outfits and mortgage lenders and insurance companies that failed to survive their attempt to make bigger profits off the public than they had been able to some decades ago.  Real Estate has always been a good racket, but of course what was happening in the last ten years went far beyond what could be described as a racket.

Now, a lot of people invested in Real Estate indirectly, including me.  Our retirement account was managed by an insurance company, which had a lot of money invested in commercial real estate.  Commercial real estate companies are not traditionally get-rich-quick outfits, though individual developers do tend to be pretty exploitative of both land and communities in order to drive through deal that would make particular parcels of real estate worth more than when they bought it, e.g. fooling with zoning laws.  But the big life insurance companies have stock in companies that own skyscrapers in Manhattan, for instance.  All they can be accused of is charging horribly large rents from retailers.

But once businesses started failing in early 2008, they started vacating large skyscrapers (and strip malls), and real estate prices plummetted, and so did the stocks.

Just like me, a lot of fat cats are hurting, because their stocks aren't worth quite as much as they were back in 2001, for instance.  So these people want Obama to do something to make their stocks as valuable as they used to be.  Wall Street stocks will skyrocket if taxes go down and stay down.  They will also skyrocket if capital gains taxes are removed.  All the things that millionaires want are precisely the things that everybody else does not want, and Democrat congressmen and senators who know how things behave are reluctant to make legislation that will give joy to Wall Street.

The Man in the Street probably does not quite see the logic of how scratching the back of Wall Street will work for him.  It is in the interest, of course, of those who understand Big Business and investment and so on, to keep the connection between taxes, Wall Street, insurance, Welfare, Housing, Education, etc, etc, well hidden from the prying eyes of everyman.  This is unfortunately very easy, since Everyman has become gradually pretty myopic, and frankly uninterested in the type of economics that puts a smile on the faces of rich investors, and the mainline members of the GOP.

Certainly some members of the GOP are nervous about what they call Obama's penchant for "Collectivization".  But the bottom line is that Wall Street does not like Collectivization, and so we're not going to have a runaway stock market (which some idiots salivate over) while the population looks towards direct methods of solving problems, like getting together to grow crops, or teach kids, or create a forest preserve out of a piece of wilderness, or putting up windmills for wind energy.  Wall Street is probably confused about the value of, say, hybrid vehicles.  If Mikey doesn't like hybrid vehicles, we don't want them either, says the GOP.  Because the GOP is too strongly influenced by people whose income comes from the stock market.

Nothing has hurt America as much as this religion of the stock market.  Some decades ago, the stock market was an engine for getting new inventions off the ground and into the factories, where someone could make an honest buck building a better mousetrap.  But somewhere along the line, people got impatient with making money a buck at a time, and that's where we got into trouble.

Arch, wondering what to do next.