Friday, January 27, 2017

Dan Froomkin — Federal Reserve Bankers Mocked Unemployed Americans Behind Closed Doors


Blood-boiler.

Unemployment is exists in America because so many American workers are unqualified, unmotivated, or  can't pass a drug test, you see.

Well, I guess it is an improvement over the nonsensical assumption that all unemployment is voluntary because workers are unwilling to lower their wage demands in the labor market.

The Intercept
Federal Reserve Bankers Mocked Unemployed Americans Behind Closed Doors
Dan Froomkin

See also
As a point of social logic, if economic outcomes differ by race and gender but the entities doing the hiring aren’t racist or sexist, the fault must lie with jobseekers. Enter the bourgeois storyline of racism and sexism as misplaced blame from ‘losers’ for their own failures.
An obvious problem with this explanation is the systemic nature of institutional racism and sexism. The White / Black employment rate (below) is one of many measures that demonstrate systematic differences in economic outcomes by race across time. Unless one wants to posit bottom-up causality, that corporate hiring, compensation and wealth distribution are decided along racial lines by working class ‘deplorables,’ blame belongs with those who control the institutions that produce it....
The practice of blaming down in an increasingly hierarchical and anti-democratic society produces an obvious benefit for the economic powers-that-be and their servants in the political class. It blames the powerless for social dysfunction over which they have little to no control. And the self-serving tautology at work, that social power is distributed through a natural distribution of virtues— qualifications in the language of corporate apologists, provides faux meritocratic cover for the social violence of economic exclusion.
The issue here is not racism per se, but rather the division of the working class along racial and gender lines for the benefit of plutocrats and their servants. In what configuration of the world does it make sense that a working class that has been systematically disempowered for the last half-century is responsible for the social disintegration currently unfolding across the West?...
The fear-mongering storyline of White backlash used to explain Donald Trump’s election perpetuates the myth of democratic rule in a plutocracy. It assumes that the political class is led from below when all evidence has it that wealth = political power. The political class does the bidding of the rich and the institutions they control. Race and gender bias are evidence of the mal-distribution of social resources, not the cause.
What anti-establishment voters, and those who consciously withheld their votes, got right in the recent election is that the illusion of choice provided by the major Parties is anti-politics. Liberals, as guardians of the status quo, are class warriors on the side of economic mal-distribution and the immiseration of the laboring classes and poor for the benefit of the rich. The ease with which the misdirection of ‘deplorables’ was sold illustrates the conundrum confronting any actual Left political movement.
Bourgeois liberalism.

Counterpunch
Liberalism as Class Warfare
Rob Urie

4 comments:

Penguin pop said...

I'm motivated, can pass a drug test and am qualified for the jobs I'm applying for, so these people can piss off. Tons of competition though in some of these job listings.

Andrew Anderson said...

As if legalized counterfeiters for the most so-called creditworthy, the rich, (e.g. Open Market Purchases, Interest on Reserves, the Discount Window, etc.) have any right to judge their victims.

Proverbs 17:5 He who mocks the poor taunts his Maker; He who rejoices at calamity will not go unpunished.

Andrew Anderson said...

As for drug/alcohol use:

Give strong drink to him who is perishing,
And wine to him whose life is bitter.
Let him drink and forget his poverty
And remember his trouble no more.


Open your mouth for the mute,
For the rights of all the unfortunate.
Open your mouth, judge righteously,
And defend the rights of the afflicted and needy.
Proverbs 31:6-9 [bold added]

Ryan Harris said...

The academic elite who lead the fed of the period mocked the symptoms of poverty by the underemployed workers while shirking their mission to maintain robust employment.

Now the academic elite through out government are indignant and want to "resist" different approaches to problem solving.