Hundreds of thousands of people are being added each week to the growing pile of outcasts and castoffs in America. The laid off, the furloughed, the “discouraged” unemployed, the imprisoned, the consultants and freelancers with no income, the foreclosed upon, the part-timers. While the cable news commentary prefers to focus on a U3 unemployment number of 10%–that’s shockiing enough–real numbers that include those who have given up finding a job and those who are forced to work part-time are nearing 20%. When we include those who have been getting by with “consulting” and freelancing since being laid off in the last recession along with those who are in school primarily because they can’t find a paying job, it’s clear that more than 25% of our country’s able, adult population have been thrown on the discard pile.
If this were a temporary phenomenon that would return to normal in 12 to 18 months, it might be tolerable, but the reality is that this situation did not arise last fall or even at the beginning of 2007 when GDP began to fall. It has been building in spurts since the mid-1970s as median income fell. It has been covered first by converting American households into two-earner units and later by debt-fueled consumption. That all ended last fall, but can it return in the forseeable future?
Not according to Mohammed El-Erian. El-Erian, as a major mover and shaker in this economy, is in a position to know. He was a managing director of Pimco before leaving to rescue the Harvard Management Fund after Bob Rubin ran off its competent manager. After a brief stay, El-Erian had an offer to return to Pimco to assume a co-management role with Bill Gross, and it was from that position that he watched last fall’s drama and now plans Pimco’s future in this changed environment.
In a Bloomberg interview, El-Erian describes what he and others are calling the “new normal.” Employment levels will not return to what they were prior to last fall. Highly skilled and educated workers who have lost jobs will never find comparable employment. It will be up to America’s tattered safety nets to keep people from homelessness and starvation. Will a government close to bankruptcy itself and hobbled by corruption and antiquated procedures be up to the task? Unlikely.
At this blog, we intend to celebrate our shared status as outcasts and castoffs. For some of us, membership in this de-selected group came recently. Others have been dealing with being among the capitalist system’s undead for some time. This author, long an outcast, viewed the events of last fall as a vindication and an opportunity. My distaste for America’s consumerist society developed as a teenager in the ’60s, and my conviction that the system was corrupt and unproductive at the core came from my exposure to the power elite in college, law school and thereafter. The collapse of this degenerate, cruel system–and listen to El-Erian, the perceived stabilization should not be mistaken for long-term survival–has created openings for us who have been rejected by American capitalist society to create new communities and systems that are more human-centered, more peaceful, more just.
The first step is to acknowledge and celebrate the death of the old world. The second is to affirm one’s newfound value and worth in the new world that’s coming. The third is to find like-minded people with whom to cooperate.
I’m thankful that change has finally come. As Grace Slick wrote forty years ago:
Don’t change before the empire falls.
You’ll laugh so hard you’ll crack the walls.
The El-Erian interview (I have trouble viewing Bloomberg vids unless I use IE):
"Greasy Heart" by Grace Slick and performed by Jefferson Airplane:
