Morning Jobs

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for December 10th 2009


Observations:


1) OK, the jobs vigil will take a holiday. This morning the team played off of yesterdays green shoots and came cast-wide with the first primitive underpinnings of practical job growth analysis. Mike Barnicle’s historical references to governments fully agendized towards job growth, the recognition of analyst Andrew Ross Sorkin’s resurrection of our manufacturing belt requirement and even the cataloging of Tuesday’s Alabama gubernatorial interview as a great idea but exemplifying why innovation based job resurrection will always be better. These are solid steps.


The concept here, that we better look at innovation based jobs, is an important element that the show should be credited for getting into. If we take the Mercedes jobs, our workers are commoditized. Joe Scarborough cites tax and union policy as to why those jobs are coming to Alabama rather than the Northeast, but doesn’t really understand that’s at best a mixed bag success. And, let’s get some substantive proof that $75,000 and full family health insurance and a G-class is a target compensation package for that Alabama worker lest we appear to be making a wishful assumption.


2) It should be no surprise that Joe Scarborough switched sides on the participation of President Obama in the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to him. At first, the discomfort of the nation watching its young President travel to receive an award built on mere aspiration at a time of increasing its war bidding and desperate needs of domestic execution seemed paramount, but upon reflection of what can be gained by reminding the rest of the world of our country’s accomplishments on their behalf, of our role to countermand evil in the world and our commitment to reevaluate even ourselves to re-commit towards proper human rights principles even in times of war, our President turned this from awkward to opportunity.


The problem is Iran. It was touched on in the show, touched on in the speech, but there is no existing global strategy to avoid that country’s nuclear proliferation simultaneous to its suppression of the will of it’s population. You can talk all you want, award prizes all you want, but until a mechanism is developed that effectively disallows the flouting of the principles covered in the President’s speech today, we will be led to war after war after war. Iran’s case is special because the collateral damage in an armed conflict represents what might be the most enlightened tipping point available to the entire Muslim conundrum. If your last resort bombs kill significant numbers of 140 IQ wielding anti-Revolutionary Guard Muslims, the loss may just define success or more likely failure of the next 60 years in the region. There has to be a better way.


Most importantly, if you want to tackle North Korea or the Congo, you have to solve this higher order problem with such a degree of certainty that it vaccinates those primitive parts of the world from replicating them.


3) Let’s put the subject of the dissolution of the middle class into the mix. There is a pattern on Morning Joe to make a gloss reference to an issue for a period of time, then cite a credible reference as a phase two inception, then, like what happened today, you bring on Elizabeth Warren to try and get it to a full blown shooting war. I love that this is important like jobs were important to Mike Barnicle. My problem is this is continuing evidence of the 30,000 feet lack of detail ethic on the Morning Joe show and it hurts your agenda.


If you were to want to get out there on a subject, your strength would be better administered if you got out there on a ‘facts on the ground’ basis. This was my chief criticism of your months of droning about jobs before you attempted to really understand the mechanics of the issue, which may not have actually started until YESTERDAY.


When you’re talking about the dissolution of the middle class, it is a distribution of wealth issue. Jobs are a symptom. Granted, a symptom on a grander scale than witnessed in recent memory, but nonetheless just a part of the polynomial. Lets construct just the first few parts:

· Taxes are at a 70 year low.
· Health care is at an all time high.
· Pensions are destructible via either a market collapse or a corporate strategy of chapter 11 bankruptcy.
· 401k’s are not pensions.
· Previously free goods like gasoline are now double-digit household expenditures.
· Jobs are the most commoditized they’ve ever been.
· Usury laws have been repealed resulting in predatory corporate behavior.
· Housing is based on mirage micro-economics and those often nightmare consequences have been endorsed by the US government.
· Educational effectiveness is declining generation over generation.
· Our prison population has exploded and its culture has found its way into our middle class where the two cultures previously rarely interacted.


OK, it’s a polynomial in the thousands of degrees, but its roots are displayed right there.


The net result is the distribution of wealth in this country has made two dividing lines move. The super rich are nominally more, but proportionately less and in possession of a greater amount of the nation’s assets then before. The middle class and the poverty line have moved closer, and closer to becoming one class.


We can catalog some solutions, but until all parties of this debate take concrete steps towards understanding the phenomena creating our current movement, those solutions won’t make sense. It also seems fair to point out that a majority of the politicians we have in office either don’t comprehend this megatrend, or are being paid to ship their conscience to Siberia by a corporate culture run amok.


That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.