The Banksters Know Just How To Fix Spain's Economy-- Suspend The Minium Wage... And Give The Banks To The Banksters

Luis Maria Linde, ECB President Mario Draghi and President of the Spanish Parliament Jesus Posada

Spain cooked its own goose last year when it elected a uber-corrupt right-wing government lead by crooked wing-nut Mariano Rajoy. The Bank of Spain's brand new crackpot right-wing Governor, Luis Maria Linde, is urging that government, enmeshed in endless corruption scandals and an Austerity economy cascading out of control, to sell two nationalized banks (Catalunya Banc and NCG Banco), quickly raise the retirement age and scrap the minimum wage. Nothing about executing banksters and confiscating all their stolen loot.

Linde calls his "reform" temporary but, of course, ending the minimum wage has been a goal of right-wingers since before it was ever adopted. He claims it will help end unemployment and give the labor market flexibility. Not a peep about the ultimate goal: slavery.

“It would be worth exploring the possibility of establishing new formulas that would allow, in special cases, temporary departures from the conditions laid down in collective bargaining agreements, or exceptional mechanisms to prevent the minimum wage from acting as a constraint on specific groups of workers with most difficulties in terms of employability,” he said in the report.

Spain’s minimum wage is currently set at €645 a month with a record 6.2 million people out of work. The national unemployment rate has hit 27.2% while Andalucia has been named as the second hardest place to find a job in Europe with 34.6% of the population without work.

Nationally, youth unemployment has reached a record 57.2%.

Linde also suggested making reforms to the state pension by increasing the retirement age and changing how pensions are calculated.

The report, which calls for the official age of retirement to increase from 65 to 67, recommends that calculating the amount a person receives should be based on contributions made in the last 25 years of working life rather than the last 15.

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Paul Krugman has a message for policy-makers: "Where we are is not O.K. Stop shrugging, and do your jobs"

Patrick Chappatte [click to enlarge]

"For more than three years some of us have fought the policy elite's damaging obsession with budget deficits, an obsession that led governments to cut investment when they should have been raising it, to destroy jobs when job creation should have been their priority. That fight seems largely won -- in fact, I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like the sudden intellectual collapse of austerity economics as a policy doctrine.

"But while insiders no longer seem determined to worry about the wrong things, that's not enough; they also need to start worrying about the right things -- namely, the plight of the jobless and the immense continuing waste from a depressed economy."

-- Paul Krugman, in his NYT column "The Big Shrug"

by Ken

Howie and I were talking the other day (or the other week?) about what is, I now gather the talk of the blogging community: the death of politics. Or rather, that fewer and fewer people seem interested in the stuff.

Which I understand completely. Things aren't bad enough to drive us into open revolt, or even vaguely mutinous disgruntlement, as might have been the case in the first year or two of the economic meltdown -- the vaguely mutinous disgruntlement, not the impulse to open revolt. We have learned enough about the corruption of our system, and the way in which it is controlled by our power elites, as to leave most of us throwing our arms up, saying, "WTF can we do anyway?"

And there's a tendency to answer: fry up some more bacon, and watch the new episodes of Game of Throw-Up.

Imagine Paul Krugman, then, trotting out the quaint idea that there are people in policy-making positions whose job it is to do something about the state of the economy.

"I've been in this economics business for a while," he begins today's NYT column, "The Big Shrug." "In fact, I've been in it so long I still remember what people considered normal in those long-ago days before the financial crisis."

In those ancient times, he says, "normal" meant:

* "an economy adding a million or more jobs each year, enough to keep up with the growth in the working-age population";

* "an unemployment rate not much above 5 percent, except for brief recessions";

* and "very few people out of work for extended periods."

"So how, in those long-ago days," he wonders, "would we have reacted to Friday's news" --

that the number of Americans with jobs is still down two million from six years ago, that 7.6 percent of the work force is unemployed (with many more underemployed or forced to take low-paying jobs), and that more than four million of the unemployed have been out of work for more than six months? Well, we know how most political insiders reacted: they called it a pretty good jobs report. In fact, some are even celebrating the report as "proof" that the budget sequester isn't doing any harm.

Krugman credits the Fed with at least -- once upon a time, which is to say last fall -- signaling a "willingness to do whatever it took to get unemployment down." But that passed, and now, he says, "sometimes it seems as if nobody in Washington outside the Fed even considers high unemployment a problem."

He wonders why this isn't "a major policy priority," and ventures three answers:

(1) "Inertia"

[I]t's hard to get policy changes absent the threat of disaster. As long as we're adding jobs, not losing them, and unemployment is basically stable or falling, not rising, policy makers don't feel any urgent need to act.

(2) "The unemployed don't have much of a political voice"

Profits are sky-high, stocks are up, so things are O.K. for the people who matter, right?

(3) "The monetary hawks"

[W]hile we aren't hearing so much these days from the self-styled deficit hawks, the monetary hawks -- economists, politicians and officials who keep warning that low interest rates will have dire consequences -- have, if anything, gotten even more vociferous. It doesn't seem to matter that the monetary hawks, like the fiscal hawks, have an impressive record of being wrong about everything (where's that runaway inflation they promised?). They just keep coming back; the arguments change (now they're warning about asset bubbles), but the policy demand -- tighter money and higher interest rates -- is always the same. And it's hard to escape the sense that the Fed is being intimidated into inaction.

"The tragedy is that it's all unnecessary"

Krugman allows that "you hear talk about a 'new normal' of much higher unemployment," but insists that "all the reasons given for this alleged new normal, such as the supposed mismatch between workers' skills and the demands of the modern economy, fall apart when subjected to careful scrutiny."

If Washington would reverse its destructive budget cuts, if the Fed would show the "Rooseveltian resolve" that Ben Bernanke demanded of Japanese officials back when he was an independent economist, we would quickly discover that there's nothing normal or necessary about mass long-term unemployment.

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The New Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment and Training Act-- Robin Hood To The Rescue?

Andy Hounshell, John Conyers-- fighting for jobs

Jimmy Carter signed the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act into law on October 27, 1978. It had passed the House on March 16... 257-152. 81% of the House Democrats (233 Members) were joined by 16% of the House Republicans (24)-- there were still that many mainstream Republicans back then-- to pass one of the era's most significant pieces of legislation. It's worth noting that the Democratic Party was so infested with racists and corporate whores even that recently that 41 Republicans joined with 111 Republicans to oppose it. The Keynesian bill, which was proposed to tackle rampant unemployment, created the largest public service jobs program and the largest training program since the Great Depression and it helped create 6.5 million new jobs and cut unemployment by 25%. During the debate, During the debate, Majority Leader Jim Wright (D-TX) said, "What this bill says is not that America owes everybody a living. No, But America owes every American an opportunity to earn a living. This bill is an embodiment of what American stands for."

H.R. 1000, the new Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment and Training Act, was introduced by John Conyers on March 6 of this year, and shut up by Boehner and Cantor in John Kline's Education and Workforce Committee, where they knew it would never see the light of day. Conyers is one of the few Members of Congress who voted for the original Humphrey-Hawkins bill. This one, has many similarities-- it is primarily a jobs bill-- but, of course includes provisions to cover things that weren't concerns in the 1970s. Here's how Conyers describes it on his website:

The Act aims to provide a job to any American that seeks work and to, ultimately, create a full employment society.

• The Act establishes a “Full Employment and Training Trust Fund” with two separate accounts. These two accounts will direct funding to job creation and training programs.

Dual Job Creation Focus: Direct Jobs Grants and WIA Training Programs

• The first trust fund account will direct funds to a new innovative direct jobs program. Funds will be distributed by formula through the Department of Labor to larger cities and states, and then be passed to localities and rural areas.

* The program will allocate funds based on the Community Development Block Grant formula modified to consider unemployment data. Local elected officials, who are closest to our communities and needs on the ground, would work with community groups and labor leaders to identify critical projects and connect workers to projects right away.

* Jobs could be in the public sector, community-based not-for-profit organizations, and small businesses that provide community benefits.

* The Program will adopt a two stage approach to ensure immediate job creation, and allow for a longer term planning process that involves community input and a focus on education and career development.

* Positions will be for up to 45 hours per week, for at least 12 months. They will pay comparable or prevailing wages, as well as benefits. Appropriate safeguards and strong anti-displacement protections will help to prevent substitution and ensure that workers are placed in new positions.

• The second trust fund will distribute funds to job training programs covered under the Workforce Investment Act.

* These funds will fund innovative job training initiatives including One Stop Job Training Programs and the Job Corps.

Revenue: Taxing Wall Street Transactions to Pay for Main Street Jobs

• Revenue for the trust fund will come from a small levy on covered trading transactions

* 0.25% on stocks = 25¢ on every $100 traded in stocks

* 0.02% on futures, swaps, and credit default swaps = 2¢ on every $100 traded on these types of transactions

* The rate for options contracts would be imposed on the underlying transaction multiplied by the premium paid for the option (still very small)

Boehner has vowed there will never be a vote on this bill on the House floor. There is a way to get a vote on it though-- defeating a couple dozen Republicans in 2014, particularly John Boehner. Andrew Hounshell, an Ohio steelworker and vice-president of the International Association of Machinist and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW) Local Lodge 1943 is running for the seat in western Ohio that Boehner currently holds. Bread and butter issues-- like jobs-- is exactly why he's running.

"A bill like the H.R. 1000 is exactly what the citizens of this great country expect from their elected Representatives," he told us this morning. "Instead they get the 37th vote to repeal or defund the Affordable Care Act from our Speaker. His excuse was that it is all about jobs. How will a vote that everyone knows will never pass the Senate be about jobs? Who's job is he referring to? His own? This bill would create real jobs, and put tax paying Americans back to work. The goal of a bill like this is to provide full employment. The problem is, the Speaker isn't interested in full employment because the corporations that support him aren't interested in it. Full employment raises the cost of labor which cuts into corporate profits. It is much more profitable for them to have the labor force in this country unemployed and underemployed. It's time our elected Congress represents the people and not the corporations."

Andy is on the Blue America ActBlue page... in case you'd like to help out.

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