Frank Rich: The "Other Plot to Wreck America"

(Very special thanks to The Grateful Dead)

Frank Rich Ignores the “Other Plot to Wreck America” that is Job Outsourcing/Insourcing

**Note: Before reading any further, click on this link right here for an extremely educational and entertaining slide presentation of The Subprime mortgage Primer (h/t/ Businesspundit.com). After learning how we are number ONE in exporting crappy mortgages, remember this: It's a “Jobless Recovery”, baby! And you're NOT invited! Don't worry. The U.S. is number ONE at exporting white collar jobs, too! But you are NOT supposed to know about that, much less demand a stop to it.

Harvard alum and former movie critic Frank Rich discusses the other plot to wreck America in this weekend's NY Times Op-Ed column, explaining how most Americans need to be schooled about the skulduggery behind the “financial weapons of mass destruction” that wrecked our economy. “When it comes to synthetic C.D.O.’s and credit-default swaps”, Rich explains, this nation's citizenry needs to learn all about the financial terrorists on Wall Street in order to to prevent “another attack”:

“What we don’t know will hurt us, and quite possibly on a more devastating scale than any Qaeda attack. Americans must be told the full story of how Wall Street gamed and inflated the housing bubble, made out like bandits, and then left millions of households in ruin. Without that reckoning, there will be no public clamor for serious reform of a financial system that was as cunningly breached as airline security at the Amsterdam airport. And without reform, another massive attack on our economic security is guaranteed. Now that it can count on government bailouts, Wall Street has more incentive than ever to pump up its risks — secure that it can keep the bonanzas while we get stuck with the losses.”

Great idea, Frank! Let's really, really understand the impossible scenarios of exotic derivatives and start to kick the gong around with all of those complicated, beastly investment vehicles that no one understands so that America's educated middle class will finally, finally get their jobs back and get back into the black. Brilliant solution. But schooling the growing millions of educated, unemployed  Americans about  sleazy and sociopathic investment bankers who created a crisis on Wall Street is like telling them there was a fire, here are the arsonists, now you know, now move along, while NOT offering them a hose  and pulling out the ladders to fight the fire on Main Street.

While he narrows his focus on the ills of Wall Street, Frank ignores how to instruct us to demand reforms to fix Main Street. He does not, for example, discuss the immediate remedy to get Americans back to work and to reverse the lower wages that have resulted due to labor arbitrage, championed by the likes of Alan Greenspan, who wants more H-1Bs so American workers are not “privileged elites.” While millions of Americans are now unemployed due to greedy and corrupt corporate hiring practices (enabled by coin-operated slot machines for politicians who sport “AMERICAN JOBS FOR SALE” on their backs) responsible for kicking college educated citizens to the curb in favor of cheap imported labor, the immediate place to start is to halt the guest worker visa and green card programs responsible. Back in 2007, Greenspan fervently recommended wiping out America's middle class. (h/t NoSlaves.) 
 

In this war on America's middle class, who exactly are the bad guys, again, Mr. Rich, and why are educated middle class Americans the enemy? (FYI: themessthatgreenspanmade.blogspot would serve as a handy primer for any serious journalist with a pair who cares to point the plebiscite in the right direction to better understand the causes behind the orchestrated collapse of jobs for Americans and how to fix this “disappearing jobs” problem and correct this “jobless recovery.”)

Meanwhile, Friday's jobless report includes unemployment statistics, while the underemployment rate in December rose to 17.3 percent, up from 17.2 percent in November. Keep in mind that even these estimates are conservative. As more and more people stop looking for jobs, they are no longer even counted among the unemployed – and this list is expanding rapidly. Despite this alarming unemployment and underemployment for Americans, lawmakers STILL want more H-1b visas (h/t Patrick Thibodeau at Computerworld) and other mechanisms to import foreign workers when there are clearly no longer enough jobs for our own citizens. Friday's jobs report also states that analysts had hoped to see the economy gained jobs for the first time in two years, but job openings remain far too few and will become worse if the government does not enact reforms to halt the corporate America's importation of cheap workers to take the jobs Americans can and must do. Surely, it is important to understand the causes and the culprits behind Wall Street's payday. But where, oh MSM and blah-gee-sphere know-somethings, art thou, when it comes to busting up the hubris soaked neo-frat boy toga party responsible for killing off jobs for America's middle class?

And the Obama administration? So far, it's more of the same old happy talk dressed up in gravitas. And the same old, same old music never stopped.

It's not the Economy, Stupid. It's YOUR JOB!

-2Truthy