Atlas Mugged: Playn'd Brand of EconTerrorism.

In an article posted on Yves Smith's (author of "Econned") blog, "Naked Capitlism", written by Marshall Auerback, entitled: "Troubles in the Eurozone - Will the contagion affect the US?", he states that, "The President should be using his position of influence, and his considerable powers of oratory, to change public perceptions and explain why these deficits are not only necessary, but highly desirable in terms of sustaining a full employment economy."

Oh please. There is no such thing as a "full employment economy", and if there were, the Fed (and consequently Central Banks all over the globe, specifically, the ECB) has been actively promoting a monetary policy completely at odds with full employment, a policy it cogently refers to as anti-inflationary.

So what Mr. Auerback is suggesting is that the President should jettison any scruples he has and simply come out full-bore with complete lies.

What the financial crisis and its relatively benign effects on the Asian economies should be teaching the West is that industrial mass-production is now completely at odds with industrial mass employment and engenders suppressed wages via cross-border wage-arbitrage. Both India and China have huge reservoirs, (as measured in hundreds of millions) of forced-labor, poverty-stricken, homeless waifs working 12-hour days and mired in interminable hopeless poverty and life-crushing endless toil, that serve as human energy reserves. This is the New Economy the Neo-Liberal regime has fostered and - behind closed doors, as they face the specter of peak-oil production - embraces.

Public and private debt sustainability has exploded as a serious issue in advanced economies, most notably in the eurozone’s countries of Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain—but also in many larger OECD economies, including the U.S. and Japan. These issues stem primarily from a loss of competitiveness, high wage growth and labor costs which outstrip productivity, a nefarious Banker cabal, and undisciplined (to put it kindly) fiscal policies. All of which grew to staggering, unsustainable excesses during the very years the US was attacking sovereign nations in order to bring them our Friedmans (Milton, Thomas and George).

As we celebrate the 40'th anniversary of Earth Day, we should look at the sobering consequences of forcing a Capitalist society to pay for the externalities of their industries' behavior: it drives those industries off-shore where they can influence central governments better. It is no coincident that it was Nixon that "opened the door to China" the same year he instituted the first Earth Day. A dictatorship beholden to the Capitalists for its economic growth, and therefore preferring to shoot its citizens down in full view of the world to letting them think they have the least iota of voice in what "their" government does is much more in keeping with Freidman-ite economic planning than any so-called Democracy does.

So by using workers' pension savings to relocate industrial production to economies that use the power of their totalitarian regimes to suppress wages, ignore environmental degradation and their attendant costs, and consider health burdens to a coughing, asthmatic population to be the burden of the workers, we've shown that a blighted life-expectancy is more desirable than years of no-growth agricultural hard toil and poverty. The way we've seen the Atlas Mugged by Globalization is in no way accidental.

So it should be abundantly clear, from the actions of the Fed and by the Health Industry debates, that the radical Capitalism advocated by the Friedman School of economics that has driven the West for the last generation has no room in it for housing, Health-care coverage, nor education for a middle-class society. All the dynamics of the so-called innovative Neo-liberal regime are toward ensconcing a self-appointed elite class over the rest of society whilst draining the output of Labor into their own off-shore, tax-sheltered bank accounts. So that contagion he speaks of, it should be quite clear, has already occurred; but it went the other way around.

This is what Mr Auerback believes the President should indenture our children to preserving by "using his position of influence, and his considerable powers of oratory". With such claptrap is the road to war paved.