Unemployment, the Judas Economy and Corporation Nation

Unemployment. Hurts, don't it? I've been there. Just a year ago. I landed a job for a lot less money. But I'm glad to be working for now. There is not an ounce of gloating in this humble soul. I've been there enough times to know how tough job searching can be...

Today the lead news story was the loss of more than 500,000 jobs nationwide in November. Lurking behind those painful statistics were even more layers of pain. Millions of workers don't even show up on the unemployment rolls because they've taken part time work to get along. Still more workers have given up entirely. We don't know how they're getting along, but the nation feels their pain.

Being unemployed or underemployed can be a life-changing experience, causing you to evaluate not only what you do for a living, but how you live your whole life.

In the last 10-20 years, corporations have shown increasing willingness to jettison workers wholesale, eliminating thousands of jobs in cost-cutting measures they claim are necessary to compensate for performance losses, or to meet projections demanded by shareholders and the white hot pressures of Wall Street. Through all this economic bombardment American workers have begun to feel like soldiers used for cannon fodder in World War I.

To understand what is happening to American workers and why the economy feels like a ship wrecked on the rocks, it helps to read two great books from the late 1990s that document the now recognizable devaluation of American workers linked to the collapse of our economy.

The first book worth reading is The Judas Economy by William Wolman and Anne Colamosca (Addison-Wesley Press) which analyzed the power of capital versus the rights and value of workers. The Judas Economy coolly analyzed the way the American economy effectively began to betray the very workers who built it. The rising ability of capital to seek out cheap labor has left American workers in the dust. A New York Times book review by William Wooley summarized this process as follows: "The new, and largely unexpected, ability of capital to move across the seas without trailing either workers, managers, or administrators in its wake has stood conventional economics on its head."

Now you know why there are no jobs. But do you know why American companies don't care about you either? In the book Corporation Nation (St. Martin's Gerber Press) by Charles Derber we learn that the mystique of corporate power to create a higher standard of living has usurped the influence of almost every other belief system at work in American society. In this excerpt, Derber speculates that corporations may threaten democracy itself:

"Yet the corporate mystique is, at heart, an ideology, which for decades has effectively disguised the rising power of corporations in our lives. Corporate ascendancy is emerging as the universal order of the post-communist world. Its most obvious feature is the reign of vast and much-admired global corporations, from General Electric to Microsoft to Disney. Yet the essence of corporate ascendancy is the quiet shift of sovereignty that is shaking the roots of our democracy."

Corporations do not care about their workers because proponents (and beneficiaries) of upper level corporate power have worked long and hard to divorce themselves from workers as the source of their strength and longevity. Instead, corporations structured themselves to exist effectively outside the law and above the rights of individuals, so much so that corporations now have the power and capital to exert their will not only upon the workers dependent upon them for income, but upon the very nations in which they do business.

Those of you sitting home reading this because you were laid off or fired from a company in the last year or two have found out how the aligning predictions of these two books have ultimately come true.

American corporations have long been shifting jobs overseas in the name of profitability even as they lobby for more tax breaks, more rights to exploit workers and more authority to dictate law in a country where corporations now have more collective rights than individuals.

So-called pariahs like Ralph Nader accurately rail against the power and influence of corporations in democracy, but America's collective indifference to men like Nader-- who speak the truth but lack the power base to effect change--has produced a political system that encourages corporate abuse of power. That's why the banking systems are screwed up. That's why Enron and the Arthur Anderson debacle were allowed to transpire. Those seeking to stretch the law have been encouraged and even directed by those whose job it is to protect the law.

Deregulation and kissing up to corporate and financial power brokers by politicians has thrown all the rights of this country to capital and corporate barons who don't give a rat's ass what happens to anyone below the 1-2% of the wealthiest Americans. Why else do you think companies like Halliburton have been allowed to make an economic playground out of this travesty we call a "war" in Iraq? This is the military-industrial complex bleeding our nation dry. Really, this has been our first truly corporate war.

If books like The Judas Economy and Corporation Nation tell us anything, it is that we've been too damn stupid to listen to people who understand the problems facing America. 50% of this country (the militant supporters...) has been more than content to elect people whose ideology exactly matches The Judas Economy flow of capital out of this country. We've handed over increasing power to corporations who literally rape and kill and divest our country of its resources with no real loyalty to the nation to which they should be indebted. Politicians like Dick Cheney and George W. Bush have been accomplices to corporation in this process. Some people think they should be prosecuted or impeached for their conduct while in office. We probably won't learn for years just how widespread their handover of power and money to corporate raiders has truly been, but the truth will come out eventually.

Barack Obama may not be the Messiah to deliver us, but his election as President may indicate America's increasing realization that we've allowed the Judas Economy and the Corporation Nation to have their run of this place too long. It's time to take back our country and put everyone back to work.