We, the People

[ contributed by The Cleveland Capital study group]

Today's quotes from this Wall Street Journal blog posting work, on several levels, to illustrate the attitudes of the clique of capitalists of the neoliberal stripe that rules from Washington.

Larry Summers most offensive statement, "Today, everyone agrees that the recession is over," embodies an arrogance that has characterized the exploiting class from the founding of America right through to the present day. The question has never been so much one of "Are all people equal?" as it has "Who really counts as a person?" Workers, the poor and the oppressed simply do not count as people for Summers. Therefore what they may agree to is never of any real concern to him when he speaks of "everyone."

Clearly the poor do not count either for Christina Romer who shows here that she shares the speech defect that afflicts President Obama, the inability to even articulate the word "poor." They instead talk of virtual people, "the people on Main Street."

There is enough information in these brief quotes to see also that, in the universe of these plutocrats, workers are not real people. America's ruling class sees workers, with a kind of peripheral vision, as a looming mass that wants their grubby fingers in the pie that proper people are dividing up. They, this looming grubby mass, is the troublesome 10%. By spring their numbers will dwindle to a manageable level and "people" can ignore them again. Never mind that in our world each worker without a job is 100% unemployed.

The oppressed, in the minds of the ruling class, are so far from the status of people that, when beans are counted by Banksters, ongoing domestic crimes against humanity, including the Pine Ridge Ridge genocide and the Detroit Michigan genocide, do not even merit a sideways glance.

source: http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2009/12/13/us-officials-send-mixed-messages-about-the-recession/

source reproduced here with added emphasis

Elizabeth Williamson reports on the economy.

The Obama White House is usually unified over their message, but the president's two top economic advisers sent mixed signals on Sunday about whether the recession was over.

Larry Summers, chairman of the National Economic Council, made the talk show rounds on Sunday bearing a confident message: “Today, everyone agrees that the recession is over,” he said on CNN's “State of the Union.” Now, he said, “the questions are around how fast we'll recover.”

Christina Romer, chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, said the opposite. Asked by host David Gregory, “So, in your mind, the recession is not over?” Romer said: “Of course not…for the people on Main Street and throughout this country, they are still suffering. The unemployment rate is still 10%.”

Romer agreed that an “official” – or statistical — end to the recession was nigh. But that wasn't what most Americans, especially jobless ones, were experiencing.

Both economic advisers agreed that job growth would begin again by the spring. But it could still be a while after that before the jobless rate improves.