To reduce the amount of money flowing into the real economy while the double-dealing Fed pumped trillions into the financial system so asset-stripping investment banksters and corporate scalawags could net beaucoup profits while working people scraped by on next to nothing. You've heard the expression "Strangle the beast"? Well, this is how it works in real-time.
Keep in mind, that according to the nation's number one economics blog, Calculated Risk, over 578,000 good-paying public sector jobs were lost under Obama, which is a situation that could have been easily avoided by targeting fiscal stimulus at the state and local level. Instead, Obama chose to shrink the size of the stimulus package (The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009), keep the economy on a ventilator, and shower the country with pink slips, just to prevent strong-enough growth to generate full employment and upward wage pressure. That was his assignment, and that's what he did. Here's a little background from an article at Huffington Post by Sam Stein:
"...members of the president's economic team felt that if they were to properly fill the hole caused by the recession, they would need a bill that priced at $1.8 trillion -- $600 billion more than was previously believed to be the high-water mark for the White House.
"The $1.8 trillion figure was included in a December 2008 memo authored by Christina Romer (the incoming head of the Council of Economic Advisers) and obtained by Scheiber in the course of researching his book.
"'When Romer showed [Larry] Summers her $1.8 trillion figure late in the week before the memo was due, he dismissed it as impractical. So Romer spent the next few days coming up with a reasonable compromise: roughly $1.2 trillion,' Scheiber writes." (Huffington Post)
Clearly, what Obama and Summers wanted was exactly what they got, a sluggish, underperforming economy that kept unemployment needlessly-high while the Fed transferred trillions to their cockroach friends on Wall Street. (The ARRA was eventually whittled down to a paltry $800 billion, a miserable $100 billion more than the bank bailout fiasco called TARP) The plutocrats raked in record profits while working Americans saw their incomes drop, their wages freeze, and their prospects for upward mobility annihilated. Welcome to Obama's Amerika. Here's more from the WSWS:
"The proportion of contingent workers holding multiple jobs has more than quadrupled over the past 10 years, from 7.3 percent in 2005 to 32 percent in 2015. Nearly one-third of people working with no benefits or job security are holding down an additional part-time or full-time job just to make ends meet...
"With spending on transportation and food also rising, 2014 became the first year studied by Pew in which median spending on these basic necessities surpassed median income. By 2014, median income had fallen by 13 percent from 2004 levels, while expenditures had increased by 14 percent." (The social crisis and the US elections, World Socialist Web Site)
Hurrah, for Obama's recovery! There's so much work out there, people can work two, three, or even four jobs a day if they want! The only problem is they still can't make ends meet because the shitty pay won't even cover their expenses. "The more I work, the poorer I get." Isn't that what the PEW report is really saying?
Sure, it is. And yet we're supposed to believe this is all just a big accident, that the weakest recovery in history is just an honest miscalculation by Ivy League-educated economists and government bean counters who just forgot how the economy works? Is that it; all the economic whizkids and Nobel Prize winning gurus are all just suffering from some odd strain of collective amnesia that prevents them from recommending solutions that actually generate growth, jobs, inflation and -- dare I say it -- economic recovery?
Baloney. The crappy recovery is all part of the plan, just like it is in Europe, just like it is in Japan, just like it is everywhere the western bank cartel and their globalist colleagues have extended their tentacles to expand their corporate extortionist empire. Let's not dignify this phenom by calling it a "conspiracy." It's not a conspiracy, it's plain-old shock therapy, the likes of which the neoliberal economists and their miscreant IMF friends have been using for decades. Create a bubble with easy money and low rates. Burst the bubble and precipitate a crisis. Impose excruciating belt-tightening measures that restructure the workforce, privatize public assets and transfers more of the national wealth to the parasites at the top of the foodchain, the mighty one percent. Wash, rinse, repeat. The current crisis in the US follows this exact same pattern. It just looks different this time-around because we're the ones with the bull's-eye on our backs.
Is it that different in Japan?
Heck, no. Here's a clip from Reuters which shows how Japan's ruling elites are not satisfied with slave wages alone. What they want is to shift more of the cost of government operations onto the backs of the people who can least afford it. Here's an excerpt:
"...part-time, temporary and other non-regular workers who typically make less than half the average pay has jumped 70 percent from 1997 to 19.7 million today -- 38 percent of the labor force."
Abenomics has made life considerably harder for these people due to the higher taxes, soaring prices, and reduced welfare benefits. The data show that Japan's poverty rate is "the sixth-worst among the 34 OECD countries" while "child poverty in working, single-parent households is by far the worst at over 50 percent, making Japan the only country where having a job does not reduce the poverty rate for that group." (Japan's working poor left behind by Abenomics, Reuters)
Is this the next phase of America's inexorable devolution into Third World poverty and immiseration? Are we about to see our bought-and-paid-for representatives levy more regressive VAT and sales taxes on the workerbees so the glorious "job creators" can continue to move more of their wealth offshore to the Caymans without adding even one lousy dime to the public coffers?
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