A Futuristic Movement of Monstrous Proportions

Barack and Michelle Obama today announced they are combining their theme songs -- "Winning the Future" and "Let's Move" into one all-purpose slogan in keeping with the current austerity campaign to trim government waste.

The President wants to Win the Future by investing in green jobs -- preferably low-wage and non-union, so we can out-compete the rest of the Third World.  Michelle wants us to eat less and exercise more.  As the President is so fond of obsessively and fallaciously saying, families and governments are exactly the same -- overweight slackers who need to tighten our belts.

So what if this month's spike in the unemployment rate is mainly due to the massive national layoffs of teachers and other public workers?  So what if boards of education throughout the land are being forced to shorten the school week to three or four days?  The kids are becoming nothing more than bloated desk potatoes anyway.  They need to get out more, stay healthy for the below-minimum wage jobs of the future. 

And what about those senior citizens?  Everybody knows your metabolism slows down as you get older. So that's why Obama and his Republican co-conspirators bipartisan negotiators have come up with the nifty idea of chained consumer price formulae.  Once you start collecting your Social Security -- if the politicians have their way, at around 68 or 70 -- you will oh so gradually see a decrease in  benefits.... say, about the cost of only a bite of that candy bar you know you don't really need, every single month for the rest of your life.  So if and when you make it to 95, you'll be as thin as a rail and down to only one meal a day on the few hundred a month you'll then be collecting.  You see, the President cares about your well-being.  He knows change is hard.  Father Knows Best.  ( And if you didn't sign his fatherhood pledge last month, you're just being a selfish ideologue.)

That's why the President is not sweating the rising unemployment rate.  The headwinds of the crappy economy are evaporating all his sweat, and they should be cooling you down too.  By Election Day, joblessness may be up to 13 percent -- but not to worry.  It's a structural thing, the new normal, and it's all according to plan.  The corporations really do want to keep jobs here, but they just don't have the confidence yet.  Wages here are still way too high.  Why pay somebody $8 an hour when they can get a Bangladeshi child to do the same thing for pennies?

The idea is to turn the United States into such a great Third World Country that other nations will start offshoring their jobs to us.  It's already happening in Sweden and the "right to work" (anti-union) state of Virginia:

Swedish corporate leaders, ironically, are now trying to exploit those wider U.S. gaps. IKEA pays its factory workers in Sweden a minimum $19 an hour. In Virginia, IKEA workers doing the same exact work start at $8. IKEA looks on the United States, local union organizer Bill Street matter-of-factly observed earlier this month, “the way that most people in the U.S. look at Mexico.” (Labor Notes).

Anti-immigration advocates love to complain that Mexicans cross the border to steal our low-paying restaurant and migrant farm jobs, have their anchor babies and grab up all our wonderful free health care.  How ironic that Mexico is a major medical tourism destination for Americans with no or crappy health coverage.  For example, the cost of a knee replacement in Mexico is $10.500 compared to $25,000 here. And there are recovery center options at seaside resorts, too.  Anyway, illegal immigration is actually slowing down because word is finally getting out in Mexico that the American economy really, really stinks. Again, all according to plan. Immigration reform legislation may not even be needed.

But I digress.  This is all a Grand Plan, for our own good.  The Social Safety Net is overrated.  We're just trapped in that net like a bunch of flailing fish who are too stupid to know what's good for us.  The President is going to slash that net and allow us to escape into the Deep, free at last.



Flagellation of the Willing