Trapped in the meltdown (continued): As the Bush economic miracle plays out, we have deeper and wider cutbacks, and nonprofits in freefall

“When [Milton] Friedman’s Platonic ideas of free-market virtues are put into practice, they have too often generated a systemic orgy of competitive greed -- whose remedies, ironically, entail countermeasures of nationalization.”

-- Marshall Sahlins, University of Chicago emeritus professor of anthropology, quoted by John Lippert in a Bloomberg piece on the apparent collapse of "Chicago School" socioeconomics in its nest

by Ken

Am I the only one who's creeped out when Chimpy the Prez (you remember him, don't you?) emerges from his rathole and blithers about the non-existent "free market" and sneers sanctimoniously at "failed companies" that under normal circumstances should be allowed to fail? Is this the Twilight Zone, or what? George W. Bush pointing a finger at failed companies? Have we all taken leave of reality? This is a dunderhead whose history in business consisted of turning one company after another to a pile of shit. Anyone who would listen to anything he has to say about business or the economy should be in a straitjacket.

And so, given eight years at the helm -- and boy, do the people who voted for him have a lot to answer for -- of course he's done what he always does: turned everything around him to shit. With, true, the small exception of the family, friends, and cronies who piled up fortunes as immediate beneficiaries of his blithering incompetence. (In fairness, some of these must have been the same people who kept bailing Chimpy out of disaster after disaster through his so-called "business career," who may be presumed to have done so as an investment in the future, or rather their future.)

It still boggles my mind to think that so many people could have been so knuckle-draggingly stupid as to fall for a creature whose every cell screams out, "Fraud!" But more importantly, at least some of those people have to learn that the moronic bullshit he poured down their throats is in large measure the same bullshit that's been fobbed off on them for generations by "the business party."

Yessiree, what we needed to do was throw off all that awful regulation, which was holding business back and preventing us from achieving real prosperity. The reality, of course, was that all that regulation, by creating in some measure at least a sort of level playing field for business and providing for some of the basic needs of society, made possible both sustainable prosperity and a measure of civilization.

Business, of course, always wants the shackles removed. And when they get it, the result is always disaster, because there's no one to protect them from themselves. This time, with Cheney the war-maker (and war is always good for business) and regulation-stripper they bought themselves the pro-business government to end all pro-business governments. And naturally the result is economic catastrophe unprecedented since the Great Depression -- and we're still counting.

It's what doomed the McCranky campaign, though there are much better reasons why that campaign should have been routed. But in the end, it really had nothing to do with the lies and imbecilities Young Johnny was spewing. Voters just knew instinctively that the people in power had to be gotten out of power. It remains to be seen what happens once they discover that President Obama can't wave a magic wand and make everything OK. But will they look in the mirror, those people who voted for a lying simpleton not once but twice, and see the people who hate America so much that they twice voted for a man whose life's work was to destroy it?

Undoubtedly a lot of the people who voted to put Chimpy in the White House are now paying the price. After all, it's only the people who engineered his career and bankrolled his candidacy who made out like bandits from it. It would be nice to think that at least some of those people have come to understand what they did, in the hope that they won't be such easy prey the next time some huckster tells them what we really need is a government that's good for business. (There's some consolation in that at the academic level "the Chicago School" -- the slash-and-burn school of Friedmanite economic and social policy -- seems finally to have come into disrepute, as recorded in the Bloomberg piece quoted up top.)

And sad to say, we no longer have just one "business party." The lesson that Democrats like Rahm Emanuel have learned since the Dems were unceremoniously dumped out of power is that it's important to show those corporate wheelers and dealers that Democrats can be just as good friends as Republicans, maybe even better.

So now we survey the wreckage, as we wonder how much worse it's going to get. And how are we feeling the pain?

Here are some headlines pulled off the New York Times website which seem to speak for themselves:

* Home Sales in November Fell at Faster Pace Than Expected

* In Budget Crises, States Reluctantly Halt Road Projects

* As Economy Dips, Arrests for Shoplifiting Soar

The Washington Post, meanwhile, has a story that shouldn't surprise anyone, on the crisis facing charities and nonprofits generally, with a disastrous dropoff in giving. It begins:

For Charities, a Season of Need
With Donations in Free Fall, Groups Try to Capture Holiday Generosity

By William Wan and Brigid Schulte
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, December 23, 2008; B01

In the world of philanthropy, December is everything. It's the one month when people are at their most generous, when procrastinators rush to beat the year-end tax cutoff for donations, and when charities count on collecting as much as a third of their annual contributions.

This year, with rising unemployment and a tanking economy, donors have already informed at least one-quarter of nonprofits in the Washington that they will be giving less, according to the Center for Nonprofit Advancement. As a result, more than 40 percent of nonprofits plan to reduce programs or cut staff, and most are reevaluating the way they do business to weather the year ahead.

The piece surveys a number of D.C. charities and nonprofits that are scrambling desperately this month to make up for gigantic shortfalls in their operating budgets, without a great deal of success. However --

Earlier that day, in Northwest Washington, organizers of another kind of event were suffering the opposite problem: overwhelming interest.

Washington's top nonprofit leaders had called an emergency meeting downtown to try to figure out how to survive the economic crisis. It was supposed to be an intimate gathering of a few dozen leaders, but so many nonprofits registered that organizers had to create a waiting list. The meeting was dubbed "Nonprofit 911."

At times, the 500-person town hall meeting resembled tent revivals of old. There were prophecies of doom, messages of hope and testimonies from people struggling in hard times.

"If you think it's a storm, you just batten down the hatches and wait for it to pass," another said. "But this is more like climate change . . . like the coming of the ice age."

"As bad as this year has been," the Post writers write, "experts say, 2009 might be worse."

"No one knows what's going to happen, the kind of choices we're going to have to face," said Adam Tenner, director of Metro TeenAIDS. For weeks, anxiety over his group's finances has gnawed at him so much that his stomach started hurting.

"When the choice becomes which service we're going to cut, who we're going to stop helping," he said, "any choice is going to be a bad one."

The Post also has a piece that attempts an overview of the deepening recession:

Deeper Cuts, Widespread Pain
Few Industries Are Immune as Companies Shed Jobs in 'Serial' Downturn

By Annys Shin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 23, 2008; D01

Recessions can be notoriously uneven. They can wreak havoc with the livelihood of factory workers but not that of bank tellers or nurses. Whole industries can see jobs washed away forever, while others hum along and even grow.

This time, however, the pain is more widespread, economists say, affecting the investment banker, the auto worker, the warehouse manager and the toy store clerk.

So far this year, companies have announced layoffs that affect more than 1 million jobs, according to job placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Bank of America, the Dow Chemical Co., Anheuser-Busch InBev, General Motors and Circuit City are among the growing number of companies that are letting people go.

Another key difference with past recessions has been the downturn's "serial nature," said Jerry Nickelsburg, an economist with the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

In other words, the recession has not affected industries and regions at once, but has rolled out in spurts.

Industries with some of the steepest job losses include construction, financial services, retail and manufacturing. The regional differences in job losses reflect how large a role those industries play in a given area's economy.

Among the states most immediately and devastatingly hit have been California, which was hardest-hit by the bursting of the housing bubble (we haven't talked about their impending state-government crisis -- I assume everyone has been tracking that story), and Michigan and the Midwest, Ground Zero for the domestic auto-industry collapse. Shin notes:

Many of those who have been or are about to be laid off will have to find a new line of work, several economists said, because they won't be able to go back to their old one.

The construction industry has shed 780,000 jobs since September 2006 according to the BLS, and it isn't likely to go back to bubble-like levels any time soon, experts said. Further, an anticipated decline in the construction of office buildings, apartments and shopping centers is likely to spur more layoffs in 2009.

Rebecca Blank, an economist at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said she expects manufacturing jobs to keep vanishing steadily from the U.S. economy, including in the auto industry. "It's been a downward trend since the late 1970s," she said. "They are not coming back by and large."

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