PROFITS MAY RISE, BUT WHAT ABOUT PEOPLE?

       Economic recovery figures mean nothing if mass unemployment is not addressed
       So much has been said about V, W or L shapes regarding how the world is doing economically. But Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz hit the nail on the head when he insisted that those possible recovery trends will amount to nothing if the most important element of the economy is overlooked. Labour, he said, still faces the unemployment menace and it will be a travesty to laud industries boasting fresh profits that resulted from massive layoffs.
       Stiglitz may be regarded by some as a doomsayer, but this particular analysis of his confirms him as a humanist. Unemployment, he warns, has reached staggering levels in the United States and is expected to rise even further. His stand during his Bangkok visit last week was clear: If people have to suffer, how can we say things are on the up, no matter how good figures on Wall Street read?
       The US government has been too dominated by the influences of the financial market, which brought on the current global crisis, but which is trying to apply its own measurements on how bad or good things are. This attitude has in fact spread beyond America. "Economic survival" often refers to those who aren't really affected by a bad economy. "Survival" is a term monopolised by those who will manage to survive anyhow.
       That's the old model, which is struggling to maintain its part in the status quo. It's all about the survival of the big fish. If you are a junior worker, you may have to be sacrificed so that richer people can "survive". If layoffs improve the financial figures of your company, the management will be lauded for effective cost cutting. And that's if the analysts are kind, because otherwise it will be called the riddance of excess rather than cost cutting.
       America will be feeling the pinch of a new economic order that is taking shape to challenge the Wall Street formula. Up to 15 per cent of Americans could lose their jobs, and that will defy whatever recovery statistics the other side may try to produce. Peaceful co-existence between flawed capitalism and the American public will be severely tested, after mutual benefits have evaporated.
       Labour is heavily linked to consumption. Workers are what make the real world. We can't expect the "real economy" to be improving when people, discouraged by job insecurity, cut back on their spending to prepare themselves for the worst. They are what make real demand, and if capitalism still ignores this truth and keeps its focus on self-serving data, the "rebound" will be fake and short-lived.
       Capitalism has arguably rewarded many wrong people, like those who were cunning enough to turn mega debts into triple-A assets in the middle of the US bubble. Those wrong people somehow came to be the driving force of our world, the world we believed was ours. Housing projects flooded the market because they wanted them. Bad debts were good debts because they said so. We were told to put our life savings in the hands of strangers half a world away because they believed it was the way things should be. We trusted everything they said when it came to what was important and what was not.
       The illusional "leverage" has failed and the real leverage, the work force that drives the real world, has been overlooked. And according to Stiglitz, the Obama administration is now in danger of falling into the same old trap. The overriding mentality remains that if you can get the financial market fixed, everything will be fine and you will get away with murder.
       The bottom line is, no system can be solid if it is weak at the bottom, and flaws in capitalism have created a huge gap between the elite and those whose only fault is that they invested with their labour in all products. Capitalism gave so much importance to the "brains", with their ability to innovate, that the brains finally became aloof and detached themselves from reality.
       We have reached the stage where the arms and legs are saying "Enough", that we live or die together. Unemployment, the suffering of those at the bottom, will decide the success or failure of efforts to solve the current crisis. Delusion - that things are improving, whereas job security is actually non-existent - will only prolong the illness. It will be like the one last good dream of a patient in a coma before it's all over.
       Whether it will be a V, or W, or L, or wobbly L should have to do with how everything non-Wall Street is doing. In other words, if the patient can lift his arms and kick the air with his legs, it will be a surer sign of recovery than signals sent from the brain that everything is okay.