We may sometimes beat a dead horse here at letthemfail. But as we explore the central theme of the bailout economy and what it means for America’s future, we continually shape the argument in the context of the administration’s reaction to reality-driven corrections.

Most recently, in Milwaukee, President Obama talked of saving jobs in a policy measure that Republicans objected to. He talked about the same hope and change that got him elected:

We didn’t become the most prosperous country in the world by rewarding greed and recklessness. We didn’t do it by just gambling and chasing paper profits on Wall Street. We did it by producing goods we could sell; we did it with sweat and effort and innovation. We did it by investing in the people who built this country from the ground up – workers, and middle-class families, and small business owners. We did it by out-working, out-educating, and out-competing everyone else.

Gee that sounds great. So just how are we going to out-work and out-compete cheap labor in a global marketplace? I mean, we know how multi-national businesses out-work and out-compete. They do it by offshoring cheap labor. But from a standpoint of labor cost, is the next generation of American’s ready to ”do it” with sweat and effort that competes with low-cost global labor wages?

A recent news story showing hundreds of unfilled agriculture job openings was taunted as a “political ploy” to reveal the hypocrisy of immigration reform. But in fact, I think it is quite fitting to point out that 99 out of 100 unemployed, relatively unskilled American citizens–who are fit to work as field hands–would choose to play the unemployment extension game over making the same amount of money, or even a little more, working long, hard hours at physical labor, under somewhat harsh environmental conditions.

In the former fantasy economy, Americans played the role of the great global consumer, buying things produced by slave labor, and enriching the bottom line of multi-national outsourcing, while investing in the very same corporations robbing them of future jobs. 

Now comes the correction: facing the music of a consumption-binge fueled by cheap consumer credit–plus the additonal  mountain of corporate debt, contrived of fraud and Ponzi schemes–heaped upon the shoulders of taxpayers in order to subsidize the fantasy, through the global banking cartel’s dictatorial decree of a world-wide speculative bailout.

But back to Obama’s speech, as it applies here:

When we passed a bill earlier this summer to help states save the jobs of hundreds of thousands of teachers, nurses, police officers and firefighters that were about to be laid off, they said “no” to that, too.

Looking past the campaign theatrics of “Victim Obama vs. the Party of NO” we see the types of jobs Obama’s policy measures are designed to save here: teachers, firefighters, nurses, police officers (all worth saving) to which I would add labor union jobs and certain other government jobs not specifically mentioned, and NOT worth saving.

Notice that all of these jobs are service jobs. None compete in the global manufacturing marketplace–they are localized and are therefore not subject to global competition. Obama does mention that his government is ready to subsidize certain “green” job creation, but the products: solar panels, windmills, electric cars, are not really meant to compete in the global marketplace–they are regional manufacturing jobs for American consumption.

We all know that a $60,000 VOLT which is less energy efficient, less stylish, and probably less reliable than foreign equivalents, and yet WAY MORE EXPENSIVE, can only sell in America under a BUY AMERICAN subsidy program, which subsidy is already in place (via the GM bailout) and has only produced sub-standard results thus far. Who will buy American made windmills and solar panels, and at what cost? How will this bucolic “green revolution” spread beyond America, when other countries are advancing clean nuclear fission and fusion technologies far beyond what we abandoned years ago?

Energy efficiencies and storage on an order of magnitude hundreds of times greater than solar and wind power-capture cannot possibly compete in a global marketplace offering nuclear power technology far safer, and far in advance of what we deconstructed as “unsafe” in the 1970′s.

So Obama’s plan is for today’s over-taxed-payer’s to subsidize a new fantasy economy of well paid service workers, and a regressive green manufacturing economy of subsidized labor, propped up by the agrandized coalition of labor unions and big government. Sounds like a great recipe for restoring America’s greatness. No wonder his numbers are tanking.

One way or another, it appears the great American lifestyle correction is coming under Obama.

It comes today in the form of a massive job market correction, subsidized by unprecedented unemployment extensions. It could come tommorrow in the form of a sovereign debt rating correction, as well as increased taxation and reduced social services (austerity) or in the form of a currency correction (inflation).

But economic corrections will come, despite all government intervention. Obama can only subsidize the fantasy for so long. His new 50 billion dollar Union Bailout may buy a great many votes from those who would hope to extend the labor fantasy a little longer, but the labor correction is still coming, and the lifestyle correction with it.

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