Mike and Tom

I wonder if there'll be a revolution. I'm not saying there will be, but I wonder. If there is one, or something in some way similar to a revolution (like 1968-69), I think Michael Moore will turn out to have been the most important revolutionary since Thomas Paine helped turn the world upside-down.

Moore was on Scarborough's "Morning Joe" this morning, not advocating any action, but simply describing our current state of affairs:

Moore: Oh! It’s so incredible. Yes. Fifteen million people out of work.

Scarborough: Isn’t this a perfect example for you? Isn’t this a great example of what you’re trying to say? How there’s a disconnect between what’s going on on Wall Street, 10,000, and Main Street, 10% unemployment?

Moore: Oh, it’s not a disconnect. It’s connected very well. It’s connected just the way our economic system is set up. It’s set up so that the pyramid scheme that we call capitalism—it’s become a pyramid scheme now—the very few at the top get away like bandits making billions and billions of dollars. And everybody else in the lower parts of the pyramid are told to work really hard and maybe some day they can come up and be on top of the pyramid too. Well guess what? There’s only a few people that can sit on top of the pyramid and it’s just so revolting and so immoral when we live in a country—the wealthiest country on earth—fifteen million people unemployed. One in every eight homes right now is in foreclosure or delinquency. And they’re celebrating on Wall Street? And they’re paying each other bonuses?

What I noticed first about Moore's little spiel is that it's descriptive, but not prescriptive. All he's doing is telling people where they are, not what they should do about it. And that's all a revolutionary has to do. No wonder the Republicans, most Democrats, and all other reactionaries and greedheads hate this guy!

And actually, it may be worse than he describes. Some economists advocate using the Bureau of Labor Statistics' "G-6" unemployment figure rather than the "G-3" number our news sources always refer to, which now stands at 10 percent. G-6 includes workers who want to work full time but are working only part time instead -- "underemployed" as they say, and that figure is now 17 percent. How many millions of people that amounts to depends on how one computes the size of the labor force, but any way you figure it's a hell of a lot higher than 15 million.