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Another day, another 7,000 people run out of unemployment benefits.
Robert L. Borosage: The New Red Ink Scare
We've got a new red scare. Forget Glenn Beck. The fear isn't that America is going red, it's that it is in the red. Conservatives in both parties are raising alarms about deficits and government spending. Well, get over it. If we are going to generate growth and shared prosperity out of the mess we are in, expanded public investment must be a centerpiece of the new economy. We've done the whole small government, low taxes, deregulation number. It is time to go another way.
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I was at my local discount shopping store last Friday, Save a Lot. There was a middle aged couple living out of their work truck trying to get their food stamp card to work so they could eat. They were contractor installers for one of the large box home improvement stores who were let go due to the economy. They couldn't afford to pay the kick back the mangers required to call them for installations jobs, so they were dropped from the call list. They have been trying to freelance for months, but their savings have finally ran out and they are at the bottom. No unemployment because they are were self employed, and only $60 a month food stamps because they are middle aged with no kids at home anymore. Another hard working couple out of work due to greed and corruption in our ivy greed educated capitalist system. Cant pay the bride fees to the manager in the blue vest, you dont get the work.
Why hasn't obama saved them? Where is the stimulus?
Mine ran out this week.
Fortunately, I start a new job next week.
In related news, America's tent cities continue to grow in size.
There are a few youtube.com videos that show huge tent cities popping out around the country and our tax money is going to millionaires on Wall Street and not homeless families?
see there is good news for wall street. Tent sales are booming! Invest in tent manufacturing and sales!
The main reason unemployment is so high is because so many millions of jobs have been outsourced to other countries over the past ten or 15 years. We need a new boom...preferably in green energy.
dont forget those desperately needed millions of H1B visas every year. They do work a lot cheaper than Americans do. But not for long!
What ticks me off his Obama's admin. has conceeded 10% uemployment for another year.
His strategy is "it took years to get us here, it will take years to get us out of this".
Uh, scusa, POTUS: you have racked up a massive deficit and you have little to show for it. You will throw a few crumbs at small business and trillions at your banker buddies.
Enjoy date nite, don't let many millions of unemployed ruin your good time. Ditto Michele.
If you and yours are happy then we should be happy.
Wah wah wah. Is it satisfying to blame Obama for this mess?
it is for the rethugs. The real culprits are the IVy Greed Communist style Capitalist, and the all the politicians they pay for favors. This is a Market Driven, Market Created economy and Government. Its a very good example of what can happen when the Market is allowed to run unregulated. The market is legislation, and the there is no enforcement of laws so its fully unregulated. The free market does not work, and lobbying proves it better than anything else.
Its stories like this that show you how "unfair and unbalanced" Fox News really is. They whine and demean Obama for the continued unemployment, but they have no news about the Republicans blocking further extensions of unemployment insurance. They have no personal stories of people who were ineligible for unemployment who have now lost everything, they have no stories of people who were denied health care for some stupid reason, or who are too poor to have health care.
They have horror stories about the few Canadians (all rich) who had the money to avoid waits for care in Canada and thus came here for treatment. They never have stories about the destitute in Canada who automatically receive treatment, regardless of the cost.
Hey Texastrixie, please read my reply to you and GirlFriday below: I was not being snide, I was agreeing, just as I wholeheartedly agree with your comment above.
Please hold the friendly fire!
This is getting so horrendous, I don't know where this will lead to. Unemployment benefits should be paid until the person can find a job or is assigned a job. I always wondered why the USA is so behind other countries in this respect. Well, actually when it comes to employee compensation it is like in a 3 World Status. For congress to have put a time limit on unemployment is ridiculous. What incentive do they have trying to keep jobs here in the USA? However, with the largest defense budget in this world
there just isn't enough money to take care of its own people! Defense is necessary so the corporations get richer and so does congress. We just die for them! Again, that is our pledge of allegiance LOL.
We can assign culpability to whomever we want, to whatever political party we want, for the problems facing this country. But at the end of the day, each of us know where that culpability lies. This President and previous Presidents didn't just suddenly one day appoint themselves as inhabitants of the Big House on Pennsylvania Ave. in DC. Same for the Congress, all of the seats in both chambers were not filled by the seat warmers because they won the March Of Dimes Marathon.
We voted all of these public officials into office. Not only that, we re-elected them to the same offices, many of them multiple times. That's right, the culpability must be positioned squarely on our shoulders, as it should be. We got what we voted for over the last 30 years or so, we demanded it even, by voting for the same candidates time after time even as we realized what was coming down the pike.
Go ahead, blame others, blame me if you wish. But know this, nothing will change if we do not find a way to bridge this lefty / righty divide and work together as a people, as Americans, to solve the daunting challenges confronting all of us.
I don't agree with you. Sometimes, one party gets voted out, a new candidate gets voted in from the other party, and that candidate takes bribes from the corporations, too. Both Democrats and Republicans voted for the war. There aren't really two parties; there's a Ruling Party.
But that is my point. We, the electorate, must come together and rescue ourselves if we are going to survive this economic calamity. Both sides of the aisle are bought and paid for, both sides are nothing more than pompous self-servers, both sides continue to "do the people" while we "do ourselves" in the interest of partisanship. This is the same partisanship manufactured each day from inside the beltway and eagerly delivered to us by the highly partisan MSM. They need divided so they can continue with their self-enrichment games, playing the game by the rules they wrote while we down here in the trenches fight amongst ourselves, too distracted to pay any attention to the bandits as they carry away our futures.
I don't know how to solve this problem, but in some states and many cases, many employers keep dropping pay with the hopes you will quite so they don't even have to pay unemployment
Politician-Think: "Well, clearly 7,000 of Americans per day won't be contributing to my campaign next time. So, screw 'em."
NOSOTROS QUEREMOS JUSTICIA!
The Dems need to put pressure on the Republicans who are blocking the passage of unemployment benefits. There are potential swing voters losing their unemployment right now.
The people deserve an indefinite bailout. That's what unemployment is. Instead, the banks get their bailout, even though they and others in finance are the most responsible for all this suffering in the U.S., not to mention the starvation worldwide.
The pressure comes because of funding. Dems want an expiring tax to flip the bill and Repubs want stimulus money.
The longer we go without investigating those who brought us here, the longer we go without putting real (not watered down) restraints on them, and the longer we go defending obscene salaries and bonuses in the name of "capitalism" while continuing to pretend that we have free markets, the angrier and more disenfranchised the country becomes.
Obama MUST get rid of his economic team -- or at least put Elizabeth Warren at the top of it with the power to hire and fire. We don't need more of the same old crap with businessmen designing their own controls (or lack of them). What we need is a REAL change agent to restore some sense of balance and decency to a "capitalist" system run amok.
I know Obama inherited a mess. The problem is that he continues to show little knowledge of how to deal with it and has let the time for unchallenged action come and go with the advice of the likes of Geitner and Sommers. Why are the same worshippers of good ol' boy capitalism still in place?
MN just announced they took away the final tier of the emergency UI. Now were cut off sooner rather than any hopes of another extention. So now what? More CC defaults, more foreclosures, more hungry scared children. More homeless and winter is around the corner never mind the holiday season. Jobs are not availble, many have hired preferred Latinos instead. Jobs are not availble! Maybe large cities have something going on but smaller ones do not! How can we move, uproot the family and still no money to get situated in a relocation? Deposits, background checks, financial checks all will hamper efforts if you can re locate. And where it is better to go? All states have more people than jobs. Desperation is setting in, what do we do?????????????????????????Most everyone is on short hours as it is. How do we work for pay if there are no jobs????????????
Right now, I feel miserably hopeless.
Come to Washington, DC. That's what people have been doing for generations. The gov is suposed to hire 600,000 in the next five years or so; 120,000 of those positions are supposed to be filled in the Washington, DC area. As a matter of fact, coming to Washington, DC en masse is the solution for desperate people everywhere; were they to march together, change would be more likely IMHO instead of hoping that senators and congressmen will listen to their voicemails, respond to their e-mails, or pay attention to the rhetoric on the web.
Yuck. Lived there for more than 20 years. No way would I ever move back to that cesspool.
Same here - mine ran out, but I'm lucky - I start a new job next week.
It's amazing to read this after reading ridiculous teabagger comments in several local and national mainstream media services.
When the Roman Senate failed its citizens jobs and reason for living, the citizens lost the motivation, knowledge and skill to direct their private affairs. Julius Caesar, then Octavian Caesar reformed taxation, public administration and initiated a massive public works program to put the unemployed citizens to work. The enfeebled, self-centered, greedy Senators were unable to manage the Roman Republic. Caesar Augustus set the Empire on an equitable, sustainable course while establishing a dictatorship. The Roman Republic became a prison for voiceless, freedomless Romans.
rome, egypt, greece, the list of once great empires who mean nothing today. the usa will be on the list soon.
The USA is on the list. With Geithner and Summers as top advisers on economic policy, we're well on our way to collapse.
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First Posted: 10-22-09 12:14 PM | Updated: 10-22-09 12:28 PM