When the latest unemployment numbers arrived on Friday, I was in Atlanta, putting three human faces on the dreary stats. The first belonged to Brenda Carter. I had written about her in Third World America and invited her to appear with me on Good Day Atlanta to tell what her life has been like since losing her job three years ago. Hers is the face of the long-term unemployed: bruised, bloodied, but, in her case, unbowed. I encountered the second face at the headquarters of Coca-Cola. After my speech there, I met people with well-paying jobs and great benefits who nevertheless are in the grip of economic anxiety. One woman teared up telling me about having to support her sister -- a single mom with two children -- who had lost her job. The third face belonged to Dr. Robert Franklin, the president of Morehouse College, who told me of a sleepless night after getting a call from a mother who could no longer afford to keep her son at Morehouse and was asking about the best time to remove his things from the dorm with the least embarrassment. Numbers -- 9.6 percent unemployment, 95,000 more jobs lost -- don't begin to capture the human devastation.
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http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=19025
One family that we hadn't seen for years sat down and told us what they had been up to the last 3 years. The mom had been a middle school principal for many years, now laid off.The dad has been a technician at a public water district for 13 yrs. When the mom lost that job with two teen daughters still at home, they had to rent out thier house to college students. Then live in a RV moving every three days. The mom became ill and had to be put in ICU for two weeks. That added 20,000 dollars on top of other bills they had. These are well educated people,hard working and conservative.
This is so very scary out here. It made me feel very insecure. I wish so much I could help them. I will be having them over for dinner as much as I can, without embarrassing them. We are holding on by finger tips also but I will share what I can.
We are living through the fallout of a failed GOP leadership!
The opposite should be done. All countries around the world should adopt strong, effective and uniform regulations to close the business loopholes that allows businesses to hold whole countries hostage regarding jobs and innovative business development and hop from country to country. Worldwide standards would even out economic development more effectively and end the beggar mentality that having the world race to deregulate would cause. It may be a good idea to make moving to other countries more expensive than opening and sustaining a business in the originating country of a business.
America is a great country and the people greater. Yet we stand by and let this country be overtaken with corporate insanities we are in other countries fighting, and have since the second world war. Americans have paid, protected, freed, and raised the standards of more countries than we can recall. Yet we are going down a road of only the wealthy being able to live the standard we are now creating in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nor are the American people so dimwitted as to not realize that the Congress, Senate, and House are well paid for by the very companies that are stealing America, much less the election itself.
We are bought and sold as slaves in centuries before. I never comprehended how thousands could be enslaved by so few in history, but in the present we vote for it, being marketed a hopeless hope daily on the news.
It really is a kind of extremism that will destroy our Democracy if it is allowed to go to far.
Second I admire your passion about the fate of jobless Americans. But also I would like to ask you:
where was this passion when during the finals years of the Bush administration 300k jobs were lost every month ? Didn't the suffering occur back then as well ?
I understand that we were all distracted by the two wars and so were you.
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts10082010.html
Paul Craig Roberts: America's Third World Economy
"For a number of years I reported on the monthly nonfarm payroll jobs data. The data did not support the praises economists were singing to the “New Economy.” The “New Economy” consisted, allegedly, of financial services, innovation, and high-tech services.
This economy was taking the place of the old “dirty fingernail” economy of industry and manufacturing. Education would retrain the workforce, and we would move on to a higher level of prosperity.
Time after time I reported that there was no sign of the “New Economy” jobs, but that the old economy jobs were disappearing. The only net new jobs were in lowly paid domestic services such as waitresses and bartenders, retail clerks, health care and social assistance (mainly ambulatory health care services), and, before the bubble burst, construction.
The facts, issued monthly by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, had no impact on the ”New Economy” propaganda. Economists continued to wax eloquently about how globalism was a boon for our future.
The millions of unemployed today are blamed on the popped real estate bubble and the subprime derivative financial crisis. However, the US economy has been losing jobs for a decade. As manufacturing, information technology, software engineering, research, development, and tradable professional services have been moved offshore, the American middle class has shriveled. The ladders of upward mobility that made American an “opportunity society” have been dismantled..."
I am an American, with a new party that will do what is needed. The first is equal trade, meaning at the manufacturing level the prices of anything shipped into this great land equals what it would cost, labor and materials plus overhead, to make it in a modern plant in the USA. If no plant now exist we would start them, rebuild, retool and re-educate are the call words.
Second is a decree, I will call on Congress in 2013 when I am in the White House and 40% of the House and Senate are no longer card carrying Democrats or Republicans to endorse a War footing putting this nation, every person and commercial activity under regulations to allow the re-building of this land, re-tooling of the manufacturing, transportation and power grids plus re-education of the Public schools and higher education so this failure never happens again. Stay the course and fail, or change!!!
About the daftest thing I have read for a long while. The situation in France and Britain is nowehere near as bad as in the US - neither in terms of foreclosure, unemployment, health care or social security. We fear becoming like America!
You point out an aspect of the economic downturn that is not so often looked at: the psychological impact - if not anger, then apathy and depression - often due to a sense of powerlessness, which economic inequality IMO induces. Well in truth, it really IS powerlessness to some extent ... given how much each of our lives center around money to give us reasonable choices on how we want to live.
Perhaps that is why the American Dream was so important - the sense of empowerment, the sense that life is not just some game of chance, or being controlled by a relatively few wealthy and powerful people.
I suppose history however is replete with those in power exploiting or robbing the masses of choice and hope. Take Stalin for example, or even the Roman Empire the way it used slaves.
We have history repeating itself - but with the same terrible consequences of hopelessness and depression and lack of meaning. And I fear also - the brutal reality that we ignore these consequences at our own risk as a People and a nation.
The direction we're heading in is fraught with psychological traps - hopelessness is more than just a sad state for people to enter, as a society, it is the beginning of chaos.
The elder population who tells us we should all take care of ourselves grew up in a US that was heavily investing in itself. In the late 30's, 40's and 50's the US spent massive funds on new technologies, building infrastructure, expanding education, fighting a war, public works, employee safety, industry regulations and taking care of our people. All at the same time. And thirty years later, we had a budget surplus.
A true look at history would do us some good. It's so sad that we're tied to election cycle rhetoric rather than the real lessons learned. It's sad, and it's clear why we're not succeeding.