Some politicians are saying that the latest unemployment report is good news, but it's not. It shows us that this country is still in crisis. It shows us that the government needs to act quickly and aggressively to create jobs, and to restore the lost earning power of the average American who has a job.
Most of all it shows us that millions of struggling people are still invisible in the nation's capitol.
This week the Occupy movement is holding a series of "Take Back the Capitol" events in Washington. Let's hope it shines some light on the country's unemployed, under-employed, and under-earning millions. Until now, they've been pretty much invisible in that town.
The Invisible Americans are all around you. They're in your state, in your community, maybe in your family. Maybe they're your kids, just out of college. Maybe they're your 50-something uncles and aunts, your grandparents, your grandchildren. They're right there in the jobs report, for anyone with the eyes -- and the willingness -- to find them.
Invisible: Millions of the Long-Term Unemployed
While some celebrated an unemployment rate of "only" 8.6 percent, half that change was explained by the fact that 315,000 people dropped out of the labor force. Job creation barely kept pace with the entry of new people into the workforce.
Those 315,000 people join the 5.7 million people officially classified as long-term unemployed. That number is at historically high levels, representing nearly half (43 percent) of all the jobless people in this country.
It's not that they don't want jobs. Most of them have fallen into despair. Even worse, what they may have fallen into is realism. Unless we use the power of government to do something, some of them will never work again. They're falling out of the "normal" economy and into a new reality of persistent joblessness and, for some, eventual poverty.
Invisible: Segregation on the Unemployment Line
The official jobless rate for white people is 7.6 percent, versus 15.5 percent for African Americans and 11.4 percent for Hispanics.
And those are only the official numbers. The figures are much higher if you count the long-term unemployed, the under-employed, and "discouraged" workers.
In a nation that prides itself on being the land of opportunity, we're denying entire groups of people the chance for a better life.
Invisible: The Jobless Generation
There's a silent epidemic of youth unemployment. Official teenaged unemployment is 23.7 percent, and the real rate is much higher. Recent college graduates face historically high jobless rates -- along with historically high student debt.
Studies show that young people who begin their work lives un- or under-employed face an entire lifetime of lower income. By failing to act, we're betraying our own children and throwing away an entire generation of young people.
Invisible: The Under-employed
There's a silent epidemic of under-employment. There are 8.5 million people who want to work full-time but can only get part-time work in that category. That figure dropped slightly, but we don't know how much of the drop was due to people finding full-time work or being laid off altogether.
And remember, underemployed people aren't just making less money. In most cases they're also going without health insurance or other benefits. They're struggling on the margins of working America, barely surviving and never knowing how much money they'll earn from one week to the next.
Invisible: The Vanishing Public Servant
While Washington politicians drone on about "budget cuts," there's not much discussion of the fact that many of those cuts increase unemployment -- at the Federal, state, and local levels. Government jobs have been dwindling since 2008, and the shrinkage is continuing a time when we need more of them.
Teachers, police officers, highway toll takers, postal workers -- you name it, they're losing their jobs. And the only debate in Washington seems to be, how many more of them can we make unemployed?
Invisible: The Drowning Middle Class
Average hourly earnings for all nonfarm employees decreased last month by 1 percent. Average hourly earnings increased by only 1.8 percent over the last year, while the cost of living (measured by the Consumer Price Index) increased 3.5 percent.
Once again, average Americans have fallen behind in earnings and have seen their standard of living decline. Meanwhile, incomes continue to skyrocket for the wealthiest Americans. Income inequality is the worst it's been since the Great Depression.
Welcome to the New Gilded Age.
Political Blindness
This week we heard almost nothing in Washington about direct action to address these crises. The Democrats' "payroll tax holiday" would provide urgently needed ongoing relief for the battered middle class, and would also have a mild job-creating effect. But it would do so in an inefficient way, and also needlessly and recklessly endangers Social Security.
Republicans have no solution at all -- just more of the same policies that caused these problems in the first place.
Our neighbors deserve better than this. We deserve better than this. Change starts with a simple statement we can make to those around us, and they can make to us: You're not invisible. I see you.
People in Washington over-complicate the debate by tinkering at the margins: tax-break this, incentive that. Those things will have some effect, but there's a simpler and better way to fix the joblessness problem: put people to work. At a time when this country needs trillions of dollar in infrastructure repair, government should hire people and get on with it.
George W. Bush had no problem doing that a few years ago. He signed a bill spending more than a quarter of a trillion dollars on infrastructure spending while the Republican Speaker of the House bragged about creating. But Republicans would apparently rather prolong the suffering so that they can defeat Obama and the Democrats in 2012.
As for the Obama Democrats, either they don't understand the problem or they don't think it's politically smart to propose fixing it. I suspect it's the latter -- and they're dead wrong. The president's jobs bill had some useful ideas. But the president went small on the fixes and, in his typical fashion, couldn't resist pushing useless conservative "job creation" ideas along with the good ones.
Far-Sighted
We need a massive jobs program now to fix our crumbling bridges, highways, railroads, dams, and public buildings. We need to fix wage stagnation by going back to the policies that built the middle class, beginning with stronger collective bargaining rights for working people. Unions were one of the engines of post-World-War-II prosperity, and the war on unions needs to stop.
We also need higher taxes for the wealthy, tax advantages for companies that hire, and higher taxes for those who make money by gambling, trading other people's debts, or hedging against the success of the American economy. We need to downsize the financial sector, which is capturing too much corporate profit and squeezing out job-creating businesses.
And we need to rebuild the firewall between banking and speculating, so that we can end too-big-to-fail and the boom-and-bust cycle that keeps crashing the economy.
Vision Test
Some political party, maybe one that has had a reputation for defending the middle class, ought to say something this: We know what's going on out there. We understand the problem. Here's how we would fix it. We're going to introduce these measures in the House and Senate wherever and whenever we can, so you can see who's fighting for the Invisible Americans, and who's fighting against them.
But no party appears willing to do that, at least not without the presence of a non-partisan movement that forces it to act.
Someday, historians will review this country's history to find those times when our people and our leaders responded to a crisis with vision and courage. They'll see the millions of Americans who rose to the occasion during the War of Independence, the Civil War, World War II, and the Great Depression.
But will they see us, or will we have become... invisible?
Our political leaders need to be pressured -- a lot -- which is why the Occupy events in Washington are so important. We need to build and maintain a movement for real change, a movement that sees the invisible ones among us, a movement that sees each of us and makes us visible, a movement that fights unrelentingly for a better society.
Hope to "see" you soon -- on the barricades.
Follow Richard (RJ) Eskow on Twitter: www.twitter.com/rjeskow
Leo Hindery, Jr.: The Payroll Tax Cut Extension, the Republicans and Mitt Romney (et al)
Deborah Gaines: The Undercover Mother
Erin Scholz: The Young and the Jobless
How did The Capitulator-in-Chief respond to this quintessentially obvious lesson? In typical fashion, he agreed with Republicans that it was time to revisit our "entitlements." HE proposed putting Social Security and Medicare "on the table." What was the result of this exercise in surrender? Shortly thereafter, a Republican was elected to Congress in the New York 9th, a district that hadn't elected a Republican to Congress in a century.
Could any lesson possibly be more vivid? A sufficient portion of the American electorate (albeit not nearly as large as it should be) seems to finally be realizing that Congressional Republicans are purposefully obstructing every effort at economic recovery that Democrats propose. The only way to change this is by administering a memorable drubbing to them next November.
But that won't happen as long as Democrats continue to be "Republican lite." Confrontation, coupled with relentless publicity that informs the public about what Republicans are doing and who they are (willing pawns of their corporate puppet masters), is the only way to make the GOP reap what it has sewn next year. However, we unfortunately have a president who probably wakes up in the middle of the night dreaming about his next "compromise" (read "appeasement").
Two quotations say it all:
"President Obama suffers from Preemptive Capitulation Syndrome." - Jim Hightower; and
"In the last 30 years, the Democrats have moved to the right, and the Republicans have moved into the mental hospital." - Bill Maher
There is one especially poignant illustration for our spineless "Democratic" friends: When Paul Ryan's "destroy Medicare as we know it" budget was announced, the immediate result was that a Democrat (Kathy Hochul) was elected to Congress in a district (the New York 26th) that had not elected a Democrat to Congress in a century. (Continued)
s."
No government has ever created a single job.
That some one else hadnt paid for.
Outsourcing Jobs, Offshoring Markets ╗ Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
"...In these neoliberal times we are no longer scandalized to learn that this pattern is heartily championed by none other than the chairman of president Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, Jeffrey Immelt, who happens to be CEO of General Electric. 2010 was a banner year for GE, when $9.1 billion of its total profits of $14.2 billion came from its overseas operations. Immelt pulls no punches in his indifference to US workers. At a December 6, 2002 investors meeting he enthused “When I an talking to GE managers, I talk China, China, China, China, China. You need to be there. You need to change the way people talk about it and how they get there. I am a nut on China. Outsourcing from China is going to grow to 5 billion. We are building a tech center in China. Every discussion today has to center on China. The cost basis is extremely attractive. You can take an 18 cubic foot refrigerator, make it in China, land it in the United States, and land it for less than we can make an 18 cubic foot refrigerator ourselves.”
This is the man Obama put in charge of a committee assembled to address the nation’s unemployment crisis..."
Unfortunately, bold projects which will people to work is not on the agenda anywhere in the West.
http://www.shadowstats.com/
There used to be a fare trade law that was broken in the late 50's I believe, in the name of competition. If you bought a bottle of aspirin you paid a set price with a built in reasonable profit for the seller no matter where you bought it. When the law was set aside large discounters bought huge amounts of aspirin and sold it at the cost of what a small drug store would have to pay for it. Michelin tires was the same "retail" price everywhere until Costco made a deal and started selling tires at a dealers cost. Loyal dealers could no longer make a profit. Then Home Depot undersold hardware stores, plumbing shops, electrical suppliers etc. Then they raised the price and cut the variety and supply inferior Chinese materials. Need I mention Walmart? All in the name of competition which has now been eliminated and now is price fixed by the few big boys that remain and there is no longer any competition. You do know that the oil companies tell each gas station what to charge. This was the beginning of what we have today. One goes bankrupt and is bought/merged. Delta Air/Continental, Home Savings to Washington Mutual to Chase, ExxonMobil, etc. ATT was broken up in 1982 and has been reacquiring them back ever since. Our country (and most others) has become one big monopoly. Business and the government wonders why we have become "anti-trust" of them.
Fanned and faved- BIG!!
There'll be more Americans leaving this country as time goes on, particularly if the GOP takes control in 2012, not only younger people but older ones as well. I wonder how many American expatriots other countries will be willing to admit.
We can take it back, but I fear that things may have to get a lot worse for a lot more before enough people wake up and realize what's being done to them.
1 in 5 kids lives in poverty and 40 million people are on food stamps, but apparently that's still not enough to inspire much action. Maybe when it become 1 in 2 and 150 million more will begin to appreciate the urgency of the situation.
As you say, not counting those that have given up looking, distorts the unemployment figure. Would you explain in a future article what the following statistics might really mean?
The population aged 18 to 65 in 2000 was 174 million and 137 million were employed.
The population aged 18 to 65 in 2010 was 195 million and 139 million were employed.
That is, the 18-65 group increased by 21 million (+12%) while total employment only increased by 2 million (+1.5%).
http://www.nidataplus.com/lfeus1.htm
How many older workers were forced onto Social Security early because their jobs were eliminated, and the only place they could find employment was part-time minimum wage?
I've been told that many employers will not hire workers over 50, and that's a pretty big chunk of the work force. That's a pretty big section of people being left out of work--too young to retire, too old to get hired.
I suggested that they modify one version of their resumes to feature a Recent Employment section that was detailed about specific skills and expertise, lists of programming languages or certifications, and recent project work as well as any project management experience, but to limit the years/jobs described to most recent (which are often the most applicable). I suggested they provide the name of the university where they graduated and degree earned, but not the year of graduation. I suggested they not list the most high level job title (or list no exact titles but use descriptors instead) because it may sound expensive (high wage/compensation) to potential employers and price them out of the market.
I recommended that they keep a full copy of their resume (all experience, all employers/jobs, dates, etc.) and not hand it out except at an interview if they get one.
At least that gives them something of a fighting chance to get an interview on the merits and maybe overcome discrimination in one case so as to get a job offer.