Joyce L. Arnold, Liberally Independent, Queer Talk, equality activist, writer.
My headline is actually a bit off. It’s probably more accurate to say something like: “Unemployment, foreclosures, poverty and other things we’re suppose to talk about only within approved guidelines.” It’s still “the economy, stupid.” There’s just only one, two corporate party way we’re suppose to understand it.
Unemployment
From The Center for Economic and Policy Research, via Common Dreams:
Unemployment Rate Does Not Tell the Full Story: Long-term Hardship a Tremendous Burden on Millions of Workers and the Economy …
Large numbers of workers are not accounted for under the traditional measure of long-term employment. As a result, millions of workers fall outside of official tallies and face significant and long-lasting loss of earnings, deterioration of skills, poverty and even higher rates of divorces and reduced physical and mental health. The report shows that this is a burden borne disproportionately by blacks and Latinos, less-educated workers and younger workers, all of whom are more likely to face extended periods of long-term hardship.
Via Truth Out, from Paul Krugman, “In the US, the News May Be Good, but Problems Remain,” in which he concludes:
Once again, at the first hint of good news, the usual crowd … is itching to pivot away from jobs.
From a February post by Digby, “Length of Unemployment is Historically Unprecedented.”
The longer you’re unemployed, the greater the difficulty in finding employment, and the longer you might (not nearly everyone does or is eligible) take advantage of unemployment benefits, and seek help for food, housing, health and other basic needs.
Digby concludes:
Sure, (long term unemployment) … may be devastating to the futures of millions of American workers, but it works like a charm to lower their expectations … and everyone’s wages.
And by the way, did you know that Job seekers (are) getting asked for Facebook passwords?
The “traditional” economic spins are being questioned. From Live Web:
US economic model broken, says survey
Almost two-thirds of working-age adults believe the US economic model ‘no longer works for the majority of Americans’ … .
Fairness was the biggest perceived flaw in the economic model – only 20 per cent of Americans said it ‘distributes wealth and income fairly’.
Foreclosures
Questioning the “fairness” of the economic model that determines employment sounds very smart to me. The same kind of questions can be asked related to foreclosures. From AlterNet:
Darrell Issa Holds Another All-Male Panel in Brooklyn, This Time on Foreclosures …
Congressman Darrell Issa, the richest member of that august body, with a net worth of around $448,125,017, visited Brooklyn today (March 19) to hold a hearing on foreclosures – and was met with a roomful of Brooklynites facing foreclosure and other economic troubles … .
Within minutes of opening the hearing, Issa was mic-checked, with activists from New York
Communities for Change and other community groups declaring ‘This hearing is a fraud!’ …… the hearing bore more than a few similarities to Issa’s recent Washington hearings on contraception: the legislators involved were all male, and no one actually impacted by the subject under discussion was called to testify.
According to the article, Issa made “jokes about the protestors,” and employed one of the favorite lines of Electeds and others when confronted by real live grassroots opposition: “This is democracy at work.” Of course, that was said as protestors were removed.
Apparently, to Rep. Issa, ‘democracy’ involves hearing from representatives of the nation’s biggest banks: CitiMortgage, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo, as well as the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
Poverty
Addressing one of the key pieces of how we’re “suppose to” look at the realities of the economy, Barbara Ehrenreich, at Truth Out, writes “How We Cured ‘the Culture of Poverty,’ Not Poverty Itself.”
It’s been exactly 50 years since Americans, or at least the non-poor among them, ‘discovered’ poverty, thanks to Michael Harrington’s engaging book The Other America. …
Harrington’s book jolted a nation that then prided itself on its classlessness … .
… The Other America also offered a view of poverty that seemed designed to comfort the already comfortable. The poor were different from the rest of us, it argued, radically different, and not just in the sense that they were deprived, disadvantaged, poorly housed, or poorly fed. They felt different, too, thought differently, and pursued lifestyles characterized by shortsightedness and intemperance. …
… In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan … blamed inner-city poverty on what he saw as the shaky structure of the ‘Negro family,’ clearing the way for decades of victim-blaming. A few years after The Moynihan Report, Harvard urbanologist Edward C. Banfield, who was to go on to serve as an advisor to Ronald Reagan, felt free to claim that:
‘The lower-class individual lives from moment to moment… He is therefore radically improvident: whatever he cannot consume immediately he considers valueless… .”
Even today …, as people continue to slide into poverty from the middle classes, the theory maintains its grip. If you’re needy, you must be in need of correction, the assumption goes … .
Unemployment … is another obviously suspect condition, and last year 12 states considered requiring pee tests as a condition for receiving unemployment benefits. …Fifty years later, a new discovery of poverty is long overdue. This time, we’ll have to take account not only of stereotypical Skid Row residents and Appalachians, but of foreclosed-upon suburbanites, laid-off tech workers, and America’s ever-growing army of the ‘working poor.’
And if we look closely enough, we’ll have to conclude that poverty is not, after all, a cultural aberration or a character flaw. Poverty is a shortage of money.
Of course, there’s a simple reason why this particular theory of how unemployment occurs is so popular: It’s convenient. Politicians get to rail about the laziness and general unsuitability of those “other people” without actually having to do anything difficult like tax their supporters. Ordinary citizens can tell themselves to ignore the problem, because those people did it to themselves.
Correction: “Ordinary citizens can tell themselves it’s perfectly OK to ignore the problem”
Exactly. Convenient, easy, and dismissive.
Back in the 1800′s, in places like New York City, the unemployed were considered ” depraved “. Many of them were sent to workhouses to labor for room and board. The people today who are dismissing the poor and unemployed of sloth and committed to living off the government are no different from the forces that leveled the same charges back then. They represent a rich, indifferent class who live in an echo chamber of like minds. This is the result of giving these people, both now and then, unlimited power and money. They will now use this money and power to corrupt the police forces and the judiciary. Those without means will be forsaken unless the citizens of this country wake up and rid themselves of the present power structure. It’s too late for fiddling around the edges, it’s all or nothing.
“Too late for fiddling around the edges” — I couldn’t agree more. And remembering the history you recount is very important. It isn’t as if we don’t have the information in front of us, to understand what’s happening.
The economic model we are moving toward seems more and more like the coal miners, owned by the company store. people who are working are afraid to ask for what they are worth or criticize their working conditions.
My daughter who has been unemployed for a year has recently found a job. It is not in her field, it does not require the education she and I both sweated for and for which she is still paying student loans. She is happy to have it. I pays pretty well and has good benefits. She is not complaining. The women who has been training her has a multitude of responsibilities and has worked for the company for years. My daughter is earning what this woman is earning. She says she is okay with that because she is happy that she kept her job when the company was laying off.
Folks like Ian Welsh and Lambert Strether refer to this as “rentier” behavior, where just about everything we of the lower classes want must be paid for to some rich person somehow. Step back a little, and it sure looks like that is what’s going on. Disney is permitted to hold copyrights on cartoons that were written, drawn, and voiced by people who are now all dead, for instance. It’s as though our government thinks that if we are getting something for free, we must be getting away with something.
Cujo, I’ve been following the “rentier” ideas Welsh and Strether write about with great interest, and agree it “looks like that is what’s going on.” Scary.
Very glad to hear your daughter found employment, LL.
The “economic model” of “coal miners” is another important piece of history to remember. We’re moving backwards.
What a bunch of BS Joyce. The 2008 global recession was second only to the Great Depression. In 1936 the uinemployment rate was 16%, the housing bubble created more foreclosures than the 2008 global recession, the Republicans declared FDR’s New Deal stimulus package a failure, unemployment was at 16% and the number of people who stopped looking for work created a real unemployment rate of more than 25%.
The GOP called for a repeal of the New Deal and FDRCARE (The social security act of 1935). The extrem left Progressives hated FDR’s policies just as much but for a different reason, FDR’s New Deal and FDRCARE hadn’t gone far enough. The extrem Progressives hatred of FDR’s policies went so far as to nominate a third party presidental candidate who received 800,000 votes but FDR won in a landslide.
In his 1936 nomination speech FDR delivered a scathing, and hilarious indictment of his GOP and extreme Progressive opponents:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRZUaW0HwCM