Why Are the Unemployed Not Speaking Out?

I have not written on this for a while, which means that I may be as guilty as anyone of complacency on this issue, despite the fact that I am one of those unemployed Americans struggling to find a job.

This article looks at some of the reasons that the unemployed in the US are not making a more noticeable protest, in spite of their massive numbers. Among the reasons, the changing perception of the reasons for unemployment, and the general loss of sympathy for organized labor in the United States. Unemployment is increasingly viewed as the result of the workers' failure to acquire the skills and education needed to find work, rather than the failure of business and the government to create the favorable conditions and demand needed for hiring workers. Furthermore, labor unions are now seen as ineffective, inefficient, and corrupt.

The article puts much of the blame for the passivity of the American people toward the unemployment crisis on President Obama, for not taking stronger and more immediate action to address this problem. And I do agree that the American Jobs Act is a positive but halfhearted measure that, if passed, would provide some relief but not nearly what is needed to truly address and resolve the crisis.

But I think much more blame needs to be focused on the failure of the media to sufficiently critique the deceptive rhetoric coming from the right wing on this issue. The Republican Party and the Tea Party movement, controlled by their Wall Street handlers, continue to insist, without a shred of rational evidence, that the unemployment rate can only be brought down through lower taxes on the already undertaxed wealthy and corporations, and reductions in public spending and regulations, when in fact these measures have been shown over and over to have exactly the opposite effect.

The insistence of the main stream media on presenting this bogus right-wing argument as a valid point of view that deserves full consideration, has left the unemployed, who are the victims of this very strategy, divided and unsure about what and who they should be protesting.

The Occupy movement has helped enormously to bring more attention to the general problems of wealth inequality and corporate and Wall Street corruption. But the movement has been short on specific demands and policy suggestions. In the early days of Occupy Wall Street, it looked like it might develop a close link with organized labor. But, mysteriously, little evidence has been seen lately of this partnership.

Given the harsh messages coming from the right, the halfhearted measures proposed by the Democrats, the vague messages from the Occupy movement, the absence of an effective and popular organized labor movement, and the all-consuming anxiety that is part of the lives of the long-term jobless, it seems likely that many if not most of the unemployed in America feel that they have been pretty much forgotten.

That's how I feel.

That needs to change.

Barack Obama's Human Rights Campaign Dinner Speech

There have been many instances since his election in which I have been disappointed in Barack Obama. This is not one of them:

We don't believe in the kind of smallness that says it's okay for a stage full of political leaders -- one of whom could end up being the president of the United States -- being silent when an American soldier is booed. We don't believe in that. We don't believe in standing silent when that happens. We don't believe in them being silent since. You want to be commander in chief? You can start by standing up for the men and women who wear the uniform of the United States, even when it's not politically convenient. We don't believe in a small America. We believe in a big America -- a tolerant America, a just America, an equal America -- that values the service of every patriot.

This is the Barack Obama who I supported wholeheartedly back in 2008, and who I wish we could see more of in 2011 and beyond.

Didn't we settle this already?

I was at the grocery store this afternoon and saw this staring at me in the checkout line...

I consider myself reasonably well-educated and informed, but I realize that there are people out there who, sad to say, will see this and actually believe that this is a real news story. And while I am as much an advocate of the free press as anyone, and more so than many people, I have to wonder if there shouldn't be some means of prosecuting the publishers and writers who print crap like this that is based on deliberate and blatant lies, that takes advantage of the ignorance of a population that has been cynically misled and used by corporate elites like the Koch brothers, to push their right-wing agenda under the guise of the allegedly "populist" tea party movement.

I know that the first impulse for many people is to ridicule anyone who is ignorant enough to purchase and believe this kind of story. To me, the people who are truly worthy of our ridicule and our contempt is those who publish these magazines, who encourage and capitalize on the ignorance of these readers, rather than using their platform as publishers and writers to educate and enlighten the public. There are plenty of real scandals going on in government and business that are much more shocking and important than the phony allegations of a handful of right-wing conspiracy theorists.

Once Again, Obama Caves In To the Right

President Obama ordered the EPA today to withdraw a proposal that would have tightened government smog standards. I can't say this comes as any surprise, as the Republicans in Congress had opposed the regulation, saying that it would have cost billions of dollars for businesses to comply. It was all but inevitable that Obama would bow down again to the right in the spirit of "compromise," as he has so many times before.

As a resident of one of the most polluted cities in the United States, I say, what about the cost to the people who are forced to breathe the polluted air, what about the medical costs that are incurred as a result, and the costs in lost productivity resulting from missed days at work? My wife suffers from asthma, and breathing the filthy summer air here in Charlotte causes her untold additional misery. Does her health and comfort rate so far below the monetary costs that would be paid by major corporations to clean up their acts?

Possibly the biggest irony is that if the smog regulations had been allowed to go forward, the money spent by the polluting corporations to comply with the rules would have been money spent on jobs... jobs producing the necessary equipment, doing the equipment upgrades and testing to make sure that the standards were being followed, researching and developing new clean air technologies. Isn't this what we really need right now?

Light at the End of the Tunnel?

After one year and twenty days of unemployment, and hundreds of job applications that disappear into what seems like a giant black hole, yesterday I got my first actual job interview scheduled. Whether or not I get this job, it is encouraging to at least be noticed by a potential employer, and to think that maybe in the long run persistence will pay off.

There is certainly reason enough out there for long-term unemployed Americans such as me not to be encouraged. The White House budget office is now projecting the unemployment rate to remain at or above 9 percent through the next year. Of course, the official unemployment rate is just the tip of the iceberg, as it does not account for an ever-increasing number of workers who become so discouraged that they simply stop looking for work and drop out of the labor force. Next week President Obama will introduce his program for jobs creation. He will have the opportunity to propose bold steps to relieve this crisis, to get Americans back to work, earning paychecks and stimulating the economy. Or he could go his usual route, play it safe and propose modest steps in hopes of reaching a compromise with the Republicans. I hope he will go with the first option, but I'm not holding my breath.

Be careful about making rash statements about things that you assume could never really happen, because they can

I can still remember when I was a child, sometime in the 1970s, my mother, a lifelong liberal and sometime socialist, saying with confidence that if Ronald Reagan was ever elected president, we would move out of the country.

He was, of course, and we didn't. The point is not that she was not prepared to back up her words, but that at the time that she spoke them, the election of Reagan, a former actor and right-wing extremist, seemed, to her at least, to be at most a remote possibility.

It is unsettling to say the least that in retrospect, and compared to the current gang of Republican presidential hopefuls, Reagan seems almost a benign centrist. The spectacle of Democrats invoking President Reagan earlier this summer during the debt ceiling debate shows just how much more extreme the GOP "mainstream" has become.

So it's even more unsettling that after months of apparent apathy, the Republican masses, those who will be voting next year in the primaries, are now growing comfortable with, and even enthusiastic about, their slate of candidates. This contrasts with the latest opinion poll results for President Obama, in which his ratings are at an all-time low, with even his leadership ratings, formerly a strong area for the President, dropping below fifty percent.

These numbers can and will change over time, of course, and a lot can happen in the next year running up to the election. But in my opinion, the left wing of the Democratic Party should at least seriously think about the possibility of fielding a challenger to Barack Obama in the primaries. Obama has failed to adequately set himself apart from the Republicans in Congress, compromising and capitulating at almost every step. It is not surprising that his leadership numbers have dropped. If he emerges from next year's primary season appearing crippled, and the Republicans have nominated a strong candidate, such as extremest right-winger Rick Perry... the Democrats are going to wish that they had considered a candidate who could establish an equally strong, forceful contrast.