By Leo Gerard — United Steelworkers International President
Glenn Beck made it official on Fox News last week: He’s seeking the office of 21st Century Marie Antoinette.
The queen of France, beheaded during the revolution, attained infamy for insensitivity toward hungry peasants. Glenn Beck, the Fox talk show host, achieved celebrity for his callousness toward unemployed Americans.
Beck leads a pack of royalist Republicans who have spent the summer mocking, vilifying and denigrating the nation’s 14.5 million unemployed workers. It is the moneyed class smacking down the working class in an attempt to disempower and disenfranchise them. Dispirited workers are less likely to vote – which could give Beck and his gang of royalist Republicans control of Congress.
The unemployed, like France’s 18th Century peasants, are fighting back, however. The Union of the Unemployed and Working America are organizing the jobless to vote this fall and to demand help from lawmakers. They’re not out to behead Beck and the royalist Republicans, just dethrone them.
Two and a half years after wanton recklessness by Wall Street banksters crashed the economy, the official unemployment rate remains stuck at 9.5 percent. It rises to 17 percent when statisticians add part-time workers seeking full-time jobs and the jobless who’ve abandoned the search out of hopelessness. With the help of a taxpayer bailout, Wall Street has recovered, and those banksters are taking home multi-million dollar bonuses again. But on Main Street, there still are five unemployed workers for every job vacancy, so no matter how hard the jobless try, there are no openings for 80 percent of them.
Routinely, crowds line up before dawn when job openings are announced. In June, in Longmont, Colo., hundreds queued up to vie for 100 low-paid clerk and stock jobs at a new SmartCo Foods. Hundreds of Louisville residents gathered in the dark on Aug. 9 at the Kentucky Exposition Center to apply for 450 state fair jobs paying $7.25 an hour and lasting a total of 20 days.
In addition to jobs, the people on Main Street are losing their homes and life savings at increasing rates. Bankruptcy filings nationwide reached the highest level in five years between April and June. Banks repossessed 92,858 homes in July, up 6 percent from July 2009. For too many, the situation is so desperate that they’re discussing plans for suicide on an on-line forum for the jobless.
Glenn Beck and the royalist Republicans don’t care about all that. Here’s Beck ranting about those who lose unemployment benefits at 99 weeks:
“Have you heard of the 99ers? These people, some of which I, frankly, I bet you would be ashamed to call them Americans, they think 99 weeks of unemployment benefists are not enough. . .Two years is plenty of time to have lived off your neighbors’ wallets.”
Video of Beck slamming the "99ers" begins at 2 minutes and 33 seconds into this clip.
Beck went on to argue that the jobless who protested last week on Wall Street were not “regular people,” like him and his friends:
“Are they just regular people? . . They are socialists and anti-capitalists.”
Then, incongruously, Beck condemned a protestor seeking jobs for all unemployed workers with a sign asserting, “A job is a right.”
“No, a job is not a right,” insisted Beck, making it clear that in his world, the unemployed are “un-American” for not landing jobs, but, simultaneously, it’s perfectly moral and fair that the American economy has failed to produce enough jobs for them to fill.
Beck is the TV mouthpiece for the royalist Republicans who champion this view: a job is not a right, and it’s not right to aid the jobless. Republicans, virtually as a block, oppose extending unemployment benefits for the jobless while they support extending tax breaks for the moneyed class – themselves. They opposed legislation to save the jobs of 319,000 public servants – the people who educate our children and protect our lives — teachers, police officers, firefighters. Democrats in Congress paid to preserve those jobs by eliminating $11 billion in tax loopholes for corporations that ship jobs overseas — a provision that ultimately could create jobs in the United States.
Like Beck, they’ve announced their loathing for the unemployed. Royalists Jon Kyl, Andre Bauer, Orrin Hatch, and others have derided the unemployed as lazy, spoiled, stupid drug users.
The jobless, however, are mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore. They’re organizing. The Union of the Unemployed and Working America, the community affiliate of the AFL-CIO, are mobilizing the jobless.
The Union of the Unemployed is launching a “Bite Back” campaign, targeting those in Congress who tried repeatedly to cut off unemployment insurance and other aid to the jobless. “They will never see us coming,” the first Bite Back ad says, “After all, the politicians whose policies destroyed our lives think we’re ‘lazy’ ‘drug users’ and ‘hobos.’ They are counting on us to be docile as lambs and so depressed we’ll stay in bed on election day.”
Working America, whose members are not in unions but align themselves with the political philosophy of the AFL-CIO, plans to organize hundreds of thousands of the jobless across the nation to vote in workers’ interests. Field organizers will ask the jobless to fill out “Help Wanted” petitions to send to their congressmen and senators asking exactly what they’ve done to create jobs and assist the unemployed.
The jobless removing the royalists from their jobs – nothing could be sweeter, unless this revolution also included dispatching Glenn Beck to his unemployment office.
Sam Seder has a great new video now featured on StrengthenSocialSecurity.org on what working people think about the attempts to weaken Social Security while giving tax breaks to the rich.
Rather than extending tax breaks for those who already have plenty of money and cutting Social Security, a fair tax approach could actually strengthen and expand Social Security. That’s exactly what EPI economist Monique Morrissey proposed earlier this year, and highlighted in a brief New York TimesOp-Ed piece on Sunday:
Do you want to know how much LeBron James pays in Social Security taxes each year? Bill Gates? Oprah? Your dermatologist? $6,622. That’s the maximum anyone pays in Social Security taxes, because earnings above $106,800 are not taxed.
By slowly raising the cap — say, 2 percent each year, though increasing it faster would raise more revenue — so that it eventually covered 90 percent of all income, we could eliminate roughly a third of Social Security’s projected shortfall. Next year, people like Mr. James would pay slightly more than they pay now while eventually receiving slightly higher benefits.
That would help restore a balance to our tax base that has disappeared over the past few decades, as incomes among top earners have grown so much more than incomes among those earning below the cap. Indeed, 16 percent of earnings in this country are completely untaxed by Social Security — a huge windfall for the rich and a terrible shortfall for the benefits program.
Better yet, we could close about 70 percent of the shortfall if we immediately eliminated the cap on the employer side. Both employers and employees pay a 6.2 percent Social Security tax on earnings only up to $106,800. Instead, employers should pay their share of the tax on their employees’ full salaries.
I’m sure someone, somewhere would complain that this just makes too much sense.
The author is the winner of the 2010 CREDO Mobile/Netroots Nation award for Blog Activist of the Year.
We’ve all heard the mantra of how the long term unemployed are lazy bums who should “go get a job at McDonalds.”
The wealthy folk who blame the unemployed for their plight also seem to believe that there are unlimited job openings available at the McDonald’s fast food restaurant chain. A number of job seekers in northern Nevada and California recently discovered that there the job openings at the chain are actually finite:
Thousands of job seekers turned out at McDonald’s stores in Nevada and California today as part of a “Hiring Day” event.
McDonald’s plans to hire about 1,000 people across 600 restaurants in the Pacific-Sierra region, which includes Northern Nevada and California.
About 300 applied at Courtney Ristuben’s five McDonald’s locations in Citrus Heights, Fair Oaks and Folsom. There, she saw “people from (age) 16 to folks with families; people with four-year degrees to others with résumés two pages long.”
The scene was repeated at McDonald’s restaurants from Sacramento to Visalia, Reno to the San Francisco Bay Area, with managers describing lines that formed around restaurants and spilled into parking lots, said Julie Wenger, a McDonald’s regional marketing manager.
Apparently even the McDonald’s chain doesn’t have over 15 million job openings.
As I look at what passes for responsible economic policy these days, there’s an analogy that keeps passing through my mind. I know it’s over the top, but here it is anyway: the policy elite — central bankers, finance ministers, politicians who pose as defenders of fiscal virtue — are acting like the priests of some ancient cult, demanding that we engage in human sacrifices to appease the anger of invisible gods.
The entire piece is well worth reading as he picks apart the arguments put forward by the deficit-fraud austerity hounds, and then…
But, in America, we do have a choice. The markets aren’t demanding that we give up on job creation. On the contrary, they seem worried about the lack of action — about the fact that, as Bill Gross of the giant bond fund Pimco put it earlier this week, we’re “approaching a cul-de-sac of stimulus,” which he warns “will slow to a snail’s pace, incapable of providing sufficient job growth going forward.”
It seems almost superfluous, given all that, to mention the final insult: many of the most vocal austerians are, of course, hypocrites. Notice, in particular, how suddenly Republicans lost interest in the budget deficit when they were challenged about the cost of retaining tax cuts for the wealthy. But that won’t stop them from continuing to pose as deficit hawks whenever anyone proposes doing something to help the unemployed.
So here’s the question I find myself asking: What will it take to break the hold of this cruel cult on the minds of the policy elite? When, if ever, will we get back to the job of rebuilding the economy?
Yesterday’s report of rising initial unemployment claims marked the fourth such increase in the last five weeks, and as Laura posted here, the 500,000 initial claims last week were the most since November 2009.
In the context of utterly stagnant private sector job growth, these reports scream for major stimulative action, including major new jobs programs from the administration and Congress as well as a massive Federal Reserve response to boost the economy.
What these reports also highlight is the need to strengthen the unemployment insurance programs already in place and extend them to the many newly unemployed workers, even as measures are pursued to address the crisis facing the already long-term unemployed.
The most recent extension of the federal unemployment benefit programs, which finally passed after a two-month battle to overcome Republican-led obstruction in the Senate, provides eligibility to those programs through the end of November for those who exhaust the 26-weeks of regular state benefits before that date.
In most cases this means that those workers who become unemployed after June 1, 2010 currently will not be eligible for the extended federal programs. That’s already a lot of newly unemployed workers. Since the first week of June, more than 4,600,000 initial claims have been reported.
Some of these recent initial claims are, no doubt, from unemployed workers who are filing anew following the end of temporary jobs, and are returning to the unemployment benefit systems in their states. It is not known what percentage of initial claims are re-entrants to the programs. But it is estimated that a much higher proportion are actually newly unemployed workers.
Congress will need to address extending long-term jobless benefits yet again when it returns from the August recess.
The author is the winner of the 2010 CREDO Mobile/Netroots Nation award for Blog Activist of the Year
In case you were wondering (Congress, pundits, and other elites, I’m looking at you), this is not good.
Fully 500,000 Americans filed new claims for government unemployment insurance last week, the highest number in nine months and a sign of persistent trouble in the job market.
Everyone is familiar with the monthly national unemployment rate, which comes out on the first Friday of each month and now stands at 9.5 percent, according to the July numbers, the most recent available. That number gives us a monthly, detailed, deep look into unemployment in the U.S.
But the new weekly jobless claims number, which is released each Thursday by the Labor Department, gives us a faster, week-by-week snapshot of unemployment. And the picture is getting increasingly ugly.
Today’s number marked the third straight week of increase in new weekly jobless claims. That suggests that employers not only are not hiring, it suggests that they’re starting to lay off workers again, and that will start a whole cascade of problems for the U.S. economy and the politicians in Washington who face reelection this November.
It’s especially not good for California, Indiana, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, or Georgia.
And this is not enough of a silver lining to make this cloud do anything but pour on us.
The number of weekly unemployment claims is still far below the levels seen in early 2009, when initial claims were rolling in at a pace above 600,000 per week.
President Obama used today’s bad jobs data to urge Congress to restart the stalled small business jobs bill that he said would help small businesses with tax cuts and expense write-offs, and would help small banks lend to small businesses.
This shows the progression of unemployment over the last decade – a frightening video by LaToya Egwuekwe. Remember, this does not include the underemployed or those who have given up.
Working America has been focusing on unemployment a lot for more than a year now, from the Unemployment Lifeline to tele-town halls to field organizing to our steady stream of actions in favor of job creation and unemployment aid extensions. And now that we’re coming up on elections, it’s time to think about unemployment as an electoral issue.
Which we’re doing with a campaign, covered today by the Huffington Post, to get our unemployed members to vote, knowing where the candidates stand on this issue specifically.
The organization is starting with 100,000 of its own members who are currently out of work. But the list of contacts could wind up being “several hundred thousand” of the nearly 15 million unemployed, said Karen Nussbaum, director of Working America. In Ohio alone, Nussbaum said, Working America has a list of 38,000 unemployed workers who are registered to vote — a major bloc that could tip the scale of the governor’s race as well as elections to the House or the Senate.
-snip-
The effort, which is the first of its kind, is an ambitious effort to re-balance the political landscape away from pro-corporate, pro-business interests. But will the unemployed vote for the candidates Working America supports? Democrats, after all, have presided over the past year-and-a-half of an epic jobs crisis and it’s not unreasonable to expect the jobless won’t be drawn to their candidacies.
“Our experience as we go door to door is that people are looking for an explanation about why this is happening to them,” said Nussbaum when asked about a potential Democratic backlash. “The knee-jerk response to get mad at people that are in power is in the absence of having a better explanation. You can talk about who’s standing in the way of investing in jobs. The fact that corporations have way too much influence in government, that makes sense to people, and that when you compare voting records, when you look at for example a Republican bloc that has voted against every single jobs bill, including this unemployment extension, that’s information people take in and act on.”
The global economic crisis has affected routine health care more in the US than in countries that have universal systems;
The study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, finds that “Americans, who face higher out-of-pocket health care costs, have reduced their routine medical care” much more than people in Britain, Canada, France and Germany.
and
Among Americans responding to the survey, they said, 26.5 percent reported reducing their use of routine medical care since the start of the global economic crisis in 2007.
This proportion dwarfs the comparable numbers for other countries: 5.3 percent in Canada, 7.6 percent in Britain, 10.3 percent in Germany and 12 percent in France.
“Even in countries with universal coverage, individuals pay some medical care costs out of pocket,” the researchers noted.
Cutbacks were generally correlated with the size of out-of-pocket costs, the researchers found. The proportion of people reporting reductions in routine care was smaller in Britain and Canada, where the co-payments are lower, than in France and Germany, where somewhat larger co-payments are required.
This isn’t a surprise. People who have difficult choices to make about keeping a roof over the family’s head and food on the table will ignore their own health issues for as long as possible. Sadly, this will mean ignoring problems until they reach a critical stage, which will mean that many will die for want of routine care.
Economic desperation is why massive free medical clinics are a draw, like this one at the beginning of the month. From HuffPo:
A massive free health clinic for uninsured people in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday morning attracted nearly two thousand people, from infants to the elderly, all taking advantage of free doctor attention, blood tests and cancer screenings they otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford.
The story profiles two men in their fifties who were laid off from their good jobs where they had insurance. They just can’t afford COBRA.
One of the men is quoted:
“Did I think I was gonna be coming to a free health clinic after working as a teacher for 24 years? No,” he told HuffPost. “My resumé speaks for itself.
