unemployment

Young Americans are a generation betrayed. Official unemployment is more than 25% for those aged 16-19. That means the real figure is much worse, especially in minority communities and depressed parts of the country. But jobs are scarce for everyone. College students are graduating with record levels of student debt before entering the worst job market for graduates in recent memory.

We're handing them a nation of crumbling infrastructure, lost ambitions, diminished prospects - and a seemingly endless parade of baby-boomer pop culture references, too. They deserve better than this legacy of dust and ashes. Since we've made such a mess of things, why not hire them to build the nation - and the future - that they deserve?

We can do it. Better yet, we can help them do it. A WPA-like program for younger Americans would give them a brighter future by hiring them to rebuild our infrastructure, develop imaginative new business ideas, create alternative energy sources, and become tomorrow’s artists and writers. We can give them control over their own destiny, too.

But first, a look at the mess we've created for them. more »

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Aspiring journalists are often advised to become multilingual so they can cover more stories. That's why I'm prepared to offer the first summer program in Federal Reserve as a Second Language ... once anybody turns up who can really understand it. more »

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It's beginning to look like there's an economic shipwreck dead ahead. That plunging stock market is the wealthy passengers, trampling the children as they rush headlong toward the lifeboats. The nation's capital, the bridge of our ship of state, lies abandoned.

The officers have gone to their quarters, the wheel's left unattended, and nobody's trying to turn the ship around. If you're not sounding the alarm, you aren't paying attention. And it looks like a lot of people aren't paying attention.

Rough seas

Sure, this month's jobs report is slightly better than the last couple of months, but that just means the drowning passengers are a couple of inches closer to the surface. That's not much comfort to them, since they're still drowning, but it seems to cheer up the ship's officers. Now that Congress has concluded its debt-ceiling deal they've all gone home.

The President's economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee, is plaintively whispering the words "unemployment insurance" to their receding backs, but it wasn't important enough to be included in the deal. And the "bipartisan" mantra forced Goolsbee to mention two free-trade deals in the same breath. That's like throwing a brick to a drowning sailor, rather than a life preserver.

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The American people have just endured a months-long bipartisan battering with words, as politicians and talking heads from both parties insist that they "take their medicine" by enduring severe austerity cuts. Against all evidence, they were told that this would be good for the economy. This illogical argument only has credence because Washington's filled with followers of a free-market religion whose deity is the Market, whose Oracle is the stock exchange, and whose clergy includes bishops named Greenspan, Geithner, Rubin, and Rivlin.

But if Democrats are true believers, Republicans are this religion's fundamentalists. All they need to do is repeat the sacred phrase "Tax cuts produce jobs!" and the whole congregation forms into ranks, prepared to do battle.

Believers in the One True Market believe that their Deity can only be propitiated when they sacrifice the sick, the elderly, and the poor. This lowers government expenditure and reduces political pressure to make the rich and powerful pay their fair share. We're told that this sort of sacrifice reassures the wealthy. These minor deities will then invest and create new jobs, which is why they're given the ritual title of "Job Creator" or "Wealth Creator."

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When “Market Man” Consigns the Common Man to the Dustbin of History

July 28, 2011
Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:

PART I: “We’re All Entrepreneurs Now…”

Introduction more »

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Written with Leo Hindery Jr., Chair of the Smart Globalization Initiative at the New America Foundation

America is facing a catastrophic jobs crisis. Not since the Great Depression has official unemployment hovered above nine percent – where it is today – for more than 20 months. Millions of American have given up looking for a job altogether. more »

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The unemployment numbers released today are terrible, and they show that budget austerity is crippling the recovery. more »

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July 2, 2011

THE LOGIC OF MARKET UTOPIANISM: WHEN “BUSINESS” TURNS BAD FOR SOCIETY
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Giving companies money does not mean they'll hire. more »

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So far from God, so close to the Republican National Committee

When some Simpsons characters took refuge in the local church after a hurricane, the church marquee read "God welcomes his victims." With that invitation, Reverend Lovejoy (an underrated Simpsons character second only to Apu on my favorites list) was alluding to that thorniest of theological questions: If the Almighty loves us, why does He subject us to so many disasters?

Modern conservatives don't need to wrestle with that kind of moral dilemma. Today's Right hates its victims, and its leaders do everything in their power to make their suffering even worse. Arizona's Republican legislators, most of them self-professed Christians, aren't singing from God's hymnal. Instead they're channeling Lyle Lovett's memorably bitter and resentful song, "God Will," as they survey the people who have been trapped in the economic wreckage of their ideology:

"God may love you but I don't/God will but I won't/and that's the difference between God and me."

Kicking 'em while they’re down

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