Unreported

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Jamie shares tales from his Jiu-Jitsu tornament victory, Allison and Jamie discuss notable election results, and list warning signs for the Social Security battle.

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Digby joins the show to discuss Democrats’ performance, Christian extremism, Wikileaks, the Catfood Commission, domestic terrorism, and why the “government is like your family” metaphor is so very stupid.

Check out Digby’s blog: http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/ and follow her on Twitter (@digby56)

Allison and Jamie discuss tax cuts for the rich, the unemployment epidemic, and banish a listener.

Also, there’s a new SUPER INTENSE Listener Mail song.

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At this point, I feel like saying “unemployment is bad” is like saying, “Jersey Shore is awful.” I know Jersey Shore is bad, you know it’s bad, and yet, when you find yourself watching the third consecutive episode of Jersey Shore*, you sort of forget how shit it is because you’ve been immersed in spray tans and Ed Hardy for so long.

Unemployment has been over 9 percent for 19 months, the longest stretch on record. Luckily, good ol’ Congress rushed to the rescue to doll out tax cuts for the rich. Also, they may not let poor people starve by extending unemployment benefits. Maybe. It depends on Mitch McConnell’s mood.

But as bad as the jobless rate is (and remember, it’s Jersey Shore-level bad,) most people still have no concept of the magnitude of destruction unemployment causes in people’s lives, and the long-term effects on their bank accounts.

SocImages links to the following graph that shows these negative effects even after individuals found employment again. The top purple line is employees who maintained their jobs through a recession. The bottom line is workers who lost their jobs in a mass layoff.

As you can see, the effects of layoffs linger for over a decade almost two decades.

…the net loss to a displaced worker with six years of job tenure is approximately $164,000, which exceeds 20 percent of the average lifetime earnings of these workers.

The long-term consequence, though less spectacular than the immediate loss of a huge number of jobs, is actually more than the losses associated with the period of unemployment itself.

There are a couple other pretty charts posted at SI that all essentially show the same trends. It’s all very depressing, but if anything, the study shows the dire need for extending unemployment benefits, and the need for stimulating job growth.

Whenever I look at these kinds of patterns, my head wants to explode when I see rich politicians and pundits demanding “shared sacrifice” from poor people, who by the way, are the only people who actually have been sacrificing anything for the past few decades. Imagine the kind of personal destruction families will have to endure as they attempt to cope with decades of struggle from the effects of this recession when politicians start cutting their aid, Social Security, and other benefits.

*Don’t write me letters. I only watched it because I was home visiting family.

Hotel workers in Chicago, Hawaii, and San Francisco are staging strikes and walk-outs to protest what they call “cheap recession contracts.” Basically, union leaders say Hilton is exploiting workers even though the company received huge taxpayer-provided bailouts.

Hilton is owned by Blackstone Group LP.

Blackstone in February cut a deal to reduce its $20 billion debt by about $4 billion. The debt was partially owned by the Federal Reserve, which had taken over the debt from lender Bear Stearns, The Wall Street Journal reported at the time.

And of course, the Blackstone Group was co-founded by Social Security privatization hawk, Pete Peterson.

Regular readers of this blog know that I have written extensively about Peterson’s privatization fetish. But this hotel strike story nicely illustrates Peterson’s grand scheme: deprive people of the most basic standards of human dignity i.e. a living wage their entire adult lives, and then rob their twilight years of the same basic standards of human dignity by raiding the Social Security funds.

Quite simply, it’s the Great Heist from workplace to grave.

A new report from RealtyTrac, Inc. predicts that lenders may foreclose on one million homes this year (via). In the spirit of accuracy, I should write “at least one million Americans,” since more than one person undoubtedly lives in a majority of those doomed residencies.

Nearly 528,000 homes were foreclosed in the first six months of 2010. As lenders work through a huge backlog of borrowers behind on their mortgages, even more home repossessions could occur before the end of the year.

According to RealtyTrac, Inc., a foreclosure listing service, the number of households facing foreclosure in the first half of the year climbed 8 percent when compared to the same time frame last year. In June, 1 in every 411 households received a foreclosure filing.

The fastest growing group of foreclosures involved homeowners with good credit who took out conventional fixed-rate loans. Many of these borrowers have fallen behind in their mortgages due to unemployment or reduced income.

It takes about 15 months for a home loan to go from being 30 days late to the property being seized and sold. Between January and June of this year, about 1.7 million homeowners received a foreclosure-related warning. At the time of this writing, more than 7.3 million home loans are in some stage of delinquency. The states experiencing the highest foreclosure rates are California, Florida, Michigan, Illinois, Arizona and Nevada.

As Susie Madrak and Atrios have been saying, HAMP was a total failure that actually ended up prolonging the agony of homeowners. Additionally, Congress has thus far failed to extend unemployment benefits, which will result in more waves of foreclosures.

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Team Internet has been doing a great job all day of ripping apart Bobo’s embarrassing op-ed, which he apparently wrote to demonstrate how not much has changed since he flunked high school math (seriously.)

Dean Baker‘s take down is particularly good, and he raises an interesting point that I haven’t heard many people discuss.

The talking heads on the teevee keep bitching and moaning about how consumers just aren’t spending money for some darn reason, while crazy austerity cheerleaders simultaneously threaten to rip Social Security and Medicare from their arms.

Asking people to believe in a government that expresses precisely zero interest in their long-term well being requires they be either extremely trusting, or extremely stupid. Saying, “Please, drop a couple grand into the economy even though we may not be paying for you to buy bread when your eighty,” takes giant balls – or a complete misunderstanding of how a civilized society is supposed to function.

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The official logo from http://www.americaspeaks.org/

Pete Peterson and his merry band of thieves recently rolled out the hilariously titled “America Speaks” propaganda tour, which was designed to brainwash citizens into voting against their own interests by supporting Social Security privatization.

Peterson wants to do this because he owns Blackstone Group, which has a subsidiary called Blackrock Financial, the firm that would — surprise! — be in charge of handling your privatized Social Security dollars, and that rerouting process could earn Peterson hundreds of billions of dollars.

The tour should be called “Peterson and Company Speak,” because it is their financial interests — not the interests of the American people — that are represented in this tour. One of Peterson’s lackeys, David Walker, is also involved in the “national discussion.” Walker is the man who openly pined for the return of debtors’ prisons, which already exist in six states, but apparently aren’t harsh enough punishment for being poor in David’s world.

If this ridiculously transparent tour actually represented Americans’ concerns, the focus would be on job creation. Numerous polls indicate that Americans’ primary concern is unemployment – not the deficit.

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