Unreported

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Interview with Immy Humes, director of ”F**KED: The United States of Unemployment,” the new Salon series that explores the lives of the 99ers. Humes discusses the epidemic of long-term unemployment and why it’s essential to not forget the millions of jobless Americans.

Jamie mocks McDonald’s, Allison discusses Adbusters’ latest call for 50,000 people to Occupy Chicago in May for the G8, and Mayor Emanuel’s authoritarian ordinances.

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Happy Labor Day! Unemployment is still extremely high, and doesn’t count those who couldn’t find jobs, the under-employed, and minimum wage workers. The CIA once handed over a key Libyan rebel to Gaddafi, Drunken Uganda wishes a listener a very happy birthday, and a former GOP hack confesses about the right’s shadowy political tactics.

Special announcement: Australia! Come out to support the BDS cause:

Melbourne protest, 5:30pm Friday 9 September. Meet at the State Library of Victoria.
Sydney protest, 1pm Saturday 10 September. Meet outside Newtown Neighbourhood Centre.
Perth protest 1pm Saturday 17 September. Meet at Murray Street Mall.

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President Obama gives a speech focusing on the deficit over mass unemployment, London burns, defining the term “looting,” dismantling the “real men eat meat” myth, religious employers might soon be able to determine if they feel like paying for women’s birth control, and Gov. Perry fails to pray the baddies away.

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Newt Gringrich’s staff suddenly leaves in mass exodus. What could be brewing on the horizon? Gov. Scott Walker’s anti-union policies have inspired the emergence of “Walkerville,” more activists have been arrested in Florida for daring to feed the homeless, the viciously anti-immigrant environments in Alabama and Massachusetts, Wisconsin’s internet is in danger, the state’s GOP’s bizarre and desperate plans to run spoiler candidates, and outgoing CIA chief Leon Panetta says – surprise! – Iraqis really want the U.S. to stay.

Support US Uncut’s fundraising drive so they, along with The Yes Men, can go expose the evil deeds of tax-dodging corporations in the Cayman Islands! Check out Allison’s latest article at The Nation about US Uncut and The Yes Men getting the band back together.

Jamie will be in Pittsburgh at 222 Ornsby July 1st! Come out and say hello!

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Allison profusely apologizes for besmirching the good name of CNN’s Donald Lemon. He loves quinoa and is super good-looking, too! Also, the media obsesses over Weiner’s package during a time of the worst long-term unemployment since the Great Depression, and Gov. Rick Perry is out of his mind. Allison and Jamie adopted two cats! Here’s why you should do the same. A comment on the “I don’t see race” crowd, why politicians sleep with prostitutes, and an announcement of Citizen Radio’s “which homophobic politician will be caught in bed with a male prostitute” pool.

Back in August, I wrote about Orrin Hatch’s plans to demand mandatory drug tests for welfare and unemployment beneficiaries. At the time, it seemed like a crazy fringe suggestion from a well-known enemy of the poor. However, it seems like Hatch is no longer stranded on the lonely loony plane.

A state lawmaker wants random drug testing of adult Kentuckians who receive food stamps, Medicaid or other state assistance.

Those who fail the test would lose their benefits under House Bill 208, filed by Rep. Lonnie Napier, R-Lancaster.

Napier’s proposal has won the backing of powerful House Speaker Greg Stumbo, D-Prestonsburg, but critics say it would stigmatize welfare recipients and possibly harm their innocent children.

Yeah, the children. It seems pro-life Republicans have the strangest habit of forgetting those little critters once they’re post-womb.

St. Napier says he’s not a bad guy, but rather he’s just looking out for the interests of the unwashed masses.

“I’m not a hard-hearted guy,” said Napier. “I believe there is a need for public assistance for those who need it, but I understand some are using these funds to buy drugs.”

Napier said the goal “is to get people off drugs.”

A couple of points here. This proposed legislation means Kentuckians must be willing to assume a couple things: 1) Jobless Americans are inferior creatures that deserve to be put through humiliating obstacles for the crime of being unemployed, and 2) Drug addicts are also lesser beings that should be punished — instead of treated — for their vices.

I hate to break it to Napier, but a drug addict who has their state assistance cut off probably isn’t going to rationally reexamine their life, quit cold turkey, run out to secure a minimum wage job (a real breeze in this market,) and open a college fund for their kids. The process of detox and recovery is a long, arduous struggle. If officials are really, truly doing this because they have some desire to see addicts become self-sufficient, they would be better off working to decriminalize drugs in order to place addicts into clinics instead of prison cells.

Now, it’s entirely possible Napier and company aren’t doing this to help drug addicts, but rather to squeeze some more money from the poorest among us. Why else implement such a generalized form of collective punishment? Even if the welfare system is teeming with drug addicts, as Napier alleges, they’re still a small percentage of the overall pool, so why put everyone through the humiliating process of drug testing?

This kind of legislation appears to be another step in the overall process of stigmatizing the poor. Remember, debt prisons are already a reality in six states (no one from Goldman Sachs has yet gone to jail), a system approved by Social Security privatization hawks, Tea Party candidate Carl Paladino wanted to stick welfare recipients in prison dorms, employers check credit scores* during the hiring process (as if a high credit score indicates good work ethic. I’m sure Bernie Madoff had great credit), and some employers refuse to even consider the resumes of unemployed people. College-age students acquire enormous debt due to loans, and they face a dauntingly diminished job market upon graduation, while the poor sustain themselves on credit cards, racking up enormous interest that may permanently bury them in debt.

All of these factors work to maintain a permanent  underclass that faces unprecedented obstacles in a dire job market, meaning there will not be enough jobs for everyone. That’s simply a reflection of poor policy and a capitulation to corporations that have a habit of chasing cheap labor overseas rather than providing for American workers. This broken system isn’t an indictment of a welfare state that caters to drug addicts. Rather, it’s an indication that the system doesn’t provide for the majority of healthy, hardworking citizens. In fact, the system is maintained by idiot drones busily testing the urine of predominately non-drugged individuals.

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Update 12/20/11: Greg Fisher from creditscoring.com contacted me to point out that the New York Times article I linked to for my example of employers using credit scores during the hiring process reports that “Employers can generally use credit checks — but not credit scores — during the employment process as long as they obtain written permission from the potential employee” (emphasis mine). While the vague use of “generally” doesn’t warrant a full retraction of my statement (after all, the NYT clearly must have found employers who occasionally do use credit scores if they said it ‘generally’ doesn’t happen,) I wanted to clarify the original article’s intended report. I also believe the use of credit checks during the hiring process is equally nefarious.

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Time magazine editor-at-large, Belinda Luscombe’s, pitiful explanation of austerity, and CNN misses a golden opportunity to show citizens how austerity affects their lives with the NYC blizzard. Allison reads a list of unbelievable Republican quotes that showcase how the rich really feel about the poor and unemployed. In the process, Jamie coins an amazing new phrase.

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So I’ve heard and read a lot of upset people responding to Kate O’Beirne‘s somewhat less than enlightened comment that kids who need help buying school lunches are victims of child abuse.

“The federal school lunch program and now breakfast program and I guess in Washington DC, dinner program are pretty close to being sacred cows… broad bipartisan support. And if we’re going to ask more of ourselves, my question is what poor excuse for a parent can’t rustle up a bowl of cereal and a banana? I just don’t get why millions of school children qualify for school breakfasts unless we have a major wide spread problem with child neglect.

“You know, I mean if that’s how many parents are incapable of pulling together a bowl of cereal and a banana, then we have problems that are way bigger than… that problem can’t be solved with a school breakfast, because we have parents who are just criminally… ah… criminally negligent with respect to raising children.”

It’s remarks like this that make me want to close my laptop and throw it out the window. I mean, where do I start?

Okay: First, Kate, poor parents aren’t confused about how to slice a banana. Some of them are single parents, raising children on their own. C&L supplies such an example.

Obviously she never met Jaelithe, who relied on the school lunch program to survive because her mother was young, single and poor, struggling to raise her daughter and get an education to better herself. Are these the words of an abused child, or just one raised in a world where the only outstretched hand was the government’s? Exactly what part of Jaelithe’s mother’s “self” should have given more?

But going hungry — that is a different story. That’s waking up in the morning hungry. Feeling, throughout the day, hungry. Lying in bed not able to sleep just yet because you are hungry. Dreaming about feeling hungry.

And there is not any trip to the taco place down the street and not a trip to McDonald’s instead and not a trip to the farmer’s market or the grocery store, either, because there is no money for those things. There is not even the option of a trip to the backyard for some homegrown tomatoes or cucumbers or strawberries because there is no yard when you live in a run-down apartment or a shelter or a car.

There is only your hollow-eyed mother who is hungrier than you are dividing the last stale crackers to make them last. Assuming that you are lucky enough to have a mother. And crackers.

See, in Jaelithe’s case, it’s not child abuse because the mother isn’t stealing from her child. She’s giving as much as she can, which unfortunately isn’t much. But Cruella de Vil Kate may be right about one thing: there may be abuse at play here.

Minimum wage is abusive if a single mother can’t support her child with her earnings. Employers are abusive if they fail to provide adequate wages, safety standards, hours, or health insurance for their employees. These things are very real obstacles, and are very much abusive practices, but a person like Kate O’Beirne isn’t interested in taking on institutions that can fight back. Her target is the poor.

And she’s not alone. James Joyner recently declared that unemployed people remain jobless because of their poor management skills. Seriously. And that’s not the most offensive part of what he wrote. (Joyner was responding to an interesting chart that shows unemployed people are less likely to vote than college-educated citizens).

An alternative view of the charts is that the unemployed are mostly people who’ve done an incredibly poor job of managing their own lives. … In this day and age, it’s simply irresponsible not to finish high school — or at least get a GED.   Hell, you’re required by law to go to school through age 16.  How hard is it to hang around another year and get that diploma?

If you haven’t passed out from all of that compassion blasting you in the face, let us examine this claim together.

What interests me about Joyner’s comment is the implication that people don’t deserve to work unless they’ve completed high school. Surely, this is a relatively new decree handed down by Lord James – one that would have infuriated many of our ancestors, who probably didn’t have very much education at all, and yet they managed to build the country, and raise their families, and live their lives.

For as many heartbreaking Jaelithesque stories as there are out there, I’m aware there are  also a lot of young people who just aren’t very interested in school. And there are a lot of different reasons why they’re bored. Some have to do with the way classes are taught (teach the test, for example,) other have to do with lack of resources: one’s family is struggling to pay the bills, one’s school has crappy, outdated equipment, unchallenging curriculum, etc. If you live in a poor community and a couple of your friends lack supervision, get bored, and drop out to start working and earning money for their family, then you’re more likely to drop out, which may inspire another friend to drop out, and the domino effect spreads throughout the community.

However, I don’t see why the act of dropping out is any cause for immediate condemnation. So what if a young person drops out? I know that we’re supposed to tell every child they’re a beautiful snowflake that can Be All They Want To Be, but say that just doesn’t work and they drop out anyway. It happens. The important thing is that they are able to work, make a living, contribute to society, and go back to school if need be. The real snafu comes courtesy of all these extreme austerity measures and state budget cuts, which make it harder for dropouts to ever reenter the institution of education to receive additional training.

(Suffice to say, poor people aren’t the ones voting to cut these budgets. Unfortunately, they’re not the ones turning up to vote at all. That could be because they aren’t excited about any of their candidate choices, but that’s fodder for another post.)

It’s unsurprising that professional pundits are continuing their tradition of bashing the poor. After all, it’s Washington’s favorite past time, donchyaknow. Yet, it’s always nauseating to hear barely-known sycophants parrot the orders of the beltway elite in some clawing, desperate attempt to be taken seriously. I understand why billionaire and millionaire politicians vote to fuck the poor in order to protect their own interests, but when second-tier media pundits join in on the off chance one day they’ll be asked to sit in on Morning Joe, it’s really pathetic.

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.

Bob Herbert wrote a very good column today about what he calls the “campaign disconnect” between Democrats, Republicans, and average Americans. I highly recommend reading the whole thing, but essentially Herbert makes the argument that neither party has adequately addressed the economic desperation of citizens. Democrats have decided to humor the disastrous idea of austerity measures, while Republicans behave as though they’ve “lost their minds completely,” an assessment that I think is way too generous on Herbert’s part.

I prefer his latter description when he accuses Republicans of “peddling a fantasy that has already damaged the country profoundly.” That definition contains the acerbity needed to fully grasp how poisonous the GOP’s philosophy is these days.

Yesterday, I briefly recapped the blatant hypocrisy displayed by certain Republicans in regards to the stimulus. Bobby Jindal and Jeb Bush, two “stalwart Conservatives” both greedily gobbled up stimulus cash before returning to their roots: bashing any recovery plan the Democratic administration proposes.

But hypocrisy aside, the GOP, and the elite in general, have genuine disdain for the underclass. The truly sad part is that they’ve brainwashed poor Republicans into going along with their scheme to permanently quarantine the undesirables. That’s when you get elderly people showing up at healthcare reform town hall meetings, screaming that they want the government to keep its hands off their Medicare. Sigh.

Senator Orrin Hatch proposed an amendment that would demand mandatory drug tests for welfare and unemployment beneficiaries because, as we all know, the only people out of work these days are worthless drug addicts. Sharron Angle implied unemployment benefits make people lazy, and that there are lots of jobs out there, but workers just refuse to buckle down and find them, and Rand Paul told them to quit being cry babies and go flip fries at McDonald’s so they can feed their children.

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