No Recovery in Sight
By BOB HERBERT
NY Times Op-Ed: June 26, 2009
How do you put together a consumer economy that works when the consumers are
out of work?
One of the great stories you'll be hearing over the next couple of years
will be about the large number of Americans who were forced out of work in
this recession and remained unable to find gainful employment after the
recession ended. We're basically in denial about this.
There are now more than five unemployed workers for every job opening in the
United States. The ranks of the poor are growing, welfare rolls are rising
and young American men on a broad front are falling into an abyss of
joblessness.
Some months ago, the Obama administration and various mainstream economists
forecast a peak unemployment rate of roughly 8 percent this year. It has
already reached 9.4 percent, and most analysts now expect it to hit 10
percent or higher. Economists are currently spreading the word that the
recession may end sometime this year, but the unemployment rate will
continue to climb. That's not a recovery. That's mumbo jumbo.
Why this rampant joblessness is not viewed as a crisis and approached with
the sense of urgency and commitment that a crisis warrants, is beyond me.
The Obama administration has committed a great deal of money to keep the
economy from collapsing entirely, but that is not enough to cope with the
scope of the jobless crisis.
There were roughly seven million people officially counted as unemployed in
November 2007, a month before the recession began. Now there are about 14
million. If you add to these unemployed individuals those who are working
part time but would like to work full time, and those who want jobs but have
become discouraged and stopped looking, you get an underutilization rate
that is truly alarming.
"By May 2009," according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at
Northeastern University in Boston, "the total number of underutilized
workers had increased dramatically from 15.63 million to 29.37 million - a
rise of 13.7 million, or 88 percent. Nearly 30 million working-age
individuals were underutilized in May 2009, the largest number in our
nation's history. The overall labor underutilization rate in May 2009 had
risen to 18.2 percent, its highest value in 26 years."
If it were true that the recession is approaching its end and that these
startlingly high numbers were about to begin a steady and substantial
decline, there would be much less reason for alarm. But while there is
evidence the recession is easing, hardly anyone believes a big-time
employment turnaround is in the offing.
Three-quarters of the workers let go over the past year were permanently
displaced, as opposed to temporarily laid off. They won't be going back to
their jobs when economic conditions improve. And many of those who were
permanently displaced were in fields like construction and manufacturing in
which the odds of finding work, even after a recovery takes hold, are not
good.
Another startling aspect of this economic downturn is the toll it has taken
on men, especially young men. Men accounted for nearly 80 percent of the
loss in employment in this recession. As the labor market center reported,
"The unemployment rate for males in April 2009 was 10 percent, versus only
7.2 percent for women, the largest absolute and relative gender gap in
unemployment rates in the post-World War II period."
Workers under 30 have sustained nearly half the net job losses since
November 2007.
This is not a recipe for a strong economic recovery once the recession
officially ends, or for a healthy society. Young males, especially, are
being clobbered at an age when, typically, they would be thinking about
getting married, setting up new households and starting families. Moreover,
work habits and experience developed in one's 20s often establish the
foundation for decades of employment and earnings.
We've seen what happens when you rely on debt and inflated assets to keep
the economy afloat. The economy can't be re-established on a sound basis
without aggressive efforts to put people back to work in jobs with decent
wages.
We also need to consider the suffering that is being endured by these high
levels of joblessness, including the profound negative effect on the
families of the unemployed. Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic
Policy Institute, warned about the consequences for children. "What does it
mean," he asked, "when kids are under stress because there is no money in
the household, or people have to move more, or are combining households, or
lose their health insurance? I believe this is going to leave a permanent
scar on a generation of kids."
The first step in dealing with a crisis is to recognize that it exists. This
is not a problem that will evaporate when the gross domestic product finally
begins to creep into positive territory.
***
----- Original Message -----
From: Dave Zirin
Sent: Thursday, June 25, 2009 8:40 PM
Subject: [Edge of Sports] Read the Rage of Steven Wells
E o S Nation: In 6 years of writing this column, I've never sent out someone
else's work. But today I do because the great Steven Wells, the sports
columnist extraordinaire for the Guardian, has died at age 49 after a
valiant battle with cancer. "Swells" was also a legendary music writer,
championing then unknown punk bands like Black Flag, the Mekons and the
Redskins. He was part Hunter S Thompson, part Lester Bangs, and part Bob
Lipsyte. And he was my friend. I didn't agree with everything he wrote, but
I was always provoked. Rage in peace, Steven.
Dave Zirin
PS - I'll have my own piece out on Edge of Sports tomorrow. But today is for
Steven. Please read the below. He was that good.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2008/jul/22/olympicgames20081
Let's shun the multinational monsters' festival of Olympic McSports
By Steven Wells
The People's Republic of China are torturing, culture-smothering and
democracy-crushing bastards. But then so was Germany in 1936. And Britain in
1908 and 1948. And the Soviet Union in 1980. And the USA in 1984 and 1996.
Then there was the massacre of hundreds of Mexican demonstrators to pave the
way for the games of 1968. In fact the history of the modern Olympic
movement is one long, sad litany of imperialism, racism, exploitation and
oppression. But that's not why I think we should boycott the Olympics.
And I do think we should boycott them. Not just the Beijing games. All of
them. Forever. Why? Because of the total disconnect between what the
Olympics are supposed to be about (grace, beauty, athleticism,
sportsmanship, solidarity, brotherhood and the human spirit) and the sordid
reality - as superbly illustrated by what the preparations for the 2012
London games are doing to the Manor Garden allotments.
Ask yourself this question: are the drug-riddled, debased and corrupt
Olympics worth the demolition of a single 80-year-old community institution
that genuinely and continually promotes health, mental wellbeing, exercise,
neighbourliness and fresh vegetables? And (while we're at it) was it worth
ripping up the much-loved and heavily used five-a-side football pitches in
East London's Spitalfields market just so the City of London could have yet
another identikit shopping/office development? (If you answered yes to
either question, stop reading and trot off and fellate a stockbroker, you
dominant ideology humping Tory bastard).
Don't get me wrong. I dislike cockney gardeners just as much as the next
professional Northern bigot. Indeed I have as little affection for the
shitty-fingered vowel manglers as I do for the feudalism-loving and
ear-flapped-twat-hat-wearing ning-nang-nongers who got their skinny Buddhist
asses kung-fu-ed by the track-suited thugs of the Sino-Stalinist sports
Gestapo when they tried to blow out the Olympic flame.
But when I see our socialist heritage of collective gardening trampled
underfoot by the size-900 Adidas bovver sneakers of soulless corporate
sport, I'm there on the front line, jabbing at the scaly, baby-eating,
corn-syrup spewing monstrosity with a dung-smeared pitchfork, glotally
whining in my best Thames Estuary accented sub-English: Bugger off back to
whichever focus-group driven hell spawned you, Nikezilla. Ils ne passeront
pas, me old cock sparrer, ils ne passeront bleedin' pas.
What are these Olympics anyway? Every square inch of its corporate
jism-soaked soul is fully owned by one crap-peddling multinational monster
or another. And all the major events are dominated by freakish, faceless,
unreal, disconnected, socially-crippled identikit meta-humans, most (if not
all) of them as keenly engaged in an ever-escalating techno-war with the
drug testers as they are in actually running, jumping or throwing
stuff.??Why should I cheer these freaks on? Because they supposedly
represent the patch of dirt I was born on? Is it not absurd that an event so
wedded to the increasingly redundant eighteenth-century notion of the nation
state should be owned lock, stock and logo-plastered barrel by nationless
corporations, all of whom automatically shift production to anywhere the
grateful peasants will work for a dollar a day (and all the rice and rat
meat they can eat) at the drop of a spread sheet?
Attending a Nike product launch in Berlin in 2006, I was somewhat stunned to
hear an executive boast that "Nike has nine teams in this World Cup". I
immediately imagined a "group of death" comprised of Nike, Adidas, McDonalds
and ING. So much more sensible than the current arrangement.
The fact is that we have irrevocably lost the Olympics to the dumb, piggish
maelstrom of corruption, blind self-interest, amorality, blandness,
hypocrisy and lowest-common-denominator aesthetics that is corporate
capitalism. And no amount of hand wringing or faux-nostalgic bleating about
Corinthian values is ever going to bring it back.
Instead we need - as journalists, readers, editors and bloggers - to
celebrate the sporting grass roots. Real sport. Y'know, jumpers for goal
posts. All that corny good stuff.
And when something wonderful like the "gay world cup" (more properly called
the International Gay and Lesbian Football Association World Championship)
takes place (as it will in the last week in August in London) we need to be
talking and writing and reading about it - and not just treating it as a
snigger-worthy freak show.
There's your real Olympic spirit.
And yes, when the corporations start to sniff around the edges of these
events (as they already do, the bastards) we should kvetch like billy-o. No,
not because it'll do any good, but because not to do so means to accept
cultural brain-death, to become sports Tories, to march in corporate
sponsored official replica shirt-wearing lockstep into a new serfdom where
our only functions are to slave and consume.
I give you the NFL, the NBA, the Premier League and every other professional
league on the planet, all of them to a greater or lesser degree on the
slippery slope to soulless shut-up-and-consume McSports status.
That's why we should boycott the Olympics. Don't give it a penny of your
money, a minute of your time or a second of your attention. Go support your
local athletics club instead. Get your fat arse down the park for a kick
about. Coach a local kids' team. Or come down to Regents Park from August
23-30 and watch homosexuals (and the homo-friendly) from all over the planet
put on a display of footballing passion that will take your breath away. Or
at least make you smile. Better still enter your own team.
(By the way, resistance to the 2016 Olympics coming to Chicago is already
under way).
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