In Search of the Lost Battalion of America's Unemployed

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.thenation.com/article/159666/search-lost-battalion-americas-unemployed

The news media these days look to outperform one another in their showings of concern for the lost battalion of America’s unemployed. Consult any newspaper, wander the Internet or the television talk-show circuit, and at the top of the column or the hour the headline is jobs. Jobs, the bedrock of America’s world-beating prosperity, the cornerstones of its future comfort and well-being—gone to Mexico or China, deleted from payrolls in Michigan and Ohio, mothballed in the Arizona desert.

The nation’s unemployment rate, officially pegged at 9.4 percent but probably nearer to 17 percent, in any event no fewer than 25 million Americans, a number more than equal to the entire population of North Korea, out of work or on the run. The metrics, so say President Obama, the Wall Street Journal and A Prairie Home Companion, are not good. The stock markets may have weathered the storm of the recession, as have the country’s corporate profit margins, but unless jobs can be found, we wave goodbye to America the Beautiful.

Not being an economist and never having been at ease in the company of flow charts, I don’t question the expert testimony, but I notice that it doesn’t have much to do with human beings, much less with the understanding of a man’s work as the meaning of his life or the freedom of his mind. Purse-lipped and solemn, the commentators for the Financial Times and MSNBC mention the harm done to the country’s credit rating, deplore the trade and budget deficits, discuss the cutting back of pensions and public services. From the tone of the conversation, I can imagine myself at a lawn party somewhere in Fairfield County, Connecticut, listening to the lady in the flowered hat talk about the difficulty of finding decent help.

:snip:

The framing of the country’s unemployment trouble as an unfortunate metastasis of the servant problem should come as no surprise. The country is in the hands of an affluent oligarchy content with Voltaire’s observation that “the comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor.” During Ronald Reagan’s terms as president, the income that individual American families received from rents, dividends and interest surpassed the income earned in wages. Over the last thirty years, the wealth of the emergent rentier class has been sustained by an increasingly unequal sharing of the gross domestic product; the percentage of GDP accounted for by manufacturing fell from 21 percent to 14 percent, and the percentage accounted for by finance rose from 14 percent to 21 percent.

More at the link --

[Newest Reality]

1. Perhaps "jobs" is the wrong place to look now?

Maybe we could consider a need to restructure our lives and priorities?

It is possible that, while we find ourselves in a collapse of old ways based on the exploitation of the few at the expense of the many, we could realize that this is about a most pressing issue for millions of us, (though the problem is old hat in many third-world countries) and that is about survival and how we might do so in a time of great and significant change in our own lifetimes and for our children and their offspring?

We simply cannot continue forward in the same old paradigm that is owned, controlled and increasingly guarded, by a Status Quo who have clearly told us what they think of our place and fate in the endgame going on.

We are called upon to be what we actually are. We are not consumers, we are adaptable creatures, despite our cravings for stability and our penchant to bitch and moan about problems and unexpected circumstances that do tend to befall us, one way or another.

We can begin now, due to our obvious circumstances and potential fates, to open our minds to many old and new ways to make subtle or drastic changes in the way we live, do business, and survive. This is the sweet spot where we can barter, exchange, form tribes, establish groups, grow food, or whatever it takes to break away from a system in chaos and on the brink of a collapse that could mean opportunity for a new way, no matter how we might embrace or disdain the fact.

So, if we think differently now, in vast numbers, and act as if we have to do that, not because we want this or that or to enhance our status or lifestyle, but because we MUST survive and move on from corporatism and its all-engrossing, enveloping monoculture of enslavement at a high price, then we will find our way out of this phase and find a new, sustainable and maybe even, a rich and more involved future awaiting.

It is a choice that many will have to make as we proceed. No doubt about it.