Three years ago next week, I was laid off from my full-time job, just as the recession was kicking in. As a middle-aged man with enough career experience to earn an above-average salary, I was immediately a less-desirable candidate for rehire in a downwardly-trending job market. My unemployment benefits ran out not quite a year ago. Three years out of the job market, even closer to the age of 50, with a skillset that is now very stale in the rapidly-changing world of IT, the aforementioned institutional prejudice against the long-term unemployed, and the looming threat of a double-dip economic disaster, it looks highly unlikely that I might ever return to “normal” employment. I have made a sincere effort to make something out of what had been a hobby of sorts — hand-holding for little old ladies who are afraid of their computers — but it still does not come anywhere near to filling the gap. Having already lost our house and gone bankrupt back in 2008, we live on the precipice of complete disaster; there is nowhere to go but into the street if the slightest thing disrupts our tenuous hold on security. If you wonder why I seem angry or bitter sometimes, it is from complete powerlessness and hopelessness. And I am only one of MILLIONS of people in this country in the exact same position.
This Big Think post by political scientist Robert de Neufville hits home very hard. The small improvements in the unemployment numbers in recent months are in no small part due to the simple reality that many people are no longer counted among the unemployed because they no longer qualify for UI benefits. Dropped off the radar of official accounting, they have also dropped off the radar of employers, and a huge percentage of those people are workers over the age of 45. People in their mid-to-late careers are, generally speaking, the most expensive ones for employers to hire: they (used to) command the highest wages and the largest benefit packages. Experience no longer wins out over cost-per-employee, and so the workforce not only sheds senior employees, it refuses to take them on when hiring picks up. Yet these people have the most to lose personally. What is one to do when one is too young to retire but too old to find a job? For me, it’s been lucky that I had a portable skill that I could turn into some (still very meager) part-time work, but the simple fact is that I would be totally unemployable if I started shopping around a resume, looking for the sort of job I used to have. It’s a very sobering realization that you are completely useless at age 47, with a very long road left ahead. It’s a good thing I’ll probably die young.
The country lost another great legislator with the passing of Robert Byrd this week, but fortunately there remain a few dedicated individuals whose first priority remains the average citizen and not the corporate one:
Dennis Kucinich on the giant fraud being perpetrated on this country called the Afghanistan War:
Bernie Sanders on Republican stonewalling on unemployment benefits while demanding the end of the estate tax, which benefits only the wealthiest of Americans:
Russ Feingold on the gutting of the Wall Street reform legislation:
It’s reassuring that for every Scott Brown, Mitch McConnell, Michelle Bachmann or Joe Barton there is still someone who can cut through the bullshit. It’s disappointing that these men are so few in the halls of power, and more disappointing still that the man in the White House does not stand with them.
To go along with my rant, here are some linky items about the economy:
We’ll start with this illustrated audio clip of Franklin Roosevelt speaking in front of Madison Square Garden in 1936, as he was running for his second term (via Crooks & Liars). Though there are some crying “enough” with the comparisons of Barack Obama to Franklin Roosevelt, the simple reality is that there is a great deal to compare, if not in the men themselves, then certainly in the situations they found themselves in as they took office. By 1936, the initial efforts of the Roosevelt administration to resolve the banking crisis had been successful, and he was trying to move forward with the broader stimulus efforts of the New Deal, and yet FDR was still faced with stubborn do-nothing opposition from the Republican Party. Roosevelt, however, recognized the position he was in as one of strength and used it to clobber the Republicans into near-total irrelevance for the next dozen years. A certain secret Muslim non-American Communist terrorist gun-hating bomb-thrower-loving scary black man I can think of ought to be keeping this in mind.
One of the key players in the Roosevelt Administration was Secretary of Labor Francis Perkins. Perkins had served under FDR while he was governor of New York as the state’s Commissioner of Industry and had fought for many reforms to the state: minimum wage laws, capping the number of work hours in a week for women, and unemployment insurance among them. She was the first woman to hold a cabinet position and was one of only two members of FDR’s cabinet to serve for the entire duration of his presidency. As Secretary of Labor, it was her agenda that led to the creation of Social Security and federal minimum-wage laws. Writing at Tina Brown’s Daily Beast, University of Chicago historian Christine Stansell reviews a new biography of Perkins that tries to expand on the personal side of Perkins’ life more than the professional, but Perkins is not generally well-known in modern times so any book about her remakrable accomplishments is worth a look.
Here’s Captain Obvious with a bulletin for you: Advertising Age reports that the struggling economy and huge increase in the number of people out of work has been a serious boom for job-hunter social networking site LinkedIn. They’ve doubled their monthly number of visitors over this time last year, snagging 7.7 million visitors per month, and presently have 36 million registered users. Now, by comparison, Facebook has over 90 million members, but most of them are already employed and spending their days goofing off playing on Facebook.
Just in case you missed it, on Tuesday the New York Times editorial board came right out and said what a lot of us have been saying lately: it’s time for President Obama to stop bailing out the banks, nationalize them temporarily, eliminate the bad ones, stabilize the good ones, and tell the fucking Republicans to STFU about “socialism”. If it were me, I’d also fire Timothy Geithner and find somebody to run Treasury who wasn’t beholden to Wall Street, and then I’d sharpen up my guillotine and start publicly executing some bank executives, but I guess that’s why Obama’s the president and not me.
Everybody’s favorite “jealous putz”, the junior senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, wasn’t very happy with the non-answers he was getting from Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Ben “Bailout” Bernanke about where the money was going, so now he’s proposing legislation to force the Fed to disclose the names of institutions they have lent money to since March 2008 and provide full details about the amounts and the rationales for making said loans. Bernie’s website includes the text of the legislation and a video clip of him chewing on Bernanke’s ass.
Lastly, I’m sure you remember that I have posted a couple of times about the severity of the economic situation in Iceland. Iceland, Latvia, and a few other small nations have been hit especially hard because their tiny economies were not capable of withstanding the strain from the failures of their national banks due to overzealous speculation. The government in Iceland collapsed recently (with the unintended and somewhat irrelevant side effect of bringing to power the world’s first openly lesbian prime minister), people are beginning to protest with pitchforks and torches (literally), and it’s looking like Iceland will have to adopt the Euro as its currency, because the Icelandic krona is now worthless (take THAT Zimbabwe!).
The latest issue of Vanity Fair has a fantastic in-depth feature piece by journalist Michael Lewis about what’s going on in Iceland these days and how they screwed the pooch in the first place. Turns out it’s all the fault of the men, who basically still act like drunken Vikings on shore leave. And, in case you’re wondering, everybody in Iceland DOES know Björk, so shut up about it.
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On Tuesday, I posted a link to a blog post from Rex Hammock wherein he listed some things that he had lost belief in due to the economic crisis we’re in, and then I added a few others that I felt were similarly discredited. In the comments, my friend Karan asked what I did still believe in and/or hope for (since Hammock had, at the end of his post, added a few on that score). Since I felt it would take up too much space to explain in a comment, I said I would write a second post along those lines, and so here we are. Given that the crisis itself stems from a lack of confidence in financial institutions (a well-deserved lack, I think), it’s much easier to point to things to be critical about, but I’ve come up with several things that I think would be worthwhile, not just in easing the strain on the economy, but in fashioning the paradigm that will replace the one presently burning itself into ashes.
Restoring the government’s role as the natural enemy of corporatism — In my view, the best role government has is maintaining an adversarial relationship to big business. Our government, by its very definition, is meant to protect the interests of individuals over the potential abuses of other institutions that can amass power: churches, military leaders, even the individual branches of the government as established in the Constitution. The founders also clearly wanted to circumscribe the power of corporations by limiting their charters and enacting other restrictions that held corporations in check for decades. By the latter half of the 19th century, the increasing economic power of some began to erode this adversarial position through the traditional route of corruption, but even the financial shenanigans of the late 1800s eventually overstepped a threshold and a new wave of governmental reform and regulation swept through Washington in the first quarter of the 20th century. The reforms in labor, in the social safety net, in the manifestation of “public interest” as a valid entity in regulation, and ultimately the sweeping financial reforms of the early part of FDR’s administration all served to rein in the monster of capitalism that came to life after the Civil War. In the years since World War II, however, and especially in the forty years since the election of Richard Nixon, government has been completely co-opted by business and now only works for the benefit of corporations. My personal belief is that it remains possible to resurrect the government’s identity as the antagonist of unbridled capitalism, though I also think it will take a few more years of drama and devastation to get there.
The adaptability of the human species — I am, quite honestly, utterly fed up with the popular fascination for Doomsday-ism, and have been for some time. Anyone who reads this blog for any length of time knows that I have zero patience or tolerance for people who are constantly looking for some catastrophe that will destroy life as we know it. While the failures of the global economy surely should not be waved away dismissively, the Doomsdayers were all too quick to latch on to this crisis and whip themselves up into a frenzy speculating over the degree of chaos it would cause, mainly because the economic crisis is a lot more real than waiting around for tsunamis, bird flu, killer volcanoes, asteroids, or glacier melting. Humans are nothing if not resourceful and adaptable, and I believe that it’s far more likely that people all over the world will develop adaptive responses to the situation rather than self-destruct. That’s not to say that there will not be unrest; indeed, there is a strong need for unrest in troubled times, as it is often the only way to shake the powerful out of their complacency and reorganize power structures to meet the needs of the many. However, to imply that all of human civilization stands on the brink of annihilation within the context of a financial collapse is simply deluded.
Money is bullshit — Money is probably the only mass delusion on Earth bigger, more powerful and more destructive than religion. What we’ve seen is that it’s possible for clever and unscrupulous financiers and businesspeople to simply invent wealth out of whole cloth in the form of credit swaps, derivatives, bogus consumer credit, and good old fashioned fraud. And then to have it all evaporate in the space of a few weeks, even though there was never any tangible wealth behind all that paper. And what is “tangible” about wealth? I hear and read a lot of people hollering about gold, but even our insistence on the value of gold is illusory. You can’t eat it or wear it; it has practical uses, but they’re limited and certainly do not justify the overall value we assign to it. The more money that appears to be lost, the more money that appears to be given away in “bailouts” and “stimulus packages”, the more it looks like the great big lie that it is in the first place. There must be other ways to effectively exchange goods and services that can be shielded from the effects of greed and fraudulence to such an extent that allows the basic material needs of all people to be met to a level that our civilized advancements can sustain for the very long term. And it’s not the All-Mighty Dollar, the Euro, or the yuan.
Wow, it has been just a smidgin over four years ago since I started out on a whole new adventure in my life by quitting my IT job and trying something completely different: cooking school. My life, however, has never traveled in a linear path, and I wasn’t really sure what I expected to get out of cooking school except a way out of a job that had come very close to killing me (literally). Now, four years later, the path I find myself on at the moment bears almost no resemblance to the one that seemed to lay before me then.
On the other hand, my friend and cooking school cohort Jo Horner had this really lovely post about how the path we set out on back then has taken her exactly where she wanted to go. Her business as a chef instructor and caterer has taken off, even in the present economy. If there is such a thing as a “Happily Ever After”, I think Jo has found it. It’s very reassuring to hear that some people do indeed make good on the promises of change they make to themselves. And she is not the only friend I have who seems to be making headway on lifelong dreams, just the only one I know with a blog to post to about it. :-p
Midlife isn’t the vast empty wasteland that younger people make it out to be. A lot of people allow themselves to be limited by their own outdated models of how the world should be, or by paying more tribute to someone else’s articulation of happiness, and so for them midlife can seem like a trek across a desolate plain, but it is not necessarily so. Even if the path to something wonderful and fulfilling isn’t as straightforward for some of us, I think the opportunity to explore and learn and discover is a pretty good alternative.
I am proud of my friend and happy for her that things have worked out so well, and also for my other friends who are seeing the rewards of their adventures beginning to bear fruit as well. You inspire me and give me the strength to continue my own journey, wherever it may take me.
You might have seen the graph on the top already — it was posted on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s blog yesterday (by a staffer, of course…you don’t think Nancy actually does those sorts of things herself do you? She has a person for that, dear) and subsequently appeared all over the political blogs and even ended up on BoingBoing. I saw it first at David Isenberg’s blog.
Pretty effin’ scary. The red and blue lines represent job losses after peak employment for the 1990 recession (Bush I) and the 2001 recession (Clinton-Bush II). The green line headed straight for the bottom is the current recession. As Pelosi’s blog points out, it represents a loss of 3.6 million jobs.
Like a lot of graphs, though, it’s a little deceptive. It doesn’t take into account the differences in the size of the labor markets in each period. That doesn’t mean the loss of 3.6 million jobs isn’t significant, because that’s a pretty scary number, it just doesn’t give you an idea of how that relates to the overall job market. It has also been pointed out that Pelosi’s graph is comparing the current situation to two relatively mild recessions for the sake of over-emphasizing the plunge of the green line.
So observe the second graph, which comes from economists Susan Woodward and Robert Hall. Their graph compares the current recession to the recession of 1981 (Reagan), which was the most serious economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s…until now. This graph re-indexes the 1981 numbers to the present size of the labor market to present a more realistic comparison.
Still, pretty effin’ scary because, as they point out in the text of the post, if the February job loss numbers continue the downward trend, Reagan’s Recession will get bumped down to Third Worst of All Time. We still have quite a bit of depth to plumb to get to the ~25% unemployment at the worst of the Great Depression, but even this graph makes it pretty evident we haven’t bottomed out yet.
