, the most in a single year since the end of World War II. No surprise. Many of them were redundant, unnecessary jobs, like building new cars when there were already enough beautiful, new long lasting, well made cars to go around, Jobs at obsolete newspapers and magazines, jobs at brick and morter stores, redundant outlets like Circuit City and Starbucks. Not the result of mismanagement or greed, but the nature of business, of the market place. It's the economy stupid. The nature of any economy is uncertainty.
Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II.
We are in the midst of a systemic breakdown, a breakdown to the economy, politics, healthcare, education, etc. Such breakdowns always occur at the end of eras, when one epoch gives way to another. Such are the times in which we live. --Darryl Schoon in The American Dream - An Obituary
This time of trouble will bring seeds of social rebirth. Americans will share a regret about recent mistakes -- and a resolute new consensus about what to do.
Resolute new consensus about what to do?
Nobody knows what to do.
We are in the midst of a systemic breakdown, a breakdown of healthcare, education, politics, the economy, etc.
Healthcare is not broken. Above average Americans have very good healthcare. We have never been promised a free ride.
Education is not broken. Except for the college racket (see 20/20 article, below) American education is better than ever. One example; contrary to popular belief, in science, fourth and eighth graders were above the international average, and only three countries did significantly better than the United States at the elementary school level. It's the bottom thirty percent that suffers, and that is always a low priority. (see Wilson Quarterly article below)
Politics is not broken It remains deeply flawed. Recent backfire of campaign finance reform. A royal Senate, with its unheard of 60% rule. The highly questionable electoral college. Seven hour voter lines. No election day holiday. Little will for progress other than early voting.
Is the economy broken ? Schoon writes; Although capitalism is not a Ponzi scheme, credit-based economies, ie capitalism, and Ponzi schemes share the same fatal flaw. Both must constantly expand or they collapse.
Most commentators expect an eventual recovery. Just another very painful Depression.
Perhaps our dramatic avoidance of the word depression has damaged our perception, otherwise we would call the 70's a depression, with seven hundred percent inflation and the forcing of homemakers into the workplace. Certainly that period saw an enormous blight in the quality of life.
Unemplyoment and underemployment on the current scale has been going on for decades. Forty percent of Americans have never been secure while the top thirty percent continue to thrive.
In general, current unemployment numbers would be between 5% and 10% higher if calculated in the same way as in the nineteen thirties; conversely, the numbers from the 1930s and 1940s would be 5% - 10% lower if calculated using our contemporary methods.
accordingly, the 25% depression unemployment figure was really 15% throughout the Great Depression and by the same token we were in the same range three years ago. Given the immigrant population and the povertizing effect of divorce and drugs and the culture of vulgarity, unemployment is arguably endemic at ten to fifteen percent, and growing because of globalization and automation. Employment figures are also skewed because so many young people don't work for four years due to college, compared to the 1930's, when sixteen year olds were considered unemployed if they didn't finish high school, and of course a huge fraction of them did not. And today's huge prison population is not considered unemployed. The exclusion of prisoners from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment rates misconstrues the actual unemployment figures. Given all these variables, it might simply be that unemployment has never differed all that much from that of the nineteen thirties at its worst. There may simply be a permanent depression with a 15 to 30% under employed and unemployed population. (see Jesse Jackson American Dream article below)
footnotes
Bad Rap on the Schools
by Jay Mathews The Wilson Quarterly,
The United States did much better than the headlines suggest.
In “More Than a Horse Race” (2007), Jim Hull, a policy analyst at the Center for Public Education, which is affiliated with the National School Boards Association, analyzed four major studies of school achievement around the world. When Hull looked carefully at the numbers, he found that the United States did much better than the headlines suggest. In reading, only three nations’ students did significantly better than their U.S. elementary and high school counterparts. “The reading performance of U.S. fourth graders was particularly strong,” Hull said. “They scored above the international level . . . while our 15- year- olds scored slightly above the average.” In science, fourth and eighth graders were above the international average, and only three countries did significantly better than the United States at the elementary school level. (It is worth noting that the studies Hull examined did not include India and China, in part because schooling is so minimal for so many children in these two countries that their performance isn’t comparable.)
The college rip off
Debt-Laden Graduates Wonder Why They Bothered With College
Stuck With Low-Paying Jobs and Large Student Loans
By JOHN STOSSEL, MIGUEL SANCHO and ANDREW KIRELL
Jan. 16, 2009—
Personal finance guru Suze Orman says college is a no-brainer for kids who can be lawyers and doctors. But she says that in this economy, many others should reassess the value of a generic bachelor's degree. She believes it ultimately might not be worth it.
"If you're in the bottom 40 percent of your high school class -- and today, colleges are recruiting lots of those kids -- you have a very small chance of graduating, even if you are given 8½ years."
first one in her family to go to college and probably be the last
The friends I know that have jobs, secure jobs, they never went to college,"
It's said that the way to earn more is to get the best education you can afford.
But in today's economy, where so many overqualified people are competing for fewer jobs, the promise of a big payoff from a college diploma can be misleading.
For some students such as Rachele Percell, it has turned out to be a total disappointment. She's the first one in her family to go to college and said she'll probably be the last. Earlier this month, struggling to make ends meet, Percell moved out of her New Hampshire apartment and is upset about taking a step back.
"I didn't plan to go move back in with my mother," she said. "I feel like I have to sponge off my family now."
Percell never dreamed that this is what would happen after she graduated from college. She grew up hearing that education pays. A government study once claimed that a bachelor's degree was worth $1 million over a lifetime. Even political figures like Hillary Clinton were touting the benefits of a college degree.
So Percell borrowed enough money to pay about $24,000 a year to attend Rivier College in Nashua, N.H. She's about $85,000 in debt.
"I was told just to take out the loans and get the degree," she said, "because when you graduate, you're going to be able to get that good job and pay them off, no problem."
But for three years, Percell has struggled to find a job with her degree in human development. And the recession has made her search even tougher. To pay the bills, she took a low-level desk job with an insurance company, doing work she says she could have done straight out of high school.
When asked if going to college was worth it, she replied with an emphatic "No."
"Because now I have this huge amount of debt, and there's no way I'll be able to pay it off," she said.
Rivier College said via e-mail that Percell's situation is" unfortunate" and that many of its graduates have launched successful careers. But many students now say the business about college earning you $1 million more is an empty promise.
'I Feel Like a Loser'
Like most students, Kris Alfred was repeatedly told in high school that everyone goes to college.
Alfred said he owes more than $125,000 for his degrees in theater when he's not even working in that field.
"I work at a call center, and I make $10 an hour," he said. "It's surreal. I feel like a loser."
Walter Rowland got a degree in meteorology and now owes $77,000 in student loans.
"College was a rip-off and nothing against, you know, my college or my professors, but I was misinformed," he said.
"You're led down this path of needing to go to college," he continued. "The college diploma is the new high school diploma."
Personal finance guru Suze Orman says college is a no-brainer for kids who can be lawyers and doctors. But she says that in this economy, many others should reassess the value of a generic bachelor's degree. She believes it ultimately might not be worth it.
Orman said it's often smarter to acquire specific marketable skills at a community college, a technical school or by working as an apprentice for a business, making yourself more employable without piling up a mountain of debt.
"I would rather see a child go to a community college, knowing that they can go out there, get a job and not be crushed under the burden of a prestigious degree," she said.
Marty Nemko, an education consultant and career counselor, said he believes the bachelor's degree is America's most overrated product. Nemko is one of many who says there are some ugly statistics the education establishment doesn't like to talk about.
"The sticker price of colleges has gone up well over the rate of inflation, for decades," he said.
Nemko said tuition money gets funneled into fancy facilities to lure students who don't question the long-term value of what they're paying for, things like rock-climbing walls, golf courses and maid services in dorms.
"Stop with these enormous country club college campuses," he said. "They are robbing people who can't afford it."
But what about that $1 million bonus for getting a bachelor's degree?
"There could be no more misleading statistic that I could possibly tell you about," he said.
Misleading, Nemko said, because it includes superearners, billionaire college grads who skew the average. Additionally, he said, the students who attend college are already more likely to be successful than those who don't.
Economics professor Sandy Baum, author of "Education Pays," a College Board study promoting the advantages of higher education, said it is the education that makes the difference.
"On average, people benefit much more from going to college," Baum said, agreeing that the $1 million figure is inaccurate. Her study estimated that graduates gain half that.
Yet universities still throw around that $1 million estimate. Arizona State University recently used it to justify a tuition hike.
Above Average Pay Without a Degree
Rowland, Alfred and Percell are skeptical about the so-called college premium. But at least they graduated. Others are not so fortunate.
"If you're in the bottom 40 percent of your high school class -- and today, colleges are recruiting lots of those kids -- you have a very small chance of graduating, even if you are given 8½ years," career expert Nemko said.
"And the immoral thing about it is that the colleges do not disclose that."
Economist Baum said, "We should make that information more available. But the reality is that even if you have some college and you don't graduate, it still pays off in the labor market."
For some kids, that is a gamble they'd rather not take. Carl Wunche High School outside Houston lets kids choose among dozens of technical education programs, from emergency medical technician training to training in crime scene investigation. This training qualifies them for real-world jobs, without the time and money required for a four-year degree.
It's worth a thought. Electricians, on average, make about $78,000 a year; plumbers, and paralegals, about $47,000. All these jobs pay above the national average and none require a bachelor's degree.
Steven Eilers went through the automotive program and then worked as an apprentice in a car repair center. He is already earning more than the average American, and he doesn't have any student loan debt.
"More people need to realize that you don't have to get a four-year degree to be successful," he said
At a time when white-collar jobs are vanishing every month, the automotive repair industry actually added jobs last year. Alfred, the theater graduate, said he wasn't surprised.
"The friends I know that have jobs, secure jobs, they never went to college," he said.
Rivier College recommended that Percell contact its career development office. But what if she could do it all over again?
"I probably would have gone to a trade school for hairdressing," she said. "It's about $11,000 and I'd probably be making better money."
Copyright © 2009 ABC News Internet Ventures
American dream or American delusion?
Don't we want workers to make family wages with health care and retirement security? Shouldn't the response to the crisis be focused on creating conditions to reinforce that possibility -- for example, by moving to national health insurance for all -- rather than undermine it? We should not be bitter that auto workers once made good salaries with good benefits. We should be insisting that those benefits extend through the country. We shouldn't be breaking unions. We should be empowering them to ensure that workers get a fair share of the profits and productivity they help to create. ---JESSE JACKSON
Will the American dream survive? America's great success after World War II was to build a country where the American dream was within reach for working people. The elements of that dream were clear: a wage high enough to support a family, a home, health care and paid vacations, high quality public education and affordable college for the young, a pension to retire with some security at the end of a long work life.
Over the last three decades of conservative rule, this system has been taken apart. Executives declared war on unions. CEO salaries soared; workers' wages did not keep up. Increasingly, it took two incomes and often three jobs to produce a family income; home ownership and college required ever greater debt; pension promises were broken, and pensions were replaced by private retirement plans.
In the auto bailout, the Republican demand -- - was that the union workers immediately give up pay and benefits to make them competitive with nonunion workers in the foreign auto companies that set up shop in anti-union Southern states.
This was said to be necessary for the auto industry to compete. But in reality, the bigger problem for the industry was health care costs, levied directly on the companies, unlike the arrangements their competitors have in other industrialized countries. It wasn't wages that were uncompetitive with the nonunion foreign startups as much as the promises made to retirees on pensions and health care.
But don't we want workers to make family wages with health care and retirement security? Shouldn't the response to the crisis be focused on creating conditions to reinforce that possibility -- for example, by moving to national health insurance for all -- rather than undermine it? We should not be bitter that auto workers once made good salaries with good benefits. We should be insisting that those benefits extend through the country. We shouldn't be breaking unions, as Corker clearly wanted to do. We should be empowering them to ensure that workers get a fair share of the profits and productivity they help to create.
The contrast between the aid to the banks -- trillions in guarantees, swaps and capital infusions, most of it committed without a vote of Congress -- and the denial of even a bridge loan for the auto industry is glaring. Will America continue to have an economic policy aimed at Wall Street or one aimed at Main Street?
For decades, under Republican and Democratic presidents, finance has ruled. A strong dollar helped investors and hurt domestic manufacturers. Trade policies protected investor rights but not labor rights. Deregulation unleashed financial speculation while encouraging CEOs to focus on short-term profits, not long-term investments.
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