Nora Gibson is a Philadelphia choreographer who has been increasingly interested in the crossroads between dance and visual art.  She has begun to add a component to her work that harkens back to the “tableau vivant,” which literally means living picture. The above photo is a very simple, spare tableau, depicting a suited person at the base of two file box towers.  This tableau was an introduction to a dance solo, and was set to music.  The image is symbolic of several things: someone wedged between mountains of work, someone who might have jumped out of tall office buildings, someone at the base of an economic canyon, etc.

Here is a link to Nora’s website:

http://noragibsonperformanceproject.weebly.com

The following is an excerpt from an article on Helium by Tom Bishop, UP member. Click on the link to read entire article.

“Struggling homeowners should not get a bailout just because everybody else has. Instead, struggling homeowners should be the first to be bailed out, even if they are the only ones.

The discussion over the mortgage bailout is just the latest surfacing of America’s ongoing class war, and the very wealthy have been winning it. They have devastated the working class, impoverished consumers, and robbed small shareholders. They provide most of the reelection funds for politicians, define mainstream political thought, and pick the winners in every policy debate. …”

http://www.helium.com/items/1358721-class-war-mortgage-bailout-wealthy-bailout-corporate-bailout-working-class-bailout

I was laid-off by IBM. Basically, IBM is laying off U.S. software developers and replacing them with developers in India, China, and other companies with lower wages. I have nothing against Indian and Chinese programmers. They’re excellent in my opinion. The problem with IBM is that they don’t respect their developers and realize their importance to the company.

“The proposed ‘shovel ready’ jobs stimulus package does too little, too late for those of us who shovel information and business processes,” according to Trude Diamond, United Professionals (UP) board member. “What are we supposed to do? Wait until the road builders and bridge constructors start shopping again, and the retailers and service providers can afford to get bank loans to grow, and finally those businesses need white-collar workers and managers again? Wait for the “trickle-up” principle to work? By that time, we’ll be living in our not-yet-repossessed cars, hoping that someone will call our prepaid cell-phone with a job offer. And what’s to keep the businesses from outsourcing the kinds of jobs we do, anyway?”

Of course, the national stimulus plan wisely addresses blue-collar, build-the-infrastructure (which is rotting as we speak) types of jobs. The able-bodied, (mostly) young, (mostly) men who do those jobs are precisely the demographic that every nation’s leadership knows are most likely to join the rebel guerillas in the jungles—or city alleys and underground tunnels—if you don’t keep them productively busy.

But, as wise as the plan is to get “the young and the restless” back to work, it would be equally foolish to leave the unemployed educated professionals to their own and increasingly angry devices. Never mind the possibility of engineers hacking the power grid and Internet servers. It’s just bad for the nation to not employ its brain-trust. We can contribute significant, workable concepts and processes that will achieve corporate and public goals. When we have money, we educate our children to ensure the next generation of American leadership — rather than sending them off to work to help pay the mortgage now that Mom and Dad are receiving unemployment compensation and food stamps. The government can create information-worker and manager jobs, too. Schools need more teachers. Federal, state and local government offices need more competent communicators working in all their offices. Think of how effective we’d be as watchdogs over the ethics of elected officials or as agents of the SEC; recent events have demonstrated how many more of those we could use.

On the private-sector side, the business bailouts must demand job-creation—re-creation, really. Corporate bailout money should come with strict rules about bringing off-shored call center and software development jobs back home as a condition of receiving the stimulus funds. Now. Not over 12 or 18 months. Now. “Flash cut,” as we say about certain business system change-overs. You know … with the same speed we U.S. workers experienced when we were laid off from those jobs in the first place. “Here’s your pink slip and check for two weeks’ pay; the security officer will accompany back to your desk to clean it out.” That kind of NOW.

Stimulus by the Numbers: Too Little, Too Late for the Middle Class

United Professionals has found that, though the total cost of the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009 is reported to be $789 billion, only about $180 billion is direct spending for job creation, of which less than $30 billion will be spent in 2009. (Most of the $100 billion to be spent in 2009 is for aid and tax cuts.)

“In the entire bill, about $33 billion is directly targeted to white collar jobs,” says UP member Tom Bishop, “which includes $19 billion in Health IT to be spent from 2010 through 2016, and that is too little, too late for the middle class, which is reeling from rounds of lay-offs and years of downsizing and off-shoring.” Bishop notes that the rest is largely for science, defense, and energy research. One unknown is the $39 billion in aid to states for education programs, because states will apply this money differently according to their immediate needs.

The stimulus bill just signed by President Obama is a good start that we hope will put the brakes on this economic collapse. But it falls far short of sustaining and rebuilding America’s middle class, which has been so badly shattered before and during this recession.

“We urge people to visit UP at www.unitedprofessionals.org, read others’opinions and post comments on this critically important topic,” states UP board chair Bill Holland. “UP plans to initiate local discussion groups and connectivity to local news media outlets in the near future.”

This is an excerpt from Rosa Brooks’s column in the Los Angeles Times from Feb. 19. Click on the link below to read entire column:

“Brother, can you spare $22 billion?

Back in the Great Depression, the song “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” epitomized all the hurt that was going around:

Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time.

Once I built a railroad; now it’s done. Brother, can you spare a dime?

There’s been some inflation since the 1930s. Today’s panhandlers don’t humbly ask passersby for a dime. Instead, they go to Congress and ask for a spare $22 billion or so.

That’s what General Motors and Chrysler demanded Tuesday on Capitol Hill, in a form of panhandling that felt more like a stickup: “Give us another $22 billion or hundreds of thousands of autoworkers get the ax!”

If the iconic images of the Depression were of individuals — a scruffy child in castoff clothes, a hollow-eyed mother in a bread line — the iconic image of the current economic crisis is likely to be that of the ravenous corporation insisting, every month or so, it needs just a few billion dollars more. …”

http://mobile.latimes.com/inf/infomo;JSESSIONID=6D0CF9BB635E048D4510.810?view=page6&feed:a=latimes_1min&feed:c=opinion&feed:i=45138597&nopaging=1

From the Fresh Air Fund Website:

THE FRESH AIR FUND, an independent, not-for-profit agency, has provided free summer vacations to more than 1.7 million New York City children from low-income communities since 1877. Nearly 10,000 New York City children enjoy free Fresh Air Fund programs annually. In 2008, close to 5,000 children visited volunteer host families in suburbs and small town communities across 13 states from Virginia to Maine and Canada. 3,000 children also attended five Fresh Air camps on a 2,300-acre site in Fishkill, New York. The Fund’s year-round camping program serves an additional 2,000 young people each year.

We hire staff members with a wide range of experience in some pretty amazing fields. Some of the more interesting programs and classes that we offer at our camps include environmental science, culinary arts, fashion design, orienteering, leadership, video editing, digital and dark room photography, ropes course, nutrition and agriculture.

Visit http://freshairfundcounselors.smnr.us/ for more information.

From BBC News:

“Protesters in Iceland’s capital Reykjavik have clashed with police during a demonstration over the handling of the financial crisis.

Several hundred protesters gathered outside the city’s main police station to demand the release of a man jailed in a previous demonstration.

Five people were injured when police used pepper spray to disperse the group after some tried to storm the building.

Iceland faces a sharply contracting economy over the financial collapse. …”

Click on this link to see story and video:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7744355.stm

 Other Media: Download

An excerpt from http://www.barbaraehrenreich.com/ehrenreich/forum/toast.asp?sub=show&action=posts&fid=2&tid=6158:

“For more than 26 years, I’ve applied myself, worked hard, gotten excellent performance reviews, and otherwise “followed all the rules.” At 50, I should be enjoying the fruits of my labor and starting to plan what I’ll do in retirement.

But instead, I am now frighteningly unsure about my entire future and what it might bring, having been just laid off yesterday, January 29, from my professional-level job (as a copy editor) of five and one-half years. …”

Click on link to read entire post.

From their website:

Coalition for the Future American Worker (CFAW) is an umbrella organization of professional trade groups, population/environment organizations, and immigration reform groups. CFAW was formed to represent the interests of American workers and students in the formulation of immigration policy.

Visit http://www.americanworker.org/whatis2.html for the full text.

See their TV ad, currently playing:

 Other Media: Download

I was basically thrown under the bus @ my last two positions previous to this one: at the first place, they outsourced all IT work, + at the second my boss + I had personal disagreements.