Archive for April, 2008

I am a full-time Ph. D. student, in my very late thirties. I am presently very underemployed and underpaid as a part-time private music instructor. As a result I am having to rely on my mother for nearly half of my financial support, which is extremely hard for me to cope with — I feel at this point in our lives the situation should be reversed.

She has chosen not to retire in order to help support me. I cannot get health insurance through my current employer due to a “pre-existing condition.” I have student coverage through my university but it is woefully inadequate — I exhausted my limit for prescription drug coverage in the first six weeks of this year. I have been searching for a full-time job with benefits for over a year now but have so far been unsuccessful.

This despite my having had a 4.0 GPA in my master’s program and having a 3.9 GPA to date in my doctoral program, and being a member of national honor societies in both music and education. It’s hard to tell if my lack of success in finding a “real” job is due to being considered “not a good fit” for those positions I have applied for, or if I’m simply “overqualified.”

Jared Bernstein has just joined UP’s board of directors. He is a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and author of  just-released “Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed (And Other Unsolved Economic Mysteries)” Below is an excerpt from the TPM Cafe Book Club at http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/tpmcafe-book-club/ where Jared, Barbara Ehrenreich, and others discuss today’s economy in terms of real people.

Let’s Talk “Crunch”

By Jared Bernstein - April 7, 2008, 9:56AM

First, I want to thank TPM’s Andrew Golis for setting up this book club. Second, I want to thank Brad DeLong, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Alan Viard for agreeing to post along with me on “Crunch” over the next few days (Tyler Cowan is a “maybe”—I’m hoping he will post some responses too).

A bunch of “Crunch” is me answering real people’s questions about the economy—not wonk’s questions, but actual questions gathered from folks who are interested in matters economic but not necessarily schooled in them. The questions range from the definitional: “What’s GDP; how’s unemployment defined,” and “What does the Federal Reserve do, anyway?” and the timely: “What are bubbles and what is a recession?” There are behavioral questions, like “Should I give money to a homeless person or hire an undocumented worker?” as well as policy questions and solutions, like “Do other countries really spend less than we do on health care with better results?” or “Are budget deficits really a problem?”

And, of course, “Why do I feel so squeezed?”

 Please click on the link to view the entire discussion:

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/tpmcafe-book-club/

Until the beginning of this month, Americans seemed to have nothing to say about their ongoing economic ruin except, “Hit me! Please, hit me again!” You can take my house, but let me mow the lawn for you one more time before you repossess. Take my job and I’ll just slink off somewhere out of sight. Oh, and take my health insurance too; I can always fall back on Advil.

Then, on April 1, in a wave of defiance, truck drivers began taking the strongest form of action they can take – inaction. Faced with $4/gallon diesel fuel, they slowed down, shut down and started honking. On the New Jersey Turnpike, a convoy of trucks stretching “as far as the eye can see,” according to a turnpike spokesman, drove at a glacial 20 mph. Outside of Chicago, they slowed and drove three abreast, blocking traffic and taking arrests. They jammed into Harrisburg PA; they slowed down the Port of Tampa where 50 rigs sat idle in protest. Near Buffalo, one driver told the press he was taking the week off “to pray for the economy.”

The truckers who organized the protests – by CB radio and internet – have a specific goal: reducing the price of diesel fuel. They are owner-operators, meaning they are also businesspeople, and they can’t break even with current fuel costs. They want the government to release its fuel reserves. They want an investigation into oil company profits and government subsidies of the oil companies. Of the drivers I talked to, all were acutely aware that the government had found, in the course of a weekend, $30 billion to bail out Bear Stearns, while their own businesses are in a tailspin.

But the truckers’ protests have ramifications far beyond the owner-operators’ plight –first, because trucking is hardly a marginal business. You may imagine, here in the blogosphere, that everything important travels at the speed of pixels bouncing off of satellites, but 70 percent of the nation’s goods – from Cheerios to Chapstick –travel by truck. We were able to survive a writers’ strike, but a trucking strike would affect a lot more than your viewing options. As Donald Hayden, a Maine trucker put it to me: “If all the truckers decide to shut this country down, there’s going to be nothing they can do about it.”

More importantly, the activist truckers understand their protest to be part of a larger effort to “take back America,” as one put it to me. “We continue to maintain this is not just about us,” “JB”– which is his CB handle and stands for the “Jake Brake” on large rigs– told me from a rest stop in Virginia on his way to Florida. “It’s about everybody – the homeowners, the construction workers, the elderly people who can’t afford their heating bills… This is not the action of the truck drivers, but of the people.” Hayden mentions his parents, ages and 81 and 76, who’ve fought the Maine winter on a fixed income. Missouri-based driver Dan Little sees stores shutting down in his little town of Carrollton. “We’re Americans,” he tells me, “We built this country, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to lie down and take this.”

At least one of the truckers’ tactics may be translatable to the foreclosure crisis. On March 29, Hayden surrendered three rigs to be repossessed by Daimler-Chrysler – only he did it publicly, with flair, right in front of the statehouse in Augusta. “Repossession is something people don’t usually see,” he says, and he wanted the state legislature to take notice. As he took the keys, the representative of Daimler-Chrysler said, according to Hayden, “I don’t see why you couldn’t make the payments.” To which Hayden responded, “See, I have to pay for fuel and food, and I’ve eaten too many meals in my life to give that up.”

Suppose homeowners were to start making their foreclosures into public events– inviting the neighbors and the press, at least getting someone to camcord the children sitting disconsolately on the steps and the furniture spread out on the lawn. Maybe, for a nice dramatic touch, have the neighbors shower the bankers, when they arrive, with dollar bills and loose change, since those bankers never can seem to get enough.

But the larger message of the truckers’ protest is about pride or, more humbly put, self-respect, which these men channel from their roots. Dan Little tells me, “My granddad said, and he was the smartest man I ever knew, ‘If you don’t stand up for yourself ain’t nobody gonna stand up for you.’” Go to theamericandriver.com, run by JB and his brother in Texas, where you’re greeted by a giant American flag, and you’ll find – among the driving tips, weather info, and drivers’ favorite photos –the entire Constitution and Declaration of Independence. “The last time we faced something as impacting on us,” JB tells me, “There was a revolution.”

The actions of the first week in April were just the beginning. There’s talk of a protest in Indiana on the 18^th, another in New York City, and a giant convergence of trucks on DC on the 28^th. Who knows what it will all add up to? Already, according to JB, some of the big trucking companies are threatening to fire any of their employees who join the owner-operators’ protests.

But at least we have one shining example of defiance of the face of economic assault. There comes a point, sooner or later, when you stop scrambling around on all fours and, like JB and his fellow drivers all over the country, you finally stand up.

If you would like to help support the truckers in any way, go to http://www.theamericandriver.com/files/TruckersAndCitizensUnited.html

From the Milton, Pa Standard Journal:

“LEWISBURG — Replete with humor and a tinge of acerbity, investigative journalist Barbara Ehrenreich called for an uprising of sorts against poverty-level wages and the disparity between the privileges of the wealthy and the working poor.
Imploring to an audience of college students, professors and community members, the noted author declared that the fact that millions of people subsist at or below the government’s definition of poverty is everyone’s plight. …”

Please click on link to read entire article