The following is a recent email conversation between UP board members Karen Watts, Barbara Ehrenreich, Bill Holland, Cryn Johannsen, Trude Diamond, and Tom Bishop. They want this to be a continuous discussion — please add your comments!

Karen Watts: I just saw an interview on the financial news about how the “American worker has priced themselves out” of the global job market. Is this perhaps something we should address? If this is the prevailing attitude in the corporate mind I think we have a problem. I know that for me the $1 per article that Indian and Eastern European writers demand would mean a 24 hour work day…and then I’d still be starving. I imagine many other white collar jobs (which was one of the highlights of this discussion) pay similarly horrible wages when outsourced.
Thoughts?

What has America lost besides jobs?
Thousands of Americans are out of work. Have we lost something else besides our jobs?
How many, and what kinds of, worthwhile projects are not getting done these days due to unemployment and underemployment? Have our all-consuming job searches or job-retention efforts kept us focused so tightly on the lowest level [...]

Watch Barbara Ehrenreich speak about her new book, “Bright-Sided” in this excellent video:
http://fora.tv/2009/10/24/Bright-Sided_Barbara_Ehrenreich

Feminism made women miserable. This, anyway, seems to be the most popular takeaway from “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” a recent study by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers which purports to show that women have become steadily unhappier since 1972. Maureen Dowd and Arianna Huffington greeted the news with somber perplexity, but the more common response has been a triumphant: I told you so.

What do you get when you combine the worst economic downturn since the Depression with the first black president? A surge of white racial resentment, loosely disguised as a populist revolt. An article on the Fox News Web site has put forth the theory that health reform is a stealth version of reparations for slavery: whites will foot the bill and, by some undisclosed mechanism, blacks will get all the care. President Obama, in such fantasies, is a dictator and, in one image circulated among the anti-tax, anti-health reform “tea parties,” he is depicted as a befeathered African witch doctor with little tusks coming out of his nostrils. When you’re going down, as the white middle class has been doing for several years now, it’s all too easy to imagine that it’s because someone else is climbing up over your back.

MoveOn.org’s nationwide candlelight vigils held at 6:30 PM local times on September 2, 2009, were meant to call attention to the all-too-many, all-too-true stories that demonstrate our pressing need for health insurance reform. Across the USA, progressives gathered to hold, first, signs (”83% Y  the Public Option,” “Health Care Reform NOW,” and more), and then [...]

We live in interesting times, times that require our action. Since the health insurance ‘public option’ has become a target for destruction by the insurance-industry-supported political ‘death panels’ and the disinformation they spew, we, the citizenry whose right to adequate health care that’s detached from employers and from for-profit insurance companies, have to take upon ourselves the fight for truth in this matter. That means we have to support in every way we can those federal legislators who have declared their insistence upon the public option in any health insurance legislation for which they will vote.

To judge from most of the commentary on the Gates-Crowley affair, you would think that a “black elite” has gotten dangerously out of hand. First Gates (Cambridge, Yale, Harvard) showed insufficient deference to Crowley, then Obama (Occidental, Harvard) piled on to accuse the police of having acted “stupidly.” Was this “the end of white America” which the Atlantic had warned of in its January/February cover story? Or had the injuries of class — working class in Crowley’s case — finally trumped the grievances of race?

Left out of the ensuing tangle of commentary on race and class has been the increasing impoverishment — or, we should say, re-impoverishment — of African Americans as a group. In fact, the most salient and lasting effect of the current recession may turn out to be the decimation of the black middle class. According to a study by Demos and the Institute for Assets and Social Policy, 33 percent of the black middle class was already in danger of falling out of the middle class at the start of the recession. Gates and Obama, along with Oprah and Cosby, will no doubt remain in place, but millions of the black equivalents of Officer Crowley — from factory workers to bank tellers and white-collar managers — are sliding down toward destitution.

Barbara Ehrenreich delivered this commencement address to the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism class of 2009 on May 16. This reprint is from the San Francisco Chronicle:

The dean gave me some very strict instructions about what to say today. No whining and no crying at the podium. No wringing of hands or gnashing of teeth. Be upbeat, be optimistic, he said — adding that it wouldn’t hurt to throw in a few tips about how to apply for food stamps.

In most parts of the world, from Paris to Beijing, mass unemployment brings the specter of mass social unrest. Not here, though, where 13 million people have accepted joblessness with nary a peep of protest.

Many reasons — from Prozac to Pentecostalism — have been cited to explain American passivity in the face of economic violence. But the truth may be far simpler: In America, being unemployed doesn’t mean you have nothing to do but run around burning police cars. Unemployment has been reconfigured as a new form of work.