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This is an excerpt from rawstory.com. Click on link to see entire article.

“Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay says that Sen. Jim Bunning was “brave” for blocking an extension in unemployment benefits.

DeLay subscribes to the notion that people only try to find jobs when their benefits run out.

“There is an argument to be made that these extensions, the unemployment benefits, keep people from going and finding jobs,” he told CNN’s Candy Crowley Sunday.

“In fact there are some studies that have been done that show people stay on unemployment compensation and they don’t look for a job until two or three weeks before they know the benefits are going to run out,” he argued.

“People are unemployed because they want to be? ” asked Crowley.

“Well, it is the truth. And people in the real world know it,” said DeLay. …”

With long-term unemployment becoming an excruciating pervasive reality, the challenge for many of us – besides surviving, is elbowing our way back into the workforce. And since as Don Peck pointed out on a recent PBS News Hour, being unemployed for an extended period is comparable to losing one’s spouse, one doesn’t want to dawdle in this state.

But has it ever been so hard to break in?

How many of us can readily endure getting an interview every seventy or eighty resumes? And even assuming one is somehow able to make end’s almost meet, the scourge of joblessness carries numerous stressors. Foremost, I’d rank alienation, self-pity, and discouragement, all offshoots of that ominous and recurring sense that while life is indeed moving on (for most), for those of us without gainful employment, it seems stuck. Regressing into self-destructive thoughts and behaviors can hover, too - as Dylan put it, “like a sucker around my skull.” To restate the obvious, one wants to find work, or something meaningful, with all deliberate speed. But how?

Generally, we’ve been conditioned to seek out the full-time job as an anecdote to being full-time unemployed. Who isn’t hoping for that? And that’s the problem. Since everyone’s seeking a few elusive slots, the competition is brutal. Even long-standing niceties like having an employers acknowledge one’s resume or interview is waning. In short, it’s often a tough slog. CNN’s financial guru Clark Howard even offered some blunt advice recently: Forget sending resumes. Most jobs are already designated from within. Find the people who are hiring yourself and cultivate relationships there.

Still, there’s another approach. In addition to pursuing that full-time job, one might consider volunteering. We’ve all heard this is a valuable endeavor. And if one can afford to, why not? Find a site whose mission reflects one’s own values and interests – and treat it as if it were an actual job. (This can be especially helpful if one has encountered numerous job difficulties and needs some real success.) Yet because one is a volunteer, fewer demands (and hours) go along with it. Such efforts also helps one forget one’s own situation, at least temporarily, while contributing to the common good. It can also generate critical contacts and future references - both vital today.

Yet for many of us, just showing up and helping out “till the cows come home” doesn’t really cut it. We need a paying job. But still don’t give up on volunteering. Instead, broach the subject of job possibilities with the director or coordinator of a particular site.

If a director states that subsequent work, even part-time, is indeed possible, do everything you can to be the best volunteer you can be. Cultivate the contact. And while many nonprofits are financially strapped, something could still develop? Volunteering gets one engaged, out of the house and learning new skills. (Also, when choosing a place,ask: Will I leave with expanded skills?) That’s why I mentioned “savvy” in the title.As a volunteer, think of what you need, too.

Another way in is through writing. Nonprofits are often desperate for grant writers – or grant assistants. While the prospect of chasing a big grant right off would be daunting for anyone, start small. Be up front with the volunteer coordinator; let him or her know what you’re be comfortable with. Say you’re inexperienced with grants but a decent writer. Try Googling grant writing or letter of inquiry. You’ll soon have plenty of guides and you’ll be on your way. A win-win in the offing!

Finally, for folks fifty-five and over (like myself) and low-income (ditto), the government established SCSEP, the Senior Community Service Employment Program. Eligible seniors are matched with sister nonprofits and receives minimum wage while learning new skills. Any subsequent employer also gets a cash allowance for hiring this person.

If you’re fifty-five and struggling to break in, see if there’s a SCSEP site nearby. My wife is thrilled after just attending a one hour orientation! And I’m thrilled, too.

Yes, the Great Recession has dumped a barrel of lemons on us. Yet rather than bemoaning our fate, maybe it’s time to get off the proverbial dime. Get involved. But don’t overextend. Start out small. Dust off your considerable skill set – and perhaps add to it. Besides, as contemporary society increasingly comes to resemble the old fable, “The Tortoise and the Hare,” position yourself. As the hares tire, us savvy tortoises will have the skills and values to make a real difference.

Once again I’ve taken to writing as a tonic from the isolation of my study and chronic unemployment. My point here is not to blow my own horn but to open up some dialogue with those of you out there who are caught in the riptides of change and despite daily efforts to rebound seem stuck like mice in a glue trap.

All of our stories are different, of course, but our beliefs, hopes and dreams probably share collective passion and hope. As an American kid, and despite my age of 57 I still think I’m a kid,  I truly believe that the best is yet to come. The problem I see is that so many of our embedded institutions, government, schools, business and yes, faith organizations, are failing us. Even more, they are clueless on how to begin.

Free marketers will lambast any of this thinking, suggesting — somewhat rightly — that Ayn Rand individualism and self-determination are the bootstrap model of innovation and wealth creation that make our nation great. They are, in part, correct.  The problem is that millions of us are not going to come up with that single brilliant idea that resurrects our income, pays our mortgages and allows us middle-class shopping choices at the grocery store.

Most of us have worked for other folks — some good, some bad — and have labored amidst the pressures of the market place to make good decisions, or perhaps the best decisions we could at the time. The political right keeps whipping our asses with their blind allegiance to the free market and the ownership society; the political left suggests that collective action, government initiatives and Keynesian pump priming are the answer.  We are sadly caught in the middle of this political whipsaw — and both sides are right and wrong with no clarity or answers in the middle for commonsense ideas that can actually help us reshape our lives in real time and TODAY.

Point of fact for me:  I have scoured the educational landscape in the New York City tri-state area for any solid re training programs that can take a 50-something with a bachelor’s degree and lots of savvy and offer clear strategies for a new career direction that fits with my age, skills and downsized goals.  While Obama Inc. has set aside a snippet of money, nationally, for community college rebirth, there appear to be no plans coming from the Department of Education, the Labor Department or the U.S. Chamber of Commerce who are addressing this issue. Local efforts by Bloomberg Inc. round up the usual suspects of retired business folk and others who offer fair local advice but no clear marketplace evaluations, training, loans or action directives.

Both sides of the political aisle are asleep at the switch, busy posturing and doing nothing in this Congressional session so they can promise to do something in the next one.  They are collectively full of crap because no one is calling these bozos on the day-to-day reality, pain and confusion that goes on our lives.  Nancy Pelosi looks confused and Harry Reid appears to be asleep. Cantor and McConnell are human soundbite machines seeking to resonate with their own self perpetuating politics of “no.”

I’m a pretty good research guy.  After decades of researching and writing stories I can flush out information and ideas quite quickly.  If I can’t find this yellow brick road of reinvention, how the hell can a single mom with three kids or a downsized factory worker or a white-collar tech guy who’s seen his gig shipped to Indonesia?

Folks, we’ve been had by both teams. What we’ve been left are millions of confused folks sitting behind their computers, weaving through job marketing brochures, private and public school come-ons and online job fairs and listings that are impersonal, at times inoperative and offer a faux sense of a new beginning.

So here’s the rub.  If you think you need a start-up, career guidance program in your neck of the woods that can provide you with honest skill appraisals,  advice that could lead you to a small mom and pop capitalism future, or a new career that is within reach of your age, education level, income and zip code, let’s hear it.  Also, if you, like me, have struggled to find local advice that allows you to see real choices, other than bedpan cleaning, in our new digitized future, I want to know.

Again, the idea is not to make dumb excuses or provide grist for conservative balderdash that if you want to work, you can find it, but to build a dialogue that says, “Hey folks, we need help.”   ”Where can I train for a year, while working part-time to engage the future?   Who is doing it?  Is it affordable?  Can I get help or assistance to gain these skills?  Where is the 1,2,3 assembly line of local counseling that allows those adrift to connect the dots to a new life and a new career, albeit with hard work and sacrifice?” “Are green jobs a reality or just B.S. for Obama speechwriters, Al Gore clones and G.E. feel good ads during the Olympics?”

Folks, this is an opportunity to put these questions directly to your elected officials, rotary clubs, churches, synagogues, civic wannabe’s, non profit guru’s (who usually are holding onto their own political reality), neighbors and friends.

The point here is to tell me if you’ve struggled with the same problem and then perhaps we can force lefty wannabe’s, blue dogs, free marketers, middle of the road muftis and round up the usual soundbite activists into actually providing services in our zip codes to get us out of our funk. Otherwise, we’re sunk holding onto visions of WPA relief that won’t come and weekly unemployment numbers that give the few remaining salaried journalists the opportunity to say the latest rise is “surprising” when in truth, it is anything but that.

We are left to save ourselves. Any friend, colleague, phone/internet buddy, or app-driven moron who talks to the machine in his palm all day and suggests that some amorphous “they” out there can help you is wrong. We need help and you have to petition for it or we’ll all keep going in circles.  It’s time to hold the belief holders, no matter what their political subset, to the local fire. We gotta line their asses up and drill into their thick skulls what we need, because if we don’t, no one else will.

Lemme know your thoughts … and let’s start being a pain in the ass until you get some satisfaction.

I promise to pepper the DOE and the appropriate Congressional clink heads with your responses.

Bruce.

The following questions were posed by UP member Bruce Reznick. Please add your comments.

1) Do you think that Obama has the “goods” to actually create jobs?

2) Do you think that your American Dream is over, or not? Explain.

3) Is there a corporate future in your future, or you children’s?

4) Does anyone in your zip code, city, town, county or state, elected official or not,  have a real plan that creates decent employment?

5) Is color the dividing line between struggling and unemployed suburban whites and blacks and hispanics… ?  If not, why don’t they ever unite?

6) In a global job market what organizing tactics are needed to build jobs at home ( be they union or non union) ?  Do consumer boycotts help? Or are things too far gone for struggling folks to make sense of it all in an organized way?

7) What’s life like on your side of the send/receive button?  Tell us your story of struggle.

8) How do you combat isolation in the age of digital unemployment  and hiring?

Bruce Reznick is a former Emmy Award winning network television news producer.  He, along with many colleagues from the news world, finds himself unemployed, disenfranchised and concerned about the state of his life, his community, his peers and the nation.

This is an excerpt from Atlantic magazine. Click on the link to read entire article.

The Great Recession may be over, but this era of high joblessness is probably just beginning. Before it ends, it will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar men. It could cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a despair not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years to come.

How should we characterize the economic period we have now entered? After nearly two brutal years, the Great Recession appears to be over, at least technically. Yet a return to normalcy seems far off. By some measures, each recession since the 1980s has retreated more slowly than the one before it. In one sense, we never fully recovered from the last one, in 2001: the share of the civilian population with a job never returned to its previous peak before this downturn began, and incomes were stagnant throughout the decade. Still, the weakness that lingered through much of the 2000s shouldn’t be confused with the trauma of the past two years, a trauma that will remain heavy for quite some time.

The unemployment rate hit 10 percent in October, and there are good reasons to believe that by 2011, 2012, even 2014, it will have declined only a little. Late last year, the average duration of unemployment surpassed six months, the first time that has happened since 1948, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking that number. As of this writing, for every open job in the U.S., six people are actively looking for work.

All of these figures understate the magnitude of the jobs crisis. The broadest measure of unemployment and underemployment (which includes people who want to work but have stopped actively searching for a job, along with those who want full-time jobs but can find only part-time work) reached 17.4 percent in October, which appears to be the highest figure since the 1930s. And for large swaths of society—young adults, men, minorities—that figure was much higher (among teenagers, for instance, even the narrowest measure of unemployment stood at roughly 27 percent). One recent survey showed that 44 percent of families had experienced a job loss, a reduction in hours, or a pay cut in the past year.

This is an excerpt from Alternet.org. Click on link to read entire article.

The Heritage Foundation, the right wing’s most lavishly funded think tank, doesn’t much like the federal budget plan the Obama White House released last week. Heritage hired guns are blasting the Obama blueprint for fiscal 2011 as perhaps the “most irresponsible budget ever.”

What has the wealthy and their biggest fans so upset? Certainly not the deficit, the cause for concern they profess so earnestly.

Growing budget deficits, as economist Polly Cleveland pointed out last week, can actually work to rich people’s advantage, in part because the rich hold so much of the government’s debt. The interest payments the rich collect on that debt “tips” America’s top-heavy distribution of wealth even more their way.

The rich can live — quite well — with budget deficits. But taxes drive them crazy, and President Obama’s second budget is proposing, over the next decade, $970 billion in new taxes on America’s most affluent.

But do these tax hikes, as critics charge, “soak the rich”? Not hardly. Obama’s budget, if adopted, will inconvenience the rich, not soak them.

For the rich, that may be almost as bad. Rich people simply detest inconveniences. Unlike people of modest means, they can afford to avoid them — and the U.S. tax code, for years now, has made that affording ever easier.

Just how easy becomes painfully clear upon perusing the fine print of the tax changes the Obama White House is proposing.

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?
Cryn Johannsen: I am really glad you sent this out. I think it definitely needs to be addressed. When you think of this argument vis-a-vis student loans, it makes the claim even more problematic, does it not?

Karen: For months Robert Reich, former labor secretary, has been warning that many outsourced jobs are gone for good. He has also stated stated that “American workers have priced themselves out of the job market.”

Trude: Reich’s solution is “permanent new investments in the productivity of Americans” in the form of “Big ones that span many years: early childhood education for every young child, excellent K-12, fully-funded public higher education, more generous aid for kids from middle-class and poor families to attend college, good health care, more basic R&D that’s done here in the U.S., better and more efficient public transit like light rail, a power grid that’s up to the task, and so on.”

http://robertreich.blogspot.com

http://robertreich.org

Trude: That strategy is all well and good for generations beginning with those in elementary schools now, and it will build upon the strategy toward highly functional reading/math/critical-thinking skills education and career-oriented curricula that many schools began to develop several years ago. But what does this attitude mean for the thousands of unemployed and underemployed today here in the United States?

Karen: It would seem that the only hope of landing a job lies in being willing to settle for 3rd world wages. Even if your ego allows you to make such a decision, how are you going to survive? Many of the pat answers we hear so often about living within our means and being willing to accept “any job” simply fall apart when examined closely. For example, live in a small apartment and take the bus to work, sounds like a good solution unless you live in a rural community without multifamily housing or public transit. Get a second job is also a favorite platitude. Never mind that childcare in many communities costs more than many of these entry level jobs pay, and is only available during traditional business hours.

It is true that the economy has changed in new, and sometimes awful and probably permanent, ways. We will have to adapt as a nation. But does Mr. Reich or corporate America really believe that adults can survive on minimum wage jobs? Even should you work a budgeting miracle and learn to live on approximately $16,000 to $17,000 a year, how in the world will you save for the future, support children or pay off the student loans for the education it took to land this dream job?

We need the administration to move beyond pronouncements and good intentions. It is time to dig deep into the complicated problems of creating new jobs for our vast unemployed/underemployed educated class and address the crushing debt they acquired based on the promise that education would lead to a better job and future.

Karen: I got a newsletter this morning from one of my local contacts. In it she advocates again that everyone should be working toward a “credit free” lifestyle. Aside from the business impracticalities of this, she is ignoring the concept of survival credit. I found one blog on it but cannot find any current data–I know that this is a big issue. People are using credit cards to buy the essentials of life like gas and groceries because their wages do not cover their basic living expenses. Perhaps this is a question we should pose as part of this?

Tom Bishop: The American workers have not priced themselves out of the job market, they have been priced out. By companies willing to pay people who went to free universities and live in economies where one can survive on far less than here. This is about how corporate America strangled its own workforce for so long that it finally killed it.

And it will kill the new workforces too.

This is a great year for bashing corporations, and I think it’s already time to start planning for summer (you know how conservatives love summer for getting their message out). Let’s make them defend Wall Street.

I would love to send my thoughts on this “Pricing Out The American Worker” very soon, if that is welcome…

Trude Diamond: Tom’s offer sounds perfect to me. Thanks, Tom, from a formerly 6-figure salaried American communications guru who now makes about $30/hr working freelance for a company based in India. Paybacks really are hell — in this case, the hell is being wreaked on the employees rather than the corporations. Onward!

Bill Holland: These comments are intended to encourage, not discourage the discussion.

For my money the discussion is too “left/right.”  I.e., much too much along traditional ideological lines.  It is an ongoing part of the “blame-game” played far too often.  To suggest that the American worker has “priced” himself out of the market–or its equally accusatory counter-part that the the Capitalists have taken the market away, makes it difficult to examine the emerging global realities that are forcing the issue.

There has been an ongoing restructuring of the global workforce for well over 30 years.  Even when, and as, this economic recession ends, it will not end the underlying shifts in the way goods and services are produced and distributed.  As such, we are in for somewhat of another jobless recovery.  As a result, there are lots of people in harm’s way.  The large question is what can be done about it and how quickly can we do it.

I do not think there is any real chance that the restructuring can be stopped–not sure it should be either.  But just as when farmers were forced off the land in Oklahoma and elsewhere, and just as unions came into existence in response to BIG CAPITAL, there is an opportunity for public policy to play an ameliorating role.

In some quarters, that discussion has already started with former Labor Secretary Robert Reich and in various other places among the American intelligentsia including Jared Bernstein’s friends over at the Economic Policy Institute.  I would like to see others join in.

But I fear we do not get very far when the first question we ask and answer is “who’s the bad guy?”

Karen Watts: I like these ideas. For me (personally) I wish to avoid a left/right kind of debate as I feel this gets people into “automatic” thinking and they just start preaching the party line…for whatever party that happens to be for them. I guess my concern about the Americans overpricing themselves out of the market idea is that it is overly simplistic and not solution focused. Okay, some jobs are not coming back. The job market is global. Now how can we and our elected leaders start coming up with creative solutions. My original idea was that the attitude/platitude of “pricing out” was basically a discussion stopper and not starter.

Tom Bishop: I looked up some figures about India, China, and the US in the CIA factbook (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/). The result:
“Have American workers priced themselves out of the job market?”

Among corporate leaders, cable news personalities, business publication editors, and business school professors, this is considered a fair question. Heads nod and faces crinkle in agreement with the general idea that workers in America have gotten themselves into a terrible situation. They’ve paid for expensive college degrees and bought decent suburban houses near the corporate centers of power. They’ve done everything their parents told them. Despite all this, they have to compete harder than ever to find jobs that will pay the bills.

Business leaders do see a problem with this, of course; they often complain that they can’t find workers in America with the right combination of experience, skill, and willingness to work for a wage that fails to feed their children. Corporate leaders gripe about a shortage of US Visas, and of having to find talent overseas, in countries whose labor forces are larger than the US’ entire population. They are forced to find workers who scramble over each other to win business contracts that pay a sum that might buy a week’s groceries in the US.

Now that’s a work ethic, say America’s business thinkers. Why don’t America’s workers have that?

This is the current wisdom in the business world; American workers are fat, lazy, unskilled, unwilling, and overpaid. If they can’t get ahead, it is obviously their own fault.

Drivel.

The economic destruction that has worked its will upon America’s workers over the past four decades does have a source. That source is not as organized as a true conspiracy should be, but it is organized enough to turn this incredible, preposterous idea into truth. The notion that globalization is an unstoppable force moving under its own power, and that there is nothing that can or should be done, is pretty well embedded into the American psyche.

An alternative to this drivel is rarely voiced.

By now, most Americans understand what globalization is. It is either the reason their stock values keep climbing, or for far more, it is the force that threatens the career they once banked their futures on. Corporate and political leaders agree in a nearly monolithic way that globalization is a good thing, even though the opposite becomes clearer to the working and middle classes every day.

Those who dare to speak ill of globalization or suggest fixes are met by accusations of protectionism, divisiveness, and playing the blame game.

This creates a practical challenge; to deal with globalization’s effect in a way that will benefit America’s embattled workforce and its economy, it is necessary to identify the cause. Yet, it is no accident that identifying the cause is akin to belching in the presence of the Queen.

So here goes: the cause is the myopic short-term focus of America’s corporate leaders.

Businesspeople used to plan for the next five to ten years. Today, most leaders don’t look beyond next quarter. That means they focus on cutting costs rather than developing ideas. They look to the quickest, cheapest and easiest way to meet a bid or finish a project, even if it means more wasted effort later on. They seek solutions overseas, regardless of the cost to quality, staff cohesion, or customer loyalty. Future inefficiencies are ignored in favor of immediate financial gain.

This is the very reason that America’s workers have suffered higher long-term unemployment and a reduction in average household income. Because corporate leaders are no longer dedicated to expanding their workforce or building a stable future, workers have suffered a depressed economy and a loss of bargaining power. And the downward spiral continues.

Why is it necessary to identify the cause of this spiral? The reason is simple: any solution is unlikely to benefit everyone. America’s corporate interests are going to have to pay, in the form of reduced short-term profits and stock values.

The right approach is to include them as a partner in the debate, but a very well-founded assumption is that corporate interests will not be honest dealers. They have benefited from the squeezing of America’s workforce for too long, and are dedicated to it continuing.

The solution to helping America’s workforce get back on its feet will look a heck of a lot like protectionism. The populations of the two most populous countries, India and China, outweigh the US population by eight times. Their workforces outnumber US workers by ten times. Yet, their average GDP per capita is about a tenth of the US’. Nobody needs a calculator to see that the majority of America’s workers will have to sink to unimagined levels of squalor to bring the workers of India and China to parity.

That leaves out billions of workers in emerging nations around the world. Clearly, America’s corporate leaders are not interested in giving up this joyride. We have to make them give it up.

- We have to force legislation from the current administration that ends the freedom of outsourcing.

- We also have to force legislation that enables and encourages the growth of unions at the expense of corporations.

- We have to embrace the insourced laborers who have come here for a better life, but are treated by companies as fodder for industrial and agricultural production, as well as to put downward pressure on wages.

- We have to force legislation that penalizes companies for moving headquarters offshore to avoid taxation.

- We have to force legislation that either raises capital gains taxes or treats them as earned income, to discourage the paying of dividends and encourage reinvestment instead.

- We have to force legislation that repeals the portions of the Fair Credit Reporting Act that allow companies to review credit ratings in hiring practices.

The result of all of these measures will be to embolden America’s workers to demand fair compensation and benefits for the work they do. They must have a foundation on which to demand career stability for themselves and their families. The long-term result is the strengthening of America’s economy, boosting its ability to develop ideas and build badly-needed innovations that will drive industries.

Corporations will not be willing to lose their certain short-term gains in order to reap uncertain long-term growth. That is why their interests are not part of this equation. They own the current conventional wisdom, largely because they created it.

It is time to create a new wisdom that favors the working and middle classes. If that’s playing the blame game, so be it.

Cryn Johannsen: Regardless of how you see it, there are institutional inefficiencies with regard to the way in which capitalism operates. When I think of these arguments vis-a-vis the student lending crisis in this country, it’s frightening to me.

I possess so many degrees from the most prestigious universities in this country (U. of Chicago, Brown, and I was also an exchange scholar at Harvard), and at this point I can’t get a job in this country to save my life! So I am fleeing the country for better opportunities AND pay abroad.

But what about the student loan debtors who can’t do that? Their jobs are being shipped abroad and will never come back. This situation is affecting countless industries. (I consider myself lucky that I can take my skills abroad – many of the people for whom I advocate can’t).

Also, when you think about the fact that the vast of majority of the wealth in this country is controlled by a tiny percentage of people, then you can, in my humble opinion, point fingers at a system and particular individuals. Nevertheless, it’s a matter of looking ahead and insisting that we shift the system, so that it’s more equitable. I couldn’t care less if my argument seems out-dated for academia. I’ve spent plenty of time discussing and writing about the nuances of post-industrial capitalism, and frankly power structures haven’t changed that dramatically. That’s coming from someone who appreciates post-modernism and every day life theories.

Bill Holland: You have hit on several issues that are near and dear.  Your words are kind when you say there are certain “institutional inefficiencies” in how capitalism works as can be seen in the student lending crisis.  That program is a violation of the most fundamental of the rules regarding capitalism–i.e., capital is rewarded or punished based on the risk to which it is exposed.  In the case of student loans, the government takes the risks and the banks get the reward at no risks to them at all.  It may be among the worse of all tricks banks are allowed to play.

Oh yes, it would be nice if there were some explicit agreement that those who sacrifice and attend school have jobs waiting at the other end of their workplace hiatus.  Truth is, there are no jobs reserved with their names on them–never have been and never will be.  Perhaps you are referring to that golden post WW II era when companies allowed universities to do their screening for them by accepting the degree as the credential for entry into their white collar jobs.

Universities (except for places like Reed) accepted the revenue from student generated demand for vocationally relevant education without ever fully accepting the responsibility.   I am afraid that the link between a degree and employment is little more than a marriage of convenience.  As Bernstein has argued, the spoils of globalization go disproportionately to those whose skills often have little to do with their formal education. It is distinctly possible that the most formally educated among us are destined for high unemployment rates.

The collective solution lies in pubic policy–retraining, better controls on global trade, and the realization that the outcomes of capitalism should not be a substitute for reasoned public policy.

For individuals, the solution is different.  The new currency of the realm is something I call “value-creation.”  The least among us has the opportunity to create value for others–be they employers, people we choose to help or goods and services we offer for sale.  And this is just the beginning of the new order of things.

A full expose here is inappropriate.  It is the subject of my next book, “Cracking the Employment Code:  Nine New Rules for Finding White Collar Work.”   Much of it is aimed at those caught in the paradigm shift between education as a ticket for entry and  a refrain from larger and larger numbers of graduating college seniors who wonder ”Now that I have my degree, where is my career?”
Tom Bishop: Bill, your points on this helped a great deal in what I wrote and sent to Karen last evening. It is critical to avoid simplistic politics and focus on solutions as you have. I only disagree on one point: the fault should be identified, since the current economic structure will have to change severely, and the people who will be most upset are powerful enough to have created the structure in the first place.

The original question was whether workers did this to themselves. I find the question itself unacceptable. It shows that the people responsible for what has happened have already created a frame that should never have been considered reasonable. Any debate has to undercut that frame as its first action.

Bill Holland: Tom Bishop–right on!

Barbara Ehrenreich: sounds really good to me, Tom. But by “public health insurance” do you mean Medicaid?

My only big issue with Reich: He has argued for so long that the cure for everything is more education, apparently not noticing the destruction of the educated middle class. Or has he changed his mind on this?

Not that I’m not all for more education, and this weekend’s tea party convention certainly showed the need for it.

Karen Watts: I think Barbara is hitting on the issue that Cryn and I have been talking about in other blogs and venues online. For years we have been hammering into everyone’s heads that education is the path to success. This has led thousands of people to take on debt they will never be able to conquer because when they enter the job market with their newly minted degrees there are no jobs available to them. Education is not a cure-all as we have discussed at length. Young graduates must face the fact that traditional entry level white collar jobs have been outsourced and older graduates realize that a new degree does not negate an “old” face in a society that still worships youth.

I filled out the “contact me” form on Reich’s blog asking him to clarify his ideas on the Dec. blog in question.

This is an excerpt from Alternet.org. Click on link to read entire article.

As welcome as it was, the removal of George W. Bush was not enough to cure what ails us. It goes to the root of our political system.

There is a widespread consensus that the decade we’ve just brought to a close was singularly disastrous for the country: the list of scandals, crises and crimes is so long that events that in another context would stand out as genuine lowlights — Enron and Arthur Andersen’s collapse, the 2003 Northeast blackout, the unsolved(!) anthrax attacks — are mere afterthoughts.

We still don’t have a definitive name for this era, though Paul Krugman’s 2003 book The Great Unraveling captures well the sense of slow, inexorable dissolution; and the final crisis of the era, what we call the Great Recession, similarly expresses the sense that even our disasters aren’t quite epic enough to be cataclysmic. But as a character in Tracy Letts’s 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, August: Osage County, says, “Dissipation is actually much worse than cataclysm.”

American progressives were the first to identify that something was deeply wrong with the direction the country was heading in and the first to provide a working hypothesis for the cause: George W. Bush. During the initial wave of antiwar mobilization, in 2002, much of the ire focused on Bush himself. But as the decade stretched on, the causal account of the country’s problems grew outward in concentric circles: from Bush to his administration (most significantly, Cheney) to the Republican Party to — finally (and not inaccurately) — the entire project of conservative governance.

From Robert Reich’s blog via Alternet.org:

I wish conservatives would stop complaining about big government and start worrying about the real problem – small democracy. I wish we’d all worry more about our incredible shrinking democracy.

It seems as if more and more decisions that should be made democratically are being shunted off somewhere to a few people who make them in back rooms. Which programs should be cut, which entitlements pared back, and what taxes raised in order to reduce the long-term budget deficit? Hmmm. Let’s convene a commission and have them decide.

Commissions are a default mechanism when politicians want to hand off difficult issues to “experts.” But reducing the long-term budget deficit has almost nothing to do with expertise. It’s about our nations’ values and priorities. Nothing could be more central to the democratic process.

Democracy requires at least three things: (1) Important decisions are made in the open. (2) The public and its representatives have an opportunity to debate them, so the decisions can be revised in light of what the public discovers and wants. And (3) those who make the big decisions are accountable to voters.

But these principles are in retreat, and I say this not just because of the proposed deficit commission.

The notorious Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) began with a virtual blank check from Congress. Treasury officials then secretly decided which companies were to receive hundreds of billions of dollars. Why these particular entities were chosen and not others remains a mystery. For months, the Treasury didn’t even disclose the identities of the major banks that giant insurer AIG repaid with its bailout money – 100 cents on each dollar AIG owed them.

The Federal Reserve, meanwhile, has gone far beyond its traditional role of setting short-term interest rates. It has bought up massive amounts of debt – mortgage debt, Treasury bills, and debt instruments emanating several public agencies, many of them supporting a wide range of private entities. No one outside the Fed knows the ultimate beneficiaries of all this government backing, the criteria used by the Fed for making these commitments, or even how much debt the Fed is buying.

Even if the economic emergency justified such secrecy – and it’s hard to see exactly why it would – the emergency is over, and yet closed-door decision making continues. Will Treasury use what’s left of TARP to help stimulate more jobs and, if so, how? Will the Fed stop buying mortgage-backed securities? No one knows.

American historian, playwright and social activist Howard Zinn died January 27, 2010, aged 87. His light will shine bright into the far off future. A new socially just world will owe a great debt to Howard and others like him who gave so much of themselves for us. — ZNet Staff