Lydia Howell: Whether it’s debt-ridden college graduates working as baristas or small town youth with only fast-food and Wal-Mart as post-high school career options, high unemployment keeps a volunteer military ranks full.
The Real News on Jobs
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Robert Reich: Conservative economists have it wrong. The underlying problem isn’t that so many Americans have priced themselves out of the global/high-tech labor market. It’s that they’re getting a smaller and smaller share of the pie.
Shock Wave Coming
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Brent Budowsky: The economic and political shock wave will be momentous as budget politics will increase joblessness and reveal with brutality that Washington is out of touch with heartland America and dominated by special interests that voters deplore.
Mandatory E-Verify Is Not All It’s Cracked Up to Be
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Michele Waslin: While everyone agrees that high unemployment levels must be addressed, simplistic measures like mandating E-Verify are not going to open up jobs for millions of unemployed workers.
The Jobs Report, and America’s Two Economies
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Robert Reich: With corporate profits are through the roof, the Dow is flirting with 12,000, Wall Street paychecks are fat again, and big corporations are sitting on more than $1 trillion in cash, you’d expect jobs be coming back. But you’d be wrong.
John’s Lament
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John Blue: Chattel slavery may be gone for good, but today’s economic slavery may be little better; with the too-high unemployment and foreclosure rates and union membership ever declining, a lot of people “owe their soul to the Company store” and who among them is so bold to challenge their bondage?
Will “Stepping on the Gas” of Immigration Enforcement Drive Us into a Brick Wall?
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Michele Waslin: Most importantly, worksite enforcement can only be truly effective if done in conjunction with comprehensive immigration reform—something President Obama alluded to in the State of the Union Address last night and Rep. Zoe Lofgren addressed in today’s hearing.
The Forgotten Jobless and Our Future
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Mark Vorpahl: As in the 1930s, today we must organize in a way that creates unity between the employed and unemployed. To start, we can organize the largest possible union-led demonstrations to realize this unity in the streets.
The Real Economic Lesson China Could Teach Us
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Robert Reich: China is eating our lunch. Why? It has a national economic strategy designed to create more and better jobs. We have global corporations designed to make money for shareholders.
Wealthy Celebrity Athletes Don’t Need the President’s Backing—But I Know Who Does
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Jasmyne Cannick: Rather than call Eagles owner Jeffrey Laurie, the President could have really made an impact by addressing employers throughout America on the importance of giving all ex-prisoners—regardless of their football playing ability—a second chance and freeing them from a life without the possibility of employment.
The U.S. Economy in 2011
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Robert Reich: The two American economies — the Big Money economy and the Average Working Family economy — will continue to diverge. Corporate profits will continue to rise, as will the stock market. But typical wages will go nowhere, joblessness will remain high, the ranks of the long-term unemployed will continue to rise, the housing recovery will remain stalled, and consumer confidence will sag.
Why America’s Two Economies Continue to Drift Apart
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Robert Reich: Nothing is trickling down to the Average Worker economy. Job growth is still anemic. Unemployment won’t get down to pre-recession levels for 20 years. And almost half of October’s new jobs were in temporary help.
The Real Deficits
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Lydia Howell: A brutal reality is undeniable in the fight over the Bush-era tax cuts and expiring unemployment benefits: American democracy isn’t working for everyday people — that is, the non-wealthy.
The American Jobs Emergency Requires Action
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Robert Reich: Not only do we need extended unemployment benefits. We need a new WPA, modeled after the WPA of the Great Depression, to put jobless Americans to work. We need a national infrastructure bank to rebuild our crumbling highways and water and sewer systems, thereby putting additional people back to work.
Alarmed & Angry at Christmas Time
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Carl Bloice: Reflect on the sudden, shocking awareness that that one third of the members of the U.S. House of Representatives are prepared to let 2 million people – victims of an economic crisis not of their making – face the holidays with no income.
Boosting the Economy—One Big Screen TV at a Time
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Walter Brasch: Overall, America is slowly on the path to recovery. But, to those who lost their jobs and then their homes, it just doesn’t seem that way.
With Federal Benefits Set to Expire, Unemployed Workers Face Shrinking Safety Net
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Marian Wang: Not extending federal unemployment insurance, it noted, would cause 2 million unemployed workers to be cut off from federal unemployment benefits by the end of the year.
National Fiscal Hypocrisy Week
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Robert Reich: The best outcome would be an agreement to extend the tax cuts for the bottom 99 percent, for two years. This would stimulate the economy in the short term when it most needs it, and reduce the long-term deficit.
Why Poverty Spreads Across America
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Sherwood Ross: Pockets of poverty, like the sores of some malignant disease, are spreading across America, as its states and cities go broke and bankrupt.
Reconsidering Japan…Reconsidering Paul Krugman
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Steven Hill: No one has been more influential in defining this narrative than New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman.
Unless Congress Acts, A Bleak Holiday Season for Millions
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Carl Bloice: If Congress does not vote over the next week and a half to re-authorize federal unemployment benefits through next year, before they expire November 30, nearly 2 million women and men and their families will face a dismal holiday season.
Why the Lame Duck Congress Must Extend Jobless Benefits For Hard-Hit Families But Not Tax Cuts For the Rich
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Robert Reich: Don’t extend the Bush tax cuts to the wealthy. Give unemployment benefits to people who need them.
Amazing Germany’s Declining Unemployment: How Do They Do It?
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Steve Hill: the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel not only pursued different economic policies than the Obama administration, but Germany also has a greater degree of economic democracy than the U.S.
African American Youth Joblessness and the “New Normal”
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Carl Bloice: If it remains almost impossible for a couple of generations of young women and men to earn a decent living, it is calamitous for black people and the country. They cannot become the personification of the “new normal.”
Meg Whitman, Job Killer
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Craig Williams: The countless ads by Whitman in the current California gubernatorial race lead most people to believe that she’s been creating lots of jobs. But when you take a close look at what her company EBAY actually does, on balance she may well be the jobs killer.
The Fed’s New Bubble (Masquerading as a Jobs Program)
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Robert Reich: The latest jobs bill coming out of Washington isn’t really a bill at all. It’s the Fed’s attempt to keep long-term interest rates low by pumping even more money into the economy (“quantiative easing” in Fed-speak).
Why It’s Foolish to Weaken the Dollar to Create Jobs
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Robert Reich:I keep hearing the only way we’re going to get jobs back any time soon is with a weak dollar. Baloney.
Republican Economics as Social Darwinism
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Robert Reich: John Boehner, the Republican House leader who will become Speaker if Democrats lose control of the House in the upcoming midterms, recently offered his solution to the current economic crisis: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmer, liquidate real estate. It will purge the rottenness out of the system. People will work harder, lead a more moral life.”
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