It appears that perhaps ironically the only solution for help for the long term unemployed – the 99ers – in getting their Tier 5 Unemployment Benefits enacted is not through congressional means but by Presidential Executive Order. There are currently 31 million unemployed professionals in America, with hundreds of thousands more being added every month to that number. Of these there are those – the 99ers – those whom have been unemployed for over six months to three years, unable to find work in this “jobless recovery,” many of whom have exhausted all of their benefits (regular, EUI Tier 1-4, and Federal EB), and have faced the last three months without a lifeline to help pay with their bills and buy food, or even keep a roof over their heads.
Congress is out of touch with Main Street. Several congressmen on both sides of the isle have charged the long term unemployed with being slothful and unwilling to find work. Insulated from this economy by six figure salaries, paid vacation, and benefits up the wazoo, they have lost touch with the hardworking common man and woman who live paycheck to paycheck, pay taxes these politicians don’t, and who now face the loss of wages for being laid off or downsized by corporations moving their business overseas to save on overhead in taxes and regulations overseas markets don’t face. Thanks a lot guys. You over-regulate business, hike taxes for everyone, and then force a health care reform bill down everybody’s throats which you know will incur costs on everyone they don’t need or want at this time, and then expect businesses to grow and jobs not go overseas.
Then after you get your vaunted health care reform bill, you throw every constituent you claimed to be for under the bus by ignoring their plight and claiming that now you are fiscally conservative and want to save the taxpayers’ money. Then you insult US by overlooking President Obama’s taking two billion of our tax dollars and investing it in an off-shore deep water drilling scheme for a Brazilian oil company for which George Soros has invested a large sum of his capital with, while placing a six month moratorium on off shore drilling here at home. That’s just great to know that you and the president “are on our side.” Right.
The Labor Department reported that the number of new claims for unemployment compensation jumped to 472,000 last week, the highest figure in several months. In the two and a half weeks since the 1st of June, when the last extension expired, some 903,000 workers have seen their benefits cut off. By June 26, that number will top 1.2 million. The vote was taken under Senate rules, not to pass the legislation itself, but to “waive budgetary discipline” and allow passage by a simple majority rather than 60 votes out of 100. The result was 45 in favor and 52 against, with three senators absent. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had already abandoned an effort to adopt a cloture motion, closing debate, for lack of the necessary 60 votes. Three months ago a similar extension bill passed the Senate easily. This is an election year, and many in congress facing reelection are misreading the cries of average Americans, many of whom are involved with the T.E.A. Parties across the nation. The result is that a Democrat-controlled Congress that rushed through a $787 billion bailout of Wall Street in October 2008 in a matter of days, (much of which went to overseas private bank accounts of the nation’s most wealthy and connected persons) and authorized a further financial windfall to the banks and speculators five months later in the ARRA (Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act), cannot bring itself to support even the smallest of subsistence for the unemployed workers who are the victims, not the perpetrators, of the current economic crisis the talking heads call a “jobless recovery.”
Our political leaders think that the calls for congress to rein in spending, to give the people a voice and a say by listening to them and not passing legislature to promote political agendas, include throwing the sick, the elderly, the unemployed, the long term unemployed, and the disabled under the bus. This includes liberal Democrats and Republicans as well as fiscal hawks within both parties. Again, these people do not know the mood of the American electorate. They have misread US. This is not what the T.E.A. Party is about. The American people want their government to cut spending, and stop hundreds of billions of tax dollars in foreign aid to questionable governments. This administration last year authorized almost a billion dollars to the terrorist HAMAS in Gaza, and is seeking hundreds of millions more this year. This while, there are thirty-one million Americans unemployed, and a congress unwilling to give them a life-line as they increase taxes on small businesses across the nation, and forcing them to add more to the rolls of the unemployed by laying more workers off in order to stay in business.
Oh, but the alphabet soup media and the virtual press on the Internet keep giving US the spin of all spins by telling US that we are in a recovery. Every other week, we hear or read stories written by “experts” who tell US that things are beginning to “Look up” even as more and more businesses close down, more and more people are laid off, and the stories of a looming depression around US, that we see, that we feel in our pockets, in shuttered businesses and empty lots all around US are seen more and more throughout areas that were once vibrant. There is something wrong with this picture. We are being told that things are beginning to get better, and they’re not. Everyone you talk to tells you the same story; things are not getting better, more and more people are losing their jobs, businesses are cutting back. And things like food and fuel, and goods and services costs more and more each day. You go to your local supermarket and this state of flux is all around you. One week the prices are at one level, a week later they’ve gone up. We’ve been told that times are getting better since the beginning of this year, but no matter how much they spin it, it’s not getting better and you and your neighbor know it.
It appears though that the media and the politicians do not. Remember the 1980s when Ronald Reagan was in his first term? We were coming out of a double digit inflationary Recession, and unemployment was just below ten per cent. Back then, the media were full of stories on unemployment, and everyone seemed obsessed by it. Every day they speculated whether it would spell the end of Ronald Reagan's presidency. On a daily basis we were spoon fed stories by the media – CBS, NBC, ABC, and the fledgling CNN on the rate of unemployment around the nation, and how unacceptable it was. Today we are seeing a tremendous difference between Washington's gut-level response to unemployment and the response back during the recession of 1983. Almost daily today we are being given skewed reports of how the economy is beginning to turn even though they are still bad, but not quite, because within these reports there are phrases which are placed in to provide the reader with the belief that even though things are bad and getting worse, these are but “hiccups” which are “slowing down the economic recovery” as though there were a recovery at all. There isn’t, and they know it, no matter how they spin it, they know they’re lying to you, and they know that you know it, but they don’t care, and neither do the politicians
Almost ten per cent unemployment was unacceptable back in 1983, why is it acceptable today? Why is the media giving this administration and this congress a pass this time around? The plight of the 99ers – those who have been unemployed more than six months, some as much as three years, is all but ignored by the alphabet soup media. It’s almost as though they do not exist. To the media the ten plus million 99ers are a non entity. The government doesn’t include them in their unemployment figures, so neither do they. And since this government has abandoned them, so has the media. The 99ers do not exist as far as this government and this media and this president is concerned. The shattered lives, the broken dreams, the loss of home, the destitution and hardship these people and many more is a forgotten statistic which is now discarded since these people have ceased to be. The media which were on top of such stories during Reagan’s first term is now silent under Obama’s. The obvious difference between the Reagan administration and today is the mainstream media -- they hated Reagan, whereas they will not criticize the Obama administration. Stories on employment have been incredibly few and far between, even skewed in many places. The Washington Times recently published a story titled, Unemployment Fell in 37 States, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jun/18/unemployment-falls-37-states-may/print/
. It’s as though the mass media and the “free” printed press in America have become an adjunct of this administration, dressing up the figures and spinning the news in order to put some lipstick and some perfume on this ugly stinking pig. But no matter how much they try to dress it up, it’s still an ugly, stinking pig.
.Regardless of how you and your neighbors feel, they politicians and the mass media believe that you can do precious little about it. Or so they think. All of the House and much of the Senate is up for reelection this year. This is where our strength lies. If they think that cutting off the unemployed and especially the long term unemployed – the 99ers – will placate angry Americans, they’re grossly mistaken. Fiscal conservatism has nothing to do with throwing needy Americans under the bus, it has more to do with wanting our elected representatives to stop profligate spending on unnecessary projects made with local machineries created to perpetuate political dynasties back home. It has to do with corruption, with runaway federal power, about the encroachment of an imperious presidency looming tyrannically over the futures of every American as it seeks to regulate, tax, impose its will, and exceed the limits the Constitution has placed on it. This is what it’s all about, and not about disregarding our needy here at home.
The fact remains that the poor, destitute, elderly, and infirmed, and yes, the long term unemployed; must not be political pawns for self-serving politicians to use in order to get their spending bills passed, and once passed, thrown under the bus as inconveniences for those who claimed previously to support their cause. This is the hard lesson which everyone needs to learn and learn well. Government cannot be trusted, and big government swallows those it considers inconveniences.________________________________________
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