Category Archives: U.S. Economy

Rutgers Students Take the Lead in Fighting Budget Cuts in NJ

by budget cuts, U.S. Economy •

The budget cuts in New Jersey are already beginning to impact higher education in various ways (increased enrollment numbers and higher class sizes, etc.). For months now, at my campus, I’ve witnessed my coworkers fret and fume about the cuts, while student activists have, to be honest, been timid and hesitant in their response, at best.

Today was a statewide day of action against the budget cuts. At TCNJ, several students from Student Government and groups like the Progressive Student Alliance (PSA) solicited signatures on letters from their peers; letters that they said would be used in their lobbying efforts in Trenton. Fair enough.

But it’s the students at Rutgers, led by a dynamic team of progressive activists, who are leading the way. And it ain’t rocket science….

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1

The new “normal”?

by Media, U.S. Economy • Tags: ,

It’s not all that radical anymore to talk about the high unemployment rates in the U.S. Mainstream newspapers are doing it all the time. Reality, it seems, is something that even the corporate press cannot always ignore. This is from today’s New York Times:

The New York Times
BUSINESS | September 20, 2010
For the Unemployed Over 50, Fears of Never Working Again
By MOTOKO RICH
A growing number of those who desperately need to work fear they have already been shut out of the work force.

This is not to gloat about the exposure that poverty and unemployment are getting in the media, but to point out that in times like these, there’s a gradual process of redefining “normality” itself. The more chatter we are exposed to about the Great Recession, the mortgage crisis, home foreclosures, layoffs and “furloughs,” etc., the more “normal” this state of affairs begins to seem. Sometimes we refer to it as getting “desensitized”; talk of “hard times” becomes blasé, and as time goes by, we are all expected to simply hunker down and get used to getting by with less and less.


In the United States, unemployment fluctuated ...

Image via Wikipedia

One of the key reasons why this tends to happen is that the challenges to this redefinition of normality are few and far between. Moreover, when such challenges are launched, they receive very little play in the mainstream media. So we hear very little about people who are in fact fighting back against the new status quo that the media and the politicians want us to accept.

But imagine for a minute what it would look like if, along with such reports about the desperation of people like Patricia Reid – the 57 year old former Boeing auditor and analyst that the Times article profiles - we also encountered stories like this one about workers at a fast-food chain in Minneapolis, who decided they’d had enough, got organized, and formed a union. Jake Foucault, one of the workers quoted in this article, says: “We’re tired of being ignored and degraded at job after low-wage job. We’re tired of being expendable.”

Don’t you think these words would resonate with Patricia Reid and the thousands like her who face the very real prospect of being unemployed for several years to come, if not the rest of their lives? Imagine what might be the impact of having extensive coverage of stories of workers’ struggles in all of our mainstream media. How would it change the way people respond to the deepening economic crisis?

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Poverty in the U.S. of A.

by U.S. Economy • Tags: , ,

Hope you’re sitting down as you read this.

If you’ve been following the daily news, you’ll know that the government released its latest poverty figures yesterday, and for people who believe that we all live in one big happy middle-class family, the figures came as a huge shock. Of course, these were mainly the talking heads and pundits on the mainstream TV news channels and the rest of the corporate media–for most regular folks, I doubt that it would have come as much of a surprise.

So, what’s the main headline? Well, the poverty rate has shot up. One out of every seven Americans is now below the official poverty line!

1 out of every 7. That’s 46 million people.
And what is the official poverty line? It is artificially low (every government does this–in India recently there have been huge debates over who is and is not to be included in the poverty estimates). Imagine this: the U.S. government defines “poverty” as a paltry $21,954 for a family of four! What this means is that, if you are in a family of four that earns, let’s say, $22,000 a year, you don’t count as being poor! In this day and age, does anyone think that a family of four, living on 25, 30, or even 40,000 a year is living comfortably and isn’t poor?!

What a joke farce travesty tragedy.

Here are some of the other egregious numbers that the government census reveals, according to a report:

  • Among the working-age population, ages 18 to 65, poverty rose from 11.7 percent to 12.9 percent. That puts it at the highest since the 1960s, when the government launched a war on poverty that expanded the federal role in social welfare programs from education to health care.
  • Poverty rose among all race and ethnic groups, but stood at higher levels for blacks and Hispanics. The number of Hispanics in poverty increased from 23.2 percent to 25.3 percent; for blacks it increased from 24.7 percent to 25.8 percent. The number of whites in poverty rose from 8.6 percent to 9.4 percent.
  • Child poverty rose from 19 percent to 20.7 percent.

So in the land of milk and honey, one out of five children live in poverty.

On a related note, check out this graph that comes to us from The Washington Independent, via The Daily KOS website. The data itself is fine–what I find fascinating (and infuriating) is the way that journalists continue to be tethered to the term “middle class,” even when describing egregious poverty rates! What on earth does “middle class” even mean on this graph??! Everyone but the very rich??

From the Daily KOS

"Middle Class"? Come again?

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