Scott Wong - The Obama administration has trotted out a parade of top officials to push the long-shot DREAM Act in recent days, even as tax, spending and defense issues dominate the lame duck session.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan this week said the immigration bill would enable thousands of young, undocumented immigrants go on to college, while Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano argued it would help her agency enforce immigration laws.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently said the DREAM Act would boost military recruitment since the legislation would provide a path to citizenship for some young illegal immigrants who attend college or join the military for two years.
And on Friday, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke made the case the DREAM Act makes good economic sense. He said 65,000 students graduate from publicly funded schools each year but can’t go to college or get good jobs because of their illegal status.
“The American taxpayer has invested in them, and unless we pass the DREAM Act we will keep throwing away this hard-earned investment,” Locke told reporters on a conference call. Also, a quarter of start-up companies that eventually went public in the past 15 years were started by immigrants, he said, meaning some of these students could “develop the next Google or Intel.”
The latest push comes as Hispanic groups and immigration advocates step up pressure on the White House and Congress to pass the long-stalled immigration bill before Republicans take over the House and gain more power in the Senate next month. Democrats are listening, given that Hispanics were credited with helping Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) fend off a tough election challenge last month and will be crucial to Obama keeping the White House in 2012. “We have a team at the White House working on this every day. The president himself is engaged,” said Cecelia Munoz, the White House’s intergovernmental affairs director and a longtime immigration advocate. “We are going stay absolutely engaged in this as we wait for congressional action.”
The House is expected to consider the measure next week, though chances of Senate passage remain slim.
All 42 Senate Republicans pledged this week to filibuster any legislation before the chamber deals with expiring Bush-era tax cuts and funding the government. With time running out in the lame-duck session, Senate Democrats also want to ratify the START nuclear-arms treaty and pass a massive defense bill that includes a repeal of the military’s ban on openly gay service members.
And even though new versions of the bill aim to address critics concerns and build broader support, it doesn’t appear that Reid has secured the 60 votes needed to move the DREAM Act forward.
Opponents say the bill would provide amnesty for lawbreakers and lead to more illegal immigration. On top of that, the measure is filled with loopholes, said Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee.
“All they have to do is really just attend college for two years. They do not have to have a degree. Only a sliver of those will use the military. Ninety percent plus would use the college type and degree program to gain this amnesty,” Sessions said during an appearance on Fox News Thursday night. “It's just not the right policy. It would in fact be just the opposite of what message we should be sending, which is that we're going to end the lawlessness at the border and create a lawful system of immigration and stop rewarding illegal immigration.”
Showing posts with label Obama adminstration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Obama adminstration. Show all posts
Friday, December 3, 2010
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Obama's New Health Care Rationing Czar
There is an interesting article in CNSNews about Obama’s nominee to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Donald Berwick, who reveals his passion for central planning and all things socialized.The article links to a June 2009 interview with Berwick in Biotechnology Healthcare. Some snippets from the article:
In a June 2009 interview in Biotechnology Healthcare, Berwick was asked: “Critics of CER (Comparative Effectiveness Research) have said that it will lead to rationing of health care.”
He answered: “We can make a sensible social decision and say, ‘Well, at this point, to have access to a particular additional benefit [new drug or medical intervention] is so expensive that our taxpayers have better use for those funds.’ We make those decisions all the time. The decision is not whether or not we will ration care—the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”
In the same interview, he also said, “The social budget is limited—we have a limited resource pool. It makes terribly good sense to at least know the price of an added benefit, and at some point we might say nationally, regionally, or locally that we wish we could afford it, but we can’t.”
Berwick also talked about his romantic view of Britain’s socialized health care system on page 213 of a report he wrote entitled, “A Transatlantic Review of the NHS at 60,” published on July 26, 2008.
“Cynics beware: I am romantic about the National Health Service; I love it,” Berwick wrote. “All I need to do to rediscover the romance is to look at health care in my own country.”
Lastly, in the 2008 report, Berwick wrote, “Any health care funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized, and humane must — must — redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and less fortunate.” Here is the 2008 speech where Berwick talks about the “darkness of private enterprise” and lauds a politically accountable system. He adds that “excellent health care is, by definition, redistributional.” Hat tip to Mark Fee for the article.
In a June 2009 interview in Biotechnology Healthcare, Berwick was asked: “Critics of CER (Comparative Effectiveness Research) have said that it will lead to rationing of health care.”
He answered: “We can make a sensible social decision and say, ‘Well, at this point, to have access to a particular additional benefit [new drug or medical intervention] is so expensive that our taxpayers have better use for those funds.’ We make those decisions all the time. The decision is not whether or not we will ration care—the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”
In the same interview, he also said, “The social budget is limited—we have a limited resource pool. It makes terribly good sense to at least know the price of an added benefit, and at some point we might say nationally, regionally, or locally that we wish we could afford it, but we can’t.”
Berwick also talked about his romantic view of Britain’s socialized health care system on page 213 of a report he wrote entitled, “A Transatlantic Review of the NHS at 60,” published on July 26, 2008.
“Cynics beware: I am romantic about the National Health Service; I love it,” Berwick wrote. “All I need to do to rediscover the romance is to look at health care in my own country.”
Lastly, in the 2008 report, Berwick wrote, “Any health care funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized, and humane must — must — redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and less fortunate.” Here is the 2008 speech where Berwick talks about the “darkness of private enterprise” and lauds a politically accountable system. He adds that “excellent health care is, by definition, redistributional.” Hat tip to Mark Fee for the article.
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Dr. Cass Sunstein Wants To Turn Off The Lights In America
Jerry Mazza - Paul Joseph Watson, a writer at Prison Planet whom I greatly respect, gave us a reminder Monday May 17th that Obama Czar Wants Mandatory Government Propaganda On Political Websites. The Big Brother Czar is also a Harvard Professor currently dishing up the pabulum for Obama’s White House that “conspiracy theories” should be banned from the Internet; so much for Harvard, Czar-Dr. Cass Sunstein and intellectual freedom.
Sunstein’s tonality is reminiscent of Joseph Goebbels New Years Address for 1939.
What’s more Sunstein wants to “legally force” Americans “to do what’s best for our society” and water down their free speech (granted by the US Constitution), by mandating websites with pop-up links to opposing government propaganda be “forcibly included on political blogs.” Could we have such pop-ups when the President is speaking, Henry Kissinger, Bibi Netanyahu, AIPAC, Larry Silverstein, NIST, Fox News, Lloyd Blankfein?
Coincidentally, the also Harvard educated Constitutional lawyer now President, Barack Obama, agrees with Sunstein and has knighted him “Head of Information Technology in the White House for ‘Conspiracy Theories,’” i.e. any political thought that doesn’t regurgitate establishment views, like Obama’s ties to the CIA at Columbia University and after. Those who talk truth to power will be taxed or banned. I hear the clicking of boot heels as Sunstein speaks and I write.
In fact, Sunstein’s “thinking” came from a rather sullied “White Paper,” in which he talks about countering “dangerous ideas” and “taking those who disseminate such theories” to where? Prisons like Hitler’s camps, Stalin’s Siberian gulags.
These dangerous ideas and/or theories would include “some held by the vast majorities of Americans,” such as the incredible body of facts that prove the JFK assassination was part of a wider plot, including the CIA, Big Oil, the Mafia, the defense industry, and a combination of assassins. Sunstein is such a patent ploy for the New World Order that he should wear an “NWO” armband, perhaps a skull and bones on his lapel.
Sunstein adds to his hit list that believing “global warming is a deliberate fraud” is another theory government censorship should stomp its black boot on. Frankly, whether you or I believe in global warming or not is our business and constitutional right, and not his. Sunstein calls “false and dangerous” the idea that exposure to sunlight is healthy, despite certain medical experts that agree prolonged exposure reduces risk of developing certain cancers. Again, whether it does or doesn’t is a matter for open discussion in a democratic society. Choices of credence should be made by individual physicians and lay people according to their patients and health.
Basically, this crypto-Nazi wants to write into law that government should dictate “the very nature of reality to Americans and that their opinions can only be voiced at best when accompanied by mandatory federal propaganda or at worst that Americans can be silenced entirely by federal decree,” as Watson writes. He also points out that our Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan argued “that the government can ban books and political pamphlets.” What’s going on there at Harvard (where Kagan served as law school Dean) that cries out for such repression? Tom Paine must be turning over in his grave.
Frankly, Sunstein’s tonality is reminiscent of Joseph Goebbels New Years Address for 1939. “This is Goebbels’… address to Germany, delivered on 31 December 1938. He reviews the past year, recalling repeatedly that Austria had been incorporated into Germany. Despite his claim that complainers are not worth dealing with, he devotes a major part of the speech to denouncing those who failed to share his faith in Adolf Hitler….”
The “complainers” that Goebbels was referencing were the intellectuals, writers, journalists, activists, the Internet bloggers and questioners of their day, who had criticized Hitler’s barbaric behavior, including the burning of the Reichstag, which Hitler and the Nazis blamed on the vision-impaired, Dutch left-wing radical Marinus van der Lubbe, who later was tried by them and beheaded. Or course, after successfully lying that the communists, not the Nazis under Goebbels direction did it, Hitler went on to create the “Enabling Act” which enabled the Nazis to strip away most of the civil rights of Germans, as did George Bush’s renewed PATRIOTACT for Americans, and which this author would like to see banned forever from our laws.
But after praising the “miracles” [read violence] that brought the Nazis to power, Goebbels goes on to say, “This ability to believe is rather weak in some circles, above all in those with money and education. They may trust more in pure cold reason than a glowing idealistic heart. Our so-called intellectuals do not like to hear this, but it is true anyway. They know so much that in the end they do not know what to do with their wisdom. They can see the past, but not much of the present, and nothing at all of the future. Their imagination is insufficient to deal with a distant goal in a way such that one already thinks it achieved.” I assume that distant, imagined goal was the fall of the Third Reich a decade later, leaving Germany in ruins, poverty and disgrace, a path on which the US may be dangerously in its pursuit to world hegemony.
Goebbels continues, “They [the complainers] were also unable to believe in the victory of National Socialism while the National Socialist movement was still fighting for power. They are as little able today to believe in the greatness of our national German future. They perceive only what they can see, but not what is happening, and what will happen.”
We perceive only what they see, like the red nanothermite dust in the ruins of Ground Zero, the high-powered aerosolized military explosive that took the towers down on 9/11. But then, we also see what has happened as a result, the creation of the War on Terror, blamed on the Muslim’s, Osama bin Laden and box-cutter carrying hijackers, which lies gave us the right to start our ongoing havoc, still running in Iraq, Afghanistan, now Pakistan, and all points south and east.
Returning to Goebbels, “That is why their carping criticisms generally focus on laughable trivialities. Whenever some unavoidable difficulty pops up, the kind of thing that always happens, they are immediately inclined to doubt everything [the administration’s 9/11 conspiracy theory] and to throw the baby out with the bath water [the truth out with blind belief]. To them difficulties are not there to be mastered, but rather to be surrendered to [lies are there to believed rather than questioned].
Goebbels adds, “One cannot make history with such quivering [sic questioning] people. They are only chaff in God’s breath. Thankfully, they are only a thin intellectual or social upper class, particularly in the case of Germany. They are not an upper class in the sense that they govern the nation, but rather more a fact of nature like the bubbles of fat that always float on the surface of things.” Bubbles of fat floating on the surface of things? Could that be the corpulent Goering? Today’s rotund Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich? I’ll work on that one.
Ergo, on mindless blasts of rhetoric like those of Goebbels, the Third Reich, meant to last a thousand years, fell into dust and disgrace in 12. Alas and alack, for the sake of freedom, for the future of America, to all who would turn off the light of truth, professors or thugs, presidents or prelates, philosophers or fools, czars or czarinas, I wish you all a hard landing in reality, ASAP.
Sunstein’s tonality is reminiscent of Joseph Goebbels New Years Address for 1939.
What’s more Sunstein wants to “legally force” Americans “to do what’s best for our society” and water down their free speech (granted by the US Constitution), by mandating websites with pop-up links to opposing government propaganda be “forcibly included on political blogs.” Could we have such pop-ups when the President is speaking, Henry Kissinger, Bibi Netanyahu, AIPAC, Larry Silverstein, NIST, Fox News, Lloyd Blankfein?
Coincidentally, the also Harvard educated Constitutional lawyer now President, Barack Obama, agrees with Sunstein and has knighted him “Head of Information Technology in the White House for ‘Conspiracy Theories,’” i.e. any political thought that doesn’t regurgitate establishment views, like Obama’s ties to the CIA at Columbia University and after. Those who talk truth to power will be taxed or banned. I hear the clicking of boot heels as Sunstein speaks and I write.
In fact, Sunstein’s “thinking” came from a rather sullied “White Paper,” in which he talks about countering “dangerous ideas” and “taking those who disseminate such theories” to where? Prisons like Hitler’s camps, Stalin’s Siberian gulags.
These dangerous ideas and/or theories would include “some held by the vast majorities of Americans,” such as the incredible body of facts that prove the JFK assassination was part of a wider plot, including the CIA, Big Oil, the Mafia, the defense industry, and a combination of assassins. Sunstein is such a patent ploy for the New World Order that he should wear an “NWO” armband, perhaps a skull and bones on his lapel.
Sunstein adds to his hit list that believing “global warming is a deliberate fraud” is another theory government censorship should stomp its black boot on. Frankly, whether you or I believe in global warming or not is our business and constitutional right, and not his. Sunstein calls “false and dangerous” the idea that exposure to sunlight is healthy, despite certain medical experts that agree prolonged exposure reduces risk of developing certain cancers. Again, whether it does or doesn’t is a matter for open discussion in a democratic society. Choices of credence should be made by individual physicians and lay people according to their patients and health.
Basically, this crypto-Nazi wants to write into law that government should dictate “the very nature of reality to Americans and that their opinions can only be voiced at best when accompanied by mandatory federal propaganda or at worst that Americans can be silenced entirely by federal decree,” as Watson writes. He also points out that our Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan argued “that the government can ban books and political pamphlets.” What’s going on there at Harvard (where Kagan served as law school Dean) that cries out for such repression? Tom Paine must be turning over in his grave.
Frankly, Sunstein’s tonality is reminiscent of Joseph Goebbels New Years Address for 1939. “This is Goebbels’… address to Germany, delivered on 31 December 1938. He reviews the past year, recalling repeatedly that Austria had been incorporated into Germany. Despite his claim that complainers are not worth dealing with, he devotes a major part of the speech to denouncing those who failed to share his faith in Adolf Hitler….”
The “complainers” that Goebbels was referencing were the intellectuals, writers, journalists, activists, the Internet bloggers and questioners of their day, who had criticized Hitler’s barbaric behavior, including the burning of the Reichstag, which Hitler and the Nazis blamed on the vision-impaired, Dutch left-wing radical Marinus van der Lubbe, who later was tried by them and beheaded. Or course, after successfully lying that the communists, not the Nazis under Goebbels direction did it, Hitler went on to create the “Enabling Act” which enabled the Nazis to strip away most of the civil rights of Germans, as did George Bush’s renewed PATRIOTACT for Americans, and which this author would like to see banned forever from our laws.
But after praising the “miracles” [read violence] that brought the Nazis to power, Goebbels goes on to say, “This ability to believe is rather weak in some circles, above all in those with money and education. They may trust more in pure cold reason than a glowing idealistic heart. Our so-called intellectuals do not like to hear this, but it is true anyway. They know so much that in the end they do not know what to do with their wisdom. They can see the past, but not much of the present, and nothing at all of the future. Their imagination is insufficient to deal with a distant goal in a way such that one already thinks it achieved.” I assume that distant, imagined goal was the fall of the Third Reich a decade later, leaving Germany in ruins, poverty and disgrace, a path on which the US may be dangerously in its pursuit to world hegemony.
Goebbels continues, “They [the complainers] were also unable to believe in the victory of National Socialism while the National Socialist movement was still fighting for power. They are as little able today to believe in the greatness of our national German future. They perceive only what they can see, but not what is happening, and what will happen.”
We perceive only what they see, like the red nanothermite dust in the ruins of Ground Zero, the high-powered aerosolized military explosive that took the towers down on 9/11. But then, we also see what has happened as a result, the creation of the War on Terror, blamed on the Muslim’s, Osama bin Laden and box-cutter carrying hijackers, which lies gave us the right to start our ongoing havoc, still running in Iraq, Afghanistan, now Pakistan, and all points south and east.
Returning to Goebbels, “That is why their carping criticisms generally focus on laughable trivialities. Whenever some unavoidable difficulty pops up, the kind of thing that always happens, they are immediately inclined to doubt everything [the administration’s 9/11 conspiracy theory] and to throw the baby out with the bath water [the truth out with blind belief]. To them difficulties are not there to be mastered, but rather to be surrendered to [lies are there to believed rather than questioned].
Goebbels adds, “One cannot make history with such quivering [sic questioning] people. They are only chaff in God’s breath. Thankfully, they are only a thin intellectual or social upper class, particularly in the case of Germany. They are not an upper class in the sense that they govern the nation, but rather more a fact of nature like the bubbles of fat that always float on the surface of things.” Bubbles of fat floating on the surface of things? Could that be the corpulent Goering? Today’s rotund Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich? I’ll work on that one.
Ergo, on mindless blasts of rhetoric like those of Goebbels, the Third Reich, meant to last a thousand years, fell into dust and disgrace in 12. Alas and alack, for the sake of freedom, for the future of America, to all who would turn off the light of truth, professors or thugs, presidents or prelates, philosophers or fools, czars or czarinas, I wish you all a hard landing in reality, ASAP.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
70% Of Arizona Voters Support Illegal Immgration Bill
Rasmussen- The Arizona legislature has now passed the toughest measure against illegal immigration in the country, authorizing local police to stop and check the immigration status of anyone they suspect of being in the country illegally.
A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey finds that 70% of likely voters in Arizona approve of the legislation, while just 23% oppose it.
Opponents of the measure, including major national Hispanic groups, say it will lead to racial profiling, and 53% of voters in the state are concerned that efforts to identify and deport illegal immigrants also will end up violating the civil rights of some U.S. citizens. Forty-six percent (46%) don’t share that concern
Those figures include 23% who are very concerned and 18% who are not at all concerned.
Civil rights concerns were a bit higher last year. following a series of aggressive enforcement actions by the Maricopa County Sherriff.
Eighty-three percent (83%) of Arizona voters say a candidate's position on immigration is an important factor in how they will vote, including 51% who say it’s very important.
The measure is already having an impact on this year’s Senate and governor races in the state.
Senator John McCain, who is facing a serious Republican Primary challenge this year in part over his involvement in developing immigration reform legislation, on Monday endorsed the new state law. McCain now earns just 47% support to challenger J.D. Hayworth’s 42% in Arizona’s hotly contested GOP Senate Primary race.
(Want a free daily e-mail update? If it's in the news, it's in our polls). Rasmussen Reports updates are also available on Twitter or Facebook.
Arizonans consistently have been critical of the U.S. government’s failure to secure the border with Mexico, and that anxiety has increased with growing drug violence along the border.
While many in Washington, D.C. view immigration reform as a way to legalize the 10 million or more illegal immigrants in the country, 73% of voters in Arizona now say gaining control of the border is more important than legalizing the status of these undocumented workers.
In July of last year, 51% of Arizona voters said it is more important for Congress to pass immigration reform than health care reform.
That view is shared by voters nationwide and has been for several years.
Eighty-four percent (84%) of Arizona Republicans and 69% of voters not affiliated with either major party in the state favor the new get-tough legislation. Democrats are more closely divided: 51% like the new law, but 43% oppose it.
Sixty percent (60%) of Democrats and 57% of unaffiliateds are concerned that the law may lead to possible civil rights violations against U.S. citizens. Fifty-four percent (54%) of Republicans are not very or not at all concerned about this.
Republican Governor Jan Brewer now has the bill on her desk, awaiting either her signature into law or her veto. State Attorney General Terry Goddard, a Democrat who is running against Brewer for governor this year, has announced his opposition to the new law.
The top four GOP contenders for governor of Arizona, including Brewer, have all expanded their support since last month in match-ups with Goddard. The Democrat has lost ground and now trails in all four contests. One factor in the latest trends may have been Goddard’s refusal to join other states in suing the federal government over the new health care law. Brewer found a way to proceed despite Goddard’s refusal and got a big bounce in the polls.
The new law puts into state statute some of the policies that have long been practiced by Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. But his aggressive enforcement of federal laws against illegal immigration have triggered a Justice Department probe and moves by the Obama administration to reduce his ability to enforce federal immigration laws.
When these moves against Arpaio were first reported in March 2009, 68% of Arizona voters said they had a favorable view of the sheriff. Voters also strongly favored his tactics including police raids on places where illegal immigrants gather to find work.
A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey finds that 70% of likely voters in Arizona approve of the legislation, while just 23% oppose it.
Opponents of the measure, including major national Hispanic groups, say it will lead to racial profiling, and 53% of voters in the state are concerned that efforts to identify and deport illegal immigrants also will end up violating the civil rights of some U.S. citizens. Forty-six percent (46%) don’t share that concern
Those figures include 23% who are very concerned and 18% who are not at all concerned.
Civil rights concerns were a bit higher last year. following a series of aggressive enforcement actions by the Maricopa County Sherriff.
Eighty-three percent (83%) of Arizona voters say a candidate's position on immigration is an important factor in how they will vote, including 51% who say it’s very important.
The measure is already having an impact on this year’s Senate and governor races in the state.
Senator John McCain, who is facing a serious Republican Primary challenge this year in part over his involvement in developing immigration reform legislation, on Monday endorsed the new state law. McCain now earns just 47% support to challenger J.D. Hayworth’s 42% in Arizona’s hotly contested GOP Senate Primary race.
(Want a free daily e-mail update? If it's in the news, it's in our polls). Rasmussen Reports updates are also available on Twitter or Facebook.
Arizonans consistently have been critical of the U.S. government’s failure to secure the border with Mexico, and that anxiety has increased with growing drug violence along the border.
While many in Washington, D.C. view immigration reform as a way to legalize the 10 million or more illegal immigrants in the country, 73% of voters in Arizona now say gaining control of the border is more important than legalizing the status of these undocumented workers.
In July of last year, 51% of Arizona voters said it is more important for Congress to pass immigration reform than health care reform.
That view is shared by voters nationwide and has been for several years.
Eighty-four percent (84%) of Arizona Republicans and 69% of voters not affiliated with either major party in the state favor the new get-tough legislation. Democrats are more closely divided: 51% like the new law, but 43% oppose it.
Sixty percent (60%) of Democrats and 57% of unaffiliateds are concerned that the law may lead to possible civil rights violations against U.S. citizens. Fifty-four percent (54%) of Republicans are not very or not at all concerned about this.
Republican Governor Jan Brewer now has the bill on her desk, awaiting either her signature into law or her veto. State Attorney General Terry Goddard, a Democrat who is running against Brewer for governor this year, has announced his opposition to the new law.
The top four GOP contenders for governor of Arizona, including Brewer, have all expanded their support since last month in match-ups with Goddard. The Democrat has lost ground and now trails in all four contests. One factor in the latest trends may have been Goddard’s refusal to join other states in suing the federal government over the new health care law. Brewer found a way to proceed despite Goddard’s refusal and got a big bounce in the polls.
The new law puts into state statute some of the policies that have long been practiced by Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. But his aggressive enforcement of federal laws against illegal immigration have triggered a Justice Department probe and moves by the Obama administration to reduce his ability to enforce federal immigration laws.
When these moves against Arpaio were first reported in March 2009, 68% of Arizona voters said they had a favorable view of the sheriff. Voters also strongly favored his tactics including police raids on places where illegal immigrants gather to find work.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
U.S. Job Claims Rise to 496,000
Blame it on the weather.
The number of Americans filing for initial unemployment insurance surged to just below the 500,000 level last week, and have climbed more than 12 percent over the past two weeks, according to government data.
There were 496,000 initial job claims filed in the week ended Feb. 20, up 22,000 from a revised 474,000 the previous week, the Labor Department said in its weekly report. Unemployment claims in Michigan decreased by 1,621.
"This is certainly not surprising given the very adverse weather conditions for the eastern half of the country, especially in the major population areas," said Robert Dye, a senior economist at PNC Financial Services. "Weather has a huge impact, particularly with things like construction, which remains very soft."
He expects employment to pick up in the next couple of months as private sector hiring continues and the government boosts its hiring of temporary census workers.
"I would expect that once we get into March and get beyond the weather-related effects, we'll see continued improvement in overall jobless claims," said Dye.
The number of Americans filing for initial unemployment insurance surged to just below the 500,000 level last week, and have climbed more than 12 percent over the past two weeks, according to government data.
There were 496,000 initial job claims filed in the week ended Feb. 20, up 22,000 from a revised 474,000 the previous week, the Labor Department said in its weekly report. Unemployment claims in Michigan decreased by 1,621.
"This is certainly not surprising given the very adverse weather conditions for the eastern half of the country, especially in the major population areas," said Robert Dye, a senior economist at PNC Financial Services. "Weather has a huge impact, particularly with things like construction, which remains very soft."
He expects employment to pick up in the next couple of months as private sector hiring continues and the government boosts its hiring of temporary census workers.
"I would expect that once we get into March and get beyond the weather-related effects, we'll see continued improvement in overall jobless claims," said Dye.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Millions Of Unemployed Americans Face Years Without Any Jobs
Even as the American economy shows tentative signs of a rebound, the human toll of the recession continues to mount, with millions of Americans remaining out of work, out of savings and nearing the end of their unemployment benefits.
Economists fear that the nascent recovery will leave more people behind than in past recessions, failing to create jobs in sufficient numbers to absorb the record-setting ranks of the long-term unemployed.
Call them the new poor: people long accustomed to the comforts of middle-class life who are now relying on public assistance for the first time in their lives — potentially for years to come.
Yet the social safety net is already showing severe strains. Roughly 2.7 million jobless people will lose their unemployment check before the end of April unless Congress approves the Obama administration’s proposal to extend the payments, according to the Labor Department.
Here in Southern California, Jean Eisen has been without work since she lost her job selling beauty salon equipment more than two years ago. In the several months she has endured with neither a paycheck nor an unemployment check, she has relied on local food banks for her groceries.
She has learned to live without the prescription medications she is supposed to take for high blood pressure and cholesterol. She has become effusively religious — an unexpected turn for this onetime standup comic with X-rated material — finding in Christianity her only form of health insurance.
“I pray for healing,” says Ms. Eisen, 57. “When you’ve got nothing, you’ve got to go with what you know.”
Warm, outgoing and prone to the positive, Ms. Eisen has worked much of her life. Now, she is one of 6.3 million Americans who have been unemployed for six months or longer, the largest number since the government began keeping track in 1948. That is more than double the toll in the next-worst period, in the early 1980s.
Men have suffered the largest numbers of job losses in this recession. But Ms. Eisen has the unfortunate distinction of being among a group — women from 45 to 64 years of age — whose long-term unemployment rate has grown rapidly.
In 1983, after a deep recession, women in that range made up only 7 percent of those who had been out of work for six months or longer, according to the Labor Department. Last year, they made up 14 percent.
Twice, Ms. Eisen exhausted her unemployment benefits before her check was restored by a federal extension. Last week, her check ran out again. She and her husband now settle their bills with only his $1,595 monthly disability check. The rent on their apartment is $1,380.
“We’re looking at the very real possibility of being homeless,” she said.
Every downturn pushes some people out of the middle class before the economy resumes expanding. Most recover. Many prosper. But some economists worry that this time could be different. An unusual constellation of forces — some embedded in the modern-day economy, others unique to this wrenching recession — might make it especially difficult for those out of work to find their way back to their middle-class lives.
Labor experts say the economy needs 100,000 new jobs a month just to absorb entrants to the labor force. With more than 15 million people officially jobless, even a vigorous recovery is likely to leave an enormous number out of work for years.
Some labor experts note that severe economic downturns are generally followed by powerful expansions, suggesting that aggressive hiring will soon resume. But doubts remain about whether such hiring can last long enough to absorb anywhere close to the millions of unemployed.
A new scarcity of jobs
Some labor experts say the basic functioning of the American economy has changed in ways that make jobs scarce — particularly for older, less-educated people like Ms. Eisen, who has only a high school diploma.
Large companies are increasingly owned by institutional investors who crave swift profits, a feat often achieved by cutting payroll. The declining influence of unions has made it easier for employers to shift work to part-time and temporary employees. Factory work and even white-collar jobs have moved in recent years to low-cost countries in Asia and Latin America. Automation has helped manufacturing cut 5.6 million jobs since 2000 — the sort of jobs that once provided lower-skilled workers with middle-class paychecks.
“American business is about maximizing shareholder value,” said Allen Sinai, chief global economist at the research firm Decision Economics. “You basically don’t want workers. You hire less, and you try to find capital equipment to replace them.”
During periods of American economic expansion in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, the number of private-sector jobs increased about 3.5 percent a year, according to an analysis of Labor Department data by Lakshman Achuthan, managing director of the Economic Cycle Research Institute, a research firm. During expansions in the 1980s and ’90s, jobs grew just 2.4 percent annually. And during the last decade, job growth fell to 0.9 percent annually.
“The pace of job growth has been getting weaker in each expansion,” Mr. Achuthan said. “There is no indication that this pattern is about to change.”
Before 1990, it took an average of 21 months for the economy to regain the jobs shed during a recession, according to an analysis of Labor Department data by the National Employment Law Project and the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-oriented research group in Washington.
After the recessions in 1990 and in 2001, 31 and 46 months passed before employment returned to its previous peaks. The economy was growing, but companies remained conservative in their hiring.
Some 34 million people were hired into new and existing private-sector jobs in 2000, at the tail end of an expansion, according to Labor Department data. A year later, in the midst of recession, hiring had fallen off to 31.6 million. And as late as 2003, with the economy again growing, hiring in the private sector continued to slip, to 29.8 million.
It was a jobless recovery: Business was picking up, but it simply did not translate into more work. This time, hiring may be especially subdued, labor economists say.
Traditionally, three sectors have led the way out of recession: automobiles, home building and banking. But auto companies have been shrinking because strapped households have less buying power. Home building is limited by fears about a glut of foreclosed properties. Banking is expanding, but this seems largely a function of government support that is being withdrawn.
At the same time, the continued bite of the financial crisis has crimped the flow of money to small businesses and new ventures, which tend to be major sources of new jobs.
All of which helps explain why Ms. Eisen — who has never before struggled to find work — feels a familiar pain each time she scans job listings on her computer: There are positions in health care, most requiring experience she lacks. Office jobs demand familiarity with software she has never used. Jobs at fast food restaurants are mostly secured by young people and immigrants.
If, as Mr. Sinai expects, the economy again expands without adding many jobs, millions of people like Ms. Eisen will be dependent on an unemployment insurance already being severely tested.
“The system was ill prepared for the reality of long-term unemployment,” said Maurice Emsellem, a policy director for the National Employment Law Project. “Now, you add a severe recession, and you have created a crisis of historic proportions.”
Fewer protections
Some poverty experts say the broader social safety net is not up to cushioning the impact of the worst downturn since the Great Depression. Social services are less extensive than during the last period of double-digit unemployment, in the early 1980s.
On average, only two-thirds of unemployed people received state-provided unemployment checks last year, according to the Labor Department. The rest either exhausted their benefits, fell short of requirements or did not apply.
“You have very large sets of people who have no social protections,” said Randy Albelda, an economist at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. “They are landing in this netherworld.”
When Ms. Eisen and her husband, Jeff, applied for food stamps, they were turned away for having too much monthly income. The cutoff was $1,570 a month — $25 less than her husband’s disability check.
Reforms in the mid-1990s imposed time limits on cash assistance for poor single mothers, a change predicated on the assumption that women would trade welfare checks for paychecks.
Yet as jobs have become harder to get, so has welfare: as of 2006, 44 states cut off anyone with a household income totaling 75 percent of the poverty level — then limited to $1,383 a month for a family of three — according to an analysis by Ms. Albel.
“We have a work-based safety net without any work,” said Timothy M. Smeeding, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “People with more education and skills will probably figure something out once the economy picks up. It’s the ones with less education and skills: that’s the new poor.”
Here in Orange County, the expanse of suburbia stretching south from Los Angeles, long-term unemployment reaches even those who once had six-figure salaries. A center of the national mortgage industry, the area prospered in the real estate boom and suffered with the bust.
Until she was laid off two years ago, Janine Booth, 41, brought home roughly $10,000 a month in commissions from her job selling electronics to retailers. A single mother of three, she has been living lately on $2,000 a month in child support and about $450 a week in unemployment insurance — a stream of checks that ran out last week.
For Ms. Booth, work has been a constant since her teenage years, when she cleaned houses under pressure from her mother to earn pocket money. Today, Ms. Booth pays her $1,500 monthly mortgage with help from her mother, who is herself living off savings after being laid off.
“I don’t want to take money from her,” Ms. Booth said. “I jMs. Booth, with a résumé full of well-paid sales jobs, seems the sort of person who would have little difficulty getting work. Yet two years of looking have yielded little but anxiety.
She sends out dozens of résumés a week and rarely hears back. She responds to online ads, only to learn they are seeking operators for telephone sex lines or people willing to send mysterious packages from their homes.
She spends weekdays in a classroom in Anaheim, in a state-financed training program that is supposed to land her a job in medical administration. Even if she does find a job, she will be lucky if it pays $15 an hour.
“What is going to happen?” she asked plaintively. “I worry about my kids. I just don’t want them to think I’m a failure.”
On a recent weekend, she was running errands with her 18-year-old son when they stopped at an A.T.M. and he saw her checking account balance: $50.
“He says, ‘Is that all you have?’ ” she recalled. “ ‘Are we going to be O.K.?’ ”
Yes, she replied — and not only for his benefit.
“I have to keep telling myself it’s going to be O.K.,” she said. “Otherwise, I’d go into a deep depression.”
Last week, she made up fliers advertising her eagerness to clean houses — the same activity that provided her with spending money in high school, and now the only way she sees fit to provide for her kids. She plans to place the fliers on porches in some other neighborhood.
“I don’t want to clean my neighbors’ houses,” she said. “I know I’m going to come out of this. There’s no way I’m going to be homeless and poverty-stricken. But I am scared. I have a lot of sleepless nights.”
For the Eisens, poverty is already here. In the two years Ms. Eisen has been without work, they have exhausted their savings of about $24,000. Their credit card balances have grown to $15,000.
“I don’t know how we’re still indoors,” she said.
Her 1994 Dodge Caravan broke down in January, leaving her to ask for rides to an employment center.
She does not have the money to move to a cheaper apartment.
“You have to have money for first and last month’s rent, and to open utility accounts,” she said.
What she has is personality and presence — two traits that used to seem enough. She narrates her life in a stream of self-deprecating wisecracks, her punch lines tinged with desperation.
“See that,” she said, spotting a man dressed as the Statue of Liberty. Standing on a sidewalk, he waved at passing cars with a sign advertising a tax preparation business. “That will be me next week. Do you think this guy ever thought he’d be doing this?”
And yet, she would gladly do this. She would do nearly anything.
“There are no bad jobs now,” she says. “Any job is a good job.”
Two incomes, then none
Ms. Eisen grew up poor, in Flatbush in Brooklyn. Her father was in maintenance. Her mother worked part time at a company that made window blinds.
She married Jeff when she was 19, and they soon moved to California, where he had grown up. He worked in sales for a chemical company. They rented an apartment in Buena Park, a growing spread of houses filling out former orange groves. She stayed home and took care of their daughter.
“I never asked him how much he earned,” Ms. Eisen said. “I was of the mentality that the husband took care of everything. But we never wanted.”
By the early 1980s, gas and rent strained their finances. So she took a job as a quality assurance clerk at a factory that made aircraft parts. It paid $13.50 an hour and had health insurance.
When the company moved to Mexico in the early 1990s, Ms. Eisen quickly found a job at a travel agency. When online booking killed that business, she got the job at the beauty salon equipment company. It paid $13.25 an hour, with an annual bonus — enough for presents under the Christmas tree.
But six years ago, her husband took a fall at work and then succumbed to various ailments — diabetes, liver disease, high blood pressure — leaving him confined to the couch. Not until 2008 did he secure his disability check.
And now they find themselves in this desert of joblessness, her paycheck replaced by a $702 unemployment check every other week. She received 14 weeks of benefits after she lost her job, and then a seven-week extension.
For most of October through December 2008, she received nothing, as she waited for another extension. The checks came again, then ran out in September 2009. They were restored by an extension right before Christmas.
Their daughter has back problems and is living on disability checks, making the church their ultimate safety net.
“I never thought I’d be in the position where I had to go to a food bank,” Ms. Eisen said. But there she is, standing in the parking lot of the Calvary Chapel church, chatting with a half-dozen women, all waiting to enter the Bread of Life Food Pantry.
When her name is called, she steps into a windowless alcove, where a smiling woman hands her three bags of groceries: carrots, potatoes, bread, cheese and a hunk of frozen meat.
“Haven’t we got a lot to be thankful for?” Ms. Eisen asks.
For one thing, no pinto beans.
“I’ve got 10 bags of pinto beans,” she says. “And I have no clue how to cook a pinto bean.”
Local job listings are just as mysterious. On a bulletin board at the county-financed ProPath Business and Career Services Center, many are written in jargon hinting of accounting or computers.
“Nothing I’m qualified for,” Ms. Eisen says. “When you can’t define what it is, that’s a pretty good indication.”
Her counselor has a couple of possibilities — a cashier at a supermarket and a night desk job at a motel.
“I’ll e-mail them,” Ms. Eisen promises. “I’ll tell them what a shining example of humanity I am.”
This article first appeared as Millions of Unemployed Face Years Without Jobs in The New York Times.
She has applied everywhere she can think of — at offices, at gas stations. Nothing.
“I’m being seen as a person who is no longer viable,” she said. “I’m chalking it up to my age and my weight. Blame it on your most prominent insecurity.” Two incomes, then noneust want to find a job.”
Economists fear that the nascent recovery will leave more people behind than in past recessions, failing to create jobs in sufficient numbers to absorb the record-setting ranks of the long-term unemployed.
Call them the new poor: people long accustomed to the comforts of middle-class life who are now relying on public assistance for the first time in their lives — potentially for years to come.
Yet the social safety net is already showing severe strains. Roughly 2.7 million jobless people will lose their unemployment check before the end of April unless Congress approves the Obama administration’s proposal to extend the payments, according to the Labor Department.
Here in Southern California, Jean Eisen has been without work since she lost her job selling beauty salon equipment more than two years ago. In the several months she has endured with neither a paycheck nor an unemployment check, she has relied on local food banks for her groceries.
She has learned to live without the prescription medications she is supposed to take for high blood pressure and cholesterol. She has become effusively religious — an unexpected turn for this onetime standup comic with X-rated material — finding in Christianity her only form of health insurance.
“I pray for healing,” says Ms. Eisen, 57. “When you’ve got nothing, you’ve got to go with what you know.”
Warm, outgoing and prone to the positive, Ms. Eisen has worked much of her life. Now, she is one of 6.3 million Americans who have been unemployed for six months or longer, the largest number since the government began keeping track in 1948. That is more than double the toll in the next-worst period, in the early 1980s.
Men have suffered the largest numbers of job losses in this recession. But Ms. Eisen has the unfortunate distinction of being among a group — women from 45 to 64 years of age — whose long-term unemployment rate has grown rapidly.
In 1983, after a deep recession, women in that range made up only 7 percent of those who had been out of work for six months or longer, according to the Labor Department. Last year, they made up 14 percent.
Twice, Ms. Eisen exhausted her unemployment benefits before her check was restored by a federal extension. Last week, her check ran out again. She and her husband now settle their bills with only his $1,595 monthly disability check. The rent on their apartment is $1,380.
“We’re looking at the very real possibility of being homeless,” she said.
Every downturn pushes some people out of the middle class before the economy resumes expanding. Most recover. Many prosper. But some economists worry that this time could be different. An unusual constellation of forces — some embedded in the modern-day economy, others unique to this wrenching recession — might make it especially difficult for those out of work to find their way back to their middle-class lives.
Labor experts say the economy needs 100,000 new jobs a month just to absorb entrants to the labor force. With more than 15 million people officially jobless, even a vigorous recovery is likely to leave an enormous number out of work for years.
Some labor experts note that severe economic downturns are generally followed by powerful expansions, suggesting that aggressive hiring will soon resume. But doubts remain about whether such hiring can last long enough to absorb anywhere close to the millions of unemployed.
A new scarcity of jobs
Some labor experts say the basic functioning of the American economy has changed in ways that make jobs scarce — particularly for older, less-educated people like Ms. Eisen, who has only a high school diploma.
Large companies are increasingly owned by institutional investors who crave swift profits, a feat often achieved by cutting payroll. The declining influence of unions has made it easier for employers to shift work to part-time and temporary employees. Factory work and even white-collar jobs have moved in recent years to low-cost countries in Asia and Latin America. Automation has helped manufacturing cut 5.6 million jobs since 2000 — the sort of jobs that once provided lower-skilled workers with middle-class paychecks.
“American business is about maximizing shareholder value,” said Allen Sinai, chief global economist at the research firm Decision Economics. “You basically don’t want workers. You hire less, and you try to find capital equipment to replace them.”
During periods of American economic expansion in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, the number of private-sector jobs increased about 3.5 percent a year, according to an analysis of Labor Department data by Lakshman Achuthan, managing director of the Economic Cycle Research Institute, a research firm. During expansions in the 1980s and ’90s, jobs grew just 2.4 percent annually. And during the last decade, job growth fell to 0.9 percent annually.
“The pace of job growth has been getting weaker in each expansion,” Mr. Achuthan said. “There is no indication that this pattern is about to change.”
Before 1990, it took an average of 21 months for the economy to regain the jobs shed during a recession, according to an analysis of Labor Department data by the National Employment Law Project and the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-oriented research group in Washington.
After the recessions in 1990 and in 2001, 31 and 46 months passed before employment returned to its previous peaks. The economy was growing, but companies remained conservative in their hiring.
Some 34 million people were hired into new and existing private-sector jobs in 2000, at the tail end of an expansion, according to Labor Department data. A year later, in the midst of recession, hiring had fallen off to 31.6 million. And as late as 2003, with the economy again growing, hiring in the private sector continued to slip, to 29.8 million.
It was a jobless recovery: Business was picking up, but it simply did not translate into more work. This time, hiring may be especially subdued, labor economists say.
Traditionally, three sectors have led the way out of recession: automobiles, home building and banking. But auto companies have been shrinking because strapped households have less buying power. Home building is limited by fears about a glut of foreclosed properties. Banking is expanding, but this seems largely a function of government support that is being withdrawn.
At the same time, the continued bite of the financial crisis has crimped the flow of money to small businesses and new ventures, which tend to be major sources of new jobs.
All of which helps explain why Ms. Eisen — who has never before struggled to find work — feels a familiar pain each time she scans job listings on her computer: There are positions in health care, most requiring experience she lacks. Office jobs demand familiarity with software she has never used. Jobs at fast food restaurants are mostly secured by young people and immigrants.
If, as Mr. Sinai expects, the economy again expands without adding many jobs, millions of people like Ms. Eisen will be dependent on an unemployment insurance already being severely tested.
“The system was ill prepared for the reality of long-term unemployment,” said Maurice Emsellem, a policy director for the National Employment Law Project. “Now, you add a severe recession, and you have created a crisis of historic proportions.”
Fewer protections
Some poverty experts say the broader social safety net is not up to cushioning the impact of the worst downturn since the Great Depression. Social services are less extensive than during the last period of double-digit unemployment, in the early 1980s.
On average, only two-thirds of unemployed people received state-provided unemployment checks last year, according to the Labor Department. The rest either exhausted their benefits, fell short of requirements or did not apply.
“You have very large sets of people who have no social protections,” said Randy Albelda, an economist at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. “They are landing in this netherworld.”
When Ms. Eisen and her husband, Jeff, applied for food stamps, they were turned away for having too much monthly income. The cutoff was $1,570 a month — $25 less than her husband’s disability check.
Reforms in the mid-1990s imposed time limits on cash assistance for poor single mothers, a change predicated on the assumption that women would trade welfare checks for paychecks.
Yet as jobs have become harder to get, so has welfare: as of 2006, 44 states cut off anyone with a household income totaling 75 percent of the poverty level — then limited to $1,383 a month for a family of three — according to an analysis by Ms. Albel.
“We have a work-based safety net without any work,” said Timothy M. Smeeding, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “People with more education and skills will probably figure something out once the economy picks up. It’s the ones with less education and skills: that’s the new poor.”
Here in Orange County, the expanse of suburbia stretching south from Los Angeles, long-term unemployment reaches even those who once had six-figure salaries. A center of the national mortgage industry, the area prospered in the real estate boom and suffered with the bust.
Until she was laid off two years ago, Janine Booth, 41, brought home roughly $10,000 a month in commissions from her job selling electronics to retailers. A single mother of three, she has been living lately on $2,000 a month in child support and about $450 a week in unemployment insurance — a stream of checks that ran out last week.
For Ms. Booth, work has been a constant since her teenage years, when she cleaned houses under pressure from her mother to earn pocket money. Today, Ms. Booth pays her $1,500 monthly mortgage with help from her mother, who is herself living off savings after being laid off.
“I don’t want to take money from her,” Ms. Booth said. “I jMs. Booth, with a résumé full of well-paid sales jobs, seems the sort of person who would have little difficulty getting work. Yet two years of looking have yielded little but anxiety.
She sends out dozens of résumés a week and rarely hears back. She responds to online ads, only to learn they are seeking operators for telephone sex lines or people willing to send mysterious packages from their homes.
She spends weekdays in a classroom in Anaheim, in a state-financed training program that is supposed to land her a job in medical administration. Even if she does find a job, she will be lucky if it pays $15 an hour.
“What is going to happen?” she asked plaintively. “I worry about my kids. I just don’t want them to think I’m a failure.”
On a recent weekend, she was running errands with her 18-year-old son when they stopped at an A.T.M. and he saw her checking account balance: $50.
“He says, ‘Is that all you have?’ ” she recalled. “ ‘Are we going to be O.K.?’ ”
Yes, she replied — and not only for his benefit.
“I have to keep telling myself it’s going to be O.K.,” she said. “Otherwise, I’d go into a deep depression.”
Last week, she made up fliers advertising her eagerness to clean houses — the same activity that provided her with spending money in high school, and now the only way she sees fit to provide for her kids. She plans to place the fliers on porches in some other neighborhood.
“I don’t want to clean my neighbors’ houses,” she said. “I know I’m going to come out of this. There’s no way I’m going to be homeless and poverty-stricken. But I am scared. I have a lot of sleepless nights.”
For the Eisens, poverty is already here. In the two years Ms. Eisen has been without work, they have exhausted their savings of about $24,000. Their credit card balances have grown to $15,000.
“I don’t know how we’re still indoors,” she said.
Her 1994 Dodge Caravan broke down in January, leaving her to ask for rides to an employment center.
She does not have the money to move to a cheaper apartment.
“You have to have money for first and last month’s rent, and to open utility accounts,” she said.
What she has is personality and presence — two traits that used to seem enough. She narrates her life in a stream of self-deprecating wisecracks, her punch lines tinged with desperation.
“See that,” she said, spotting a man dressed as the Statue of Liberty. Standing on a sidewalk, he waved at passing cars with a sign advertising a tax preparation business. “That will be me next week. Do you think this guy ever thought he’d be doing this?”
And yet, she would gladly do this. She would do nearly anything.
“There are no bad jobs now,” she says. “Any job is a good job.”
Two incomes, then none
Ms. Eisen grew up poor, in Flatbush in Brooklyn. Her father was in maintenance. Her mother worked part time at a company that made window blinds.
She married Jeff when she was 19, and they soon moved to California, where he had grown up. He worked in sales for a chemical company. They rented an apartment in Buena Park, a growing spread of houses filling out former orange groves. She stayed home and took care of their daughter.
“I never asked him how much he earned,” Ms. Eisen said. “I was of the mentality that the husband took care of everything. But we never wanted.”
By the early 1980s, gas and rent strained their finances. So she took a job as a quality assurance clerk at a factory that made aircraft parts. It paid $13.50 an hour and had health insurance.
When the company moved to Mexico in the early 1990s, Ms. Eisen quickly found a job at a travel agency. When online booking killed that business, she got the job at the beauty salon equipment company. It paid $13.25 an hour, with an annual bonus — enough for presents under the Christmas tree.
But six years ago, her husband took a fall at work and then succumbed to various ailments — diabetes, liver disease, high blood pressure — leaving him confined to the couch. Not until 2008 did he secure his disability check.
And now they find themselves in this desert of joblessness, her paycheck replaced by a $702 unemployment check every other week. She received 14 weeks of benefits after she lost her job, and then a seven-week extension.
For most of October through December 2008, she received nothing, as she waited for another extension. The checks came again, then ran out in September 2009. They were restored by an extension right before Christmas.
Their daughter has back problems and is living on disability checks, making the church their ultimate safety net.
“I never thought I’d be in the position where I had to go to a food bank,” Ms. Eisen said. But there she is, standing in the parking lot of the Calvary Chapel church, chatting with a half-dozen women, all waiting to enter the Bread of Life Food Pantry.
When her name is called, she steps into a windowless alcove, where a smiling woman hands her three bags of groceries: carrots, potatoes, bread, cheese and a hunk of frozen meat.
“Haven’t we got a lot to be thankful for?” Ms. Eisen asks.
For one thing, no pinto beans.
“I’ve got 10 bags of pinto beans,” she says. “And I have no clue how to cook a pinto bean.”
Local job listings are just as mysterious. On a bulletin board at the county-financed ProPath Business and Career Services Center, many are written in jargon hinting of accounting or computers.
“Nothing I’m qualified for,” Ms. Eisen says. “When you can’t define what it is, that’s a pretty good indication.”
Her counselor has a couple of possibilities — a cashier at a supermarket and a night desk job at a motel.
“I’ll e-mail them,” Ms. Eisen promises. “I’ll tell them what a shining example of humanity I am.”
This article first appeared as Millions of Unemployed Face Years Without Jobs in The New York Times.
She has applied everywhere she can think of — at offices, at gas stations. Nothing.
“I’m being seen as a person who is no longer viable,” she said. “I’m chalking it up to my age and my weight. Blame it on your most prominent insecurity.” Two incomes, then noneust want to find a job.”
Friday, September 18, 2009
Race Hustlers And Political Pimps
I knew as a African-American Conservative as soon as Barack Obama was elected President Of The United States that anytime he ran into political trouble with his domestic or foreign policies and it was not accepted widely by the majority of the American voting population that they would be called "Racist". This is "Standard Operational Procedure" by most African-American politicians when they are in social or political bind. The liberal state run media refuses to report that President Obama did not write the 787 billion dollar Stimulus Bill. The Apollo Alliance wrote the bill that so, many Americans believe is a waste of taxpayers dollars. The President passed Cap-And-Trade legislation that will basically, destroy the manufacturing and industrial sector of the American economy. This means that millions of Americans will lose jobs trying to satisfy the Environmental left in America. The President version of Health Care Reform is a complete debacle and the American people see this legislation as a turn to Socialized Health Care in America. Therefore, white liberals like Maureen Dowd, President Carter and Chris Matthews are stoking the fire for African-Americans to hate Conservatives and Republicans because they have a honest disagreement with President Obama failed policies. The last two years any criticism of President Obama by his opponents have been declared racism without any real response by the Clinton Campaign or Republicans. The Obama Administration and the state run media are use to making these false accusations of racism to protect the "Messiah" when he is in some serious trouble. The racism accusation is used to marginalize Republicans and Conservatives so, they are not taken seriously by the majority of the American population. This is a tactic used by liberals to put fear in Conservative dissent because, they know that the Average American does not want to be called a racist by there fellow Americans. Finally, I am telling Conservatives all across America keep the pressure on President Obama and Democrats because when they call you a racists they are waving the white flag of surrender when it comes to Obamacare. This tactic is only used when they can't win the battle of ideas with the majority of the American people. President Obama, Democrats and State-Run Media are nothing more than a bunch of "Race Hustlers And Political Pimps".
Sunday, August 23, 2009
OBAMA What Economic Rebound? Foreclosures, Job Losses And Higher Taxes
The Obama Administration CNN, MSNBC, NBC and CBS are trying to tell the American people that the economy in making a turnaround but, delinquency and foreclosure rates for U.S mortgages continue to rise in the second quarter, with loans to most qualified borrowers going bust at a unnerving clip, especially in hard hit states in California and Florida. The numbers reported Thursday by the Mortgage Bankers Association show clearly that the rising job losses are worsening the nation's housing troubles and threaten the Obama Administration effort's to keep owners from losing there home. The quarterly National Delinquency Survey showed that almost 1 in 10 homeowners with a mortgage was at least one payment late, and thus delinquent, while another 4 percent had entered the foreclosure process on there loan. Nowhere, is there less sunshine in the picture than Florida. The survey found out from April to June 12 percent of all Florida Mortgages were in foreclosure and about 23 percent of all Florida mortgages almost 25 percent were late on payments or under threat of foreclosure. In California, 11 percent of all mortgages were 90 days, or more past due or in foreclosure. While the Golden state accounts for 13 percent of U.S. mortgages. It is also the site of almost 20 percent of foreclosure starts from April to June. More worrisome is a trend emerging deeper in the numbers, sub-prime loans given to the weakest borrowers are now a declining portion of delinquency and foreclosure rates, while prime loans, given to highly qualified borrowers, are a rising share. The rise in prime delinquencies is a clear indication that unemployment is the driver of mortgage performance, with the worst performance coming in those areas that are combining job losses with large drops in home values in California and Florida. Finally, there will not be a turnaround in in delinquencies until we see improvements in employment. there was bad news for the Obama Administration on the employment front Thursday the Labor Department reporting for the second consecutive week and unexpected rise in initial job claims. The 576,000 claims last week, following 561,000 the week before, likely sets up a bad jobs report for August from a so-called July reprieve. The unemployment rate stood at 9.4 percent in July but is expected to peak at 10 percent. That means more foreclosures, which will put a drag on the economy.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Keeping Names,Taking Numbers "Obama Snitch List"
The Obama Administration secret e-mail list or Snitch list has not closed up shop they are keeping these names in a secret vault to retaliate against individuals Americans who are against President Obama socialist policies. The mass e-mailing list from a top Presidential Advisor Valarie Jarret and David Axelrod to President Obama has the leading Republican on the House Oversight Panel looking for answers. California Rep. Darrell Issa is asking the White House lawyer for details about a Health Care overhaul e-mail signed by Obama Adviser David Axelrod. Administration officials says the e-mail list was sent only to people who signed up for a White House e-mail list that is typically used to provide updates on the President's speeches. Issa on Monday cited reports that some people received the e-mail though they never signed up. Critics say that the White House combined it's taxpayer funded list with member roles from third party political group. I am asking a simple question who are the "third party political groups" and how did the Administration get these private Americans names. Where is the liberal socialist Obama Media to investigate these privacy matters. During the Bush years the New York Times complained that the Administration was violating Americans rights to there own privacy through the Patriot Act. If President Bush had sent out these e-mails there would be a media "Jihad" for the next three months until the media received all relevant information about the unsolicited e-mails. It seems like the only organization that will investigate the Obama administration is Fox News and Conservative bloggers. This means that this administration has free regin to intimidate individual Americans into complete silence when it comes to opposing administration policies.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Declining Dollar And Economy
The news that came out on Thursday that the implied AAA Credit rating of the United States will eventually be downgraded. The dollar was hit hard again on Friday and that could have some serious implications when it comes to stabilizing our economy. What are implications of a weak American dollar. The first problem is high inflation and a perceived greater risk of holding the currency and dollar denoted assets. The greater perceived risk, investors will ask for a higher rate of return. This means that interest rates will be going up in America. The biggest problem is a significant exit of foreign capital from our markets. Therefore, can you imagine conversations between China, Japan and Russia the largest holders of our debt. The United States is forced to pay higher interest rates to attract capital, the economy slows as the cost of debt services increase. The Obama administration may want a weak dollar because it will help domestic production relative to our continued reliance on imports. Therefore, by generating some inflation is a means of devaluing our outstanding massive amount of debt. Whomever, is in debt currently can actually pay back those debts in future dollars that are worthless. Finally, we can stem the decline in the value of the dollar by increasing short term interest rates, that is, Federal Fund Rates currently sitting a 0-.25% will have to go higher. Higher rates means slowing down the economy. Although given the current economic turmoil, the Fed may have to increase the Federal Fund Rate even sooner than they desire and we could suffer through a nasty curse of STAGFLATION. The Obama Administration must find a credible way to protect the value of the dollar. This could be the first step in the downfall of America.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
OBAMA "GLOBAL WARMING NUTS"
The other day Vice President Al Gore was is in town creating another stir about "Global Warming". The Washington D.C. area had a couple of inches of snow and he, is still crying and lying about Global Warming. Sir Albert Gore appeared in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in front of another Clown Sen. John Kerry the ranking member of the Committee. Vice President Gore said that the earth is in "Grave Danger" and we need to break our dependence on oil. Vice President Gore said in his opening remarks that the Senate should pass President Obama Stimulus Package as fast as possible. Sen. john Kerry said that "Climate Change" will be a central part of our foreign policy and national security and a focal point of this committee. Sen. Kerry could not look outside his committee window and see that the weather was extremely cold and it was not 80 degrees outside. Vice President Gore can't wait for the stimulus package to pass because, of all the earmarks the Democrats and President Obama put in the package for these Global Warming Nuts. finally, I could spend hours talking about the Global Warming Nuts in the Obama Administration. Hey! just go outside right now and see if there is anything abnormal about the temperatures where you live, because I live in Upstate New York and it is cold as hell. I need some Global Warming Temperatures Vice President Al Gore.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)