unemployment in this country. All said by smart alecs who are employed.
It's one of the most brutal forms of class warfare there is, to deny the energy and talent of those willing and able to work. It is dehumanizing and tells them that but for the luck of a straw vote they had no say in, they are to be discarded.
For those who have jobs, it's a constant source of fear as the existance of the unemployed is fertile field for bigotry and accepting discrimination against those without work and divides people. It's a potent threat to the survival of anyone who is not the beneficiary of inheritance or aren't in the investor class.
Reagan said while running for the office of president:
'A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours...'
The emotional point he is making there, that is true. He was attacking Carter based on semantics, not being upfront about the actions of his sponsors, the fossil energy companies who were determined to get Carter out of office because of his energy plan:
National Energy Program Fact Sheet on the President's Program.
April 20, 1977
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=7373
They manufactured a crisis to make Carter's policies seem ineffective. The GOP also manufactured a huge PR campaign of right wing religion, homophobia, sexism, and racial bigotry. They opposed employing minorities in jobs held by white men for the most part. Carter's policies on civil rights in that area were changing the face of work environments and equality was going up and not down. They decided they had to stop him since inequality is how wealth is transferred from one group to another in a game of winners and losers. But there is never any peace.
Reagan made a permanent loss of jobs for millions of Americans in the working class and attacked unions all the way through his tenure. Meanwhile, the media joyfully sang the chorus of '
Greed is Good.'
The pundit class had their cavalier assessment of the necessity of people being kept unemployed for controlling inflation. But they were only speaking for Wall Street. This is in contrast to the policies of President Roosevelt:
Chasing Full Employment
By LOUIS UCHITELLE - February 12, 2006
President Franklin D. Roosevelt put full employment on the table in 1944, declaring that having a job was a basic human right. During World War II, the nation actually achieved full employment. And twice since then, Congress has considered bills that would have guaranteed a job at decent pay for every adult who wanted work. That doesn't mean everyone; lots of people don't want to work. But in a society that legislated full employment, the government would be the employer of last resort if the private sector came up short of good jobs for those who wanted them.
These are radical concepts today. Fear of another depression prompted the first debate, in the mid-1940's, and a steep recession contributed to the second, in the mid-1970's. Both bills, as finally enacted, failed to achieve their original goal. And as inflation rose in the late 70's, government shifted to fighting it, often at the expense of employment.
The old-timers who tried to legislate full employment saw it not as a desirable market phenomenon - the spinoff of a robust economy - but as a civil right, on a par with the right to vote. That is still the view of a few economists, including Amartya Sen at Harvard, whose writings on famine, poverty and other injustices won him the Nobel in economics in 1998.
"I know that people get scared of inflation and Wall Street is a natural ally in this fear," Mr. Sen said. "But the real costs of unemployment are very high. Having a job confers not only income, but social recognition and self-respect, which comes with having the sense of being wanted by society..."
A lot more on competing views of economics at the link here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/business/yourmoney/12view.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
i will say it again; there is great profit to be made off the dehumanization and theft of wealth from others. We cannot have a just society without addressing the root causes of inquality.
JMHO.
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