This is your life from now on.Jobless father of 4: Awaiting lifeline from Congress
By Jennifer Liberto @CNNMoney March 24, 2014: 7:14 AM ET
Renardo Gomez is living on borrowed everything.
He owes several family members payments of $50 to $100. The borrowed money, along with food stamps, has helped feed his four kids. His unpaid cable bill has mounted to $400, his electricity bill $600. His landlord has let him postpone rent. But next month, he owes double the rent: $700.
Gomez is among 2 million unemployed workers hoping Congress moves forward this week to renew federal jobless benefits for up to five months. Two weeks ago, a bipartisan group of Senators reached a deal, which is expected to pass the Senate this week. Five Republicans signed on to the $9 billion measure. However, its fate looks grim in the House.
"I'm worried. ... What if I get evicted? What's going to happen?" said Gomez, 51, who worked as a facilities specialist for the Federal Emergency Management Agency in New York City until his contract ended last April. Gomez has been looking for jobs since. The deal would throw a financial lifeline to people in the same situation like Gomez who have been scrambling to get by since federal jobless benefits lapsed the week of December 28. When the recession-era program expired, it took away a safety net for 1.3 million long-term unemployed Americans who have been unable to find new work.
...
The cavalry is not coming.
You are on your own.
And every time a resume goes out and is never answered -- not even with a perfunctory email or a form letter -- hopes dies a little because you are reminded once more that you have ceased to exist.
A thousand resumes. A thousand little cuts, each one deeper and closer to an artery than the last.
Then hope dies a little more because in the job search game you are not allowed to feel despair. You Must Remain Chipper And Upbeat At All Times because no matter how qualified you are, no matter how flawless your credentials, if anyone ever sees you frown or smells the blood seeping through your Good Interview Suit or in any way senses you are anything less that 100% Chipper And Upbeat, no one will ever hire you and it'll be your own damn fault.
The cavalry is not coming.
Because your name is not Citibank or JP Morgan.
4 comments:
And since people had children later in life this unemployment happens when your kids are in the last years of high school and are starting to look at colleges.
It's a total, painful life train wreck.
It's time we rob the rich. Now.
I have been hearing reputable economists bitch about this recovery being lackluster, or not comparing well to earlier recoveries; particularly with the long term unemployed.
"Recoveries" now being the quaint term used for what happens after the cycle in which republicans finish raping the overall economy and funnel all the money upward.
Those on the right will invariably come up with the canard "When have you ever seen a government spend it's way out of debt?"
Of course the simple answer is "Every single time this country has been in recession"...but such a common sense approach is so dead without the "Mars Attacks" solution for congress.
Since the biggest hit to employment was the massive, but somehow secret, public sector sacking of about 450k workers, and the assorted ripple effects that has had cannot be acknowledged, it's all just a big mystery....I guess.
The multiple modest infrastructure jobs bills the President has proposed would have sent us soaring years ago, since for a brief time, we had a strategic advantage over most of Europe, due to the one economic policy move the President was allowed in the form of the too low stimulus package.
Since he has effectively had his hands tied behind his back from year three in office and is now being blamed for the problems he is not allowed to solve; what can possibly be done?
I fear that this time, the damage is so deep in the system, even a massive new stimulus package directed at actually putting people back to work (not another bullshit tax incentive bill) will not be enough.
No such package will ever be considered again, unless the dems can pull out a mid term miracle of some sort...so yes
we are truly fucked.
It's not just for the over-45 crowd, by the way. Ask someone with a college degree or two who graduated post-2007 with no experience in their field how life is going.
The train wreck isn't just "older" Americans and their kids. It's very much a whole lot of Americans who should be a part of the middle class.
Ultimately, this is the end-stage of Reagan-era economics of redistributing money to the top and gutting the middle class.
And while I'll sound like a silly radical as I've sounded many times, there aren't a whole lot of ways around the coming neo-feudalism. Either a major political shift happens (and that won't happen before 2016/2017) or guillotines roll out.
Or, what is pretty much just as likely full-fledged neo-feudalism. Oligarchs want aristocracy. The Kochs can smell it, and they want it.
So, until the guillotines roll out (and I'll happily volunteer to wear a black hood when it does) I'll continue to vote for the lesser evil, because I'm not as fucking stupid as the Pures™ who think that all we need to do is stop voting, let Republicans complete the transformation to neo-feudalism, and then something something utopian social democracy.
Meh. Same ol' same ol'. None of this is new and the future has been written about by sci-fi writers and Marx.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/
Post a Comment