GDP: America's New Misery Index?

Truthout published an article today that is well worth a read in its entirety.  Mark Provost in "Why the Rich Love High Unemployment" argues that the "jobless recovery" is not a fluke, rather high unemployment has been a boon to the super rich.  Political focus on the GDP and corporate profits as the sole measure of economic health have made jobs a low priority.  While the U.S. has the second largest GDP growth from 2008-2010 (after Canada) of the G-7 countries, it has the highest unemployment. Provost writes:

A JPMorgan research report concludes that the current corporate profit recovery is more dependent on falling unit-labor costs than during any previous expansion. At some level, corporate executives are aware that they are lowering workers' living standards... Call it the "paradox of profitability." Executives are acting in their own and their shareholders' best interest: maximizing profit margins in the face of weak demand by extensive layoffs and pay cuts. But what has been good for every company's income statement has been a disaster for working families and their communities...

In the first Great Depression, President Roosevelt created an alphabet soup of institutions - the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) - to directly relieve the unemployment problem, a crisis the private sector was unable and unwilling to solve. In the current crisis, banks were handed bottomless bowls of alphabet soup - the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the Public-Private Investment Program (PPIP) and the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF) - while politicians dithered over extending inadequate unemployment benefits...

Proponents of labor-market flexibility argue that it's easier for the private sector to create jobs when the transactional costs associated with hiring and firing are reduced. Perhaps fortunately, legal protections for American workers cannot get any lower: US labor laws make it the easiest place in the word to fire or replace employees...

America's labor market depression propels asset price appreciation. In the last two years, US corporate profits and share prices rose at the fastest pace in history - and the fastest in the G-7. Considering the source of profits, the soaring stock market appears less a beacon of prosperity than a reliable proxy for America's new misery index.

What You Learn on Park Benches

Sara Peters, writing in Happy in Hooverville, discusses what she learned as an unemployed New Yorker from the people she met on park benches.

Being that these new friends were people who were sitting on benches during the daylight hours, rather than sitting in an office, these people were actually quite a bit different than most other people I know. Different ages, different vocations, different backgrounds, different views on life, different views on work. Inexplicably, they had every confidence that I would find work again, and every confidence that I'd be good at it.

Over the months my attitudes toward many things began to change. My bench, the people I met, the wind whooshing its way through the trees -- they all slowly unraveled the tightly woven, rock-hard snarls of foolish assumptions that had been twisting me up inside for longer than I could remember. They allowed me to release some of the sources of stress that had become a part of my very being.

Life after Layoff: Cards of Change

Discovered the Cards of Change site today.  It is a cathartic celebration of life after layoffs in the form of re-designed business cards sent in by readers who have lost a job and found their way to something new.  Follow the link to see the current collection or upload your own.

Giving When You're Down: Broke and Beautiful Person of the Day

Being laid off can be a big blow to a person's feeling of self-worth. As much as you may know logically that you were "let go" because of market forces beyond your control, the sense that you were not valued enough to be kept on is, emotionally, hard to shake.

The Washington Post on Friday told the story of Reed Sandridge, an unemployed Washington D.C. man who found a solution to his out-of-work blues: random acts of kindness towards others.

Sandridge has been giving $10 a day away to a stranger and blogging about the people he meets.

His mom, the daughter of a coal miner whom he remembers most for her kindness, always told him that when you're going through tough times, that's when you most need to give back.

So not long after he was laid off, on the third anniversary of his mom's death, he started his "year of giving,"...

the year of giving is not about the money. Sandridge is trying to spread an idea. Doing nice things all the time is addictive, he said.

Besides, he added, "being unemployed, I was starting to go nuts."

You can read the entire article at the Washington Post or follow Sandridge's blog yourself. It has been added to the blog roll.

Another Member of the Broke and Beautiful Nation

Lesley Pink, an editor, writer and contributor to The 405 Club, wrote about the benefits of being unemployed in her article On the Bright Side:

There are some positives to being out of work. I don’t have to ride the subway during rush hour. Office politics are no longer since I don’t have an office. I can take a walk in the middle of the day. I am not hidden away in a windowless office for eight hours a day. Grocery stores and banks are much less busy in the middle of the day. I get to watch “The Price is Right.” I don’t have to feel guilty about skipping the gym because I don’t belong to a gym anymore— that had to go when I lost my job. I can wear flipflops instead of heels.

Something to Sing While You're Waitin'

Zombie Outbreak

Something to do while you're scanning the on-line want ads:

The Consumerist posted a link to this animation The Geography of Jobs, which shows jobs gained and jobs lost with green and red blotches. In honor of Halloween, the Consumerist suggests thinking of the red blotches as zombie outbreaks and playing scary music as you watch the blood-colored splotches take over the nation! Boo-ah-ha-ha-ha!