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The Daily Stirrer

The 99ers: Death Of The American Dream.
The 99ers are a new social class createde by the economic recession in the USA. This new demographic, not one the advertizing industry will be interested in are jobless people whose unemployment benefit (job sekers in UK parlance) benefit has run out and thus who have dropped off the unemployment statistics. But even for people who are not 99ers times are hard scross the pond.

The99ers: Death Of The American Dream
by Ian R Thorpe.
2010-11-26
CREATIVE COMMONS: Attribute, non commercial, no derivs.
KEYWORDS: job, jobless, 99ers, america, dream, welfare, unemployment, economy, politics, obama, krugman, business, work

Richard Gaines runs a barber's shop on Camden's Haddon Avenue. It is not the best shopping area in town and is lined with cheap businesses that cater to the lowest and of the market. Haddon Avenue is also the place of business for traders who prefer not to work from anything as formal as a shop, drug gangs operate with apparent freedom here. Gaines, 50, whose a hair salon doubles as a fitness centre. He works hard and is a respected member of the community. But Haddon Avenue is not a place to get rich or even make a good living in the best of times.

Just how badly the great recession has affected this fragile New Jersey town, according to official statistics currently the poorest in America, was recently spelled out to Gaines. In more prosperous years – whatever that might mean for a city so destitute – local businesses on Haddon Avenue could at least rely on a bit of trade from those who made their money illegally on the street.

Young men whose choice of career meant they were always stalked by the shadow of sudden death had an easy come, easy go attitude to money. They bought flashy clothes and wanted sharp haircuts and always paid in cash. Those days are gone. The economy is now so bad in Camden that even the criminals are struggling and going short. "Even the guys who got money from illegal means really don't want to spend it," Gaines said. This would come as a shock to fictional Mafia cappo Tony Soprano who once famously said "The three businesses that suffer least in a recession are gambling, prostitution and crime." To hear that the bookies are out of business, the whores applying for jobs as office cleaners and the criminals are struggling to earn a dishonest buck would shake the foundations of Tony's world.

A town like Camden though is just a snapshot of the deep problems still hitting the wider American economy. Growth rates are stuttering and a recovery is struggling to take hold. It may even now be showing signs of going backwards again, as countries such as Germany start to power forward and even Britain, blighted by over - reliance on a FUBAR financial sector and a bloated housing market is showing sings of improvement as the coalition's efforts to get the public sector deficit under control restore confidence.

Joblessness has taken hold like a plague in America, with the numbers of long-term unemployed reaching levels not seen since the slump of the 1930s. The figures are frightening and indicative of a society that is in deep trouble.

The headline jobless figure of 9.5% is bad enough but does not begin to convey the problem as it fails to measure those who have stopped looking for work. The American system of counting the unemployed, like that of Britain, is based on a headcount of those claiming a job seeker's allowance. This runs out after a certain period and as people are switched to welfare benefits (inappropriately called income support in the UK) they are no longer counted in the monthly unemployment figures. In the United States currently the limit for job seeker's benefit stands at 99 weeks.

Up to now more than a million Americans have fallen into the category of having officially topped seeking work: effectively giving up hope of finding a job and dropping out of the official statistics. Living on food stamps paid for by the individual states. Such cases are seeking jobs of course, most would love a job, any job. Benefits in the U.S.A. are not so generous as those in Europe and then there is the self esteem factor and the desire to provide for one's family to take into account. Simply to write people off in order to massage the statistics is inhuman. The ranks of those no longer deemed not economically active, made unpersons in Orwellian newspeak, are likely to grow as millions more who joined the job queue after the crash of 2008 find their jobless status becoming a permanent state of hopelessness as the job seeker benefit runs out. Some estimates says as many as four million will fall into this state of limbo in the first half of 2011. Surveys show that with each passing week on the dole their chances of finding a job get slimmer.

Though corporations, especially in the banking sector, are posting healthy profits, they are not hiring new workers. At the same time, government cuts are sweeping through city and state governments alike, threatening tens of thousands of jobs and slicing away at services once thought vital. Schools, street lighting, libraries, refuse collection, the police, fire services and public transport networks are all being scaled back. The Obama administrations lonytoons economics have led to such irresponsible overspending that America is having difficulty selling its bonds on the international market. The economic behemoth is struggling to fund its commitments.

As each tranche of bonds is sold of course the sum of interest America must pay the people who hold those bonds rises each month. And all the time tax revenue is falling.

America appears to be a society splitting down the centre, shattering the middle class that long formed the backbone of the society and dividing it into a country of haves and have-nots. "A once unthinkable level of economic distress is in the process of becoming the new normal," warned Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman in a recent New York Times column. A facile enough conclusion but Krugman, one of the economists President Obama listens to and thus one of the sources of fuckwittery has been voluble in calling for another stimulus bill which in the light of the first one's failure would be the worst possible thing to do. Steven Green, an economics lecturer at Baylor University showed a firmer grasp of reality when he told a UK newspaper: "We are really in a tough spot right now."

There is a new name for those falling down the black hole of joblessness that has rent the continuum of America's economy. They are the 99ers. It is a moniker that no one wants. It refers to the 99 weeks of benefits that the jobless can qualify for in America. Government cash helps those laid off keep a tenuous grip on a normal life. It keeps a roof over their heads, pays a phone bill, puts food on a table and petrol in a car. But once the 99 weeks are up the payments stop – as is happening now for millions of people – and they are 99ers.

Alexandra Jarrin, 49, is a 99er. She worked for a small technology company near New York City, earned $56,000 a year (about Ł30k but housing is cheaper and taxes lower across the pond), had petrol in her car and a roof over her head. She was enrolled in a graduate business school. Then, two years ago, she lost her job.

She received her last unemployment benefit payment back in March and promptly became an "unperson.", one of the first wave of "99ers" who have exhausted their 99 weeks of entitlement. When interviewed by the New York Times, she was living in a motel in Brattleboro, Vermont, having paid $260 she managed to scrape together from friends and from selling her living-room furniture – enough for a week-long stay.

Alexandra told a television reporter she wept as she left her old life. 'I thought, you know, what if I turned the wheel in my car and wrecked my car?' Her vehicle is now on the verge of being repossessed. Jarrin has contacted her local shelter, but was told there was a waiting list. "Barring a miracle, I'm going to be [sleeping] in my car," she said. And after it is reposessed ....?

The Obama administration cannot be blamed for all America's troubles but neither can the Bush administration that left offioce two years ago. The systemic problems in the American economy go back to the end of the 1960s, to the infiltation of politically correct thinking into the civil service, the education system and the social care agencies. This has encouraged an overdeveloped sense of enlightenment and a victim culture. Affirmative action programmes aimed at redressing the iniquities of the past have lowered the bar too much and people who were promoted beyond their ability when they were taken from the pap have been advanced to positions of responsibility in government agencies, the military and the administration. The President himself is the ultimate affirmative action appointee of course. Whatever possessed anyone to think this unremarkable junior senator's reading one pre written speech reasonably competently from an autocue qualified him to lead the world's most powerful nation. The Obama catastrophe is the culmination of 40 years wrongheadedness.

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No Jobs For The Masses In The New Economy Despite University EducationNo matter how leaders like David Cameron and Barack Obama try to talk up their economies or assure voters the jobs market is improving, growth returning and unemployment will soon start falling, the truth is change does not equal progress and forcing the pace of social change has only masked the true depth of economic and social problems. One of these is unemployment and particularly joblessness among the young. Even a universdity education does not provide a guaranteed career path.
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Amazon Takes On Sainsburys We are not against progress at this publication nor are we against technology. There has to come a point however where, when presented with some new development and told it will make life better in many ways for us all, we take the advice of Marcus Tullius Cicero and ask "Cui Bono?" Who benefits? One such case is exemplified by the expansion of Amazon into the grogeries business. The Necessity Of Curbing State Spending
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At Prime Minister's questioin time today David Cameron was given a threashing the like of which he had not experienced since he was at his very posh school, and he did not enjoy it. After less than 10 minutes of suffering "the slings and arrows of outraged MPs from members of his own and opposition parties, the Prime Minister looked like a pit bull with piles. The Leverson inquiry ...

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COMMENTS AND RECOMMENDED READING AROUND THE WEB

In this section we do not necessarily support the views expressed in linked articles but try to give a coss section of interesting and well written articles that we think are likely to stir things up a bit.

COMMENT:
(A random and ecletic mix of what we thought was worth reading recently)

The Question That Wob't Go Away: Who Is Barack Obama?
So now Chris Matthews isn’t the only one experiencing a little thrill when he thinks about Barack (omit middle name) Obama. The recent revelation that from the early 1990s until the day before yesterday—or, to be more accurate, until Obama made his decision to run for president—a biographical pamphlet circulated by his literary agents described him as having been “born in Kenya” has been setting the world of ...

How The Grexit May Make Things Worse In Greece
It looks more likely that Greece will crash out of the euro. But if it attempts to return to the drachma, there's a pretty big problem, which no one's really come up with a way to fix. The printers at De La Rue or its rivals are, according to reports, preparing to run off some new Greek banknotes ...

Is America Really A Post White Nation or Is This Writer Spouting Typical Progressive Claptrap When is a majority less than a majority? Answer: when the minority is bigger. This is what has just happened in the US: births to the white majority in America fell in the first six months of last year to just 49.6 per cent of the total, meaning that Caucasians, as they are quaintly known, may within the next 30 years become an endangered species.Given America’s boast that it is a land of ...

The New Reactionaries by Victor Davis Hanson, Pajamas Media
About fifteen years ago, many liberals began to self-identify as progressives—partly because of the implosion of the Great Society and the Reagan reaction that had tarnished the liberal brand and left it as something akin to “permissive” or “naďve,” partly because “progressive” was supposedly ...

Wind farms can cause climate change, finds new study
Wind farms can cause climate change, according to new research, that shows for the first time the new technology is already pushing up temperatures.

I Promise You The President Has A Big Stick says vice president
Vice President Joe Biden went after presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney in a campaign address at New York University, questioning the former Massachusetts governor’s chops on foreign policy. And, he was there to try to prop up his boss’ credentials ....

Minimum Alcohol Pricing Shambles by Dick Puddlecote
You have to wonder if UK politicians who have been promoting minimum alcohol pricing might have been a bit pissed when they made the decision to go for it. Consider this response to a parliamentary question tabled by a UKIP member of the House of Lords ...

Asinine bureaucrats
I shared Gildas’ rage yesterday; he fared better than I, he was actually able to articulate his rage. PMQs left me quite speechless and I abandoned the effort to write.PMQs has become a monotonously unfolding pantomime of ...

A Spectacular Devaluation But no Recovery In Sight
The sterling effective exchange rate is one reason why the UK has recorded the highest inflation rate of any advanced economy. With the onset of the crisis, the Bank of England allowed sterling to depreciate dramatically ...

Salt Tax Again
Salt is now the same as tobacco. Soon there will never be a heart attack again, anywhere in the world, and the drones will live in morose greyness for all eternity. Well, I like tobacco, but I won’t die if I can’t get any. It’s a fun part of life ...

Obama Message Booed ~ In Massachusetts (by Allahpundit)
Well, it stands to reason. Massachusetts is a deep red state. Wait, what?
I held off blogging this yesterday in hopes that video would emerge but after almost 24 hours I’ve given up hope. It started when Romney advisor Eric Fehrnstrom tweeted: ...

The second front - the new fear and panic tactic to replace AGW
Apr 22, 2012 Greens If the struggle to put climatology back on a scientific footing were not bad enough, the UN has just set up a new intergovernmental body, which will push biodiversity as the new excuse to "scare 'n' tax".

Inequality: a middle-class obsession by Daniel Ben-Ami
Unlike past warriors for equality, today’s campaigners simply dislike both the super-rich and ‘trailer trash’.

Executive Order 13547: “The Sleeping Power Grab” (by Erika Johnsen)
To be fair, President Obama’s executive-order output hasn’t unreasonably outpaced that of his predecessors – his especial willingness to actively circumvent Congress and snatch huge gobs of power for the federal bureaucracy only makes it feel like he has. In July of 2010, President Obama signed executive order 13547 – “Stewardship of ...

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