Nicholas Kristof Suddenly Discovers the Unemployment Crisis
Posted: August 28, 2011 Filed under: Barack Obama, Economy, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, unemployment | Tags: Barack Obama, callous disregard for human lives, Depression, joblessness, media elite, Nicholas Kristof, politicians, Suicide, the NEW York Times, Torture, unemployment, war 16 Comments
I probably shouldn’t pick on Nicholas Kristof, because I guess as media elites go, he’s one of the least offensive. But really, his latest column just about sent me out into the street screaming and tearing my hair out. The piece is titled “Did We Drop the Ball on Unemployment?”
WHEN I’m in New York or Washington, people talk passionately about debt and political battles. But in the living rooms or on the front porches here in Yamhill, Ore., where I grew up, a different specter wakes friends up in the middle of the night.
It’s unemployment.
I’ve spent a chunk of summer vacation visiting old friends here, and I can’t help feeling that national politicians and national journalists alike have dropped the ball on jobs. Some 25 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed — that’s more than 16 percent of the work force — but jobs haven’t been nearly high enough on the national agenda.
Duh! I have a question for Captain Obvious Nick Kristof: Is the Pope Catholic? Here’s another one: Does a bear sh*t in the woods? Yes, Nick. You and your pals dropped the ball, missed the boat, and every other metaphorical cliche you can think of. Yes. And it’s way too late for your mealy-mouthed *concern* to make a difference.
What is wrong with these people? Kristof goes on to provide a few examples of people he knows in Oregon who are suffering from joblessness and hopelessness. Frankly, I found his little anecdotes rather patronizing. Maybe I’m being too hard on him, but really, if this man claims to be a “journalist,” why didn’t he recognize years ago that unemployment was a huge problem for the American people and for the economy as a whole? Kristof’s half-hearted prescriptions for solutions aren’t much better than Obama’s:
There are no quick fixes to joblessness, but Washington could temporarily make federal money available to pay for teachers who are otherwise being laid off. We could increase spending on service programs like AmeriCorps that have far more applicants than spots.
We could extend the payroll tax cut, which expires at the end of December. Astonishingly, Republicans in Congress seem to be lined up instinctively against this basic economic stimulus. Could the Tea Party actually favor tax reductions for billionaires but not for working Americans? Could we have found a tax increase the Republican Party favors?
Mr. Obama, with 25 million Americans hurting, will you fight — really fight! — to put jobs at the top of the national agenda?
Give me a break! Obama isn’t going to fight for anything except his own reelection and keeping his wealthy donors happy. And Nick Kristof, after tossing of a facile column in which he pretends to care about struggling Americans, will return to Washington and New York, smile his self-satisfied smile, and continue to ignore the depth of what is really happening to our country.
Why doesn’t The New York Times hire Jeffrey Kaye, who writes about important topics like torture? Joblessness can be a kind of torture too, and a couple of weeks ago, Kaye wrote a fine article about the links between unemployment, depression, and suicide.
When considering the effects of unemployment, and the desultory, really uncaring response of the current Democratic administration, as well as Republicans in Congress, to the human devastation of joblessness, it is important to consider the terrible emotional and psychological effects of such unemployment. Such effects are well-documented, but rarely mentioned in articles or blog postings.
A well-regarded 2010 study by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, “The Anguish of Unemployment,” quantified the tremendous emotional suffering engendered by unemployment. “‘The lack of income and loss of health benefits hurts greatly, but losing the ability to provide for my wife and myself is killing me emotionally,’ wrote one respondent to the survey.” ….
Just last April, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released a study that showed that suicide rates rise and fall in tandem with the business cycle.
Kaye, a clinical psychologist actively working with clients, says he has seen the devastating effects of joblessness in his own practice since the financial crisis. He writes:
Unemployment is deadly. The effects of the capitalist boom-and-bust system seriously damage millions of lives. But with an almost daily bombast of propaganda about terrorism, the populace lives in fear, while wondering how they will make their bills, ground down between anxiety over ghostly terrorists and eviction, or how to put gas in their car, or afford a bus pass. Hopelessness stalks the land, not Al Qaeda. And yet the politicians in D.C. care little or nothing about the suffering their policies cause. Indeed, their pockets are lined with campaign donations from corporations that routinely layoff hundreds of thousands, and ship many thousands more jobs overseas.
Callous disregard for human lives is what links the terrible policies of war and torture with the policies of neglect and indifference towards the jobless. Such callousness is the by-product of a get-rich-quick ethos that worships profit over all else, over worship of a capitalist system that has brought about terrible world wars, massive depressions, colonial atrocities, and even genocide. U.S. society awaits its turn through the meat-grinder of history.
That is the kind of writing I’d like to see on the op-ed page of the NYT. Of course I know it will never happen. The elite media, the out-of-touch political class, and their wealthy enablers must not be made to feel even slightly uncomfortable about the effects of their actions–not even for the few minutes it takes to read a newspaper column.
peej
Carissa
ecocatwoman
mablue2
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
CDC study on joblessness and suicide: 1928-2007
Here’s another one: Does a bear sh*t in the woods? Yes, Nick. You and your pals dropped the ball, missed the boat, and every other metaphorical cliche you can think of.
So true, BB. What is sad is that he is considered smart. Couldn’t see what everybody here knew in 2007. Why Dak isn’t one of the left’s official PAID economists is completely beyond me…..
Hillary 2012
The reason Dak isn’t one of the official paid economists is that she’s too smart to buy their propaganda and too stubborn to lie for them.
Amen.
Hillary 2012
Word….
Great read BB – really gets to the heart of it.
Thank you!
Nicholas does what all good propagandists are paid to do by the PTB. He fulfills there every desire. The only reason he’s finally sorta looking at the problems that the hoipolloi are experiencing is that he’s paid to pay attention. The PTB must be really upset by the WON if they are unleashing well paid upper crust quacks like Nick. I wonder who they have lined up to take the Won’s place – please not Bachmann.
If anything this simply underscores the bubble that our pols and American journalists are living in. Kristof has to travel home to his native Oregon to get a dose of reality. WTF??? Maybe it’s because there’s very little investigative reporting being done, the hard nitty-gritty that gets a reporter out of the NY Washington rarified air to bump shoulders with real Americans, to see what the lives of the working class is all about. That’s giving him the benefit of the doubt because Kristof has written about the diminished lives of people in other countries, the exploitation of children and women, the ravages of war and vilence. It’s time to look inward. Time to spend some thought and energy on the exploitation and failures closer to home.
Is this what koolaide does to the human mind? FDR was part of the elite class. Why is it that FDR recognized the human tragedy of massive unemployment and none of our ‘so-called’ elites today seem to get it? Nor do they seem to care or like Kristof are blinking in the sun and muttering: Oh, dear. Did we drop the ball?
A day late and a dollar short.
No. These are the same elites who came up with the amazing phrases of: we have to expect and accept a ‘jobless recovery.’ The ‘we,’ of course, never included themselves, those with access, friends in high places. It was the grubby, faceless masses, those with neither access or influence.
Now as this consumer-driven economy teeters, they wonder why. How do the unemployed buy anything beyond absolute essentials? How do we collect sufficient taxes when 25 million citizens and counting are unemployed? How do cities, counties and municipalities balance budgets [required by stupid laws] pay their bills, fulfill their obligations when tax receipts are at record lows? One of those ways is by selling public assets to private investors. Which in all honesty, I think was the grand scheme all along. The common good/grounds will be sold for a song for short-term purposes, only to have those same assets rented back at outrageous cost. This is the old saw of selling the family silver to your worst enemy. And then, your enemy applies the thumb screws.
The Barons and the serfs.
When Kristof and his ilk were writing of injustices around the globe, they took their eye off the ball at home. Meanwhile those who protest the corporate takeover, the continuing economic and social injustices against the middle-class, the poor, the elderly, the disabled, women, the environment, etc., those people are labeled as ‘domestic terrorists, rabble-rousers, unpatriotic morons.’
Yeah, the ball was dropped. Right down the sewer.
When I read something so clueless, I literally want to bang my head against a wall.
Hear, hear Peggy Sue. You hit the nail
Peggy Sue,
“Kristof has written about the diminished lives of people in other countries, the exploitation of children and women, the ravages of war and vilence. It’s time to look inward. Time to spend some thought and energy on the exploitation and failures closer to home.”
That’s what bothered me so much about this column. Kristof is so compassionate when it comes to people who are starving and being abused overseas. But no one wants to look at the poverty right now in the U.S.
This over at Huffpo: Robert Kuttner: It’s Not a Great Recession
I’ll go with number 2 Alex – the great depression 11
Say what? A pittance to pay some teachers and expansion of Americorps along with that pathetic tax break which should be expired. It’s not creating any jobs but it is robbing Social Security of income. Then again that may be the point to help kill social security sooner.
Is this the best he could come up with? What utter and complete failure, after he tried to pick up the ball. I absolutely detest our media.
Ralph,
Why is it that no one in our media-political elite class can remember Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson? Can anyone explain that to me? It wasn’t that long ago that we had actual Democrats as Presidents.
Marco Rubio’s Profound Idiocy
If you haven’t seen Paul Rosenberg’s take down of Rubio, it’s really very good.
http://www.merge-left.org/2011/08/26/marco-rubios-profound-idiocy/