Unemployment - La Cueva

Les Leopold brings out some cogent points in "Why The Idiocy About Unemployment?"

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07/11-4

This is a topic dear to my heart since I have been on it for two years now, fired from my last job just as the economic meltdown was beginning.

While I'm still going to the unemployment office four days a week (the other day I go to the local food bank) I am resigned to the fact that I will not get work again in any of the fields I have previously worked in and I will begin to draw on a pension and try and write.

So many people I encounter at the unemployment office have college degrees; the woman I'm sitting next to as I write this has one in accounting! There is a group of professionals that meet weekly to network, share experiences, work on resumes and it seems their fate is not much different than mine.

Leopold is absolutely correct that,

• There is plenty of work to do and plenty of people who need work. Why is it that the twain can never meet?


• What jobs? We're still down 8 million jobs since the recession began. I can attest to this first hand. Every job interview I have gone on (none recently) the interviewer has said the company was "swamped" with applicants. The official number is six applicants for every available job.


• Why haven't Democrats gone out into the streets--or food banks--on behalf of unemployed people? For that matter, why haven't unions done this? There is one group that is trying, though: UCubed, which trys to organize unemployed nationwide, especially online.

Last add on the World Cup: If it makes Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh, John and Ken and others of their ilk madder than wet hornets, it has socially redeeming value!