The Wolves will come--our invisible unemployed

We will forget them. How long were you there? Twenty five years. Just like that. You? Fifteen years. Just like that. Did you notice how fast the day goes when you are unemployed? I'm not good at this. I just want a job. They are here again. The coffee house lost days of the unemployed. Me and them. We are all invisible now. Writers are always invisible, but now all these men are invisible too. Many will never return. The recession will end and they will not find purchase in this new economy.

The dirty secret. In this culture if you become old then you are done. Passed over for the younger employee. They are wandering around in my domain now. I have always been the inverse of the working man, haunting the coffee houses of midday with a laptop and a book. But now they are here. I can hear them now. How long have you been off. A year. A year and a half. Who is your headhunter? Can you get a job anywhere now? For a lot of people this is a new sensation. For the first time highly educated people have been made redundant. The best and the brightest of other generations are pounding the pavement. Could it be there are just too many people now?

Like the housing market we are awash in too much inventory. There are too many people looking for work. Who will employ these millions. College students join the ranks every day and they are young. They can give sweat and effort. What can the older experienced worker give in the new economy? We don't' really know. All we know is that there are so many people looking for positions that have dried up or have been eliminated. We have seen this before in the blue collar industries. People replaced by robots or factories closed and jobs shipped overseas. But now the people who always assumed they would have a job have been put out to pasture years ahead of retirement. The old economy died under them and they have no place to go.

Will our new cyber based green economy snatch up these people. Will our new energy efficient Juggernaut need all this old economy talent. Or have we created a cyber world where people are pushed aside with the click of a mouse. Can we have an economy that needs all those people skills or does that belong to a brick and mortar world gone by?

I don't have an answer and neither does anyone else right now. But they are here. And we will ignore them when it all starts up again. They will become invisible, members of the permanent unemployed. The Indians used to leave their older members behind on the prairie with wood for a fire and a blanket. When the wood burned out they would freeze to death. Then the wolves would come.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Our Herbert Hoover

In the waning days of his administration, it is said that Herbert Hoover sat in the White House and literally didn't know what to do. The nation had slipped into a depression and the best he could say was that the economy would have to take it's course. This was after the famous, Prosperity is right around the corner speech. Hoover was a rich man who didn't understand struggle and the nations woes just seemed like a distasteful mess that was beyond repair. He did not like Roosevelt. He did not understand a man who had become a cripple and seemed to exude a confidence and enthusiasm that should have been his. Riding to the inauguration, neither man looked at each other.
Now we have our Hoover. The automakers are closing. Interest rates are at zero. Credit is frozen, people are losing their jobs in a tidal wave of corporate panic. Yet our Hoover sits in the White House and does nothing. After the firecracker of the Great Bailout, we are left with a man who just wants to go back to his ranch. You can see it in his face. I didn't make this mess fairly screams out at you. He is busy giving oil companies their last shots at Federal Land out west and pardoning cronies and putting his boots by the door. Time to go back to Texas and live like a rich oil baron again. Maybe it is his due. But the truth is he doesn't know what to do. Like Hoover, Bush is a duck hit on the head with the concussive effects of nuclear force bad news. The waves just keep coming and he is not a man for this type of crisis. Like Hoover, Bush has always been a rich man comfortable with steering the ship, not charting new courses. Like Hoover, his best effort was to reassure the American public the economy was fundamentally strong before handing over the keys to the bankers to keep their own respective ships afloat.
Now the car manufacturers are dying. They are looking to Washington for help, but Hoover is not thinking about that anymore. He is thinking about that final ride into the sunset where the world is right and let's leave it to that new guy. While not a cripple, Obama climbed out of obscurity and he knows how to fight. The ride to the inauguration will be a repeat of two fundamentally different men sharing a common space. Then they will both be on their own.
http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

FEAR ITSELF

1929. Fear itself. That rainy drizzly inaugural day in Washington with the stock market decimated and Mr. Roosevelt standing next to Mr. Hoover in those tall stove pipe hats, everything as somber as the black and white film where Mr. Roosevelt tells a crowd of black umbrellas--the only thing we have to fear, is fear itself. Quaint words once upon a time, but we know fear itself don't we? We feel it when we watch the cable channels and listen to wrestlers and has been kung fu actors tell us who we should vote for. We feel it when we can no longer decipher between news and entertainment where Larry King holds us hostage with who the Donald will endorse for President. Where have all the real people gone? We feel it when the market plunges nearly five hundred points and nobody can really have a serious discussion about the problem because everyone is busy being a celebrity. Are there any adults left in the house?Are we now victim to the Sara Palins who are as much a phenomenon for her hair and accent as her experience? Where is Mr. Obama now? Has he been swiftboated by the forces that be? Has the news media finally devoured their own? Where did all that hope go to in two short weeks? Could a woman who likes to shoot wolves from a helicoter and field dress a moose and talk about war with Russia and not even know what the Bush doctrine is really derail our best hope for change in this country? Could an old man with a rich Stepford wife really inherit the White House by proxy, hiding behind the short skirts and updo of a woman half his age who is married to snow mobile racing First Dude, a woman who tries to ban books, fire state troopers, and has her husband call people to tell them she is not happy with them? Where is that higher calling? Has it really all been sold down the river with the rest of our values? For what? A buck? Where is our Mr. Roosevelt now? We need him and we need him badly, because my friends, we are the ones standing in the rain now, and it's 2008.