Arctic Defrost Dumping Snow on U.S. and Europe | CommonDreams.org

Arctic Defrost Dumping Snow on U.S. and Europe | CommonDreams.org

Straightening Out Addicts Through Memory Work | Psych Central News

Straightening Out Addicts Through Memory Work | Psych Central News

Hullabaloo: Don't Squeeeze the Baby Boomers

Unemployment among those of us who are 55-64 is 40%.

Hullabaloo: Squeezing the Baby Boomers

by digby

Ezra Klein has a good post [http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2011/01/too_young_not_to_work_too_old.html] with an interesting graph showing what I am seeing among my friends:




That doesn't count the underemployed, which afflicts even more people my age. They lost good paying jobs and are now toiling at part time work or contracting that pays substantially less than what they made before. Strangely, it turns out that nobody is eager to hire 50 year olds at the wages they spent 25 years working their way up to and they aren't very excited about having a bunch of old duffers around the office or the factory when they can get young people to do it for much less and lower health care costs.

Here's the political problem with this scenario. This is the baby boom and there is a huge number of them. You can ignore them and pretend that it doesn't matter that this huge group is rapidly going through their meager retirement savings, but unless you are prepared to kill them, they're going to be around for quite a while. And they are getting poorer rather than richer, what with the real estate and stock market crashes at the worst possible time in their lives --- they're still putting kids through college and taking care of aging parents. It's a real squeeze.

I know it's fashionable for Democrats these days to write the baby boom off as a lost cause --- apparently, it's assumed they're all going to vote for Republicans forever because the oldsters are all voting for them today. But it's really not a good idea to let that happen -- there are simply way too many of them and they will vote far more reliably than under 30s do. Older people are just more interested in politics --- especially when they are financially screwed and have no time to make the money back.

We can thank Joe Lieberman for one thing: he shot down the Medicare buy-in for 55 year olds, which would have been a huge, huge benefit for all these people and cemented their loyalty to the Democratic Party for the rest of their lives. But that would have made the hippies happy and Holy Joe was having none of it. Too bad.

Update: I also have to point out that for those of us in the individual health insurance market --- as most of those unemployed 50 somethings are --- the health care bill is extremely inadequate. It's very expensive for us and when I did the famous HCR calculator, I found out that my savings from the bill will be minimal. And I don't make much money. I suppose a few of them will qualify for medicaid, but if you have any assets at all, you're stuck in the private market and it's brutal for people over 50 --- just when your health usually starts to be an issue.

I think this is a political time bomb. The only thing Dems have going for them is that Republicans are trapped in their ideology and can't really do much of anything but lie and misdirect. But that's a very thin reed.

Sputnik Will Make Us the Best Place to Do Business

Two things. First what sense does it make to evoke the manned space program while presiding over the closing down of the actual real space program of today? It only reminds me that the Russians are now the only ones still in the space flight business. In the end we LOST the "sputnik" race, and its a national shame and a disgrace. This is why it is such a false note for him to mention it. It is not inspiring; its depressing and discouraging. The fact that he is so out of touch not to understand that is incredibly disturbing.


Second, its this "best place to do business" crap. We had a governor in my state who thought it was smart to make up a new slogan: "West Virginia: Open for Business". What he meant was that he would give anything to bribe some company to set up a headquarters in West Virginia - cut any tax, refund fees, revoke regulations to undercut the offer any other governor could offer, to be "competitive" effectively in a race to the bottom.

It went so far the one gas company dropped their plan to set up their main offices in the state because they lost a court case where they were being sued by several landowners for cheating them out of royalties for gas pumped out of their land and Governor Manchin did not fix it for them.

Hullabaloo: State of the Union

Jonathan Schell at The Nation has written an excellent critique of the president's speech that captures the nagging problem I've had with it since I first read the transcript. As with so many policy discussions lately, it seemed to be forcefully addressing a problem that isn't acute and ignoring the ones that are:

Why has that moment, now more than a half century past, been dragged out of obscurity to define the present? And why was the associated theme of American competitiveness in the world market chosen as the theme of the president’s State of the Union speech? After all, no superpower is aiming terrifying new weapons at the United States, as the Soviet Union seemed to be doing with its ballistic rockets during the cold war. As a matter of fact, even this was an illusion. The Soviet lead in rocketry almost immediately gave way to clear US superiority, although the mistaken belief in a “missile gap” persisted for years and was in fact instrumental in producing the Cuban missile crisis.

The New American Caste System | FDL News Desk

The New American Caste System | FDL News Desk:

"And with that, I think we can close the curtain on liberal – or even centrist, really – governance, and take a long intermission. Government has now abandoned the idea of promoting full employment. If people can walk to work in Washington without wanting to endlessly apologize for the failure of 15 million unemployed citizens, then that part of New Deal liberalism has ended. Government no longer tries to level the playing field between labor and management, not through regulation or through working to tighten the labor market."

Space Shuttle Challenger Explosion: 25 Years Later, A Still Painful Wound

I remember that day; I was in the middle of seminary. And on a day fourteen years later when I was preparing us to move after being forced out of the ministry I turned on the TV and watched the towers fall on 9/11/2001.

I had not put it all together until reading this article, how brutal these last 25 years have been. Add to it three wars and all the rest. The personal things I won't write about here.

Exhausted, discouraged, hanging on by a frayed thread, a very dimly burning wick.

Space Shuttle Challenger Explosion: 25 Years Later, A Still Painful Wound:

"'You say 'Challenger' and then we see that figure of smoke in the sky,' said Karioth, who teaches death and dying classes.

There has been a growing list of calamities since then.

Waco. Oklahoma City. Columbine. 9/11. Shuttle Columbia. Katrina. Virginia Tech. And now, Tucson.

With so much carnage, another space catastrophe wouldn't have the same impact as Challenger, Karioth noted. 'We're used to everybody dying now,' she said."

Washington, DC: Capital of conservatism

Capital of conservatism

Democrats are as responsible as Republicans for the right-wing climate in Washington.

January 26, 2011

President Obama delivers his State of the Union address

THE DOGMAS and delusions of conservatives and Corporate America are still dominating national politics--and their most effective advocate has turned out to be a Democratic president.

That's the conclusion we drew from President Barack Obama's State of the Union address. The man who not long ago was derided as a "socialist" by the right wants to "make America the best place on Earth to do business" and to work with Republicans to shrink the deficit with a five-year freeze on federal spending--non-security-related spending, that is....

It's become the logic of U.S. politics: The right wing captures the initiative with wild and reactionary rhetoric, and the Democrats concede half the way or more--until the "middle ground" has been pushed far enough that Corporate America and even most Republicans are satisfied.

So it was with the big issue of the lame-duck session of Congress after the November election--repeal or extend the Bush tax cuts for the small fraction of the richest Americans who enjoy a bonanza worth tens of thousands of dollars every year.

Republican defenders of the "little guy" suddenly forgot their hostility to Wall Street bankers and took a hard line calling for an extension. Obama and the Democrats complained and conceded, complained and conceded some more--until the final deal became exactly what the Republicans had been demanding all along: a temporary extension on all the tax breaks, including for the super-rich.

Many hurdles face relatives-turned-parents

It is not that unusual for grandparents to have a greater role in raising children than we picture in an "ideal family". I think that this "non-traditional" family arrangement is actually the normal and natural setup. The two-parent and child socially independent and self sufficient family is something created in modern times to suit the economic system that requires workers to be movable to follow the job.

All of our problems about "balancing" family and job, the one career and two career problem, child care, etc. are not personal problems to be solved by individuals, they are social problems created by our economic system that can only be solved by the system, not the families.

Many hurdles face relatives-turned-parents - The Charleston Gazette :

"How did the Nate come to live with his grandparents?

When Rachel became pregnant at age 21, she was a sophomore at Marshall University. A series of tragic events, including a car accident, money from a lawsuit and an abundance of prescription painkillers, led Rachel to realize she couldn't stay with Nate's father and she couldn't raise her child without help.

'The No. 1 reason a child is being raised by relatives, nationwide, is substance abuse,' Rachel said. 'At 23, I was still living with Nate's birth father.'

She said the situation went from bad to worse.

'I decided to get help with a drug addiction. It's not always been a bowl full of cherries,' Rachel said. 'I thought I would go to rehab, then go back and get Nate. But it often takes more.'

At this point, Nila and Howard became Nate's legal guardians.

'I can love my daughter as much as anyone else, but I don't have to like what she is doing,' Nila said. 'The hardest day was when I had to stop worrying about what was best for my daughter and worry about my grandson.'"