September was the 21st straight month of job loss — the longest unbroken stretch of losses since record-keeping began in 1939 — bringing to 7.2 million the number of positions that have been axed since December 2007. And that understates the damage. During the recession, the [...]]]> Good editorial on the deteriorating jobs situation in today’s Times:

September was the 21st straight month of job loss — the longest unbroken stretch of losses since record-keeping began in 1939 — bringing to 7.2 million the number of positions that have been axed since December 2007. And that understates the damage. During the recession, the economy has failed to create another 2.7 million jobs that were needed simply to employ new workers — like high school and college graduates, immigrants and stay-at-home parents who want to go back to work.

The unemployment rate for September — 9.8 percent — also understates the damage. It would have been higher but for the fact that 571,000 people dropped out of the work force last month — in general, it’s assumed, because they’ve despaired of finding work. If they had kept looking, they would have been counted as unemployed.

The combination of a rising unemployment rate and a quickening pace of labor-force dropouts is especially worrisome. In September, the employment rate for all workers — defined as the share of the population with a job — fell to 58.8 percent, its lowest level in more than 25 years. For adult men, who have been particularly hard hit by job loss in this recession, the employment rate fell to 67 percent, its lowest level since the government began keeping track in 1948. Before this recession, that rate had never dropped below 70.5 percent.

***

The real work, however, lies ahead. Economic recovery will not automatically replace the jobs that have been lost so far in this recession. Nor will higher levels of learning and skill — necessary as they are — magically create jobs, especially in the numbers that are needed.

If successful, ambitious goals like health care reform and energy legislation may generate jobs, but officials have not persuasively linked them to job growth. Congress and the administration also have not done enough to directly create jobs. That could be done with more stimulus to spur job creation, or a large federal jobs program, or tax credits for hiring, or all three. Or surprise us. Just don’t pretend that the deteriorating jobs picture will self-correct, or act as if it is tolerable.

Here’s what I said in this comment (awaiting moderation):

Coming back from Europe last year really underscored how scary and unfriendly US security has become compared to the rest of the world.

At Charles DeGaulle Airport, [...]]]> According to the Times blog, the IOC gave the nod to Brazil because everyone hates getting through U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Here’s what I said in this comment (awaiting moderation):

Coming back from Europe last year really underscored how scary and unfriendly US security has become compared to the rest of the world.

At Charles DeGaulle Airport, we waited to go through security in a modern, dimly lit carpeted corridor, with the screening happening at the end of the corridor behind a frosted glass partition. When we came to the head of the line, there was an attractive female Air France agent seated at a table asking passengers whether they had any questions or concerns about security procedures; there were brochures on the table.

JFK couldn’t be more different. We waited with our carryons to go through customs and immigration screening, in a dingy holding area with dirty windows and yellowing linoleum that looked like it had not seen a paint job since the airport was named Idlewild. A large not-attractive woman stood behind a podium barking out orders in a military fashion to each person waiting to put stuff on the screening device belt. “NO. I said DON’T put the laptop in a bin, PUT IT ON THE BELT!”.

At least when we got to passport control, the agent was friendly. I’m not so sure it was the same in the longer lines for Non-US citizen lines, but customs/immigration is often harrowing, even for us citizens whose “papers are in order” and who are not committing any legal violations (that we know of).

Part of this is problem is the hideous physical condition of our ports and custom facilities: they just aren’t physically welcoming. Part of the problem is the personnel: most of them seem to come from a military, prison, law enforcement or security background where shouting orders at people expecting knowtowing in return seems to be the norm.

I’m really not surprised if this cost us Chicago’s Olympics bid. Perhaps money should be spent not on PR and fluff but hiring Air France to tell us how to do security and make it charming and attractive rather than scary and off-putting.

— GrumpyBoomer(dot)com

Related Times blog post here.

After several months in which the American economy flashed tentative signs of improvement, a sobering report on the national job market released on Friday amplified worries that a lengthy period of [...]]]> Another month and another quarter have ended this week, and the jobs report is again bad and worse than expected, reports the Times this morning.

After several months in which the American economy flashed tentative signs of improvement, a sobering report on the national job market released on Friday amplified worries that a lengthy period of lean times lay ahead.

The economy shed 263,000 jobs in September, and the unemployment rate edged up to 9.8 percent from 9.7 percent in August, according to the Labor Department’s monthly snapshot of the employment picture.

Though the job market worsened, the pace of deterioration remained markedly slower than during the early months of the year, when roughly 700,000 jobs a month were disappearing. That improvement seems consistent with the widespread belief that the recession has given way to economic growth. Yet the report also buttressed fears that economic expansion would be weak and hesitant, with scarce paychecks and economic anxiety remaining prominent features of American life well into next year.

Meanwhile, over at Salon, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich opines without some massive government intervention, there will be no recovery and politics is likely to get ugly, a la 1930s Europe as the usual scapegoats get blamed and things get increasingly edgy in the economy’s downward spiral:

Which brings us to the obvious question: Who’s going to buy the stuff we make or the services we provide, and therefore bring jobs back? There’s only one buyer left: the government.

Let me say this as clearly and forcefully as I can: The federal government should be spending even more than it already is on roads and bridges and schools and parks and everything else we need. It should make up for cutbacks at the state level, and then some. This is the only way to put Americans back to work. We did it during the Depression. It was called the WPA.

Yes, I know. Our government is already deep in debt. But let me tell you something: When one out of six Americans is unemployed or underemployed, this is no time to worry about the debt.

When I was a small boy my father told me that I and my kids and my grandkids would be paying down the debt created by Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Depression and World War II. I didn’t even know what a debt was, but it kept me up at night.

My father was right about a lot of things, but he was wrong about this. America paid down FDR’s debt in the 1950s, when Americans went back to work, when the economy was growing again, and when our incomes grew, too. We paid taxes, and in a few years that FDR debt had shrunk to almost nothing.

You see? The most important thing right now is getting the jobs back, and getting the economy growing again.

The comments to the Salon article are pretty interesting too, with the usual debate you see these days with the Reaganite free marketeers still blaming the victims for their own economic misery. I particularly liked this response.

This article on the Times blog has already scrolled off the Times’ front page (together with reports of today’s stock market decline, owing apparently to scant signs of recovery apart from the irrational exuberance and animal spirits emanating from [...]]]> I often don’t know whether to laugh or cry when doing my daily read of the Times.

This article on the Times blog has already scrolled off the Times’ front page (together with reports of today’s stock market decline, owing apparently to scant signs of recovery apart from the irrational exuberance and animal spirits emanating from Wall Street itself).  According to a report by two Rutgers economists, employment will not recover to its pre-recession levels until 2017.

Yes, you read that correctly: twenty-seventeen, approximately eight years from now.

Is this thing on?

Hello, random site visitor who has stumbled upon this blog.   Those of you who are familiar with WordPress and blogging know that I have just navigated the daunting instructions of starting a blog. These included more [...]]]> Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Is this thing on?

Hello, random site visitor who has stumbled upon this blog.   Those of you who are familiar with WordPress and blogging know that I have just navigated the daunting instructions of starting a blog. These included more than I wanted to know about the mechanics of administering a *NIX server, themes, CSS, etc.

So just the fact that you can read this seems like a major accomplishment, to me anyway.

WordPress estimates there are over 9,000,000 blogs, and those are just the ones that use WordPress publishing software.   Many of my favorite blogs set the bar pretty high in terms of adding great content at an astonishing rate.  So why do I want to add my admittedly modest contributions to the fray?

Like the soldier’s proverbial rifle, there are many blogs, but this blog is mine.   The motivating idea was pretty simple.  For years, friends had been urging me to commit some of my better raves that I had inflicted on them to the blogosphere for the general consumption of my Fellow Americans.  It had remained one of those “someday” projects for a long time.  But a little over one year ago, on Monday, September 15, 2009, we awoke on a cruise ship in the port of Rome to CNN International reporting the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the eastward -spreading collapse of the global stock markets that day.  With that shocking news of the financial meltdown reverberating in the air, we took a surreal ’shore excursion’ to tour the ruins of the Roman Forum and Coliseum with our veteran tour guide Rita (below).   The decline of empire and the comparisons to our perilous condition seemed inescapable.

Rita, our Rome tour guide

Hearing about the elaborate spectacles at the Coliseum (to which, according to Rita,  admission for all Roman citizens was free, sponsored by wealthy politicians) made me wonder about the day that the circuses stopped, what it was like for those who thought it would always be showtime down at the Coliseum.   And it made me wonder about contemporary books and journals which might have been kept, about the mindset of Saint Augustine who I’d studied in college philosophy courses explaining why heaven (i.e., “City of God”) > Rome anyway, so there.  So I felt it was my calling, nay perhaps even my obligation, to contribute a contemporary account and analysis on what ails our economy and culture, what makes me a Grumpy Boomer.

Grumpy was painstakingly chosen, despite the negative connotations.  It wasn’t just the domain availability, or the fact that I’d been using the pseudonym on the New York Times website for a year. And I include some of the joys of life such as music, bicycling and cats within the blog to make it clear that, like life, this isn’t just about just gloom and doom.  But there are some serious issues too, and sometimes we need, like our President, to take a serious appraisal of reality and have an adult conversation about it.  I hope to support that by discussing political and business issues and the zombification of all business by short term cost cutting techniques and resultant un- and underemployment.

So, that’s a tall order and I have some audacious hopes here to contribute something of interest and substance on the collective cave walls of teh internets.  With this first ps0t out of the way, I need to go back and figure out more basics about WordPress formatting, file uploading and all of that megillah.  So there may be a while before another post and the site may look or act different then when I get beyond the rudiments of installation.

Thanks for reading.