Unemployment shatters families, communities, self-respect and the belief in a positive future.
We have failed – or at least are failing – to provide an opportunity that is so basic to human dignity and well-being. An opportunity to participate in what is called “the American Dream.”
There is no possibility to rebuild our democracy, our economy, or our society when the unemployment rate for African-Americans with less than a high school education is more than 42% and the overall unemployment rate based on the broader U-6 measure is currently around 17%.
That’s almost one out of every five Americans.
Harvey Brenner, a sociologist and a public health expert at Johns Hopkins University and the University of North Texas Health Science Center, is a longtime student of the correlations between economic fluctuations and mental and physical health.
According to Brenner, for every 1% rise in the unemployment rate (about 1.5 million more people out of work), society can anticipate 47,000 more deaths, including 26,000 fatal heart attacks, 1,200 suicides, 831 murders, and 635 deaths related to alcohol consumption.
This is a dangerous game of cause and effect we’re playing. It’s time to dig into solving the root causes of unemployment, instead of making superficial promises and quick fixes that engender negative long-term outcomes.
It’s time to stop killing opportunity and start creating opportunity. Are you with me?
YES. What we need is state-level focus on re-localizing production. It’s time to reverse the trends created by NAFTA etc which offshored our production. It’s time for communities to become productive and self-reliant for food, energy and basic material needs. The is nothing sustainable, or just, about the “global” economy.
But for small, localized enterprises to blossom, we need CAPITAL. We need aggressive micro-finance for small businesses and farms. The big corporations, and banks, are all sitting on TRILLIONS of dollars because they’re scared the global economy is going to collapse (they are right) and they are keeping their reserves in their pocket for the foreseeable future.
So where will this investment capital come from? Look at the state of N. Dakota, which is the only state in the US that has had a budget surplus the past 3 years, which is all because they are the only state with a state-owned bank that supports local businesses by working with local banks to ensure that capital is affordable, and available, for in-state productive enterprise. Small business and agriculture is THRIVING in N. Dakota.
AND we need a massive populist movement to MOVE YOUR MONEY out of Wall Street, and invest in MAIN STREET in your home-town businesses. If all 250,000 Vermont households moved all of their 401k $ out of Wall Street (conservative estimate is $50k per household) that would create $12 BILLION in investment capital for Vermont enterprise.
People create new opportunities every single day regardless of the state of economy and probably BECAUSE of it.
We have a saying in some part of Europe: under pressure everything becomes fluid. So, because the economy is in bad shape it empowers people to search for different solutions or to implement different strategies.
We need to abandon our traditional way of looking at situations and systems in place that have not served us. Because so many African-Americans are illiterate does not mean those people are brain dead, on the contrary: they all possess skills, they might be unaware of it. Schools in my mind has failed in empowering people to develop their skills, to discover what they’d love to do and what their passion is. In that context schools are a failure anyway.
How many university students today are unemployed or performing jobs they did not study for, experiencing a total dislike for what they are doing every day and wondering why they “wasted” so much money if it were not to procure the jobs they were aiming for? How empowering is that for the young generation?
As a community it is important that we start looking at people in terms of their own skills and resources, and maybe less at the piece of paper they got legitimately or not from one or the other university.
There are plenty of people on this planet that have had no formal education, or very little and are quite resourceful in creating opportunities for themselves. Your very famous Edison is I think a typical example.