Tag: unemployed
Danziger Draws

Danziger Draws

Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons and one novel. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.

Obama Asks Employers, Congress To Help Long-Term Jobless

Obama Asks Employers, Congress To Help Long-Term Jobless

WASHINGTON — Tapping the bully pulpit, President Barack Obama used the White House backdrop Friday to urge American companies — and Congress — to help the nearly 4 million long-term unemployed.

In a White House ceremony, Obama brought out workers who have been jobless for more than half a year to insert real people into a bitter bipartisan debate over the expiration of benefits for the long-term unemployed.

“Folks who have been unemployed the longest often have the toughest time getting back to work,” the president said, highlighting Misty Demars, a mother of two boys who’d never before depended on government benefits. “It’s a cruel Catch-22: The longer you’re unemployed, the more unemployable you may seem.”

According to one study Obama cited, those who’ve been out of work eight months are likely to get called back for interviews only about half as often as those who’ve been out of work one month, even with identical resumes.

“Statistically, the long-term unemployed are oftentimes slightly better educated, in some cases better qualified, than folks who just lost their job,” the president said. “Just because you have been out of work for a while does not mean that you are not a hard worker. Just means you had bad luck or you were in the wrong industry or you lived in a region of the country that’s catching up a little slower than others in the recovery.”

Earlier Friday, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, Jason Furman, met with reporters at a breakfast held by The Christian Science Monitor and stressed that there isn’t any one thing that stands out about these long-term jobless workers other than their duration of unemployment.

“To a first approximation, the long-term unemployed look an awful lot like the labor force as a whole,” Furman said. “This is not some especially disadvantaged or less-skilled group.”

Obama spoke in the East Room of the White House, alongside Vice President Joe Biden, after he met with the CEOs of some of the nation’s largest public and private businesses.

He continued to urge Congress to pass benefits for more than 1 million of the nation’s unemployed. Roughly 3 million long-term unemployed still qualify for benefits.

“Last month Congress made that harder by letting unemployment insurance expire for more than a million people,” the president said, adding that 72,000 people a week are now losing their “economic lifeline.”

Obama also announced a $150 million grant competition through the Department of Labor to support public-private partnerships geared toward helping to prepare and place the long-term unemployed in open positions. Applications will be available in February and awards will be made in mid-2014.

More than 300 companies, including 80 of the nation’s largest businesses, have agreed to a new policy spelling out ways they’ll try to recruit and hire the long-term unemployed, the president said. They’ll ensure that advertising doesn’t discourage or discriminate against the unemployed, and they’ll review recruiting procedures, encourage all qualified candidates to apply and share information about hiring the long-term unemployed within their companies and across their supply chains and the business community.

Obama signed a presidential memorandum to ensure that government adopts the same practices.

“The federal government is America’s largest employer. While seeking to employ a talented and productive workforce, it has a responsibility to lead by example,” the memorandum said, spelling out new guidelines for hiring.

In another step to help workers, Furman said, Obama’s fiscal 2015 budget plan will propose expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, now available for lower-income workers with children, to include lower-income workers without them.

“That is very much a work-oriented approach. It’s very much about increasing the reward for work, and we expect it to have many of the same benefits in terms of participation and (economic) mobility,” Furman said. “That’s what he is going to be out there proposing.”

Companies and organizations that committed to expand efforts to recruit or hire the long-term unemployed include LinkedIn, Skills for America’s Future, National Fund for Workforce Solutions, Skills for Chicagoland’s Future, Per Scholas, Goodwill Industries, JPMorgan Chase, AARP Foundation, Platform to Employment and Pacific Gas & Electric.

AFP Photo/Brendan Smialowski

The GOP Will Remain United By One Issue — Not Helping The Unemployed

The GOP Will Remain United By One Issue — Not Helping The Unemployed

A Republican thinker did something radical this week: He proposed an agenda for job creation.

Michael R. Strain’s “A Jobs Agenda for the Right” includes all of the right’s compulsive instincts to cut taxes for the rich, eliminate environmental regulations and suspend the minimum wage. But it begins with the premise that long-term unemployment is a crisis and a crisis that can’t just be solved by doing those who have been out of work for months the “favor” of cutting off their only income, as Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) suggested.

Strain even seems to be in favor of a program that would feature infrastructure spending.

LOL.

“Um, OK. There are people who’ve been trying to do just that. And not only Barack Obama,” The Daily Beast‘s Michael Tomasky pointed out. “John Kerry led this effort in the Senate, and he was joined by Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison (who’s since retired). Their attempts to fund a modest infrastructure bank were supported by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. But it could never get anywhere because of rock-solid GOP opposition.”

Tomasky notes that Republican obstruction is the key element that prevents any sort of job creation. This has continued past 2012, when it seemed the GOP’s only goal in life was to keep unemployment over 8 percent. And it will continue as 1.3 million being cut off from benefits likely sends the unemployment rate even lower as hundreds of thousands of Americans in the prime of the work lives decide to give up even looking for a job.

And there’s no better explanation of why we shouldn’t expect any movement toward job creation from the right than to point out that the person who replaced Kay Bailey Hutchison in the Senate was Ted Cruz (R-TX).

Cruz understands the base of the Republican Party better than any Canadian citizen alive.

He knows the only things that truly unite it are opposing anything President Obama does and pissing off liberals. Unfortunately for Cruz, it seems that major funders of his party recognize that these fixations of the right wing-media and the primary electorate are actually what will prevent it from winning the White House.

When it comes to bashing Obama and infuriating the left, it doesn’t get better than the last few months. Republicans have been blessed by the fumbled rollout of HealthCare.gov as they’ve collectively pretended that millions of people getting health insurance is a terrible thing.

The adrenaline of the last few months has helped the GOP erase most of the damage of the Cruz-led government shutdown. The memories of that fiasco and the focus on Obamacare’s struggles have empowered the party’s leadership to boldness few thought it was capable of.

Both House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) have publicly blasted the outside conservative groups actively attempting to usurp their power. And they’ve consecrated a budget deal that likely indicates that government shutdowns and debt limit crises will not be an issue again for at least a couple of years.

In the next few months, the Republican leadership will mollify their members by offering various Obamacare repeals. But when the deadline to file for a primary election passes, their trouble begins.

Speaker Boehner has signaled that he will pursue some sort of immigration reform. It will probably not be enough to satisfy advocates but any sort of legalization at all — even just for people brought to this country as children — will be enough to enrage the right wing of the party. This will be happening as more than a half-dozen contested Senate primaries pit incumbents against Tea Partiers whose entire goal in life is to move the party to the right.

Both the right and the far right will accuse each other of corrupting the conservative movement. Millions will be wasted as the GOP likely faces its third chance to regain the Senate in as many election cycles as divided as it’s been in decades.

But what will always bring the party together is its true agenda when it comes to job creation.

That agenda is “denying Medicaid to 5 million poor Americans in states they control, proposing $40 billion in cuts to food stamps, and cutting off unemployment benefits to workers who can’t find jobs,” New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait explained.

This agenda — and its increasing cruelty and obliviousness to the shrinking deficit — will remain in place as long as President Obama or any Democrat is in the the White House.

Then on the day a Republican enters the Oval Office full of promises to restrain government and empower job creators, we can expect a repeat of the only strategy that the conservative movement has ever successfully employed to create jobs — growing massive deficits that make even more cruelty inevitable when a Democrat returns to power.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

The GOP Would Care About The Unemployed — If They Were Fired For Anti-Gay Comments

The GOP Would Care About The Unemployed — If They Were Fired For Anti-Gay Comments

Approximately 6,800 Louisianans who have been out of work for more than six months lost their only income this weekend.

But what’s the state’s governor Bobby Jindal (R-LA) worried about?

One Louisiana-based millionaire was temporarily put on vacation from his reality television job because he said that homosexuality is a gateway to bestiality.

When Duck Dynasty‘s Phil Robertson was suspended by A&E, Jindal — a literal Rhodes Scholar who famously said the GOP should not be “the stupid party” — issued a statement that read, “I remember when TV networks believed in the First Amendment.”

Of course, the First Amendment says nothing about your boss having to put up with you publicly insisting that black people were happier during segregation. But Jindal was siding with the initial interpretation of noted Constitutional scholar Sarah Palin, who later insisted that Robertson was expressing ideas from the Gospels, after admitting that she had not read his comments — or the Gospels, as homosexuality is never mentioned by Jesus and all four accounts of His life.

When A&E shockingly, after airing marathons of Duck Dynasty almost 24 hours a day since the “suspension,” announced Robertson would be returning to the show in 2014, Jindal celebrated.

“Today is a good day for the freedoms of speech and religious liberty,” Jindal said, in another statement he rushed to get out before anyone might leave him out of their story about the reinstatement.

LOL.

If a Muslim were arguing Christianity leads to bestiality (an equally abhorrent theoretical argument that I’ve never heard advanced by any Muslim) and Jindal had defended him, that would be a victory for free speech and religious liberty. Robertson’s return to television, as Rob Delaney pointed out, was a victory for “bigotry and greed.”

One of the most protected rights in America is the ability to say horrible things about lesbians, gays, transgenders and bisexuals. Need proof? Search the word “f-g” on Twitter, right now. What the critics of the Duck guy were hoping is that it was no longer a position that sponsors of commercial television would want to support with their cold, indifferent, promiscuous money.

Compensation was the issue, of course. Not speech.

Jindal was defending Robertson’s right to be highly compensated despite saying things that not only offend people but contribute to a culture of discrimination and violence against gays and lesbians.

Jindal, however, isn’t speaking out on behalf of his state’s residents who are looking for a job and cannot find one, as everyone on unemployment insurance must do or else be punished, by law. The governor doesn’t seem to care if you’re out of work — unless you lost your job for saying terrible things about gay people.

So I have an idea.

Let’s tell Governor Jindal that all 6,800 of the long-term unemployed people in his state who were just cut off from unemployment insurance by the Republicans in Congress are out of work because of anti-gay comments.

A few thousand said gay people are ruining their marriage, 2,400 or so believe that gay people are trying to spoil the Winter Olympics and the rest all think gay people are staring at them whenever they try to take a shower at the YMCA — and that “C” stands for Christian!

It used to be that Republicans could be forced to care about something by pointing out the hollowness of their “support the troops” rhetoric. But the fact that 20,000 veterans are among the 1.3 Americans who lost their unemployment insurance this weekend hasn’t moved one major Republican to call for an immediate extension. In fact, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) thinks he’s doing the men and women who served this country a favor by taking away that income.

What is it about the unemployed, the uninsured and the undocumented that doesn’t inspire conservatives to spring into action, as they do when they worry the right to hate may be limited?

What is it about the “hidden exiles” who live lives ““marked by fear, uncertainty and difficulties,” as Pope Francis described refugees in his liturgy on Sunday, that only inspires “tough love” from the right?

Compassion for those who are downtrodden is a virtue of the Gospels that is making Pope Francis wildly popular even with liberals, who may not agree with him on his view of reproductive rights and other issues but see that his humility and rhetoric all reveal an overwhelming concern for those who are suffering most. Francis’ obsession with calling out policies that make the richest richer speaks to a willingness to risk the wrath of those who make their living defending inequality and cruelty to the poor — like Rush Limbaugh.

Bobby Jindal seems far more concerned about the right to be rich and powerful, yet still hateful to those who have been most afflicted in our society.

So, in the name of those who are suffering, somebody please tell Jindal that the thousands of people in his state who have been cut off by Congress aren’t out of work because an under-regulated Wall Street destroyed our economy and a conservative obsession with budget cutting has maimed our recovery.

No, tell them that they’re all being denied employment because they said terrible, indefensible things about gay people that they justify by reading the parts of the Bible most convenient to their hate. Then he’ll have to care.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr