Labor Day 2010
In theory The Great Recession is history, but for those of us who live and work on Real Street the carnage and horror continues. On Real Street, outside the gated communities where 1% of the people own 90% of everything, we are now at 99 weeks and counting.
The insurance we purchased over years of dutiful employment has run out. We will be living on the street soon, it's just a matter of time.
If you're a small business on Real Street, a business run by a real person that employs less than 25 real workers, that relies on real people to purchase real goods and real services, the economy looks like a desert of foreclosure and unemployment. We search the horizon from our shop windows and trade vans thirsty for customers. They're out there, but they're penny less and some are bleeding a real sadness that will be diagnosed as depression.
And, what has our government done to get us back to work? Nothing. The Congress has done nothing. The White House has done nothing. The Chamber of Commerce has done nothing. The Democratic, Republican, Green, Liberal, Socialist, Tea parties have done nothing.
The economists and the stock market have been cheering for months that our troubles are behind us. They say there will be no second economic crash. But, out here on Real Street the Gross Domestic Product is nothing more than a mantra economists chant while they contemplate in their dirty navels.
Week after week, Paul Krugman of the New York Times argues economic semantics with the likes of the Wall Street Journal as the main stream media throws gasoline on the fighters to fire up the political polarization. Cut the crap. None of it matters. We're dying from a thousand cuts of being nickle and dimed.
President Obama says there is very little the government can do to create jobs. I wretch and my eyes bulge each time I hear our most promising leader in decades spew such a lie. The government makes the rules. The current rules aren't working or were never enforced. Take the bull by the horns you shameless flak for Wall Street and do something: Put the American people back to work now!
Small businesses are running on cash flow fumes. High unemployment, less and less discretionary income, fewer and fewer middle class families means less customers spending less and less and less. Add them up: a few million 1099 workers without benefits here, tens of millions of part-time and freelance workers there, millions more struggling to pay the rent, before you know it you're talking real unemployment and peonage.
We can't do anything to create jobs? Really!?
One: End the H1B Visa and All Tax Incentives for Offshore Jobbing
The H1B is nothing more than a license to put American workers on the unemployment line. There are plenty of people right here in America right now that can do anything a person from any other county can do.
The only Americans that benefit from the H1B, other than CorpPersons, are the lawyers toiling day after day to craft absurd job specifications allowing companies to not employ Americans and import cheaper workers. None of that was the intent of the H1B in theory, but on Real Street that is exactly how this nonsensical device is used.
Who doesn't believe Americans can do any job here? Where in the world are there better workers? That we are failures and have fallen behind is a myth. We are the hardest working people in the world, you know it, I know it, the corporations know it and the government knows it. American workers are a real value, until you have to pay them what they're worth and a living wage necessary to live in America.
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