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Unemployed Being Demonized By Right Wing
Posted by: Linda Carbonell on September 8, 2011. 09-08-2011 by Linda S. Carbonell
Waiting to get in to job fair in North Carolina
Remember how Tea Party candidate for the Nevada Senate seat, Sharron Angle, said the unemployment insurance made people lazy? That’s a fairly common theme among the right wing nuts – it even made it into the Republican debate last night, the idea that those horrible, terrible, no good, very bad entitlement programs are just making people fat and lazy and encouraging them to stay home and watch Ellen.
The unemployed millions in this country are facing an increasingly hostile environment, in their state houses and as they apply for jobs. In South Carolina, after passing a bill that cut unemployment benefits from 26 weeks to 20, state Senator Kevin Bryant blogged, “Part of the unemployment problem is that our human nature is to take advantage of the ability to get paid to not work…I’m very sympathetic to those out of work desperately seeking it, but I’m disappointed that we have a significant segment of our society leeching the system.” South Carolina is tied for third highest unemployment rate at 10.9% with Minnesota where they just cut lifetime welfare benefits to four years.
Frederick Tanery, as associate economics professor at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania said recently, “Two years is a long time [to get unemployment benefits]. At some point you’ve got to provide more incentives to get people to do things.” Like, maybe, not making them stand in line with 300 hundred desperate people applying for the same 30 jobs? That kind of incentive?
Go on the news story comment streams and you will constantly see accusations that people are choosing to be unemployed. Hell, why not? We all want to get stinking rich on 36% of our average wages from when we had jobs. We all want to get evicted, be foreclosed, get fat because we can’t afford good food (pasta is cheap, bad food is cheaper than fresh veggies and lean meat), sit around dodging phone calls from bill collectors. It’s the life we all dream of, isn’t it? We want to be afraid to answer our phones or our doorbells.
Economist Wayne Vroman, at the Urban Institute, noted, “There are statements about UI recipients that are similar to statements about ‘welfare queens’ and that show a certain lack of sympathy with the situation of the unemployed. Any human endeavor has people who game the system, but to attribute this to a massive kind of rip-off by the unemployed doesn’t really match reality.”
A large part of the problem is a concerted effort by the Republicans to make their constituents feel that they are victims of these leeches. It’s part of the “taxed enough already” position of the Tea Party – they pay taxes and liberals live off them. It’s very specifically aimed at liberals. No one who is one unemployment or receiving welfare or on any entitlement program could ever possibly voted for a Republican. Republicans are self-sufficient, hard-working, tax-paying true Americans and the entitlement leeches are socialist, Marxist, Maoist Democrats like our Kenyan President. No kidding – that’s what you will find on the net all the time. The demonization of the unemployed is a callous political strategy.
When Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett was running in 2010, he told a reporter, “The jobs are there, but if we keep extending unemployment, people are just going to sit there.” Counselor Ahniva Williams, of the non-profit Unemployment Information Center in Philadelphia, doesn’t feel that Corbett’s subsequent statement that his words weren’t meant to be insensitive. “It enraged a lot of my members who were actively looking for work, volunteering, going to school, taking classes and going to job fairs.” One of her clients, Charlette Pennington, who lives in a shelter, said “I’d like for him to visit one of these shelters and hear these women’s stories. He might change his mind.”
Of course he won’t visit these shelters. Frankly, there isn’t enough media visiting these shelters and therein lies a lot of the problem.
Yahoo is collecting stories from the long-term unemployed. The comments posted on these stories from the rightwingnuts are hateful, disgusting and inhuman. I read one that said the woman in the story had a particular street corner as her business address, accusing this educated woman of being a whore. Still, I encouraged one man to write his story and send it to Yahoo.
But Yahoo is not the medium most visited by the right wing, by conservatives, by Republicans. A trip to Fox News website shows how computer-crippled their viewers are. A ten-year-old could have designed a better website. We need some old-fashioned journalism.
Way back in the 1950′s there was a legendary television journalist. His name is invoked with something beyond respect, nearly awe, by journalists – Edward R. Murrow. Murrow’s most famous special program was called “Harvest of Shame.” Until then, Americans did not know about migrant farm workers and the horrific conditions they worked under. Murrow changed that. He was taking the print tradition of people like Jacob Riis and moving it into the 20th century. During the Reagan administration, there were news reports about the homeless. They explored the effects of Reagan’s block granting, which closed residential treatment centers for the mentally ill and caused too many of them to live on the streets and become a danger to the population. One television program I especially remember related to the clear cutting of Western forests. It debunked the idea that lumber mills had been closed down because of environmentalists and showed the stripped hillsides where trees had been harvested for sale to Japan.
MSNBC has championed the cause of free clinics, beginning with Keith Olbermann and now Ed Schultz. The nightly news isn’t showing these clinics, isn’t reporting how many cases of cancer were detected, how many cases of high blood pressure or diabetes were found. This is where these stories should be told – on the local news and on the three broadcast networks.
Yes, there are those who play the system. There always have been. There are young women who know that they will be required to work when their baby reaches 12 months of age, so they get pregnant when the baby is 10 months old. These are the kinds of welfare queens who caused the passage of lifetime limits. But those limits have always been used in relation to the realities of the availability of jobs, not as a punishment for being unemployed. We greatly cut our welfare rolls during the Clinton administration because we did two things – created workfare and education programs for welfare recipients and grew the economy.
The Republicans have been fomenting hatred for minorities, for the unemployed and for welfare recipients as part of their drive to get their coveted permanent majority in the House and Senate and regain the White House they think they are entitled to. It is a technique that works well during times of economic crisis when people are already prone to trying to find someone to blame for their problems. The Republicans do not want people to blame those actually responsible – the financial services industry and the Republican administration that bankrupted our country and regulated that industry. So – they tell their base that the unemployed want to be unemployed and are just sucking the public teat.
Honestly, I love doing this and if it made enough money I’d be thrilled. I hate my paying job, but it pays the bills. I have absolute proof there is no Satan. He would have shown up years ago to offer me a huge lottery win for my soul and I would have taken the deal. Every once in a while I fantasize that a tornado rips the rood off the building where I work, so I get a couple of months on unemployment. But I know that I can’t pay those bills on unemployment insurance, so I keep slogging away. Yeah, most of us would rather be rich, rather be on a permanent vacation, but unemployment isn’t a permanent vacation. It’s hell. I’ve been there. I know how bad it is.
Maybe everyone needs to be unemployed at some time, just to understand what it really means.
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You are here: Home » News » Business & Economics » Unemployed Being Demonized By Right Wing
Unemployed Being Demonized By Right Wing
09-08-2011 by Linda S. Carbonell
Waiting to get in to job fair in North Carolina
Remember how Tea Party candidate for the Nevada Senate seat, Sharron Angle, said the unemployment insurance made people lazy? That’s a fairly common theme among the right wing nuts – it even made it into the Republican debate last night, the idea that those horrible, terrible, no good, very bad entitlement programs are just making people fat and lazy and encouraging them to stay home and watch Ellen.
The unemployed millions in this country are facing an increasingly hostile environment, in their state houses and as they apply for jobs. In South Carolina, after passing a bill that cut unemployment benefits from 26 weeks to 20, state Senator Kevin Bryant blogged, “Part of the unemployment problem is that our human nature is to take advantage of the ability to get paid to not work…I’m very sympathetic to those out of work desperately seeking it, but I’m disappointed that we have a significant segment of our society leeching the system.” South Carolina is tied for third highest unemployment rate at 10.9% with Minnesota where they just cut lifetime welfare benefits to four years.
Frederick Tanery, as associate economics professor at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania said recently, “Two years is a long time [to get unemployment benefits]. At some point you’ve got to provide more incentives to get people to do things.” Like, maybe, not making them stand in line with 300 hundred desperate people applying for the same 30 jobs? That kind of incentive?
Go on the news story comment streams and you will constantly see accusations that people are choosing to be unemployed. Hell, why not? We all want to get stinking rich on 36% of our average wages from when we had jobs. We all want to get evicted, be foreclosed, get fat because we can’t afford good food (pasta is cheap, bad food is cheaper than fresh veggies and lean meat), sit around dodging phone calls from bill collectors. It’s the life we all dream of, isn’t it? We want to be afraid to answer our phones or our doorbells.
Economist Wayne Vroman, at the Urban Institute, noted, “There are statements about UI recipients that are similar to statements about ‘welfare queens’ and that show a certain lack of sympathy with the situation of the unemployed. Any human endeavor has people who game the system, but to attribute this to a massive kind of rip-off by the unemployed doesn’t really match reality.”
A large part of the problem is a concerted effort by the Republicans to make their constituents feel that they are victims of these leeches. It’s part of the “taxed enough already” position of the Tea Party – they pay taxes and liberals live off them. It’s very specifically aimed at liberals. No one who is one unemployment or receiving welfare or on any entitlement program could ever possibly voted for a Republican. Republicans are self-sufficient, hard-working, tax-paying true Americans and the entitlement leeches are socialist, Marxist, Maoist Democrats like our Kenyan President. No kidding – that’s what you will find on the net all the time. The demonization of the unemployed is a callous political strategy.
When Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett was running in 2010, he told a reporter, “The jobs are there, but if we keep extending unemployment, people are just going to sit there.” Counselor Ahniva Williams, of the non-profit Unemployment Information Center in Philadelphia, doesn’t feel that Corbett’s subsequent statement that his words weren’t meant to be insensitive. “It enraged a lot of my members who were actively looking for work, volunteering, going to school, taking classes and going to job fairs.” One of her clients, Charlette Pennington, who lives in a shelter, said “I’d like for him to visit one of these shelters and hear these women’s stories. He might change his mind.”
Of course he won’t visit these shelters. Frankly, there isn’t enough media visiting these shelters and therein lies a lot of the problem.
Yahoo is collecting stories from the long-term unemployed. The comments posted on these stories from the rightwingnuts are hateful, disgusting and inhuman. I read one that said the woman in the story had a particular street corner as her business address, accusing this educated woman of being a whore. Still, I encouraged one man to write his story and send it to Yahoo.
But Yahoo is not the medium most visited by the right wing, by conservatives, by Republicans. A trip to Fox News website shows how computer-crippled their viewers are. A ten-year-old could have designed a better website. We need some old-fashioned journalism.
Way back in the 1950′s there was a legendary television journalist. His name is invoked with something beyond respect, nearly awe, by journalists – Edward R. Murrow. Murrow’s most famous special program was called “Harvest of Shame.” Until then, Americans did not know about migrant farm workers and the horrific conditions they worked under. Murrow changed that. He was taking the print tradition of people like Jacob Riis and moving it into the 20th century. During the Reagan administration, there were news reports about the homeless. They explored the effects of Reagan’s block granting, which closed residential treatment centers for the mentally ill and caused too many of them to live on the streets and become a danger to the population. One television program I especially remember related to the clear cutting of Western forests. It debunked the idea that lumber mills had been closed down because of environmentalists and showed the stripped hillsides where trees had been harvested for sale to Japan.
MSNBC has championed the cause of free clinics, beginning with Keith Olbermann and now Ed Schultz. The nightly news isn’t showing these clinics, isn’t reporting how many cases of cancer were detected, how many cases of high blood pressure or diabetes were found. This is where these stories should be told – on the local news and on the three broadcast networks.
Yes, there are those who play the system. There always have been. There are young women who know that they will be required to work when their baby reaches 12 months of age, so they get pregnant when the baby is 10 months old. These are the kinds of welfare queens who caused the passage of lifetime limits. But those limits have always been used in relation to the realities of the availability of jobs, not as a punishment for being unemployed. We greatly cut our welfare rolls during the Clinton administration because we did two things – created workfare and education programs for welfare recipients and grew the economy.
The Republicans have been fomenting hatred for minorities, for the unemployed and for welfare recipients as part of their drive to get their coveted permanent majority in the House and Senate and regain the White House they think they are entitled to. It is a technique that works well during times of economic crisis when people are already prone to trying to find someone to blame for their problems. The Republicans do not want people to blame those actually responsible – the financial services industry and the Republican administration that bankrupted our country and regulated that industry. So – they tell their base that the unemployed want to be unemployed and are just sucking the public teat.
Honestly, I love doing this and if it made enough money I’d be thrilled. I hate my paying job, but it pays the bills. I have absolute proof there is no Satan. He would have shown up years ago to offer me a huge lottery win for my soul and I would have taken the deal. Every once in a while I fantasize that a tornado rips the rood off the building where I work, so I get a couple of months on unemployment. But I know that I can’t pay those bills on unemployment insurance, so I keep slogging away. Yeah, most of us would rather be rich, rather be on a permanent vacation, but unemployment isn’t a permanent vacation. It’s hell. I’ve been there. I know how bad it is.
Maybe everyone needs to be unemployed at some time, just to understand what it really means.
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