New Mexicans Up, Up and Away to Highlight Jobs Crisis
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Andy Richards on our Field Communications staff files this report.
Wow! Take a look at these photos from the America Wants to Work event in New Mexico over the weekend!
The jobs crisis is so urgent that working families in New Mexico are literally going to new heights to get the message out that lawmakers need to be focused on creating and protecting good jobs. This weekend, as part of the huge Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta, jobless New Mexicans and workers from across the state will launch a hot air balloon every day during the nine day festival draped with a 40 foot banner brandishing a message all Americans agree upon: “America Wants to Work: Good Jobs Now.”
LeRoy Apodaca, an unemployed Working America member and active participant in New Mexico Wants to Work—a program that has been organizing unemployed workers since January—will be one of the dozens of jobless New Mexicans who will be there Saturday.
I have been unemployed for over 2 years. I want to work, but finding a job these days is difficult. We are asking our elected officials to focus on job creation and make that their most important issue.
Sadly, Apodaca’s story is similar to millions of other jobless workers across the country. Read the rest of this entry »
Seven Questions for Ben Bernanke
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is poised to become the first chairman of the Fed to hold a public press conference, following a meeting of the powerful Federal Open Market Committee that sets short-term interest rates. Many are asking whether this is a unique peek into the traditionally closed-door discussions of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), whose policy affects so many lives, or simply a public relations exercise.
But behind the political speculation, there are real implications for working people in what the FOMC will decide. Since the beginning of the financial crisis, the Fed has worked diligently to keep both long-term and short-term interest rates low to try to encourage economic growth and job creation. But now the Federal Reserve is under immense pressure by some in Congress and within the Fed itself to raise rates, even though economic growth is still painfully weak and there are five job seekers for every job opening.
Federal Reserve Should Bail Out Main Street, Not Wall Street
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The Federal Reserve’s announcement this week that it will purchase $600 billion of Treasury debt, also known as “treasuries,” to help stimulate the economy should be a wake-up call to lawmakers that government needs to spend more, not less, to create jobs, economists say.
Here’s Josh Bivens, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI):
[The Fed purchase] is a welcome acknowledgement that the economy needs more help.…Congress should follow the Fed’s lead and provide this needed support, starting with an extension to unemployment benefits that are set to expire at the end of this month.
House Republican Agenda: Make Big Banks More Profitable
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When the Republicans take over the U.S. House in January, one of the first things on their agenda is payback to those who helped get them in office: Wall Street.
And they’ve already announced one way they plan to do that.
The financial reform legislation that President Obama signed into law in July gave regulators a significant tool to rein in gambling by big Wall Street banks. The “Volcker Rule,” named after former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker who proposed it, is aimed at preventing Big Banks from speculating on securities or other complex financial products (a.k.a. “proprietary trading”) and putting strict limits on their ability to bet on hedge funds and private equity funds.
Dean Baker: Recession Didn’t Have to Happen
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If the Federal Reserve had done its job, the worst economic downturn since the Depression of the 1930s would not have occurred. Rather than heeding warnings that the sharp upturn in the housing market was a bubble that inevitably would bust, economists at the Fed ignored all the warning signs, says Dean Baker in a Point of View (POV) guest column at the AFL-CIO website.
Baker is co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) and author of several books and the popular blog Beat the Press. He will speak tonight about his new book, False Profits: Recovering from the Bubble Economy, at Busboys and Poets in Washington, D.C., at 6:30 p.m. For more information, call 202-387-7638.
Baker says there was more behind the near-collapse than greed and incredible economic mismanagement.
Wall Street greed has received considerable attention—but the failure of those in policy-making positions is still not fully appreciated.
Here’s Why U.S. Job Loss Worse, Wider Than Previous Recessions
The current economic downturn is the worst since the Great Depression and has led to more job loss than the previous two recessions. Just as in the 1930s, today’s economic crisis was triggered by a banking failure created in large part by financial degregulation. Both jobs and a stronger financial system must be addressed to prevent future problems, say two union leaders key to solving the crisis.
In a recent interview with National Public Radio (NPR), AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka, a member of President Obama’s White House Economic Recovery Advisory Board, pointed out that the current recession is worse than the recessions of the mid-1970s and early 1980s when it comes to job losses. Says Trumka:
This recession began in December of 2007, and we’ve already lost more jobs as a percentage of total employment than in the entire ’73 or ’80-’81 recessions.
