Rise in Jobless Poses Threat to Stability Worldwide
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ
PARIS — From lawyers in Paris to factory workers in China and bodyguards in Colombia, the ranks of the jobless are swelling rapidly across the globe.
Worldwide job losses from the recession that started in the United States in December 2007 could hit a staggering 50 million by the end of 2009, according to the International Labor Organization, a United Nations agency. The slowdown has already claimed 3.6 million American jobs.
High unemployment rates, especially among young workers, have led to protests in countries as varied as Latvia, Chile, Greece, Bulgaria and Iceland and contributed to strikes in Britain and France.
Last month, the government of Iceland, whose economy is expected to contract 10 percent this year, collapsed and the prime minister moved up national elections after weeks of protests by Icelanders angered by soaring unemployment and rising prices.
Just last week, the new United States director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, told Congress that instability caused by the global economic crisis had become the biggest security threat facing the United States, outpacing terrorism.
“Nearly everybody has been caught by surprise at the speed in which unemployment is increasing, and are groping for a response,” said Nicolas Véron, a fellow at Bruegel, a research center in Brussels that focuses on Europe’s role in the global economy.
In emerging economies like those in Eastern Europe, there are fears that growing joblessness might encourage a move away from free-market, pro-Western policies, while in developed countries unemployment could bolster efforts to protect local industries at the expense of global trade.
Indeed, some European stimulus packages, as well as one passed Friday in the United States, include protections for domestic companies, increasing the likelihood of protectionist trade battles.
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Stimuls package: Mr. President, where the hell we goin'?
“Rise in Jobless Poses Threat to Stability Worldwide” (NELSON D. SCHWARTZ, New York Times, February 15, 2009) and we in the United States are not exempt from the problem. And neither we nor other nations of the world have considered what it is that we expect all of us common folks to do to make a living. How do WE THE PEOPLE engage in personally meaningful, financially rewarding and culturally beneficial work?
The stimulus package just passed and soon signed into law did not query the matter; it is a shoot-first-ask-later answer. At best it may be enough to start towing the remains of a dying economic system off to the junkyard of things that have run their course, and to attempt to get the nation moving on into a sustainable American Dream that starts with learning, moves to working and ends up in letting us enjoy a quality of life that is worth living---this in place of the cancerously destructive mass consumption of people and resources in the production of landfill-destined things and in the squirreling of ill-gotten gains into Swiss bank accounts.
An emerging means for making a better and more fulfilling living is not your father’s economy, that of Adam Smith, or more of the Republicans version of either of these.
Everything under the sun changes, economies included, and into history have gone food gathering and hunting, camping and trading, serfdom and servitude, mercantilism and craft/agrarian production, and industrial capitalism and the mass labor movement. Now fading into the past goes the current top-down, mass-consumption market that has ravenously eaten itself alive and discards onto the bone heap of waste: no-repair appliances and other junk, working people and various business owners, and now investors whose nest eggs have disappeared.
These savers are regularly discarded by means of a Ponzi scheme that used to be though of as the financial market---a house of cards now full of ever improved financial “instruments” that gobble up loot, even that of government, and poop prolific piles of profitless paper.
To our rescue has come a man that knows how to get out in front of the parade, President Barack Obama. The march is well underway, the music is stirring, masses of people have left the curb and joined in the procession, and it may not be too long until someone yells from back of the line, Mr. President, where are we going?