The Forgotten 99ers -- Abandoned By Their Country

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2011020504/forgotten-99ers-abandoned-their-country

I was looking for news reports about the "99ers" -- people unemployed for 99 weeks or more, and therefore unable to receive any unemployment benefits -- and noticed that almost no one is covering this. Mostly Examiner.com, MLive, "From the Trenches" and "RantRave." This is a story in itself.

The long-term unemployed are forgotten, a nuisance. Millions of people, unemployed for a very long time, now without even receiving unemployment benefits. The wave of layoffs started just over two years ago (as Wall Street got bailouts used to pay out huge bonuses), so right now, 2 years later, each month another several hundred thousand people drop into this void.

Who are the 99ers? The Congressional Research Service says they are, Older Workers Most Likely to Experience Very Long-Term Unemployment,

Once they have lost a job, older Americans are more likely than any other age group to remain out of work for 99 weeks or more, as calculated in a new report by the Congressional Research Service.

More at the link --

[Omaha Steve]

1. K&R!

[WCGreen]

2. No one is even talking about the long term unemployed...

Too negative, too down, too real.

[leftstreet]

3. K&R

[CaliforniaPeggy]

4. And they most likely won't find work...

Some companies have the reprehensible requirement that anyone they hire must have been working in the last year...

Or else they won't be eligible.

[Freddie Stubbs]

5. Wasn't extending unemployment benefits to these people part of the deal Obama made with

the Republicans last year?

[MadHound]

6. No, the 99er's were left out in the cold. n/t

[leftstreet]

7. No n/t

[jp11]

8. I think the GOP memo says they are supposed to work for less or become

entrepreneurs, go get a loan, start a business and create jobs.

[cutlassmama]

10. Or become the newly homeless. I see them everyday with their shopping carts

full of stuff. It's so sad. They try desperately to sell what belongings they can and the get the shopping cart and start walking. :scared:

[CC]

9. When the weather starts to get better

a million or so unemployed (and supporters) need to head to the front yard of the capital (aka The National Mall) with tents etc and set up a tent city there. That is about the only way to break through the right wing echo chamber, corporate dollars and media love affair with the tea party so the average American can seen and heard themselves. Let the rest of the country see how bad it really is and let Congress know they are the ones that will be held responsible. People can bitch and blame Obama all they want but it is Congress that controls the purse strings. It is Congress that has spent its first month working on anything but jobs. The GOP ran on and were elected to get jobs, not repeal HCR and certainly not to take us into the middle ages when it comes to women.

[Newest Reality]

11. What will happen to those people?

Well, being one of them, I have some idea.

If you have no personal support system or reserves, you are on your own -- the Katrina effect. There is no safety net! There is not even a hammock made out of dental floss. Does that need to be underlined, emboldened and repeated several times?

How many of those dangling at the end end of a short, frayed rope will be able to hold out much longer and where will they end-up? How many homeless people do we expect to ignore in this Grim New World? How long will we be able to deny the potential health impact as vectors for disease increase and hungry people roam the streets? How many people will be dying in abject poverty? The meter is spinning faster as the numbers grow. How many of them will we allow to be imprisoned for their crimes of vagrancy and begging simply because they are an unattractive nuisance to the haves? Oh, but the private prisons will provide almost free prison labor to corporations, so there is a bright side again ... for our Corporate Occupation.

Who really thinks they are immune to the outcome of spiraling societal impacts from this debacle, and for how long would that immunity last? What business model are we looking at when instability is the outcome? Chaos Capitalism may be a new term to coin because I am pretty sure there will be huge profits to be made in the accelerating decay of our very humanity.

When you are talking numbers like 2,000,000, (and potentially double that number in the future) people dumped into the heartless void of this society's new black whole of drugged-out and copiously entertained denial, that's not only an individual and collective crises at the onset, it creates certain formula for some heavy-duty, widespread impact. There will be a price that those not effected will eventually pay and it seems that we are on a sow-and-reap track to disaster.

This is not about if or when. It is in our midst. We only need to know how much longer this descent will be allowed to continue and how low we are going to go as a society before we can muster the will to reverse the American Nightmare.

[LiberalEsto]

12. My husband's brother is one of them

We think he's getting help from an older brother, but if it weren't for that, he'd be out on the street.
He was a computer programmer, another one of the many Americans who have lost jobs because pf H1-B visas.