Susan Saulny and Monica Davey of The New York Times report on just how bad the economy is in Michigan:
"Around the state, home foreclosures are commonplace, the trust fund that pays unemployment benefits is millions of dollars in debt, food banks are struggling and health agencies are reporting an uptick in people with symptoms like anxiety and depression. Suicides were up in recent years, although officials caution against drawing any direct links between deaths and the economy.
"In one sign of distress, in the first nine months of this year, some 130,000 Michigan residents who had lost their jobs remained out of work so long that they ran out of regular unemployment benefits. By the middle of this month, 63,000 people (who had already run out of their ordinary maximum benefit — as many as 26 weeks, at as much as $362 a week) also ran out of an extension authorized by Congress."
yeah, and doubtless the top 1%er's will be so tragically affected by this so called recession. God forbid they have to buy domestic, or suffer through with less domestics in their mcmansions, in their little compounds, where they won't have to see the outcome on the lower classes...Do I regret the wages earned by GM line workers and rank and file? never. small change compared to CEO's all over this country.
ReplyDeleteI always said that the government's non-response to Hurricane Katrina was as much about poverty as anything else. There was a pretty unsubtle subtext to the rhetoric that believed "those people" deserved what they got. This article, and much of the national "debate", about the auto companies and citizens of this state remind me of that same mentality. Republicans have been very successful pitting segments of society against each other, so much so that people in other parts of the country refuse to believe that this current state of affairs is coming for them, too.
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