Sunday, November 23, 2008

As Bad As It Gets?

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."



2 comments:

  1. 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.

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  2. I 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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Thanks for commenting. I moderate comments, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You might enjoy my book about Flint called "Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City," a Michigan Notable Book for 2014 and a finalist for the 33rd Annual Northern California Book Award for Creative NonFiction. Filmmaker Michael Moore described Teardown as "a brilliant chronicle of the Mad Maxization of a once-great American city." More information about Teardown is available at www.teardownbook.com.