I’m Shocked

Shocked, that is, that Barbara Ehrenreich was allowed to speak this truth in a nationally-read newspaper:

So thoroughly is the economy decoupled from ordinary experience that according to a CNN poll, 57 percent of Americans thought we were already in a recession a month ago. Economists may complain that this is only because the public is ignorant of the technical definition of a recession, which specifies at least two consecutive quarters of negative growth. But most of the public employs the more colloquial definition of a recession, which is hard times. And — far removed from whatever happens on Wall Street, the Nikkei, Dax, or the curiously named FTSE — most Americans have been living in their own personal recession for years.

I could see this when I was doing research for a book on white-collar unemployment in 2004. Although the economy was officially on an upturn, I met laid-off people who’d been searching for a job for more than a year and often ended up — after selling their homes and borrowing from relatives — taking low-wage work as big-box sales clerks or even janitors.

In the months ahead, we can expect the hard times to spread. Citigroup has announced plans to eliminate 21,000 jobs; investment banks in general will shed 40,000. The mortgage industry is in a meltdown; Business Wire predicts a 37 percent increase in the number of companies planning layoffs this year. This is what a stimulus package needs to address: the persistent and growing struggles of the middle class and the working class, which is increasingly conterminous with the working poor.

But of course this wasn’t on the WaPo’s front page.  And don’t expect to see this on the evening news, either:  Because to acknowledge this means to admit that we need unions and the New Deal and rolling back Bush’s tax cuts for rich people, and since the anchors’ paychecks are around a hundred times what ours are, you can imagine that they — or their even-richer bosses — won’t like that one little bit.