I have to tell you some terrible things.
I didn’t want to do it – I almost didn’t bother with this post as it’s soooooo depressing and who wants to hear that crap but there’s also a lot of stuff going on and it’s my job to inform you of it so I’m HOPING (because I am a hopeful guy) that, if we get it out of the way now, we can start the new week in a better mood. So, I’ve decided to post up some of the news stories I’ve been reading but intersperse then with encouraging pictures to take the edge off a little:
First, a couple of items about jobs. It seems that the aggregate hours worked in U.S. economy from all workers moves back to February 1999 levels. 25 million Americans out of work or looking for full-time work as middle class continues to shrink. RortyBomb points out: “This is part of what people mean when they say there’s unused capacity, and that’s a tremendous waste of people’s talents and lives.” An unemployed person detracts from the wealth of the nation and anyone in Congress who doesn’t believe that does not value the American workers and should not BE valued by them in November! Equally awful: At this point, only 45 percent of Americans now have health insurance through their employers. Equally startling is the 16.6 percent (52M) that have no insurance at all. The employment figures are one facet of the larger storyline of a shrinking middle class.
Meanwhile, as our Congresspeople tell us we can’t afford $1Bn for this and that program that benefits the American people, Brown University’s Eisenhower Research Project just released a study that shows 225,000 people killed in the Iraq-Afghanistan wars, 137,000 of whom were civilians with 7.8M people turned into refugees – about the entire population of Connecticut and Kentucky combined forced to flee their homes and about 20% of population of the countries we invaded. They US has spent about $4,000,000,000,000 on the war (so far), which was enough money to give 8M people $500,000 each rather than blowing up their homes. That’s OK though, there are 110M taxpayers in America so we only borrowed $36,363.63 each to pay for it (so far).
According to the Institute: “The human and economic costs of these wars will continue for decades, some…
