41% Unemployment Rate?

We, as individuals, left alone to our own devices, are not highly efficient mechanisms for survival. We depend on the organized cooperation of huge numbers of people to guarantee our material survival. As economist and author, Robert Heilbroner said, "We are rich, not as individuals, but as members of a rich society, and our easy assumption of materials sufficiency is actually only as reliable as the bonds which forge us into a social whole."

In other words, we're all in this together and anyone who thinks they're "self-made" is a damned fool. No one does it alone.

So, when 41% of working adults are out of work ("the real unemployment number is, by definition, the proportion of working-age adults who aren't employed"), our economy is not functioning properly no matter what we're told. The civilian employment-population ratio -  the real employment rate - is currently at about 59%,

Meanwhile, with so many people out of work, and while average tax-paying Americans are bailing out organized wealth, while organized wealth is doing their best to undermine our efforts at  survival.

Take the Tea Party, who presents itself as a grass roots "populist uprising against vested corporate power" when it's really covertly coordinated by billionaires for billionaires.

Five hundred people attended the summit, which served, in part, as a training session for Tea Party activists in Texas. An advertisement cast the event as a populist uprising against vested corporate power. “Today, the voices of average Americans are being drowned out by lobbyists and special interests,” it said. “But you can do something about it.” The pitch made no mention of its corporate funders. The White House has expressed frustration that such sponsors have largely eluded public notice. David Axelrod, Obama’s senior adviser, said, “What they don’t say is that, in part, this is a grassroots citizens’ movement brought to you by a bunch of oil billionaires.”

Links:

Unemployed Friends - is a great forum with resources for the unemployed and it also contains a forum where unemployed Americans can share their stories and support each other.

Where Service Jobs Will Be -- tracking where new jobs will be created in America. Today, I look at the sector of the economy that accounts for the largest share of all jobs - the service class.