Keeping Track

Let's make a list of the Senators and Congressmen and women who have voted against extending unemployment insurance at a time when well over twenty percent of the population is either unemployed or underemployed.  I use twenty percent, instead of the official ten percent because I am one of the many millions who are not even counted anymore and I know there are lots more like me.  The statistics are based on bogus figures that leave out everyone underemployed and everyone who is no longer collecting unemployment. There could be as many as thirty percent unemployment now, but I'll go with a conservative twenty percent.  Twenty percent. One in five. For every five people you know that used to have a job, one of those people is now unemployed.

Some people are luckier than others. It depends on what part of the country they live in. In South Florida, half of my family is unemployed. In California, all three persons in my household are un/underemployed and five of my good friends. Only my family in Indiana is working now, and that is because GE had second thoughts and did not close their Bloomington plant and send all those jobs to Mexico. They were planning to, but someone must have had the brilliant thought that people without jobs don't buy refrigerators, so they retooled the plant and started hiring again. Thank you General Electric. You value American workers.

Then take a look at a company like Hewlett Packard (HP).  Isn't it annoying when your computer breaks down and you call for technical support, and the person who answers the phone is on another continent and hardly understandable?  It is especially irritating since I have friends in the U.S. who lost their jobs at HP when Carly Fiorina was CEO and practically transferred all of tech support jobs overseas. Now the pride of the Californian Republican party, she is running against Barbara Boxer for the US Senate.  In January 2004, at a meeting to "head off rising protectionist sentiment in Congress," Fiorina said: "There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore."  I  for one can tell you, that's not who I want representing me in the U.S. Senate.

Meg Whitman, the current Republican candidate for governor of California sent 40 percent of eBay’s jobs to low wage areas abroad. According to Carl Boice of the LA Progressive, "Between 2002 and 2007, Whitman increased the number of overseas workers at eBay by 666 percent, rather than keeping jobs in California."  Now Whitman claims to run on a platform to find jobs for the very people she has abandoned.  Does that make sense to you? 

By the way, I stopped buying HP products and switched to Dell, which is still based in the United States.  I love my new Dell notebook and I love talking to Americans when I need tech support. Go, Dell for keeping America working. More corporations need to follow GE and Dell's lead and bring our jobs back home. 

That is why I am keeping a list of Congressmen and Senators who don't believe we really want to work, who blame us for not finding a job when there are no new jobs, who have abandoned us in this time of crisis.  Let's print that list on the front pages of every newspaper on election day, to remind voters who actually helped us when we were down and who didn't even try.  Don't buy into their bull about less government, unless you enjoy being unemployed and living in the streets.  Less is not better for the American people, and punishing the unemployed for not having a job is pure election folly.

And finally, a huge round of applause for Republican Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, for crossing party lines and doing the only humane thing to do and extend unemployment. Shame on the rest of you.