On The Mark -- Street Corner Powder Kegs

bitchpd said it best as a comment in The Misanthrope’s post on retiring retirement:

“I truly believe that the end result of this, if the Republicans stay in power, will be to make the American economy look a lot like a lot of South American economies--very small elite, and everyone else lives in slums.”

I’ve seen this when visiting South American countries. I’ve seen it in places like Russia. I reported recently about how an acquaintance who once lived in Iran saw this on the streets of Tehran recently. But even more telling is that many of the unemployed are youth – teenagers and young adults who should be actively employed and starting to make their way in the world. Yet, more and more, we’re seeing them standing on street corners, smoking and trying to figure out how to get rid of their energy – and anger – since jobs are not to be found.

I bring this up because the trend is happening here in the United States. While the Bush administration hyped that the latest unemployment report for April showed that 274,000 jobs had been created, it didn’t mention a very telling statistic that other economic groups are pointing out – that the employment rate for teenagers in the first 11 months of 2004 (36.3 percent) is the lowest it has ever been since 1948 (when it started being monitored). The administration also didn’t point out that the 20-24 age group’s employment rate was only 67.9 percent, down nearly 5 percent since 2000.

As reported by Bob Herbert in the New York Times, Andrew Sum, the director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University said, “Younger workers have just been crushed.” He added, “The economy is growing and real output is up, but the distribution of income, in terms of how much is going to workers, well, the answer is very little has gone to the typical worker.”

Herbert says, “…wealth and power in the United States has (sic?) become ever more dangerously concentrated, leaving an entire generation of essentially powerless workers largely at the mercy of employers.” He ends his column with a great quote from Louis Brandeis:

“We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few. But we can’t have both.”

Cities and villages throughout the world are powder kegs of unemployed youths looking to release their energy and anger. One may think that it can’t happen here, that the U.S. is too big and it all evens out.

I’ve seen several sizable businesses operate with the same blindfolds on. They’re out of business now.