Photo: iStockphoto

While the national unemployment rate of 10.2 percent is a sobering reminder of the depth of this recession and the protracted timeline a recovery will take, the challenges posed by long-term unemployment are far greater.

“We are breaking every record post-Great Depression on long-term unemployment,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute. Right now, around 35 percent of those without jobs have been unemployed for more than six months, a figure that adds up to 3.6 percent of our country’s labor pool.

The result is a crisis unlike anything seen since the 1930s. “The numbers are unprecedented,” said John Challenger, CEO of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a human resources consulting firm. “What it suggests and it bears out in reality is that as people become long-term unemployed, they become damaged goods in the job market.”

While economists are divided about the best way to combat this growing problem, most agree on how it happened. The current recession exacerbated an ongoing economic shift from manufacturing to a service base. Troubles faced by Detroit’s Big Three automakers fanned the flames, rendering the skills of many workers obsolete. Even as local economies withered on the vine, workers were rendered immobile, locked into their homes by the real estate crash.

Long-term unemployment is dangerous because it can have a snowball effect, says Kevin Lowden, managing economist at the Milken Institute. The longer someone is out of work, the more likely he or she is to default on his or her mortgage, even low-risk borrowers at the time when the loan was originated.

“You also see significant issues in terms of the effect on consumer demand due to the dramatic increase in savings rate,” he said. While this increase in savings is good for the economy long-term, right now that frugality comes at the expense of consumer spending that could lead to employers hiring more workers.

This epidemic of long-term unemployment also puts an added burden on government coffers. “This is direct drain on budgets in two ways,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Government doesn’t collect income tax on laid-off employees, and when these workers go onto unemployment or disability rolls, this creates an additional drain on the system.

For instance, the increase in workers applying for disability has shot up. Currently, some 7 million adults are on disability, an influx so overwhelming that the trustees of the Social Security program predict that the disability fund will be emptied by 2017 if nothing changes.

This mass migration to disability status is primarily a function of our employer-based health care system, according to Lawrence Katz, a professor at Harvard University. “If you have a pre-existing condition, even if you get another job there will be problems with your coverage,” he said. “The one place you can go is disability, where you get onto Medicare. And once they go on, they basically never come off.” Health plans currently under debate in Congress would subsidize low-income citizens and families, which would include the unemployed, as well as ban insurers from eliminating pre-existing conditions, which make going off disability feasible. Currently, those jobless for a long period of time have nothing to fall back on after their COBRA benefit expires.

Even if those who have been unemployed long-term make it back into the workforce, their future earning power suffers. There’s some evidence that post-layoff retraining can mitigate this, but only under certain circumstances. A study out of the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy Studies found that attending one year of community college gave displaced workers a 5 percent wage boost. Unfortunately, the vast majority of workers enrolled in such programs don’t stick around for even a semester, let alone a whole year.

However, for workers that stick it out and specialize in vocational training, science or mathematics, the returns can be even greater. The study’s authors found a 10 to 15 percent jump in wages for this subset of workers, as well as higher returns for those who already had some degree of college education prior to their participation in the program.

To this end, much of the work that is being done to combat long-term unemployment focuses on retraining workers so that their skills are more in alignment with today’s service-based economy. “The economy has changed fundamentally and our workforce system has not,” said Andy Levin, Michigan’s chief workforce officer, who runs that state’s No Worker Left Behind program. “Most people who lose their jobs can’t replace their standard of living without getting significant training because of the rapid and ongoing march of technology and globalization,” Levin said.

No Worker Left Behind began operating in August 2007 and is funded primarily by the Workforce Investment Act, which was created in the 90s and received $1.25 billion in stimulus funding to help dislocated workers. Since then, No Worker Left Behind has trained 102,000 at-risk or jobless Michigan residents for jobs in growing industries like health care, technology and transportation.

Levin has put into place bureaucratic efficiencies, such as standardizing which types of jobs are eligible for training subsidies throughout the state and streamlining the process that lets jobless workers continue to receive unemployment benefits while pursuing additional education. When the program conducted a survey this April, they found that nearly half of the workers who had completed training had landed a job, 86 percent in a field that related to their training.

Other economists say that programs such as No Worker Left Behind, while helpful, don’t do enough to address the root of the problem: the overwhelming lack of jobs. Although the pace at which companies are laying off workers has slowed, companies aren’t rehiring, which means there are still too few jobs to go around. Traditionally, small businesses are the first to hire when the economy picks up steam after a recession; however, small-business financing has dried up due to the credit crunch, preventing entrepreneurs from expanding and adding employees.

“The crisis is just so big at this point with 10.2 percent unemployment that we’re thinking about new direct job creation proposals because the scale of the problem is so large,” said Allegra Baider, senior legislative associate at the Center for Community Change. That group, along with a host of other advocacy and labor organizations, recently released a joint statement calling for new investment in job creation in fields such as infrastructure and education.

“A top priority ahead of job training is we’ve got to fix the labor market and start generating jobs,” said the Economic Policy Institute’s Heidi Shierholz. The Obama administration plans to hold a jobs summit next month examining incentives like tax credits to encourage businesses to hire new workers.

John Challenger of Challenger, Gray & Christmas acknowledged that even if such programs succeed, many Americans will have to make adjustments. “One of the things that’s happening is a steady career at one large company or in a company town is no longer available, and people at all levels can no longer think of their careers as always progressing upwards in income.” Even as they learn new skills, employees also have to be taught how to be flexible so they can adapt to the twists and turns of the 21^st-century economy.

Martha C. White writes for the Washington Independent.

(Photo: Minnesota Independent)

Referring to the 6th District Republican as a “lightning rod for leftist hate,” KTLK’s Chris Baker welcomed Michele Bachmann to his radio show Thursday morning. She accused Barack Obama of using the bank bailout fund as his “slush fund,” said we’re “observing the destruction of… capitalism,” and again borrowed columnist Michael Barone’s term “gangster government” for the administration’s dealings with GM. Vowing to block Obama’s efforts, she said, “This is like Al Capone in Chicago politics. It may work in Chicago, but it won’t work in the state of Minnesota.”

Bachmann began the interview by stating she’ll be part of a “caucus on media bias” — a followup to Baker’s introduction, which had its own sound-effect: a “moonbat alarm” alerting left-wingers to “get your blogs ready!”

Bachmann says conservatives need to mobilize to fight media bias, “because the media picks a target, they demonize them, they drum them off the stage and they do it over and over and over.” Her example? David Letterman telling off-color jokes about Palin’s daughter (here’s Letterman retelling the jokes and responding to Palin’s ire).

“A lot of times conservatives want to be nice and they fold their hands,” she added. “It’s time now, I think, to stand up and call them for what they’re doing.”

When asked whether she’s running for governor, she said, “If I felt the tug to do it, I would do it… I just don’t have that tug.”

She reserved most of her anger for Obama and how he’s managed the bailouts of GM and Chrysler. Stating that she expects the current 9.4 percent unemployment rate to jump to 10 percent, she said of the administration:

They calculate prosperity by increasing the number of government jobs, and you can’t do that. Your barometer of success in a growing economy is how many jobs are created in the private sector without government subsidy. Private business can handle themselves just fine. They can grow just fine. Every day government is doing things to put them out of business. This is the most clear example I can point to, Chris, which is: the federal government overnight purchasing General Motors and then in the course of 100, 150 days choosing to shut down over 3,000 dealerships across the country, throwing thousands of people out of work and destroying people’s capital.

GM originally said it’d close around 1,100 dealerships, but that number has doubled — to 2,059 (See Huffington Post’s interactive map of closures.) She says dealerships will today have to sign an “extortion agreement,” which she says releases GM from liability, and if they don’t sign, they’ll lose the warranties on the remaining GM cars on their lots. Further, she says, “they also have to hand over to the government their customer lists, their customer service lists… The government will turn these lists over to the competitors, the remaining GM dealerships.”

“They have literally shafted these private businessmen,” she said.

A partial transcript of the interview follows:

I’m in the process of looking for legal ways to intervene in stopping the president from doing what he’s doing… I’m not speaking as an attorney right now, but from my point of view, this is not legal… It says they will not protest and they will not contest anything… If they do protest, they have to pay not only their own attorney fees, they have to pay GM’s attorney fees at $1500 an hour. The lawyers for these car dealers told them early this week that it is as though the government has handed the dealers a gun, playing the game of Russian Roulette, and they’ve put a bullet in every chamber. There’s no way out for these dealers.

We need to be outraged by what the federal government is doing, because Michael Barone has called this — he’s a columnist — he’s called this “gangster government.” There couldn’t be a more descriptive term. This is like Al Capone in Chicago politics. It may work in Chicago but it won’t work in the state of Minnesota… I’m going to look for avenue I can to block the administration…

Congress turned that down [the late 2008 bill seeking a bailout for automakers]. We said no to bailing out the car companies. We went home over the weekend, and over the weekend, the Obama administration contacted President Bush and asked President Bush to bail out the car companies. I believe this was in December. I think it was something like $14 or $17 billion dollars, something of that avenue. Unfortunately, President Bush gave that money to the ‘Auto Task Force’ which President Obama set up. That money was given without Congressional approval and taken out of the bank bailout money. I think that was illegal to do that. Congress did not give approval. Since that time there’s been at least another $65 billion that president Obama has dipped into that bank bailout fund and put into these bailouts for Chrysler and GM. That is money that at this point, based on their business plan, GM or Chrysler can never pay back to the taxpayer. They have no plan to ever be able to pay that back. This bank bailout is working as a slush fund for the Obama administration to spend wherever they like…

This is bipartisan. President Bush should not have released the money out of the bailout fund for the banks and given it to President Obama to create an Auto Task Force. There’s no oversight from Congress. This is something unilaterally that was done at the White House level and since that time President Obama has gone to town. And they’ve taken another $65 billion, without congressional approval, and dumped it in GM, and where’s it gone? Here’s Chrysler, which for all intents and purposes is dead, and somehow the White House said, “Now you, Fiat, will own Chrysler.” Fiat didn’t put a dime on the table, but we did, the taxpayer did…. And what is unbelievable is, here you’ve got actual investors in Chrysler – the bondholders – they put money, cash on the barrelhead, into Chrysler to keep Chrysler going. Some of those bondholders were teacher pension funds, cop pension funds, and president Obama said to those people, who are secured creditors, which means this: if anything happened to Chrysler, they were to be made whole, 100 percent, first, before any unsecured creditor got their money. President Obama said, “I don’t like that.” So he turned 150 years of bankruptcy law on its head, defied bankruptcy law and said, “Nuts to you people who are secured creditors. We’re going to put the UAW… first in line, and we’re going to make sure that we pay for their healthcare costs and their retirement costs with your US tax money. And so we’re gonna pay them first and put the secured creditors – which include teacher pension funds and cop pension funds – you’re going to get something less, maybe 26 cents on the dollar.”

…It seems illegal because I believe it is illegal. There has not been any contravening change in the law to make this happen. This is an outright power grab….

This is beyond crazy, because you’ve got the president who’s set up something like 21 czars now. We’ve never seen any thing like that. They’re unaccountable. He is completely bypassing Congress. I mean, you want to talk about an Imperial Presidency? He is bypassing Congress and setting up these czars. He just set up a new one, I think yesterday — the pay czar — to decide compensation limits, for heaven’s sake… That’s why I feel like I need to be in Washington now rather than running for governor of Minnesota. What’s happening here in Washington is nothing short of historic. We’re observing the deconstruction of free market economics and capitalism.

Listen to the interview.

The report summary says:

Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.

During the Bush administration, Twin Cities vegan potluck dinners were the targets of suspected terrorism, as were environmental groups, gay rights activists and PETA. One of the biggest criticisms of the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security in the wake of 9/11 was that it was quickly becoming politicized. Now, the shoe seems to be on the other foot.

Minnesota Majority, a conservative interest group, seems to find a link between the tea parties and the right-wing militias in the DHS document. Quoting the report, Minnesota Majority wrote, “‘The historical election of an African American president and the prospect of policy changes are proving to be a driving force for rightwing extremist recruitment and radicalization.’ The rise of the national ‘Tea Party’ protest movement may be considered a part of this radicalization and recruitment,” said Minnesota Majority. “Joining policy-focused organizations like Minnesota Majority, the NRA or the Taxpayers League could also be construed in this way.”

The group continued, “At more than one point in the report, opposition to illegal immigration is linked to racism, xenophobia or white supremacy. It is a document clearly written by people with a strong ideological bent of their own and unfortunately, this report was crafted by employees of the federal government, on government time for official government purposes and was bought and paid for by us, the US taxpayers.”

The DHS report talks at length about groups promoting racism and xenophobia, but bloggers say that rallying against illegal immigration is not racist or xenophobic.

“The report seems to suggest that opposition to illegal immigration equates to white supremacy and is symptomatic of ‘right-wing radicalization,’” wrote Minnesota Majority.

On the contrary, Tea Party organizers suggest their event is open to all, regardless of race or ideology.

“We just got Barb Davis White on board, so that’s exciting,” state coordinator Toni “No Bologny” Backdahl told KTLK’s Chris Baker (MP3). “And I’m doing some outreach now to see if I can’t get a diverse crowd so I can prove we’re not racist! We’re across the board.”

So says MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann. He spent seven minutes fact-checking Republican U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann’s recent interview with KTLK’s Chris Baker. Olbermann pulls in Chris Hayes from The Nation to add some analysis to the critique of Minnesota’s most conservative member of Congress.

Photo: MnIndy

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann’s ranting has the blog world buzzing yet again this week. Late last week, in an appearance with KTLK’s Chris Baker, the Minnesota Republican said, “We’re running out of rich people in this country.” She said she thinks Obama will lower the “rich” threshold to couples making $65,000 a year.

The Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen went through her comments line by line and found some false, albeit interesting, ideas held by Minnesota’s most conservative member of Congress:

* ACORN is “under federal indictment for voter fraud,” but the stimulus bill nevertheless gives ACORN “$5 billion.” (In reality, ACORN is not under federal indictment and isn’t mentioned in the stimulus bill at all.)

* many members of Congress have “a real aversion to capitalism.”

* the stimulus bill includes a measure to create a “rationing board” for health care, and after the bill becomes law, “your doctor will no longer be able to make your healthcare decisions with you.”

* the recovery package is part of a Democratic conspiracy to “direct” funding away from Republican districts, so Democratic districts can “suck up” all federal funds. Bachmann doesn’t think this will work because, as she put it, “We’re running out of rich people in this country.”

* the “Community-Organizer-in-Chief” is also orchestrating a conspiracy involving the Census Bureau, which the president will use to redraw congressional lines to keep Democrats in power for up to “40 years.” When the host said he was confused, noting that congressional district lines are drawn at the state level, Bachmann said Obama’s non-existent plan is an “anti-constitutional move.”

Toward the end, Bachmann said, “We are literally losing our country,” to which Benen responded, “Congresswoman, you’ve literally lost something, but I don’t think it’s your country.”

Audio clip of Bachmann’s interview on KTLK:

The signers of the ad, a cadre of religious-right figures calling themselves No Mob Veto, said, “beginning today, we commit ourselves to opposing and publicly shaming anyone who resorts to the rhetoric of anti-religious bigotry.”

Sporadic skirmishes have arisen since the passage of Proposition 8, a California initiative that rescinded the right for same-sex couples to marry in that state. Someone sent an envelope containing white powder to Mormon temples in California and Utah recently — owing to the church’s investment in supporting the measure — and a school board member punched and kicked a gay man in Bakersfield, Calif., during a Prop 8 protest in October.

And the ad has touched off another round of heated rhetoric by both sides.

“Several signatories to the ad are generals in the culture wars,” said Rev. Susan Russell of All Saints [Epsicopal] Church in Pasadena, Calif. Russell works on religious issues with the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), an LGBT group that opposed Prop 8.

“They lied about gay people in the campaign, and now they are lying again when they say we are in favor of mob intimidation and violence,” she said.

The No Mob Veto ad vows to shame anyone who resorts to anti-religious bigotry — and the ad’s signers know something about anti-religious bigotry: Many have engaged in it themselves.

Click to view the ad in a new window.

“Mormonism either affirms historic Christianity, or it doesn’t. Since it doesn’t, it can’t call itself Christianity — a fact that all the good will and public relations in Utah can’t change,” wrote Chuck Colson, a central Watergate figure who, after being “born again” as a Christian, started the Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Colson is a signer of the No Mob Vote ad. He also told The Washington Monthly in 2005, “While Mormons share some beliefs with Christians, they are not Christians.”

On Muslims, Colson told ABCNews in 2007, “Islam is a vicious evil.”

Meanwhile, National Association of Evangelicals lobbyist Rich Cizik, another signer of the ad, spoke for the majority of evangelicals on Mitt Romney’s chances as a Mormon presidential candidate. “Most evangelicals still regard Mormonism as a cult,” he told Washington Monthly in 2005. “That will shape, I’d imagine, their reactions to Romney as a candidate for the White House.”

Signer William Donahue of the Catholic League also has a laundry list of controversial statements to his credit.

“Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It’s not a secret, OK? And I’m not afraid to say it,” he told MSNBC when asked about opposition to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. “That’s why they hate this movie. It’s about Jesus Christ, and it’s about truth. It’s about the Messiah.”

Donahue also went after President Bush in 2005 for allowing the White House to hand out holiday cards that didn’t specifically reference Christmas. “The Bush administration has suffered a loss of will and … they have capitulated to the worst elements in our culture,” he said, according to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

He has also gone after Sen. Charles Schumer, folk singer Joan Osborne for her God-inspired song “One of Us,” ABC drama Nothing Sacred, indie filmmaker Kevin Smith, alt-rocker Marilyn Manson, the fantasy film The Golden Compass, conservative radio host Michael Savage, comedian Kathy Griffin, CBS’ prime-time series “CSI: Crime Scene Investigations” and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee.

Donahue blamed gays for the sexual abuse scandals plaguing the Catholic Church. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation said in 2005, “Since 2002, Donahue has continued to opportunistically exploit the crisis in the Catholic Church to link adult homosexuality (and gay people in general) with child sexual abuse — ignoring the fact that such abuse of power is not reflective of any healthy adult sexual orientation — gay or straight.”

Not all religious leaders agree with the latest religious tactic to paint themselves as persecuted.

Bishop John Selders of Amistad United Church of Christ in Hartford, Conn., commented in an HRC press release Monday, “As an African-American, I’ve heard this before. A few frustrated members of a minority group respond in anger to a new indignity and the oppressor calls them anarchists,” he said.

“Satan, sometimes called the Father of Lies, is at work when powerful people seek to dehumanize those who are less powerful.”

Rev. Russell agreed. “Many of the leaders cited in this ad preach hate against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, then look the other way when LGBT people are the victims of hate crimes,” she said. “This ad is an act of individual and corporate hypocrisy.”

Doesn’t some of the blame lie with the American media who enables this fraud? Doesn’t some of the blame — I would say a majority of the blame does not lie with the nitwit that shot him, other than the fact that he’s a nitwit and a guy who should have been in prison in my opinion, who shot him. But to me, this is the — this is an example of how, by enabling people and trying to push this false reality, leads to horrible crimes like this…

He added, “I believe the media and the rest of the enablers out there, they have this guy’s blood on their hands because they create this false sense of reality and they enable people who need serious psychological counseling.”

Andy Birkey of Eleventh Avenue South (and our former colleague here at MnIndy) writes, “Baker’s ignorance of the realities of trans people is telling. Psychological counseling is most often the bedrock of a transition from the born gender to the target gender. A person’s transition is never something that is done lightly as it comes with great obstacles in virtually every facet of that person’s life.”

Birkey reports that Soulforce Q, a young-adults group “dedicated to confronting spiritual violence against the LGBT community through nonviolent civil disobedience,” has gotten tentative permission to have a representative appear on Baker’s show to discuss the issues.

The index’s record high was on Sept. 24, 2001, just weeks after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.

Rapture Ready’s Todd Strandberg wrote this morning, “I’ve received dozens of emails pointing out the odd fact that the day after the election, the daily pick-three lottery number in Obama’s home state of Illinois was ‘6-6-6.’”  Strandberg says it’s “unlikely” Obama is the anti-Christ, since the “beast of Revelation will come out of Europe.” But he adds, “[E]xpect the prophetic time clock to tick away at a faster rate” in an Obama presidency. The key thing to watch: How he deals with Israel. Strandberg writes:

The Bible warns us that the day will come when Israel is standing by itself against its enemies. For decades, prophecy scholars have wondered what will cause America to become isolated from Israel. Some have wondered if it will be a Russian nuclear attack, while others have thought it might be the impact of the rapture. We can now add the possibility of political change to the list.

And, of course, what happens? Well, obviously, it’s racist. I love that — that it’s — this little bitch needs to stand up for himself. Sorry, I can’t stand this. You want to be the president of the United States, and you won’t even stand up to a smoking-hot chick from Alaska? How is he gonna stand up to the world’s terrorists?

I mean, this — this guy — this guy is — he’s a — he’s a wimp is what he is.

A CNN fact-check on Palin’s allegation concludes: “There is no indication that Ayers and Obama are now ‘palling around,’ or that they have had an ongoing relationship in the past three years. Also, there is nothing to suggest that Ayers is now involved in terrorist activity or that other Obama associates are.”