04.04.08
Are You Ready?
Huge job losses set off recession alarms - Yahoo! News
The latest figures, apparently released today, show that experts are starting to realize what everyone else has known for about six months—that we are in a recession period in the U. S. economy. That it took so long to recognize it shows again just how clueless those in the forefront of government and the financial industry are.
It’s no longer a question of recession or not. Now it’s how deep and how long.
Workers’ pink slips stacked ever higher in March as jittery employers slashed 80,000 jobs, the most in five years, and the national unemployment rate climbed to 5.1 percent. Job losses are nearing the staggering level of a quarter-million this year in just three months.
Says one candidate, let’s retrain workers, so they’ll be able to compete for jobs. Says another, let’s boost unemployment benefits and aid to communities, so they can hold on until the recession ends.
Retraining does not hit at the core of the problem: lax oversight of large corporations and financial enterprises has allowed those large enterprises to destabilize the economy. Rather than round up the perpetrators and make them do the perp-walk through phalanxes of TV cameras in their orange jumpsuits, we are trying to bail them out. The result was predictable, even if the timing and the exact sequence of failures was not.
All told, the economy now has lost 232,000 jobs in the first three months of this year.
I would not be surprised if there is a brief recovery in late Summer and early Autumn. We could even get back some of those lost jobs. Make no mistake about it, though. This was not the normal business cycle recession. This was preventable, and since no one is yet dealing with the “wink wink, nudge nudge” regulators who allowed this to happen or the corporate and financial shenanigans that caused it, I would expect that by the end of this year or the beginning of the next, the “double-dip” part of the recession will come, only it is probably going to be much more severe than what we are experiencing today.
I would expect that local communities need to focus on shoring up locally-owned businesses, particularly SLOBs, emphasizing a “buy local” policy. SLOBs, in turn, need to use local sources and locally-produced goods and services as much as possible. If we do this in California’s Victor Valley area, for example, national chains will face the brunt of the effect, while SLOBs will maintain their positions or even grow stronger. Since the area serves primarily as a far-away bedroom community for Los Angeles and Orange counties, this will help to ameliorate the effect of some commuters losing their out-of-area jobs.
Are you a part of your local chamber of commerce? Does your CoC have a “buy local” promotional program? If not, why not? A strong base of SLOBs (small, locally-owned businesses) is the foundation for a strong local economy. Among other things, you need to be involved in advocating that local governments use SLOBs for nearly all of their vendor / supplier and contractor needs. It isn’t just your wallet that is affected—it also affects the wallets of other locally-owned enterprises and the next generation of employees, too.
