Is the worst of the recession behind us?

No

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by Gerard Coulombe

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Is the worst of the recession behind us? A few in government who speak authoritatively tell us that it is or soon will be. But others look at employment as the other leading indicator of the state of our recession. They believe that the backbone of America, those fellow American citizens, now unemployed, will not be witnessing a rainbow in the skies over their heads any time soon.

The powerful and wealthy may see a turnaround, but the American workers, professional or laborer, will not dig themselves out of the hole they have fallen into as long as jobs continue lagging behind potential or as long as the pace of ever increasing unemployment advances steadily and fewer and fewer good paying jobs fail to materialize.

Most of those old jobs will never to return. Many of those unemployed workers will never find the kind of work that paid them so well and provided them with so many benefits. All in all, the good working people of this country of every class are about to experience a sea change in their lives that they could never have envisioned, even as the country went though the periodic recessional bumps in just about every decade or so for the past sixty years.

Many over those sixty years saw themselves confronted by the uncertainty of lost jobs as technological advancement and corporate decisions, including looking to cheaper labor abroad, started the steady and irrevocable push to have more work and jobs reassigned to areas of the world where cheap labor and few obligations governing the rights of workers pleased the corporate giants all too well.

Untold numbers of American skilled workers who had known the rewards of hard work, found themselves forever losing their place in the fabric of American society, some denouncing workers as unworthy, avaricious villains because of their gains over the years.

With enormous sea changes in lifestyle and with loss of hope, they have just about forever lost their places on the starship to success and happiness on the starship known as The American Dream.

How does a family man recover from loss of a good paying job, insurance, steady income, pride, loss of himself and even his house, taken by bankers who take and break? Take from the government and break the workers' back.

Not everyone in the labor pool will go down. Our President offers the downtrodden hope; he urges patience, while he battles those who plot against him with words of fairness and justice.

Meanwhile some will simply not listen to his message. They rather hope to see the ruination of his plans for a better vision of America. The competitive vision is an America ruled by corporations. Their laws are what are fair for them because they, not the people, own America.

They want to own Congress, too. They not only want to increase the wealth of their vast corporate entanglements, but they want to continue to get theirs out of the people because it is their corporate right, not individual right, but corporate right. They have the might to do it with their phalanxes of lawyers. I'll miss the Lion of the Senate just about as much as I have missed those old anti-trust laws.

Where are we now in Bridgeport which was the model of industry, full employment, happy families? Industry has disappeared from the landscape. There are pockets of wealth, but there is a lot of poverty. Far too many are hungry within this once thriving city. This is the mirror of the future, is it not?

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