Layoffs
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by Eleanor Arnason Continue Reading
700 billion dollars
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by Eleanor Arnason • 10/22/08 • A billion dollars spent on infrastructure creates 47,000 jobs, according to Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. If the $700 billion we just appropriated for Wall Street could be spent on bridges, highways, sewer lines, housing for homeless people, new schools and so on, it would create 32.9 million new jobs. At present, 154.7 million Americans are working. That is a lot of extra jobs.
Think of all the construction workers and teachers and child care workers and engineers we could hire with 700 billion dollars. Continue Reading
Sheep bubble
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by Eleanor Arnason • 10/17/08 • Iceland is the canary in the economic coal mine.
There is an article on Iceland in today’s Guardian. The Icelanders interviewed are still being philosophic, saying “We’ve been poor before” and “We know how to work hard” and “We don’t have to worry about eating; we have plenty of fish.”
My favorite quote went more or less like this:
“We’ve been through hard times before, when the sheep bubble collapsed…”
I suppose I need to Google “sheep bubble” and get the details… I think I’ve found it. Continue Reading
What is to be done 3
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by Eleanor Arnason • 10/14/08 • I have taken to writing angry political poetry, which I used to do in the 1960s and have not done much since. The following came to me as I was waking this morning.
Eight years of a strutting fool
and Dick Chaney hunched in his bunker
like Darth Vader in the Death Star
plotting endless war and ruined cities,
the nation bleeding from ten thousand wounds,
the rich happy in their fortresses.
“This is our achievement,” they say,
“The ruined country and broken government, Continue Reading
Retirement in modern America
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by Eleanor Arnason • 9/28/08 • I just asked Patrick why he sighed. He said he was reading a small article. The number of employed people who are over 65 doubled from 1977 to 2007; and the number of those people who work full time rose from 44% to 56% from 1995 to the present.
I am 65. You don’t have the energy you had at 25 or 35 or 45. And if you are working a physical job, you probably go home very tired.
Economic collapse
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by Eleanor Arnason • 9/24/08 • I come from a family that never recovered from the Crash of ’29. My parents never invested in the stock market. My father didn’t pay much attention to money, as far as I can tell; and my mother kept waiting for the next crash. I have lived my entire adult life expecting capitalism to unwind any day now. Continue Reading
Putting it in perspective: U of M hockey riot worse than RNC
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by Eleanor Arnason, September 18, 2008 • I have been doing more research on the Internet. This is from the Minnesota Daily, the University of Minnesota student newspaper:
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