Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Hiding in Plain Sight: Mass Unemployment

Last night I attended the annual Loeb Awards dinner sponsored by the UCLA Anderson School which honors the best that business journalism has to offer. You can call it the Pulitzer Prizes for business journalism. All of the main characters from The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, CNBC, etc were there.

To be sure all of the awards were relevant and they honored stories, among others, on the BP blowout in the Gulf, the scandal at Remington Firearms, and a significant book on hedge funds, but just like last year there was nary a mention on the unemployment crisis facing America. We are now in the third year of the worst unemployment crisis since the 1930s and nobody seems to care.

It seems that politicians of both parties and the journalists who cover them are in a conspiracy of silence. Maybe no one has any real solutions or maybe too many of the unemployed are out of sight and out of the minds of the policy elites, but make no mistake our country is being destroyed worker by worker. Unless there will be a dramatic change, this is one story that will end very badly.

1 comment:

  1. The joblessness issue is a disease without no easy cure - and politicians, like doctors, are loathe to think about disease without easy cures. We hear Republicans drone on about tax cuts, a subject never raised in VC discussions with startups. And while Democrat advocacy of infrastructure investment may soak up some unemployed hard hats, it does little or nothing to deal with the REAL hidden unemployment issue: universities continuing to accept hundreds of thousands of dollars from indebted students and their parents, training for careers for which few jobs are on offer.

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