From: Michael Moore Mailing List Message [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] August 29, 2003 Happy Labor Day - Now, Get a Job (A letter from Michael Moore)
Greetings Friends,
For his part, George W. Bush will spend Labor Day doing what he does best - not really working. Instead of protecting the country (I'll have much more to say on that in the coming weeks) or addressing the nation's floundering economy, he'll be raising money for his re-election campaign in Ohio.
Bush is on pace to raise almost $200 million in time for the Republican primaries where his only competition will be his own dismal record. In Minnesota this past Tuesday, Bush raised $1.4 million by giving a 24-minute speech. That's about $60,000 for each minute of "work." By contrast, the weekly salary of the average American worker is a staggering $616.
As Ron Eibensteiner, chairman of the Minnesota Republican Party, left the event in St. Paul, he was met by hundreds of demonstrators. Being the dignified, freedom-loving, compassionate conservative we all wish we could be, Eibensteiner leaned over a police barricade toward the protestors and yelled, "GET A JOB!"
It was a positive, uplifting message to America. The Minnesota Republican Party isn't going to do anything to turn the economy around, and Bush hasn't done anything in almost three years in office. The best any of them can do is yell at people.
In the past year, 700,000 people were added to the list of unemployed. The number of people out of work for half a year or more is up 28%. Thanks to "Welfare to Work" (and Bill Clinton), July of 2003 saw 43.8% of the unemployed lose their state support even though they still could not find a job--a record high. Since Bush took over the country, roughly 2.5 million jobs have simply evaporated.
Bush and the Republicans are going to need every cent of that $200,000,000 to campaign against an increasingly angry nation of temps and burger flippers! In fact, he might need more, which is one good way to explain the Republican's recent attempt to paint Bush as an 'underdog.'
"Democrats and their allies," Bush's campaign chairman Marc Racicot wrote to super-rich Republicans, "will have more money to spend attacking the president during the nomination battle than we will have to defend him."
Obviously Bush and his team have a problem with math that extends beyond the $400 billion deficit we'll have by the end of this year (and the projected $6 trillion deficit we will have amassed ten years from now under Bush's guidance). If you look at the campaign fundraising so far, you see that Bush has already raised $35 million. The closest Democratic candidate, John Kerry, doesn't even have half that. Does the Bush campaign know something we don't about where the Democrats are hiding all that money?
And who has been giving Bush all this money in a time of prolonged economic
downturn? Why, the companies that trade in money, of course! Of the top twenty contributor's to the Bush campaign, twelve are finance companies. With more than a year to go until the election, his top contributor, Merrill Lynch, has already given $282,250. Doesn't it seem just a little strange that the companies which SHOULD be suffering the most in Bush's destroyed economy, would not only want to keep Junior around, but then get together and pump millions into his reelection campaign?
As for the Bush protestors in Minnesota, and the unemployed across the country, and the millions who only make minimum wage, and the 40 million who don't have health insurance: if you can't rake in $60,000 a minute or if you can't even manage the $616 weekly American average, there's only one thing left for you to do this Labor Day: GET A JOB!
Find a temp agency. Go to Wal-Mart. Join the Army (Lord knows we'll be in Iraq for a while, and that'll be one handsome, steady paycheck).
Or apply for work at the Minnesota Republican Party's office. Here's their email address: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Send them your resume and a nice letter telling them you've decided to take their advice to "GET A JOB" and you're coming to work for them!
But whatever you do, you really must quit your whining.
You are scaring the "President."
Yours, Michael Moore [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.michaelmoore.com <http://www.michaelmoore.com/> **************************************************************************** Kim Ode: Get a job, sha na na na, sha na na na na Kim Ode, Star Tribune Published August 30, 2003 ODE30
Last spring, it felt as if every gathering of friends or acquaintances brought news that someone's husband had just lost his job, or feared for his job.
The wife usually blurted it out, clearly having rehearsed how she'd tell us, only to discover no good segue to this news. Then we'd discover that there's no segue out of it, either. Eventually, our sighs and gasps of sympathy and outrage would dwindle enough that we could resume talking about kids or school or the treasurer's report without feeling completely heartless. After a few such incidents, my fear was that we'd get good at this.
These were not factory workers or blue-collar employees, people who've rarely had job security, or even the luxury of holding just one job at a time. These were businessmen in their 40s and 50s with years of button-down experience and the inoculation of class.
The news didn't improve with summer. Minnesota's unemployment rate in July was the highest in 15 months. The state now has lost jobs in eight of the past nine months.
So to hear Ron Eibensteiner, chairman of the Minnesota Republican Party, yell, "Get a job!" to some protestors on Tuesday seemed a little, um, off-message.
Granted, Eibensteiner was cock of the walk at the moment, emerging from St. Paul's RiverCentre having delivered to President Bush a crowd of 600 willing to pony up $1.4 million for a meal of corn dogs and pickles-on-sticks. It was a tremendously successful fundraiser, a golden moment.
Out on the street, a group of protestors had been chanting taunts about the economy. They peered through binoculars to better see the still distant recovery, set up ladders to look high and low for good news. So yeah, they came prepared to press a few hot buttons.
But of all the taunts that Eibensteiner could have hurled back, his last choice should have been "Get a job!" Not only did it sound like something a teenager would shout from a car window, but he focused attention on the very subject that can't stand much scrutiny right now.
Any conversation about jobs is glazed with a lot of numbers and a lot of spin. Take the unemployment rate. The figure went down an eyelash in July, to 6.2 percent. The administration hailed it as sign of a turnaround. But some analysts had the audacity to mention that much of the drop came from 470,000 people who simply abandoned their job searches in frustration. They report, you decide.
Here's another example: In a single week this month, 386,000 newly laid-off workers filed claims for unemployment benefits. That's a lot of families. But it's also what passes for good news these days because it was the lowest number of suddenly unemployed people in six months.
Maybe the economy will rebound now and illuminate many jobs that went dark. But from what I'm reading, a lot of economists are hedging their bets about whether there ever will be enough jobs again, or if they'll came back soon enough to help our fellow Americans make ends meet.
Speaking of illumination, Eibensteiner's crack revealed one more thing than he might have intended. Newspaper reports described the protestors as a mix of people, among them military vets, teenagers and retirees, but also nurses and Teamsters.
Maybe Eibensteiner, a venture capitalist, lives in a world where people work from 9 to 5 and doesn't fathom that some people may work nights, or odd shifts, or have jobs that consume their weekends but give them Tuesdays off. Maybe some of them felt deeply enough about the issue to devote their lunch hour to make their views known before going back to their jobs.
And maybe some would do anything to take him up on his advice.
Minnesota lost 3,600 jobs in July. That makes 67,600 jobs lost since the recession began in March 2001. Still, there are signs of a turnaround, mostly from retail stores. Gander Mountain, for example, is opening a new store in Forest Lake and now is sifting through the 1,100 online and 500 in-person applications it received -- for 150 jobs.
Kim Ode's columns run Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays. Write to her at [EMAIL PROTECTED],or 425 Portland Av. S., Minneapolis MN 55488. For past columns, go to http://www.startribune.com/ode.
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