Ten journalistic horrors of 2010: #2 The case of the disappearing 99ers

These journalistic horrors are under-reported stories or badly reported stories that have haunted me. I thought each horror would generate a paragraph of text. HA! Was I wrong.

The good news here is that press on the plight of the 99ers is now picking up. But mid-year I was shocked at how little I could find out about it.

I had decided I had to refer to unemployment in a blog post. And I thought I’d better refer to the officially unemployed and the unofficial. At that point I ran into a concept I’d heard here and there, “99er”.

A 99er in common parlance is an American who has exhausted all unemployment benefits. In reality, only 24 states offer 99 weeks of unemployment and the remainder offer less. There are also plenty of bureaucratic wrangles that short beneficiaries.

Anyway, I wanted to know how many 99ers were out there. I found no official answer. I let that question go.

Later in the year, we all read about the compromise tax plan that wound up extending unemployment benefits for 13 months and extending Bush-era tax breaks for two years. “Aha!” I thought. Here’s where we’ll see some remedy for these 99ers.

Ultimately the 99ers were given no continued unemployment payments in the final tax plan.

So how many people were left in the cold? And how many more might be turning into 99ers shortly?

Returning for 1 more try at the number of 99ers, I found this one at Mike Shedlock’s excellent  blog: 6,927,372 which he called up in September. Which is backed up by the Wall Street Journal’s estimates on December 16th [if you do the math].

7 million 99ers equals 2% of the population. They’re a subset of the 18% of Americans unemployed. It comes to 18% when you add 9.8% officially as of November to the 8% in part-time or temporary positions looking for full-time work and people discouraged and no longer looking.

And if/when those official 9.8% fall of the unemployment rolls without a job, and become 99ers, they can sink hard. Welfare is there IF folks have a minor child. Foodstamps, and some patchwork of local programs is out there for those with kids and without.

This makes 99ers much less likely to keep homes and keep on paying bills, which makes their hardship ripple out to everybody, including you Dear Reader. Or maybe you are a 99er?

Socially, culturally, spiritually… The fabric of American life itself is torn when these individuals are pushed closer to desperation. I have a feeling I could spend another few hours digging up stats on crimes, depression, homelessness. But I’m not sure a statistic replaces a first-person story anyway. There are no shortage of on the blogosphere. As for the formal news outlets: some applause to the New York Times which did do a good story focusing on 49-year-old 99er Alexandra Jarrin on August 2nd.

I think that while 1 in 5 Americans is unemployed, the amount of press given to people losing unemployment benefits should be through the roof. And the press on those completely at the end of their rope?… Whew.

If they had gotten more press, maybe they could have gotten over 99 weeks of unemployment – what’s called Tier 5 – for all unemployed into that tax plan last December.

Not reporting on an issue is one thing. What Glen Beck did… (could somebody tell me what you call what he does?) In August Glen Beck called 99ers “not normal people”. He said this while pointing to some protesters carrying union and socialist signs who came to Wall Street in November. Broadcaster Ed Schultz from MSNBC was at that protest and he’s been advocating for 99ers faithfully, but I don’t think he has as much firepower as Beck. [Correct me if you think I’m wrong.]

A half of a hat tip goes to ABC & Jack Tapper who did some softball questioning of White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs regarding 99ers on December 21st. Gibbs bunted, saying pretty much that the job market itself would have to take care of those 99ers. Michael Thornton plucked out a few quotes for Huffington Post including “the best thing we can do for them is to create an environment where businesses are hiring”.

PBS Newshour did a show devoted to the 99ers in August.

Annie Lowrey of Slate.com has been focusing on unemployment for some time and a of December 30th focused on 99ers.

I’ve noticed that examiner.com writers across America are doing a pretty good job of reporting on unemployment and 99ers – and in fact, examiner.com writers in general are doing a much better job than I could have dreamed.  Here’s Naomi Cohn of New York.

The New York Times has done a good job of reporting on unemployment regularly, but not 99ers. Bob Herbert is now focusing more on how serious intractable unemployment is, and in this way, he’s giving what he can to our 99er friends.

Though I’m usually disappointed in the Wall Street Journal, and as you may guess, I think Rupert Murdoch has horns, WSJ did run a stats-heavy 99ers story on December 16th.

I’m a godless humanist so I can’t pray for the 99ers. Being Earthbound, and who I am, I’m the type to write. I hope we’ll see their stories more prominently in 2011 and see them get help whether it be paid job training or Tier 5 unemployment.

Stay strong 99ers.

Bernie “Give ’em hell” Sanders

Bernie Sanders  gave D.C. holy hell on Friday. For 8.5 hours straight.

What I heard was 1 man trying to get the United States government to do much better than the tax plan Obama is floating which maintains tax cuts for the wealthy and only 13 months of unemployment with zero help for the “99ers”[people no longer eligible for unemployment after being out of work 99 weeks].

By the way, if you still don’t get twitter, Friday should help clear everything up for you. On Friday, tweeters, who I’ll call “commoners”,  gave him their full attention, making his speech the number 1 topic for longer than 8 1/2 hours. News outlets? Not so much.

The commoners are the 98% of the American public that is more likely to get their credit on a card at 25% interest instead of the 1% interest rate for corporatations.

That disparity in access to credit? And in rates? –  That’s something Bernie brought up on Friday. And by “brought up” I think I mean “yelled”.

To help his colleagues in D.C.  get “reacquainted” with life in recession-era America, he read letters from his constituents. He read about Vermonters working 3 jobs, breaking up all the furniture for fuel, hoping that their old cars hold up. He talked about a woman who wrote that she can’t afford both winter fuel and food so her baby got sick, and then he yelled “She did not ask me to give tax breaks to billionaires!”

He called for banks to be broken up:  “If an institution is too big to fail,it is too big to exist. Let us break them up..Four large  institutions have assets that are over half of the nation’s GDP…they issue 2/3 of the credit cards in America”

He called for a national cap on interest rates and called greedy lenders gangsters committing thievery, practicing extortion and loan sharking, and he pulled out stats and numbers as back-up: 79.9% interest is charged on the nation’s 10th largest credit card.

He quoted CEO’s who bragged about pouring money into China, and later had no shame asking the U.S. for a handout: “When GE needed 18 billion..I didn’t see them turning to china for that welfare check!”

Most of the tweets commoners sent about Bernie Sanders were snippets of his speech or  cheers for him to keep on going. But a few were wildly funny jokes.

This tweet was resent over 200 times:

@brandorogers: FACT: Southwest Airlines requires Bernie Sanders to pay for two seats because of his massive balls. #filibernie

Now to answer, “Will Bernie’s speech make a difference?” I think it has gotten attention, but I can’t say if it has gotten much of Obama’s respect.

President Obama brought in the reinforcements of Bill Clinton in a hastily organized press event at about 5pm Eastern Time Friday. His diversion gave the New York Times a chance to bury Bernie’s speech Saturday (I’m so livid, I don’t want to relive my critiques of their stubby little articles).

But big media and New York Times be damned: If spirited tweeters and commenters are any indication, there are demands on Senators to back up Bernie Sanders.

The commoners will need to do a lot of that. Obama publicly dissed the Left December 7th when he rebuked critics of his tax compromise for holding onto a “purist” position, for being “sanctimonious” and risking never “winning victories for the American people”.

And in his Dec 7 interview, Sanders contends that Obama never really tried to fight for a position that Americans support: not giving tax breaks to the rich.

It’s more than Lefties on Sanders’ side.  I think it’s actually a Centrist position right now to NOT extend tax cuts for the wealthy and fight for more unemployment help MAYBE because unemployment is nationally at an official 10% and an unofficial 17-20%. Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks pulls together stats showing 67% of the country don’t want tax cuts for the rich (including 52% of Republican voters).

I think it’s Obama that is risking not winning a victory for the American people, not us tweeting commoners sticking with Sanders.

Obama’s administration claims the tax plan will get passage in the Senate tomorrow, and from there it will be in the House.

What can I say…we will see.

More:

Daily Kos has my favorite article on the topic.

Mother Jones collected some favorite speech snippets.

The Moderate Voice has a good piece.

Here’s 1 White House graph and a white board talk.

Forbes provided a word cloud of the speech, as seen below.