Fruit Vendors Setting Up Shop #nyc #fruit #newyork #ues #manhattan #jobs #healthy #iphoneography #instagram #featured (Taken with Instagram at Upper East Side 10128)
Fruit Vendors Setting Up Shop #nyc #fruit #newyork #ues #manhattan #jobs #healthy #iphoneography #instagram #featured (Taken with Instagram at Upper East Side 10128)
NYC Sewer, Made in India: Why?
Look: people are frustrated. And that frustration has expressed itself in a lot of different ways: it expressed itself in the Tea Party; it’s expressing itself in Occupy Wall Street. I do think what this signals is that people in leadership,whether it’s corporate leadership, leaders of the banks, leaders in Washington — everybody needs to understand that the American people feel like nobody’s looking out for them right now.
You know, traditionally, what held this country together was this notion that if you work hard, if you;re playing by the rules, if you’re responsible, if you’re looking out for your family, you’re showing up to work everyday and doing a good job — you got a chance to get ahead, you got a chance to succeed. And right now, it feels to people like the deck’s stacked against them and the folks in power don’t seem to be paying attention to that.
…We are working every single day to figure out how do we give people a fair shake, and how do we make sure that everybody’s doing their fair share. Then people won’t be occupying the streets because they’ll have a job and they’ll feel like they’re able to get ahead. And part of my job over the next year is to make sure that if they’re not seeing it out of Congress, then at minimum they’re seeing out of their President somebody’s who’s going to be fighting for them.
(via theatlantic)
Meanwhile, jobs go begging: in Alabama, which passed the nation’s harshest anti-immigrant law; in Georgia, where the governor suggested using convicts to work in the fields after 11,000 jobs went unfilled; and in the orchards of Washington, where the flow to the far north has diminished mainly because of the recession.
Well then, why not hire only people with full citizenship? One farmer in Colorado, John Harold, tried doing just that, hoping to fill harvest positions with jobless locals looking for extra cash. But as my colleague Kirk Johnson reported, many of those locals did not last even a full day; they complained of the hard work in the onion fields of Colorado.
The problem, through good times and bad, is that there are millions of jobs that Americans will not do.
(Source: The New York Times)
I spent the day at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, NY. Faced with a catastrophic economy and rampant unemployment, Roosevelt put Americans to work revitalizing infrastructure and creating cultural and artistic capital. Yes, there were the naysayers that called him a socialist and a traitor to his class—much like the Tea Partiers of today. However, F.D.R. made a compelling case to the American people that the New Deal was necessary to resuscitate the economy and put safeguards in place to create benefits for the sick, the elderly, and the unemployed so they could subsist.
I just caught a New York Times headline saying that a drawbridge over Connecticut’s Norwalk River became stuck this afternoon, disrupting rail service. A Metro-North railroad spokeswoman, Marjorie Anders is quoted as saying, “You have a hundred-year-old bridge that carries four railroad tracks over a major river, and it opens on a pivot with gears like bicycle gears…Something goes wrong and it won’t close…It’s causing major problems, I can tell you that.”
Considering how frequently I used to take the Metro-North New Haven line and the fact that I took another Metro-North line this morning, it’s rather disheartening to learn that the railroad still uses hundred year old bridges that are so prone to failure.
But this bridge is not an anomaly. The map below, from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, shows all of the structurally deficient bridges on the National Highway System.
There are 69,223 structurally deficient bridges, amounting to a whopping 11.5% of all bridges in the United States. These bridges are ticking time bombs in dire need of repair. With a 9.1% unemployment rate and an infrastructure sorely in need of upgrades and repair, we ought to be putting people back to work and fixing the backbone of our nation. Considering the threat the status-quo poses to everyone in our country, there is a moral imperative to act.
Roosevelt did and there’s no reason we can’t follow suit. The numbers speak for themselves.
