PHOTOS, PAGE 1

       Editor and prime reporter is Doug Terry, a veteran television and radio reporter in   Washington, DC, (details below)

Unemployment in California is now at 12.5 percent. Wow. That’s a lot. If you add in those who have given up looking for work, the number would be considerably higher, no doubt.

There is a rule of thumb in terms of unemployment, desperation and revolutionary change. It is this: at 25%, get ready for a revolution, a military coup, national strikes, something big. Over 25%, in the thirty to thirty five percent range, revolution becomes almost inevitable.

We are a kind of comatose democracy or maybe a somnambulant democracy would be a better way to describe it. We have a vigorous system and great possibilities, but most of us, most of the time, are not sure what we want to do with it. We like to yell, scream, post insane things on line and call in to conspiracy radio shows, but we are more talk than action. People who demonstrate, as hundreds of thousands of students, parents and teachers did yesterday, are marginalized in America. We have the right to assemble for the “redress of grievances, but, thanks, we’d rather not.

This is mentioned because it should be considered in trying to understand how desperate the situation has become for some people. We don’t have the tools of national strikes and, thank goodness, there has never been an outright, military coup in this country (we might have had some backdoor coups, but,  hey, who’s counting those?)

It is no wonder that millions of people see the health care reform debate as a lot of noise blasting from DC, making their lives even more uncomfortable by showing how stupendously ignorant politicians can be in the middle of a deep recession. California was flying high in the housing boom, it was flying high in the dot.com mania and it has benefited over decades by billions spent on defense and aerospace, so the low now is really low.

California is not as boom and bust as Florida, where you basically have only three businesses: 1. Selling property to those moving in and out. 2. Agriculture 3. Tourism.  Since #1 went bust and #3 is way down, Florida is in a hell of a mess. (Why hasn’t this gotten more national attention?) The are reader comments on the Miami Herald website saying that you can buy a condo in south Florida now for 20 or 30 thousand dollars. Apparently, the building owners are trying to stay afloat by imposing huge maintenance fees, sort of like the people who sell books for one penny on Amazon and then try to make a small profit on the shipping  fee.

The more boom you go, the more bust you get. California was propped up aartificially by the huge, phony rise in real estate prices that spun off billions of dollars. Some of the money came from people selling and cashing out. Some from people borrowing on second mortgages and spending the loot. Some of it was just churn, people buying and selling until the crash caught up with them, and all of us. I would be willing to bet that California will not be back to its pre-bust economic strength for the better part of the next ten years.

There’s another problem. I don’t know what is happening there, but here in the east everyone is trying to ride out the down economy on the back of the middle class. Secret price increases are sneaked in everywhere, but in places where people might not notice. Likewise, fees and more fees, from sea to (shinning?) sea. And taxes. And cutbacks on service by governments, school districts, colleges, everything, everywhere.

The mentality of the cutback, coupled with the quick, silent grab of cash out of the pockets of those still employed, is going to hold the economy down for a long time. With any luck, things will be looking better by 2011 and 2012, when Obama and his (by then) deflated Democratic ranks will be seeking a new, more narrow mandate from the people. (2.5.10)

Here is a link to the LA Times story on unemployment in California:

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-caljobs6-2010mar06,0,4374734.story

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