WAISHINGTON REPORT: The Job on Jobs
Getlein, Frank
shouldn't be afraid," the bishops concluded in their final message. "With the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit, the Christian can be, according to the word of the Apostle, 'strong in the...
...Traditionally, we provide the jobs in order to get the whiz-bang and thus save Pocatello from the Red Army, but the whiz-bang finally flies on the jobs argument...
...How many for 30 and so on until the crew was complete...
...In that instance, almost alone, it didn't work, but it is time we realized that, thanks to the arms merchants, this country has long been committed to government spending to provide jobs...
...It was like a whiff of grapeshot or a salutary hanging "to encourage the others...
...The defense line, manned by Carter, 9 December 1977:776 is really symbolic, probably having to do with the specter of socialism...
...It's not that he needs the money, it's just that he and many like him feel that nothing is really legit in this country unless he and those like him get a cut...
...If we really want a jobs policy, therefore, we should program procurement officers, arms merchants and big bankers into it...
...FRANK GETLEIN 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 FREDERICK MORGAN SUSPIRIA Take them, death--take whoever belongs to you: your likeness is stamped inwardly, on the plasm...
...The final push for the B-1 was based on distributing jobs around the country in such a manner that practically every congressman of consequence got at least some for his district...
...the new one, arrived at through weeks of negotiating everything away to the fiscally conservative Carter administration, does nothing...
...The workers, leaving the factory gate and seeing the non-workers scraping the garbage cans, thought, there but for the grace of Mr...
...The classic theory of unemployment is that it keeps inflation down, but of course it is not working like that at all and it's time we stopped pretending it does work like that...
...If this scheme seems fanciful, it is much less so than expecting Carter-Humphrey-Hawkins to get anyone a job...
...consciousness, too, is renewed, pale in its billion cells...
...Gotrox go I so I'd better go easy on Gotrox, perhaps offer to take a cut...
...Let Lockheed and Northrop bid on leaf-raking in the South Bronx-more accurately, no doubt, let them decide between themselves which one will put in the "low" bid this time--and you'll be amazed at the speed with which congressmen, Pentagonians, even the Carter administra= tion will rally round the program to end unemployment...
...They may be right, but, however inadequate, the original Humphrey-Hawkins did something...
...Hence, the government is, and for a long time has been, in the job business...
...The rival can operate, but only if the original man gets his established cut...
...Humphrey-Hawkins ain't nothing...
...We can easily legislate, for example, that for every unemployed person hired by the government, David Rockefeller gets a hundred smackers...
...Augustus F. Hawkins of California in the leastDhe did co-sponsor a bill that meant at least a little help for the unemployed--in the Carterized version the "Hawkins" seems really to stand for Sadie Hawkins: the Joint Resolution encourages the unemployed to go run after jobs just as Sadie Hawkins Day used to encourage single ladies to run after Dogpatch's determined bachelors, with the difference, of course, that there were a lot more bachelors per Dogpatch maiden lady than there are jobs per job-seeker...
...The reason both those product-pending projects are good things is that they are memorials to one of the last top liberals in government, a remarkable man any way you lo0k at him, and while one may be dubious about the HEW architecture or reserved about the political science institute, the other available memorial is the Humphrey-Hawkins Bill and you don't need reservation or dubiety about that: whether you like Humphrey and his politics, or hate both with the gem-like flame intensity of James Jackson Kilpatrick, you have to admit that Humphrey is something...
...Write if you find work...
...So the Gotroxes of this world really have nothing to lose by letting people work for the government if they can't find work elsewhere...
...How could we...
...You could have 50 percent unemployment and those who did have jobs would still be paid at least the minimum established by law and in most cases the much higher minimum established by contract...
...If all else fails, it ~ails, but we wish you well, pal, in your daily round of workplaces overstaffed with workers...
...Between union contracts on the one hand and minimum wage laws on the other, the labor market has not worked that way in a long time and even the wildest dreams of the deceptively named Rightto-work Committee don't really see that happy state returning...
...That actually did work when the labor market was literally a kind of auction: How many will work for 20 cents a day...
...The classic theory was that a pool of the unemployed kept the employed from getting too uppity...
...WASHINGTON REPORT THE JOB ON JOBS That HEW building at the foot of Capitol Hill with a view of the skating rink one way and of the city's most astonishing freeway access complex on the other may be no great shakes as architecture--although well above the Federal mean around hereDbut it is named .for Hubert Horatio Humphrey and that's a good thing...
...Meanwhile, in far Minnesota, the Hubert H. Humphrey political science institute is in far too early a stage for anyone to know whether it will ever amount to anything or not, but that's a good thing, too...
...Yet the odd thing is the government has been into providing jobs for a long time and its doing so in one big area is regularly lauded by lots of the people who fear the same thing if done for the unemployed...
...Commonweal: 777...
...Now, there is nothing as last resort if all else fails as all else has stubbornly continued to do for some years now...
...We have settled into what looks like a permanent seven percent unemployment rate...
...Surely it is time we put it on a rational basis, figured out how to get the jobs without the whiz-bangs and use the money saved to get enough jobs to go around...
...Similarly, the jobs program could as easily be run by the arms merchants as by anyone else...
...The single life blossoms, fades, drops to the earth, as the tree lives on in the dream by which it is remembered...
...MARCO HAMMOND (Margo Hammond, a frequent contributor, is an American journalist working in Rome...
...With the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit, the Christian can be, according to the word of the Apostle, 'strong in the faith.' The authentic opening of the spirit presupposes and demands a clear and mature consciousness of one's own identity which is necessary for witness and mission...
...Well, it may surely be time we did that, but we surely aren't going to do it the way things look now...
...As for procurement officers, let's say that for every thousand unemployed put to work, five procurement officers get a free duck hunt on the Eastern Shore...
...Whenever the Joint Chiefs' procurement officers and their once and future employer-corporations come up with some new, incredibly expensive miracle weapon, the lack of which will insure the landing of the Russians in Bismarck, North Dakota, Tuesday at noon, the ultimate argument is that the thing will create jobs...
...There are people on the Hill who believe it never was much and you can make the case that it never was as much as was needed to achieve something more nearly approaching full employment than anything we are likely to achieve in the next few years...
...It's something like running a crap game...
...Those people say the new bill is not only watered down, which everybody says, but that it is watered down water...
...That area, of course, is military spending...
...Not to denigrate Rep...
...What is lacking in the Carter-Humphrey-Hawkins is any plan at all to get that down to six, let alone the three/four the bill proclaims as a national goal...
...The original may not have been the boldest job plan anyone has come up with-offhand, I can think of two both bolder and more imaginative---but it did place the government as employer of last resort if all else fails...
...What are you, against employment?, it is regularly asked of citizens and congressmen expressing doubt about the latest high-priced whiz-bang...
...It is a kind of joint resolution, not joint of the two Houses of Congress, but joint of the Legislative and Executive Branches, that they all believe everybody ought to have a job and they sure wish good luck to anybody looking for one...
...The mass of flesh and bone absorbs into the soil...
...Our national thinking at the moment seems to be that the only legitimate way for the government to create jobs for people is through the trickle down theory in general and specifically through handing billions to the weapons merchants so they can pass much of the money on to workers, with normal breakage or a little more than normal going to the merchants and their bankers...
...naturally you don't want some two-bit rival like the United States government operating its own down the street...
Vol. 104 • December 1977 • No. 25
